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Jared Alexander Williams was born in Queens in April of 1991, to Felisha Jane Williams and Marcus Rutherford Williams. Felisha was a nurse at Mount Sinai Queens Hospital, and his father was a Sergeant in the United States Army that fought in the Gulf War.
Jared had a decent upbringing, with him and his family living in a reasonably nice house that his parents income had bought them. Nevertheless, the impact of race and his status as a black person was brought home to him on numerous occassions. The time when he was 7 and his father was dragged out of their car by a white police officer with guns drawn and treated like garbage simply because he 'looked like a gangbanger'. The times he was endlessly followed around and harassed by store security as a teenager, while other - white - teenagers got away easily with shoplifting. The ignorant remarks made to him by his classmates and teachers ('can I touch your hair?' 'Wouldn't it be fun if you did your book report as a rap?').
But through all this, he learned to live with it. Nevertheless, life still got tough. When he was 13, he and his mother discovered that his father had been carrying on an affair with another woman (a hedge fund manager) for the past two years. To this day, he still remembers the horrible blow-up fights that happened after this revelation, and it all led to his father leaving the family. This shook Jared to his core and to this day he's deeply insecure about his place in the lives of those he loves, worried that if he does something wrong, he'll drive them away. In a way, he subconsciously blames himself for his father's affair, though he's not at the point where he'd admit that to himself yet.
As a young teenager, he discovered a love of learning, devouring books and diving into his schoolwork, finding within himself a competitive spirit for it. He also found a love of martial sports, diving into martial arts and boxing, in addition to getting deeply into geekery, nerd culture, and computers. On the physical curriculum side, by the time he was 16, he could deliver a mean right hook and hold his own in a fight, and on the school front, by the time he was 17, he had secured a free ride to a number of colleges, amongst them Harvard. But he chose New York University because he wanted to stay close to home, and saw NYU as a school that was just that while at the same time giving him a quality education.
But things troubled him as he grew into adolescence. The unjust nature of how he was treated and seen by others simply because he was black, but moreso, how others were treated because of their genetic code.
Jared knew some mutants in high school, and while he was wary of them (what human wasn't?), his mother had always taught him to see the best in people, and how the biggest sin anyone could ever commit - especially black people, given what they'd been through - was bigotry. So Jared, when he was 15, put his foot out there to befriend some of the mutants at his school. Initially they were surprised and wary, given that most of the humans at his school wanted nothing to do with them, but they soon accepted him when they found he was genuine. Being the only human in the mutant crowd at his school changed him and how he viewed the mutant question - and it also changed how he was viewed by the other humans at school. He ended up becoming an outcast, a 'fucking mutie lover'. Things changed brutally when he was 16 - he witnessed after school, being physically held down, a close friend of his, Malina, a girl whose ability was the ability to turn her skin translucent, being viciously beaten by a number of other students. The teachers soon ran out and broke up the fight, and it ended - to Jared's horror and outrage - with Malina being expelled for 'provoking fights' and 'being a disruptive influence on the other students'. The rest of Jared's mutant friends drifted apart after this, with a number of them being kicked out due to bigotry-inspired reasons or dropping out, having lost faith in the system.
In essence, this radicalized Jared and caused him to get involved in mutant rights activism. When he arrived at NYU, he joined the first mutant rights club he could find. Concurrent to this, he got involved in anti-racism activism, being horrified and enraged by the murder of Trayvon Martin. This was the context for his undergraduate education, and things went well as he made decent grades. Then Liberty Island happened.
As Jared watched the news coverage of the event on CNN, his first instinct was to call the mutants he knew on campus and tell them to stay indoors and keep low, that if they needed him to, he'd go and get their food and groceries for them and deliver them. He did this out of fear for the anti-mutant backlash that was sure to come.
And come it did. Campaigning hard for President Bancroft in the 2012 presidential election, he was utterly dismayed when Simon won. But he kept on keeping on. Eventually, in 2013 he graduated with Honours with a degree in Africana Studies and History, and admission to the NYU American Studies PhD program. He also graduated just in time for the creation of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. He immediately joined, and over the next three years, he dived deep into his studies and into pro-mutant and pro-BLM activism.
It's 2016 now, and, working away at his PhD program, mutant rights activism, and teaching (as part of his PhD program) Jared is still dedicated to fighting for a better world, driven by anger that things are the way they are, and hope that they can be better than how they are.
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