Preston Hollow neighbor and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban held a speech, sporting shorts and a t-shirt but sounding presidential. The Dallas Mavericks hosted a “Courageous Conversation” at Victory Plaza. Cuban implored people to “really open up and talk to each other, even when it’s difficult. Even when it’s not something we’re comfortable with, particularly those of you who look like me, the white people. Because it’s hard to discuss race when you’re white. The reality is, to be brutally honest, when people talk about white privilege, we get defensive. We all have this mechanism that I call manufactured equivalency to try to protect ourselves. We’ll say, ‘I have a lot of black friends.’ We’ll say, ‘I grew up in a mixed community, so I’m not like that. I can’t possibly be someone who takes advantage of white privilege,’ and manufacture this equivalency. It’s incumbent on us to stop doing that, because that doesn’t move us forward when we do that. That’s part of having a courageous conversation.”