I’ve been trying to write this post for about a year, but the words have escaped me. Until now.

On August 4th, a Twitch streamer by the name of Kai Cenat invited his fans and friends to Union Square in New York City for a giveaway including Playstation 5s and PCs. With more than 11 million followers, Cenat is one of the most popular Internet figures in the world. For three hours, this poorly-planned giveaway went from a gathering of about two thousand mostly Black and Latinx fans of Cenat to a riot involving more a thousand police officers, tools from a nearby construction site, and a fire hydrant. News cameras from local and national stations got most of the angles for eyes across the country.

(Read the reliable recap from Wikipedia yourself.)

In the aftermath, the NYPD arrested and later released Cenat after being charged with inciting a riot and unlawful assembly. The mayor, police commissioner, and chief of police all had press conferences with a consistent message: these kids are out of control. We saw images of kids jumping on cars, climbing to the top of the subway gazebo, and running away from heavily armed men in riot gear. We saw a young and famous Black streamer in handcuffs, dreads hanging off the side of his face. Helicopters gave us aerial views of the gathering over those fateful three hours with mixed messages from reporters and commentators alike.

To Cenat’s credit, he paid close to 60-thousand dollars to the Union Square Partnership (USP) for the mess they made. To the district attorney’s credit, the charges were dropped. After that, it feels like we need a rethinking of the whole incident. Or, more broadly, our society needs to think about our relationship with youth. Because from an educator’s point of view, it looks like we hate kids. Let me explain.

The local media speculated that Cenat didn’t even have gift cards, but the USP contribution suggests otherwise. People described Cenat as an unsympathetic troublemaker when he graduated from one of NYC’s best high schools. Mayor Eric Adams even went so far as to say that students shouldn’t get their morals from social media. We saw clips of the skirmishes and arrests, but not of police officers picking up random kids and slamming them across cars and floors at will. We also didn’t hear students’ calm testimony that this riot was “no big deal” and this “happens everyday.”

Our kids who ride the subway, walk the bustling city streets, and have attended any parade are accustomed to large crowds. In fact, more than 70 thousand people pass through Union Square on foot on a daily basis. In fact, the next day, Union Square returned mostly back to normal. The farmer’s market, the local vendors, the chess players, and the passersby went back to business.

In researching this piece, I saw a spectrum of opinions about Kai Cenat, but where some might see a wasted individual, I see a potential leader. Cenat not only graduated from NYC Public Schools, he went on to college. He dropped out because he couldn’t keep up with his coursework and the demands of his newfound tech career. As a fellow Caribbean, I can imagine the values instilled in him about a hard work ethic and religious upbringing. In his apology, he comes across as contrite and grateful. I didn’t care as much about his choice of words as I care about his message. The more I watched, the more I realized that he was, at worse, naive about his audience. Looking through the composition of his fans, he may have thought the crowd abide by the fun, familiar, and intimate energy from his videos.

Because of his objectives for the event, he could have gone through the proper channels to ensure safety for the younger kids and their parents in attendance. He could have called it a meetup without the giveaway part, and then held an organized raffle. There were probably better spots to have such a meetup than one of our city’s epicenters, too. Events like this sometimes make people more popular and that part makes me skittish, too. But putting the full blame on Kai Cenat and the majority of attendees who weren’t trying to start a riot feels short-sighted.

They get signals all the time that society doesn’t care enough about them. Gun violence in schools has become normalized with no end in sight. The United States has some of the highest rates of child poverty in the world. Districts have stopped investing in local community centers where kids can gather. Their teachers are becoming less hopeful about K-12 education, too. Our student disciplinary codes and classrooms feel carceral. I’ve documented the parallels between school and prison for more than a decade, too. A couple of years prior to that incident, Black Lives Matter protests highlighted the plethora of children that look just like them whose lives were ended at the hands of people entrusted to protect them. These problems are not new.

Our society already oversurveills, overpolices, and under-resources them in policy and practice.

Readers recognize the parallels between the Union Square incident and another where adults gathered without police permits. On January 6, 2021, our young people watched as thousands destroyed offices across the Capitol building while police officers died and congresspeople stood powerless against the riotous crowds. Not only was the head of the “riot” not held accountable, he’s slated to become president again. (America. Learned. Nothing.) The mayor who moralized about the incident is now willingly obeying the rioter-in-chief in advance to avoid consequences for his legal troubles.

The Kai Cenat incident of 2023 was a book club by comparison.

There’s been a lot written about parasocial relationships and the nature of social media since the Union Square incident. Social media has transformed who we rely on for our information, who we take advice from, and who gets exalted. We still need more classes on digital citizenship for everyone. But even before social media, society needed a better relationship to its children.

The Kai Cenat incident offers insight about our children and we’re not listening. Let’s do better.