(ThyBlackMan.com) Tenants’ groups and leftwing activists are cheering New York City’s newly announced multiyear rent freeze. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent scheme is headed for a judicial smackdown at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2023 and twice in 2024, a hesitant Supreme Court declined to hear challenges by building owners ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Haiti is not an abstraction. Haiti is a nation whose pain has too often been treated as policy collateral, a people whose labor is welcomed when needed and whose lives are discounted when convenient. Now, with the Supreme Court clearing the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the iconic welcome to the world’s oppressed inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus, the poet who penned those words, had herself helped Jewish refugees from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe who had ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) My grandmother kept receipts. Not only the paper kind, though a shoebox of those sat beneath her bed. The ones that counted she kept in memory, in the long private ledger a person compiles after a lifetime of learning whether the world means to deal fairly. The grocer who ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) “The majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision. But the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” The President’s allies on the Supreme ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Plenty of presidents have come and gone in my lifetime. A few earned my vote with pride. A couple I would have crossed the street to avoid. Across all those years one lesson stuck, and I wish more of our young people held it close before they get swept ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Growing up, somebody always told me soccer was the sport you picked when you couldn’t hang on the basketball court. Made me laugh every time. The cats I knew who could really go, the ones with touch and vision, were pure athletes. Quick feet, lungs that wouldn’t quit, a ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Closing out this month of celebrating Black Music, I would like to do some sankofa sharing of some essential sensitivities and thoughts about the meaning and magic of Black music. Although we celebrate June as Black Music Month, every day and hour is an open space for making and ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Yes, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s socialist picks just knocked off some Democratic incumbents in New York City. They included surprising defeats, especially that of Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat lost to Darializa Avila Chevalier, whose social media swims with past calls to abolish the police, ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I have been watching this country choose its leaders for longer than I care to put in print, and if you do that long enough you start to notice the things that nobody says out loud. There is a quiet in American politics, a thing that lives underneath the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I have been writing about politics long enough to remember when the idea of a Black family living in the White House was something folks only said in low voices, half dream and half dare. So when Michelle Obama walked through that door back in 2009, I watched the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) It is hard to see what President Donald Trump could have done differently. He faced the usual Trump Derangement Syndrome from his political opponents. He faced resistance from those who oppose almost any military action abroad. He faced public frustration over rising gas prices — even though gasoline was ...