(ThyBlackMan.com) I have watched a lot of politicians stand at a podium and talk about the little man. Most of the time the little man they picture looks nothing like me, my nephews, or the fellas I came up with back home. So when Vice President JD Vance gets up and mourns forgotten workers, shuttered plants, and hard times in Ohio, I listen. But I listen the way an old head listens. Slow, waiting to see whether the words carry any weight.
He tells a real story. Middletown, a rough childhood, a grandmother who held things together, a stretch in the Marines, then Ohio State, Yale, and a career in venture capital. Vance wrote much of his upbringing down in a book that made him famous, and he says now that Washington cast his hometown aside and left behind the folks who built things with their hands. I believe that part. Plenty of towns got hollowed out while the people at the top counted their winnings.
Here is where my patience starts to fray. When Vance names who got abandoned, the picture in his head tends to be white, rural, and male. That framing has a long history in this country. Blue collar gets treated like a code word, and the code rarely includes brothers on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bottom back home. Millions of us punch clocks, drive trucks, run wire, and pour concrete. We are labor too, forgotten long before anybody wrote a bestseller about it.
Right now, in 2026, the picture remains unsettled for the brothers. Black unemployment rose from 6.2 percent in January 2025 to 7.7 percent in February of this year before falling to 6.3 percent by July. That improvement matters, but the latest rate was still nearly twice the 3.6 percent recorded for white workers. Among Black men age 20 and older, the share holding a job stood at 63.4 percent in July, nearly unchanged from 63.2 percent a year earlier. Still, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition estimated that roughly 650,000 fewer Black men were working in May than in November 2025. The same analysis found that labor force participation declined during that stretch, suggesting that some men left the job market, though the monthly numbers cannot tell us why every one of them disappeared from the count.
So the question I keep circling back to is plain. Does his agenda reach us, or does it just repackage old populism for a fresh season?
Take the pieces one at a time. On tariffs and factory work, his bet is that walls around trade bring the plants home. Maybe some come back, and increased domestic production could help certain industries. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that American consumers will carry much of the cost through higher prices. Its latest projections say the new duties will leave consumer prices about 0.8 percent higher by the end of 2026 than they otherwise would have been. The administration granted exemptions covering more than a third of imports, but nobody has laid out a clear plan ensuring that whatever factory work returns will reach the Black neighborhoods that lost the most.
Bring up unions and Vance claims the Republican Party now speaks for working people, member and nonmember alike. To be fair, he joined a United Auto Workers picket line and worked with Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown on a bipartisan railway safety bill. Those actions count. He also opposed the PRO Act, organized labor’s major proposal for making it easier to form unions and bargain collectively. That leaves a mixed record. A visit to a picket line carries meaning, but workers also deserve to know which protections a politician will support once the cameras leave and the legislation reaches the floor.
Apprenticeships are where the double message gets loud. The administration signed an order calling for more than one million new active apprentices, and the Labor Department awarded nearly $162 million for expansion efforts in July. That is real money and deserves acknowledgment. At the same time, one outside expert estimated that the office overseeing apprenticeships lost as much as 30 percent of its staff. The administration also proposed eliminating Job Corps and cutting about $1.6 billion from it, although Congress rejected that request and provided roughly $1.6 billion for the program in the current fiscal year. Some women focused apprenticeship grants were canceled in 2025, though the Labor Department later listed seven recipients and opened another funding round in 2026. Starting in July, Workforce Pell Grants also became available for approved trade and credential programs as short as eight weeks. The record is not empty, but it is uneven, and Black workers need to see exactly where the new opportunities will land.
Wages tell a quieter story. The federal floor has sat at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and nobody in this administration is racing to lift it. Whatever the paycheck picks up, higher prices tied to tariffs can quietly claw some of it back on the grocery run, so the bottom rung never truly climbs. Housing runs worse still. In the second quarter of 2026, 45.4 percent of Black households owned where they lived, compared with 74.5 percent of non Hispanic white households. That canyon has not closed in my lifetime, and I have heard no detailed Vance plan explaining how his working class agenda would help families cross it.
Family is his signature note, the drum he beats hardest. Back in 2024, he floated a child tax credit of $5,000 per child and wrapped it in warm talk about the American household. He called for a broad credit that would reach families across income levels, but he never supplied enough detail to show how refundable it would be, how it would be financed, or how much the poorest households would actually receive. Without those details, nobody can honestly claim to know what the lowest income parents would get. Then there was the Senate vote that would have widened the credit for low income children, the one he skipped before going on television to promote his own larger number. Vance called it a show vote that would have failed with or without him. That may explain his absence, but it does not replace a written plan.
Then comes reentry, the piece nobody with a national platform should be allowed to ignore. A staggering number of our brothers carry a record, and a record follows a man like a shadow when he goes looking for honest work. The Labor Department did announce approximately $81 million for its RESTART initiative in February, offering skilled trade training, paid work experience, and apprenticeship opportunities to people returning from incarceration. Credit where it is due. But a grant program is only one part of the road back. Second chances, expungement, fair hiring, and permanent ladders onto the payroll still need a place near the center of any serious working class agenda.
Add it up and the pattern shows itself. The Vice President has built a brand on grievance that plays well in certain counties, and he has never fully explained how his cure reaches the corner where I grew up. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that Black America needed about 1.8 million additional workers in 2025 to match the white employment rate. The organization placed the resulting loss of income at approximately $87 billion. That was an estimate rather than money somebody physically removed from an account, but it measured the cost of a gap this country has tolerated for generations.
That brings me to the part we control ourselves. The midterm sitting in front of us this year is the lever, and we should quit waiting on any one man in a suit to redeem himself and start showing up where the decisions actually get made. School boards help shape career and technical education. City councils and county commissions move development money most people never hear about. Plenty of us skip the statewide races on the 2026 ballot because we only tune in when a president is on it. That is backwards. Governors and legislatures make major decisions involving training money, housing, and the road back for a man leaving prison. My grandfather knew that. He voted in every little election nobody else showed up for, and I am ashamed at how much of that lesson my own generation misplaced.
So make him prove it. Ask his people, in writing, what their plan does for a laid off brother in Youngstown or Charlotte. Push them on how the million apprentice goal will be met after staffing losses and where those training dollars will land. Bring up reentry beyond a single grant program and see whether the answer includes fair hiring and records relief. While you wait on a response that may never arrive, register your folks, run for something small, and back a candidate who knows your street. A pretty story about a hollowed out town means nothing to me until it makes room for the sons my community keeps burying and keeps trying to raise anyway.
Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna
Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.
One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.
