I have been voting since Carter, and I have watched this cycle spin around more times than I care to admit. Somebody rises. Cameras find him. He can preach, he can quote scripture and Baldwin in the same breath, and when he speaks at a funeral the whole country stops chewing for a minute. We gather up all our grief and hand it to him like a collection plate. Then we wait.

What exactly do we expect that man to do? Explain every crisis on Sunday morning television. Show up in whatever town the latest tragedy happened. Defend more than fifty million of us against whatever slander is trending. Sit across from senators and governors and somehow negotiate with a system that took three hundred years to build its defenses. A single human being. One phone, one calendar, twenty four hours.

Nobody survives that job description. Dr. King was thirty nine and exhausted and under federal surveillance the day they killed him. Jesse could not carry it in his prime either, and none of the ones who came after have managed the trick. Some get bought. Others turn bitter. A few get caught with their hand somewhere it should not have been, and cable news runs the footage for a week straight. Plenty simply burn down to the wick doing work that ten thousand hands should have been sharing.

Here is the part that stings. When our chosen figure stumbles, the whole thing goes quiet. Problems did not solve themselves; we simply never built anything underneath him. Rallies stop. Listservs go cold. Folks who drove four hours to hear him speak cannot name a single person on their county commission. We invested everything in a personality and got no equity in an institution.

Go back and read the history honestly. Montgomery did not happen because a young pastor gave a good speech. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had leaflets running off a mimeograph machine before most people knew what had happened to Rosa Parks. E.D. Nixon had been building labor and civil rights networks through the Pullman porters for nearly three decades. There were carpools, dispatch stations, insurance workarounds after the companies canceled policies on the cars. That boycott ran three hundred eighty one days on logistics, not eloquence. Preaching helped. Logistics won it.

Ella Baker understood this better than anybody, and she said it plain: strong people do not need strong leaders. Her organizing philosophy often pushed her to the margins, because the men around her were building a pulpit model in a moment that called for a network. Young folks in SNCC listened to her, though. They went into Mississippi with no cameras and no charisma to speak of, and they registered voters in counties where doing so could get you shot before supper.

Television changed our appetite. A movement of ten thousand quiet organizers will never be booked for a four minute hit, but one man in a good suit can. Social media took that appetite and put it on steroids. Now we measure influence in followers, and we mistake a viral thread for a base. A hundred thousand likes will not stop a school closing. Forty parents in a boardroom, showing up every month for a year, might.

Politicians love our arrangement, and you should understand exactly why. When a mayor wants cover, he does not have to answer to a thousand organized constituents with a written list of demands. He calls three reverends and a state representative, takes a photograph, and reports that he consulted the community. Consultation with a handful of individuals runs cheap. Accountability to an organized body costs something. Guess which one they prefer.

Political maturity begins the day a community stops confusing inspiration with organization. That confusion is comfortable. Inspiration feels like progress. You leave the auditorium with your chest full, you tell your cousin about it, you post the clip. Organization feels like nothing at all for a long time. It looks like a Tuesday night meeting with eleven people and bad coffee, arguing over whether to endorse in the district attorney race.

Yet the district attorney’s office has broad discretion over which cases get prosecuted and what charges are pursued in your county. School boards decide which buildings get renovated and which get shuttered. Local governing bodies and utility commissions approve water rates. Zoning boards and elected councils decide whether the warehouse goes up next to the elementary school. Far too many sheriff’s races across the South run unopposed. Those seats get filled by whoever bothers to show up, and for decades that has not been us in the numbers it could have been.

I am not dismissing the young folks doing mutual aid and bail funds and tenant work. Much of it is sharper than what my generation built. My caution is different. Horizontal structure without durable infrastructure has its own failure mode. Everybody talks, nobody decides, the group exhausts itself in eighteen months and the landlord is still the landlord. Distributed never meant unorganized. Somebody has to keep the membership list, file the paperwork, and answer the phone in year four when nobody is watching.

Churches carried this load for generations, and some still do. But a congregation of two hundred with a food pantry and a van is doing charity, which is holy work and still a far cry from power. Charity feeds a family this month. Power changes who writes the budget that made the family hungry.

So what would it look like to grow up? Stop asking who the next great figure will be. Start asking what your organization can survive. Can it lose its founder and still function? Does it have money that does not come from one foundation with opinions? Are there folks under forty being trained to run it? Do you have a written agenda that a candidate can be measured against, so that endorsement means something more than fondness?

Build a bench, not a throne. Twenty capable heads in a county with real assignments will outlast any single voice, however golden. And when that voice inevitably says something foolish, gets indicted, or just gets tired, the work keeps moving because the work never belonged to him.

No savior is coming down that road. Never has been one. Everybody we canonized was a mortal doing their part inside a machine that thousands of anonymous hands were feeding every single day, and those folks are the reason anything changed at all.

We should stop looking for someone to follow, and get busy being somebody worth joining.

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.

The Baton Rouge rapper, whose legal name is Torrence Hatch, handed over six hundred thousand dollars to a couple of Washington operators who swore up and down they could carry a presidential pardon right to Donald Trump’s desk. The paper never showed up. Now Boosie is fighting to claw back half of what he spent, and according to text messages reviewed by NOTUS, the two men he trusted with that money claimed their firm was effectively bankrupt and could not give it back. Their firm disputes that it ever agreed to refund half of the fee.

Sit with that number a minute. Six hundred thousand. That is more than a whole lot of hardworking folks will see across ten years of honest sweat. He put it on the table because he was staring down a federal gun conviction and did not want to see the inside of a cell.

Here is how it went sideways, according to the reporting from NOTUS. Late last September, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, running a shop called JM Burkman and Associates, pitched Boosie hard. He told reporters they talked like they had the president on speed dial. They dropped big names, waved around their so-called connections, and made the man believe a clean slate was practically already signed. On New Year’s Eve, one of them texted that Trump had it “in hand and is ready to sign.” A day later, on New Year’s Day, Boosie’s lawyer got a call saying the deed was done. Trump had supposedly signed the pardon. Time to celebrate.

Except it was not done. When his people checked with the court and the prosecutors, there was nothing. According to Boosie’s lawyer, a White House aide later said officials had not seen a pardon application for him at all. A White House official also told NOTUS that the clemency team had never heard from Wohl or Burkman and warned that their involvement could hurt an applicant’s chances. Boosie’s lawyer later filed a separate application directly with the White House, which acknowledged receiving it and said it was under review.

The kicker is that Boosie avoided additional prison time anyway. A federal judge sentenced him in January to 10 days of time served, three years of supervised release, 300 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine, no thanks to the men he paid. So all that money bought him disputed promises, a pardon that never appeared and a refund fight he is still trying to settle.

Now, before I go further, let me back up for the young folks who never had to think about any of this.

A pardon is an act of mercy from the president. When a man is convicted of a federal crime, the president has the power to forgive the offense, relieve federal punishment and remove certain legal disabilities caused by the conviction. It does not declare the person innocent or erase the conviction from his criminal record. That power sits right there in the Constitution, Article Two, Section Two. The framers borrowed the idea from old England, where kings called it the prerogative of mercy, a custom that goes back more than a thousand years to the seventh century. Alexander Hamilton is the one who argued for putting it in the hands of one man, the president, so somebody could soften the law when justice and cold rules pulled in different directions.

This is not new, and it is not small. George Washington himself used it in 1795 to pardon two men convicted of treason following the Whiskey Rebellion. Gerald Ford used it in 1974 on Richard Nixon, and that decision was so unpopular it may have helped cost Ford the next election. Jimmy Carter granted unconditional pardons to people who violated the Selective Service Act during the Vietnam era, though his action did not cover military deserters. Ronald Reagan forgave the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Bill Clinton, on his very last day in the White House, forgave his own brother Roger along with a fugitive financier named Marc Rich, and folks are still arguing about that one to this day. And Barack Obama leaned on the power more than almost anybody, granting 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons. Many of those commutations went to ordinary people buried under harsh federal drug sentences who never had a famous name or a lobbyist working the phones for them. He also commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the soldier who leaked government files. Different presidents, different reasons, but every one of them shows the same thing.

So the office of mercy has a long, heavy history, some of it noble, plenty of it ugly. Presidents have used it to heal a divided nation and they have used it to take care of friends. That is the honest truth of it.

And yes, this president has handed out relief to famous men in the music world. Lil Wayne got a full pardon in Trump’s final days back in 2021. NBA YoungBoy got one in 2025 after federal firearms convictions. It is easy to see how Boosie might have looked at those cases and figured he was next in line if he just spent enough. That right there is where his thinking went crooked.

Because here is the part I want every rich and famous person reading this to burn into memory. Fame and money solve a certain kind of problem. When you have a hit record and a bank account, there is always a manager, a fixer, a lawyer, or an accountant who can make trouble disappear. You throw money at it, and it goes away. That is the world these stars live in, and it teaches them a dangerous lesson: that everything, including a man’s freedom, is for sale to whoever writes the biggest check.

Washington does not run on that arithmetic. Not the honest part of it, anyway. A grant of mercy from the president is not a product on a shelf. It is a personal decision by one man, filtered through a process that no lobbyist can force. You cannot buy it any more than you can buy the sunrise. What you can buy, if you are not careful, is a couple of slick talkers who noticed you were scared and cashed in on it.

And look at who Boosie handed his trust to. These two are not statesmen. They are political operators who pleaded guilty in Ohio over an illegal robocall campaign that targeted Black voters. They later agreed to pay up to $1.25 million in a New York settlement, while the Federal Communications Commission imposed a separate fine of more than $5 million. Let that sink in. A Black man from Louisiana paid six figures to the very same characters who had already been convicted over a scheme targeting Black folks at the ballot box. If that is not a warning wrapped inside a warning, I do not know what is.

Even one of Trump’s own loud supporters, Laura Loomer, told him plain when he tagged her online. She said you cannot pay for this, and she asked who told him that is how it works. Boosie, to his credit, thanked her for the honesty. But by then the money was already gone.

I do not write this to laugh at the man. I have some sympathy for anybody scared of losing his freedom, reaching for any hand that promises to pull him out. That fear is real, and men with money are targets precisely because they can pay. The predators know a frightened rich man is the easiest mark alive.

The lesson is bigger than one rapper and one bad contract. It is this. When you step out of the recording booth and into the halls of government, the rules you grew up with do not apply anymore. The people who whisper that they have the president’s ear are usually selling you a door that does not open. Real access is not something a stranger can hand you for a fee, and any grown man who tells you otherwise is measuring you for a con.

Boosie may survive this pardon mess, but his legal troubles are not finished. He avoided additional prison time in January and returned to performing, but federal authorities are now seeking to revoke his supervised release over allegations that he violated its conditions in May. That matter has not been resolved. Whatever happens next, six hundred thousand dollars remains a hard way to learn that some doors in this country do not have a price tag. They have a lock, and the key is not for sale.

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.

Now I have watched a good many presidents come and go. Some I admired. Some I could barely stomach. A few I simply outlasted. You reach a certain age and you stop keeping score by party. You start measuring a man by what he leaves standing after the movers come for his boxes.

So consider what the sitting president of the United States did as that building’s opening approached. No invitation came his way, which surprised nobody. The reply arrived anyway, a picture cooked up by a machine showing the center with a giant garbage bag sitting on its roof.

There it is. The whole decade in one image. A man raises a building. Another man draws a cartoon of trash on it.

I am not here to canonize the 44th president. He made his share of choices I would argue with over a long dinner. But I lived long enough to see a Black family walk into that big white house not as the help but as the first family, and I will not pretend that meant nothing to a man like me. It meant a great deal. And it seems to have meant a great deal to Mr. Trump too, though for reasons pointed in the opposite direction.

Think about where his modern political rise truly gathered force. Not with a plan for the country. It gathered force through a lie about a birth certificate. Before the rallies, before the red hats, there was a wealthy fellow on television insisting the sitting president did not belong, was not truly one of us, had slipped into the highest office through a side door. That was the launchpad. Everything after got poured on top of that original suspicion.

Look at where we sit in the summer of 2026. This past February the White House announced the full revocation of the endangerment finding, the 2009 determination that gave the government its footing on greenhouse gases, and billed it as the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the republic. Read the celebration statements. Count how many times a certain name appears. The finding was not simply wrong in their telling. It was his. That was the selling point.

Then came the plan released just days ago. More than seven hundred rules lined up for the chopping block, with a trillion and a half dollars in projected savings claimed by the administration, a good portion aimed backward at what one predecessor wrote and what the next one wrote after him.

I want to be fair, because fairness is the only thing that earns a writer the right to be believed. A president is allowed to disagree with the man before him. That is ordinary. Reagan undid Carter. Obama walked back plenty of Bush. Reversal is part of the job, and the president’s people will tell you, with some justice, that he has done more than knock things over. There is the big tax and spending law. There is the Laken Riley Act. There are the judges. There is a hard turn at the southern border. There is the Gaza ceasefire he helped push across the line in the fall of 2025, which surprised a number of doubters, myself among them.

So no, the ledger is not empty. I grant the man his entries. But sit with the shape of it, and notice how many of even those wins get sold as corrections. Again and again the pitch is not, here is what I am creating for you. The pitch is, here is what I am erasing. And a man who defines himself by the erasing has quietly handed somebody else the pen.

It has traveled well past policy now, and this is where my stomach turns. Last summer the president stood in the Oval Office and accused his predecessor of treason. Not corruption. Not bad judgment. Treason, a word that in this country still carries the shadow of a rope. It came out flat, the former president named as ringleader, without public evidence presented to substantiate the charge. The response from Chicago called it what it looked like, a weak attempt at distraction. Then Trump reposted a fabricated video of the man being handcuffed.

This past February, a video depicting the former president and his wife as apes appeared on Trump’s Truth Social account. The White House blamed a staff member, but the image had already gone out beneath the name of the president of the United States. I am an old man. I know exactly what that picture is. My grandmother knew what it was. There is no cleverness in it and no politics in it. It is the oldest insult this country ever manufactured, passed along like a joke among friends.

Joe Biden gets his own version of the treatment. The autopen business has swallowed enormous energy, the claim that the signature was mechanical and the mind was gone and the orders were therefore hollow. Trump said last fall he was canceling executive actions signed that way. The House ran its investigation and produced its report. Then federal prosecutors looked hard at the thing and walked away without a viable crime to charge. Biden answered plainly enough, saying he made the decisions during his presidency. Yet in May the president was still posting cartoons of a sleeping Biden with Obama standing over him holding the autopen box.

Meanwhile the country he actually governs has its troubles. Prices have not behaved. Consumer sentiment hit a record low this spring. His approval has fallen into the mid thirties, matching the lowest levels of his second term and approaching the worst numbers of his first. And when the numbers sour, the reflex is not to reach for a fresh idea. The reflex is to reach for the old enemy.

That is the part that ought to trouble even his admirers. When your identity gets stitched so tightly to opposing one man, you have handed him a strange authority over you. You have made him your compass. The man is out of office, writing his books, raising his daughters into grown women, and still that name floats up at the podium, still the ghost the crowd gets asked to boo. A free man does not keep returning to the cell he swears he escaped from.

I have known this type in ordinary life, not only in politics. The fellow who cannot stop talking about the brother with the bigger house. The uncle still fighting an argument from a Thanksgiving twenty years gone. There is a hunger in that habit that never fills, because what they are truly after is not victory over the other person. It is the quieting of something inside themselves, and no amount of knocking down another man’s work will ever hush that particular noise.

Here is what my years have taught me about legacy, and I use the word carefully because it gets tossed around too cheap these days. You do not earn a good name by proving somebody else deserved a worse one. You earn it by building. A school. A road. A law. A place where a grandfather from Texas can bring his granddaughters and show them what he witnessed with his own eyes. Roosevelt built. Johnson, for all his sins, gave us the civil rights and voting rights laws that reached down and changed my own life in ways I can still feel in my hands.

So what has Mr. Trump raised that will still be standing, still throwing shade, when the noise finally dies down? That is not a rhetorical trap. It is an honest question, and I would welcome one of his people across the table to answer it without once reaching for the name of a predecessor. I suspect they would struggle. And I suspect the struggle tells the story better than I ever could.

There is a real sadness in it, once you let yourself feel the thing. Here was a man handed enormous power twice. The podium, the pen, the party, all of it in his grip. Any road was open to him, including the one where you get remembered for something entirely your own. The grudge won out. So did the wrecking crew, swinging away at another man’s house instead of laying the first brick of your own.

The final verdict is not written, and I am old enough to know better than to pretend otherwise. History has a way of embarrassing men who were dead certain they had it figured. Maybe something he set in motion will grow into a thing worth remembering on its own terms.

But I would not lay my money there. Because the picture I cannot shake is from that Friday in Jackson Park. A building full of light and children on one side of the country. On the other, a man alone with a screen, drawing garbage onto somebody else’s roof.

A shadow is not a legacy. And a man who spends his one life fighting one has told you, without meaning to, exactly whose light he has been standing in the whole time.

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.

I never could bring myself to nod with them. Something in the verdict sat crooked in my chest, though I will admit it took a long stretch of years before I understood exactly what.

There is a certain notion of what a brother is supposed to be, and it gets passed down like an heirloom nobody remembers buying. He is meant to be granite. Unbothered. A little dangerous, or willing at least to look the part. The face stays still. Tears do not fall where folks can witness them, love does not get spoken aloud, and Lord knows a real one does not sit on camera talking about faith, and gratitude, and drinking his water and guarding his recovery. To plenty of us, that kind of living looked like a get-up. Like a performance staged for a camera owned by other people.

Here is what I have finally come to understand about the granite, though. It was never vanity. It was survival.

My father wore it. His father wore it deeper. Both came up in a place that punished tenderness in men who looked like them, a country that read a smile as weakness and gentleness as an opening. So the wall went up. Hurt got swallowed. Softness got answered with a set jaw, because the world outside that door was hunting for any reason. The pose kept them breathing. I will not sit here and mock what kept a whole generation alive.

The trouble is what came after. We took the shield and started bowing to it. We forgot it was only ever a shield. Somewhere along the road the armor stopped being protection and became the entire definition, until a young brother who refused to strap it on could look, to the wrong set of eyes, like a counterfeit.

That is the room Russell walked into.

He came grinning about possibility. Why not you, he kept telling children and telling himself. And a hope that plain made people suspicious. We have been sold so many bright teeth over the years that a real smile now reads as a hustle. When the quarterback spoke about faith, folks rolled their eyes and called it a brand. When he loved his wife openly, lifted her up in front of the entire world, some cackled and questioned the man’s spine, as though devotion were a thing to be ashamed of. He did not run the streets. He did not drink himself sideways. He guarded his health and his body like they were worth guarding. And for all of it, the verdict came down quick. Corny. Fake. Not really one of us.

Sit with how strange that arithmetic is. We had reached a place where clean living, and open affection, and a fella saying he believed in something larger than himself became the evidence used against him.

Now, I am not handing you a saint. Russell is a whole person, with the ego and the misjudgments and the odd business venture any of us would have carried. Seattle grew tired of him and he grew tired of Seattle, and there is history in that split that has nothing to do with our subject here. I am not composing a hymn to the athlete. He is a door, and I want to walk you through it into the wider room waiting on the other side.

Because the true matter was never one player. It is the narrow little box we built around ourselves and then had the nerve to call freedom.

Consider all the men who never got to be gentle. Who had jokes but were not permitted grief. Who could dance but could not tremble. Fellas who buried three friends before thirty and were told, by their own people, to keep it moving, hold the face flat, do not let anybody catch the water in your eyes. We handed each other that instruction like it was affection. Maybe, once, it was. But plenty of good souls died lonely inside it, cradling a whole ocean they were never allowed to pour out.

What truly unsettled folks about Russell, I have come to believe, is that he declined the audition. He would not act out the hardness for their comfort. He was optimistic in front of a people trained to distrust hope. He was warm in front of a people taught that warmth gets you played. He prayed aloud in a culture that had learned to keep the Lord inside the building and off the field. And every single time he did it without shame, he was quietly posing a question a lot of us were not ready to face. Who told you that you had to be stone. And who profits from you believing it.

I think about the boys watching. Always studying, always sorting out what a grown one is permitted to be. A son reads his father for the list of what is allowed, and if the only item on that list is grit, then grit is the whole inheritance he receives. A cramped inheritance. He hands the same tight little will down to his own, and the ocean gets buried one more generation deep.

So when I hear that a brother proved he owes no one a show of toughness, I do not receive it as an insult to strength. I have known powerful men my entire life. My grandfather could break a chain and hum a spiritual while he did it. Real fortitude was never the enemy. The enemy is the imitation, the pose we mistook for the person, the shield we knelt before so long that we could no longer tell it apart from our own faces.

Optimism is not softness. Loving your wife where everyone can see is not softness. Faith is not a costume, rest is not laziness, and a grown one weeping at a funeral is not less of what he is. None of that should sound daring. It only sounds daring because we let a stingy definition wear the crown for far too many years.

I wish somebody had told my uncle that, back in the shop, before he waved off that grinning young quarterback. I wish somebody had told my daddy he was allowed to set the wall down sometimes. That the door had been unlatched for years, and he could have stepped out into the evening air and simply felt something without first checking who was looking.

We do not always get to repair the past. But we do get to loosen our grip on what follows it.

A grown one can be tender and still be whole. He can hope in broad daylight and mean every word. He can believe, and love out loud, and keep himself well, and not a single ounce of his manhood goes missing in the exchange. Russell did not invent that truth. He simply stood in front of the cameras and lived it plainly, long enough that even the stubborn old heads in my shop finally had to set down their laughter and listen.

And that, when you get all the way down to it, may be the bravest thing any of us ever does.

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.

I came up in a sterner time. Back then your word was your bond, and how you carried yourself when the heat was on told folks more about you than any speech ever could. My father, God rest him, used to say you find out who somebody really is when the trouble shows up, not when the cameras are being kind. That old line has been sitting on me lately. Keeps walking me back to the same door.

My mind goes to the days right after Sandy Hook. All those babies, gone. A whole country sucker punched and not even sure how to breathe. He came to that podium and you could just see it sitting on him. Jaw tight. Eyes wet. That long pause before he could get a single word out. He didn’t dress his grief up for us. He let it be what it was, and in doing that he gave everybody else a little room to hurt too. Plenty of leaders will tell you they feel your pain. Not many will stand up there and let you watch them carry it. That’s a whole different animal. I caught it every single time.

Now hold on, don’t get me wrong. Nobody around here thinks he walked on water, me least of all. Had my fights with him. There were days I wanted him to hit back twice as hard, dig his heels in, quit reaching across an aisle that kept smacking his hand away. We said as much down at the barbershop most Saturday mornings, coffee going cold, everybody talking over everybody. But not once in eight years did he make me ashamed of how he talked to the world. And brother, that’s a low bar we didn’t know we’d end up missing this bad.

Obama had a way with words that I think we all took for granted while we still had it. Spoke in whole thoughts. Trusted you enough to actually build the argument out, let a sentence breathe, figure you were sharp enough to walk with him clear to the end of it. He wasn’t trying to shout you down. He was trying to reason with you, which is a lost art if there ever was one. When he got on television to talk to the nation, it felt like sitting across from somebody serious who understood exactly how serious the job was. Didn’t matter if you liked his politics. You knew he’d read the briefing and lost sleep over it.

Think about the ugliness they threw at him, and Lord, there was a mountain of it. The birth certificate mess. All that whispering about where he was really from, what he really believed down in his chest, whether he even belonged in that house. A whole cottage industry got built just to tell this Black man he was a stranger in his own country. And through the worst of it, he mostly kept his cool. Used humor when he could. Swallowed insults that would’ve cracked a lesser spirit clean in two. My generation knows that particular discipline in our bones. Twice as good, half as loud. Eat the disrespect so nobody can turn around and say you lost your composure. Watching him do it up on the highest stage there is, I felt two things at the same time. Proud he could. Sick that he had to.

Whoever came after showed us the other road a president can walk, and the contrast couldn’t have been starker. Donald Trump didn’t swallow a thing. Said the quiet part out loud, was widely condemned for appearing to mock a disabled reporter, attacked John McCain’s status as a war hero, and turned the office into something closer to a cage match than a solemn trust. Some folks ate it up. Called it authentic. Called it fighting back. They can have that opinion, it’s a free country. All I know is I watched the temperature of the whole place change right in front of me. The meanness that at least used to hide itself came out and pulled up a chair at the head of the table. Once that dam broke, it’s been awful hard to build back.

That’s really the center of what’s been eating at me. It isn’t just that I miss one particular man. It’s that his absence threw a hard light on how coarse everything’s gotten. Politics now is loud in a way that leaves you wrung out. Everybody hollering. Everybody performing their outrage for a phone. Half the people we ship off to Washington seem more interested in going viral than in doing the actual work, and Trump didn’t invent that fever so much as he gave everybody permission to run it hot. In all that racket, the memory of a leader who’d drop his voice to make a point stands out like a porch light on a black country road.

Let me be careful here, though. Nostalgia is a slick trickster. It’ll sand off every rough edge and hand you back a fairy tale. Obama years had their failures, real ones, and history’s going to weigh them the way it should. The drone strikes bothered my sleep. Wall Street walked off too clean for my liking. That hope he was selling back in ’08 was always bigger than any one fellow could deliver, and some of it soured into flat disappointment for people who needed a good deal more than a beautiful speech. I’m not asking you to forget one bit of that. A grown assessment holds the good and the bad in the same two hands and doesn’t drop either one.

But temperament is its own kind of substance. How the person at the top behaves ends up shaping how the whole nation behaves. Children were watching. My own grandbabies were watching. For eight years one of the most powerful people on earth showed them patience, curiosity, and self-control. He read to kids on the floor. And down in a church in Charleston, packed wall to wall with grieving people, after a young man had walked into their Bible study, sat among them for nearly an hour, and then murdered nine souls who had welcomed him into their prayer circle, the president stood up and sang Amazing Grace. That one lives in me. A sitting president, up there singing, because plain words just couldn’t hold the weight anymore. Wasn’t a poll tested thing. That was a human being reaching for the only thing left that might do any good at all. I’ve spent enough Sundays in enough sanctuaries to tell a performance from a prayer. What I saw that day was a prayer.

What I’m really grieving, if I’m being honest, is a whole idea. The notion that decency and strength can live under the same roof. Somewhere along the line we got sold this lie that kindness is weakness, that you’ve got to be cruel to be tough, that a leader who stays calm must be soft as pudding. It’s the whole gospel Trump preaches, and a lot of good people bought it. He put that lie in the ground just by being who he was. Firm as they come. Made the hard calls, sent people into harm’s way, carried the weight of every one of them, and never once turned into a bully to do it. He showed you can be steady and strong at the same time. That composure isn’t cowardice. That you can hold your ground without spitting on the fella standing across from you.

The young ones coming up didn’t really get to see any of that in real time, and it eats at me. A whole generation’s being raised to believe political life is nothing but combat, that the loudest, nastiest voice takes the whole pot, that contempt and conviction are the same thing. They flip on the television and watch grown adults act worse than middle schoolers, and they figure that’s just how the game is played. It is not how it’s played. It wasn’t always like this. There was a stretch, and not that long back either, when the person in the highest office carried himself with a dignity you could point a child toward and say, there now, be like that.

I’m not saying any of this to make a saint out of him. He’d hate that, and he’d be first in line to rattle off his own shortcomings. I’m saying it because we’re living through a mean, bruising stretch of American life, ugly enough that we’ve halfway forgotten the other thing ever existed. And remembering matters. Remembering is what keeps a people from just settling for the mud. Let cruelty become the water we all swim in, let shouting become the only tongue that power speaks, and we’ll have handed away something we might never get back.

Old preacher I knew a long time ago said grace isn’t weakness dressed up in Sunday clothes. It’s strength that has finally learned how to hold itself. That always rang true to me. Takes a whole lot more backbone to stay measured when the world’s poking at you to snap than it does to just blow sky high. He had that backbone. Showed a country a president could disagree without demonizing, could lose without whining, could win without gloating. Reminded us the office was always bigger than any one ego, that whoever sits in it is meant to be a servant and not some kind of king.

I’m an old man now. Seen enough presidents come and go to know not one of them is perfect, and every last one will let you down somewhere down the line. But every so often one of them shows you the very best of what the job can be, and he did. Not through the laws alone. Through the plain, almost radical act of behaving like a decent human being while half the world sat there openly hoping he’d fall flat on his face.

We shouldn’t need a former president to teach us how to treat one another. But if that’s the one lesson we’re willing to carry out of those eight years, then let’s carry it and let’s carry it seriously. And let’s not wait too long before we start expecting it again from the people we pick to lead us.

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.

That inheritance comes to mind whenever someone asks whether Black America will let bygones be bygones with the large retailer headquartered in Minneapolis. The question rests on an old and flattering assumption, that Black consumers forget quickly, that loyalty can be revoked and later repurchased at a discount. The record suggests otherwise. I have followed this kind of story long enough to know how its final chapter tends to read.

Consider the sequence. A corporation spent years assuring its Black customers that it understood them. It made the pledges, hung the language of belonging and equity on the wall, and collected every ounce of goodwill that language earned. Then the political wind shifted, a new administration arrived, and almost overnight the same firm decided those commitments had grown too heavy to carry. The reporting left little doubt about the timing. Early in 2025, the moment principle carried a price, the retailer sat down.

The response was disciplined. Shoppers marched. Clergy fasted. Organizers gathered outside the headquarters and named precisely what they had watched unfold. Then the numbers moved, which remains the only language certain boardrooms respect. Foot traffic thinned. By late 2025, the stock had surrendered roughly a third of its value from the rollback period. A chief executive entered a transition, leaving the CEO role while remaining executive chair. None of it came from a hashtag. It came from ordinary people, one cart at a time, choosing to spend their dollars somewhere else.

And then came the part that stings.

Someone inside that building grew clever, or believed they had. The strategy assumed the road back into those wallets ran straight through the music. So the chain reached for a giant. Shawn Carter, the man out of the Marcy projects, agreed to let his debut album return as a polished anniversary pressing sold beneath that red circle. White vinyl, collector’s packaging, the release timed close to Juneteenth so the message could not be missed. Welcome home, the gesture seemed to say. All is forgiven. Come and spend.

I have admired that man’s mind for thirty years. I bought Reasonable Doubt when it was new, and the corner spoke through every bar. Yet admiration is not obedience, and a great record cannot launder a corporate retreat. Some of us remember an earlier season, when a young quarterback filed a collusion grievance after kneeling and saying the football league had shut him out, and that same mogul stepped forward with a partnership and urged everyone to move past protest toward what he termed progress. The progress, as far as anyone could tell, amounted to a wealthier Roc Nation and a handful of diverse faces at the halftime show. The young quarterback never threw another professional pass.

That is the pattern. I am not the first to notice it, and I will not pretend to read another man’s heart. But I can read a calendar. When the pressure on an institution runs highest, that is the precise moment the deal materializes, and the deal tends to enrich the dealer most of all.

Boycotts run deep in our tradition. The word sits easy because earlier generations made it work when everything was at stake. Workers walked to their jobs in Montgomery for more than a year rather than ride in the back, and they did not relent because the city printed a friendlier notice. They relented when the law itself was forced to bend. Farmworkers out west held their line for years until the wages finally rose. That lesson passed down like a family recipe. A fast does not end because someone offers a snack. It ends when the thing being protested gives way.

People keep asking why the line still holds more than a year on, so permit me to state it plainly. This was never about a retired slogan. Long before the rollback, the chain had built its public face on welcoming Black shoppers, sponsoring the galas, printing its name across the programs at community events. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, the company made genuine vows. A racial equity plan. A commitment to raise Black representation in its workforce by a fifth. Donations directed toward historically Black colleges. And the headline pledge: more than two billion dollars to be spent with Black owned businesses by the close of 2025, purchasing the goods that fill the shelves, contracting the agencies and vendors and media firms, channeling real buying power into a community long shut out of it. Not a charitable donation. A promise to conduct serious commerce at scale. The word was accepted as given. Some felt pride, even, watching a hometown brand appear to do right by its neighbors.

Then a new president took office vowing to dismantle DEI programs, and within a week the entire posture collapsed. The speed told the story. An institution that requires only seven days to abandon a principle never truly held it. Organizers grasped the larger stakes at once. If a giant so loud about inclusion could fold that quickly and pay no price, every boardroom in the country would read the outcome as permission. Drop the promises. The memory will fade. No one keeps the bill.

Here lies the splinter no one in that building wishes to remove. The outgoing chief executive wrote last summer that the two billion in promised spending would be met by year’s end. Target later said the pledge had been fulfilled in early 2026, but critics still had not seen the kind of detailed public accounting they believed the community was owed. Even the minister who later tried to declare the fight finished conceded he had seen nothing confirming the money moved. So the request now is to forgive a debt that has not been publicly itemized to the satisfaction of those who were asked to trust the promise. My elders had a rule for exactly this. You do not mark a bill cleared on the word of the man who still owes you a receipt.

That is what holding the line looks like up close. We are well into 2026 now, more than a year past the first betrayal, seventeen months and counting, with no central authority issuing orders, only households across the country arriving at the same decision in their own kitchens. One organizer put it more sharply than I could, declining to trade the community for crumbs or a seat at a corrupt table.

What the strategists in those marketing meetings keep getting wrong, generation after generation, is elementary. They treat sentiment as inventory, as though trust were a mood restored by the right celebrity and the right rollout. Trust is not a mood. It is a contract. Once broken, no jingle, no exclusive, no famous friend signs it back into being. Only conduct does that. Restore the hiring commitments. Resume the spending with Black owned firms without waiting to be shamed into it. Stand with the immigrant families being torn apart in nearby neighborhoods. Perform the unglamorous, expensive, sustained work that earns no applause. That is the only receipt worth accepting.

What these strategists underestimate most is straightforward. They keep treating forgetting as a certainty, a line of credit to draw against, and they have done so for a hundred years. The assumption is always that the next campaign will arrive before the last betrayal hardens, that the public holds the attention span of a quarterly report. They are mistaken, every time. The proof rests in the simple fact that they must keep trying. No new strategy is required to recover people who never left.

Let me be fair, because fairness is its own form of memory. Good souls will buy that record and feel no shame, and I understand them completely. A collector wants the pressing. A devoted listener wants to honor thirty years of a classic. A person can refuse an injustice and still love a song. I will not stand over anyone’s cart counting their groceries. Each household keeps its own ledger.

But let no one persuade you the matter is settled because a single pastor announced his fast complete. Those who began this never surrendered the ending to one voice. The chain restored a fragment here, a pledge there, a portion of what it once promised, and called the result peace. Partial repair is not repair. It is an admission that something broke, then papered over with a gesture sized for a press release rather than a remedy.

My grandmother had a phrase for that kind of offering. She called it being handed a bone and told it was a feast. She never ate it, and she taught her children to refuse it as well.

So no, I do not believe this community is fooled the same way twice. Once, perhaps. A first betrayal can catch even a careful person unaware. But Black America learned long ago to watch the timing, to notice who appears when the cameras are hot and who quietly does right when no one is filming. Our own history is crowded with demands to forgive on command, to set down a fresh injury the very moment it became inconvenient for someone else. That arrangement wore thin generations ago, and weariness has a way of sharpening the eyes.

What I return to is this. That store did not lose its Black customers by failing to entertain them. It lost them by revealing who it was the moment the cost turned real, and they believed what they saw. That is not bitterness. It is literacy. A people who survived everything this country has thrown at them did not endure by remaining naive about who keeps their word and who discards it the instant honoring it grows costly.

If the retailer genuinely wants those shoppers back, the path is not a vinyl record, however beautiful the object. Real repair is slow and unrewarding. Honor the original promises. Mean them this time. Then mean them again next year, when the political weather turns cold and meaning them becomes unpopular. Sustain that across a stretch of seasons, and watch how a people who never forget a wound prove equally incapable of forgetting a kindness.

Until that day arrives, the music will play and the carts will roll past the bullseye. Somewhere an older man will hum along to a record he has cherished since long before its maker became a billionaire, his money resting quietly in his pocket. He can love the song and still remember the seller. The two were never the same thing.

The receipts remain where they have always been kept, in memory, and they do not fade on anyone’s schedule. A company that mistakes patience for forgetting has misread the very customers it hopes to keep. That has long been the costliest miscalculation in American commerce, and somehow it is the one corporations cannot stop repeating.

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.

A mood going around in 2026 troubles me. Some of our folks speak about Donald Trump as though heaven mailed him down to rescue the forgotten. Others talk like the man wakes each morning and schemes against every one of us before his coffee cools. Both notions are childish. Both hand him something he never earned, which is a seat inside your head where good sense used to live.

Understand where this comes from. My generation guarded the vote with our bodies while dogs and fire hoses answered back. Grown men wept the first time they slid a ballot in a box without fear of losing a job or a life. So nobody needs to teach me what this country has done to us. This much lives in my bones. Bitterness, though, left to run loose, makes a person easy to lead by the nose, and worship does the same work coming from the opposite direction.

Here is the maturity being asked for. Quit letting either party treat you like a wife who will never walk out no matter how she is done. The Democrats have leaned on our loyalty for sixty years, sometimes earning it, often just assuming it. The Republicans, for a long stretch, did not bother to ask. Now a few on the right are knocking, and some of us feel so flattered by the knock that we forget to ask what they brought to the door. A person should never be so starved for respect that he sells himself cheap to the first stranger who learns his name.

So set the savior tale down. Set the devil tale down beside it. Pick up something harder and worth more. A clear eye.

Take the measure of the man by what he does, not by how a crowd feels around him. Watch who he hands power to. An appointment tells you more than any speech, because a speech is wind while an appointment is a living person with authority over real lives. Who sits on the courts now, and how do their rulings land on a tired mother fighting to keep her apartment? Who runs the agencies that decide if your neighborhood drinks clean water or gets handed a poisoned river nobody downtown ever has to taste? Those names outlast the rally lights.

Now the money, and let us be honest about it. Donald Trump points to payroll employment and talks as though the country is roaring. In some raw numbers, work remains historically high. But step closer. Overall unemployment by the close of last year sat around the mid fours, while Black unemployment told a harder story. Across 2025, Black workers carried an average unemployment rate near seven percent, and late in the year that number pushed higher. Heading into 2026, the strain on Black households had not eased. Among young Black workers, especially teenagers, joblessness remained painfully high, often running near or above eighteen percent depending on the month. That is not a small detail. That is somebody’s son filling out applications and hearing nothing back.

Another clear share of the pain also came through the federal payroll, where better than a quarter million jobs disappeared in 2025. Our folks have leaned on government work as a road into the middle class for generations, so when that road gets torn up, we are the ones thrown off it first. Not every federal job belongs to a Black family, of course. But any honest person knows public work has long been one of the more stable doors into benefits, pensions, homeownership, and a life with some breathing room.

There was loud talk of tariffs bringing the factories home. The factories did not come roaring back. Manufacturing shed work after those tariffs landed, while tariff-related costs helped push prices higher on the shelf for households already trying to stretch a check. Set that against the corner of the economy that did grow, health services and private schooling, which added jobs even as wages in many of those places stayed too thin to cover what rent and groceries now demand. The full picture sits right there, and a grown person takes it in whole instead of grabbing one bright statistic and waving it like a flag.

Look too at where the relief went. A tax bill passed last year, and much of its sweetness flowed upward, while fresh work rules tied to Medicaid are set to press hardest on low-income people who can least afford to lose their coverage. Closer to home, Howard University had to push back against proposed budget reductions and ask that its federal support be sustained at least at the prior year’s level. That matters, because photographs with Black students and kind words about Black colleges do not mean much if the budget tells a different story. An order signed in one room and a funding decision made in another can wear very different faces.

The old wound has not healed either. As 2026 opened, Black homeownership still sat around forty-four percent, while non-Hispanic white homeownership ran around seventy-five percent. That gap was not born yesterday, and no one president created it by himself. But nothing in the current playbook seems built with the force needed to close it. A people cannot build lasting power on applause alone. We need land, equity, access to credit, fair appraisals, decent wages, and neighborhoods where our children are not priced out of the very blocks their grandparents held together.

Turn to the vote, the matter I hold closest. Anything making it harder for an old woman with no car to cast a ballot earns a cold, hard stare, no matter which party dreamed it up. Lines stretching for hours in our precincts while they melt away in the suburbs are no accident. Watch what gets signed and what gets gutted by people in robes who will never once face a voter. This is not cheering for a team. The point is keeping the single tool our grandparents bled to put in our hands.

On crime Donald Trump claims a historic drop in killings and points to his law-and-order push as proof. He is right that last year brought a major fall in murders. But honesty demands the rest of it. Those numbers were already tumbling before his current term became the headline, climbing down from the pandemic spike, and the experts who study this for a living do not all agree that federal pressure deserves the credit he wants to take. Both can be true at once. A safer street is a blessing wherever it springs from. A leader taking credit for a tide already turning before he showed up is just politics in a good suit. Maturity means carrying two thoughts without dropping one to feel better.

Here is the part no campaign wants you dwelling on. Most of what shapes your day never crosses that desk in Washington at all. Your child learning to read by third grade rests with a school board you probably cannot name. The officer on your corner sees a neighbor or sees a suspect, and the call comes down to a chief, a mayor, a union contract. Does the store on the avenue sell fresh food or only liquor and scratch tickets? A zoning meeting decides it on a Tuesday night when you were too worn out to show up. We pour all our heat into the top of the ticket and sleep clean through the elections touching the ground under our feet. All backward, and it costs us dearly.

Nobody here is telling you how to mark your ballot. Such talk would insult you. The ask is simpler. Walk in there owning yourself. When a politician courts you, make him show his work on the block where you actually live, not the block in the commercial. When someone swears one figure is your ruin or your rescue, hold it up against your own kitchen table before you believe a word of it. Feelings are real, yet they make a sorry compass in a voting booth.

Our strength was never meant to be a present we sign over to one personality. Strength is leverage, and leverage only bites when the other side believes we might truly walk. The day both parties have to compete for us in earnest, instead of taking us for granted or writing us off, is the day we start drawing real value out of this democracy. Such a day is not born of worship, nor of fear. It rises from a people too clear to be flattered and too proud to be scared.

So no, we owe Donald Trump no bowing. He stands there a politician of flesh and bone, packed with the same vanity and arithmetic as all the rest. We owe him no cowering either, no jumping at shadows, no letting dread think on our behalf. He is one figure in a long line of them, and like all the others he will pass on. What stays is us. Our families. Our blocks. Our long memory and the longer road still in front of us.

Size up the policy. Study the result. Count the people he lifts and the people he steps on. Then carry that reckoning into every election, the 2026 midterms and the small local ones most of all, with your back straight and your mind your own.

This is not loyalty to a party, nor love for a man. It is simply what growing up politically looks like, and the good Lord knows we are long overdue for it.

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.

Understand this is no tribute. Both of these women ran campaigns with real holes in them. Both made decisions you could argue with until the sun came up. I am not here to sand the edges off either one. I am here to talk about what their careers revealed, because what they revealed is bigger than the two of them put together.

Start with the resumes, since folks love to pretend these women just floated up out of nowhere. Hillary sat in the United States Senate representing New York. She ran the State Department as the nation’s top diplomat, shaking hands with kings and warlords on the country’s behalf. Before that came eight years inside the White House, and decades in public life stacked on top of those. In 2016 she won the popular vote by nearly three million ballots. Won it outright. Then watched the keys to the building get handed to a man who had never held any office of any kind, ever. Sit with that arithmetic for a second.

Now bring up Kamala. District attorney in San Francisco. Attorney general of the most populous state in the union, running an entire justice apparatus. United States senator. Then vice president, the first woman ever to hold that office, the first Black woman, the first daughter of immigrants from that part of the world to climb anywhere near so high. When the sitting president stepped aside in the summer of 2024, she picked up a national campaign with a little more than a hundred days left on the clock and made it far more competitive than many expected.

By any measuring stick this country claims to respect, these were serious people. Credentialed, tested, steeped in the work, the kind of preparation we say we want. And here is the part that ought to keep you up at night. None of it protected them. In certain rooms, the preparation itself seemed to count against them.

You heard it with Hillary in that one little word everybody reached for and nobody could ever quite define. Trust. Folks did not trust her. Ask them why and watch the sentence fall apart in their mouths. There was always a feeling, a vibe, a sense that she wanted it too much, that she had been planning too long, that her drive had a smell to it. Funny thing about that. We have never once held a man’s hunger against him the same way. A fellow who spends thirty years angling for the top job gets called determined. A woman who does the identical thing gets called calculating, cold, somehow not to be trusted for the sin of wanting what she wanted.

And before anybody points the finger only at the other side of the aisle, hold on right there. Some of the loudest doubt came from people who would swear on a stack of Bibles they believe in equality. Young folks on the left who decided she was the lesser of two evils and said it with a curl in the lip. Self-styled progressives who found her insufficiently pure, who could forgive a flawed man his sins in the name of the larger cause but could not extend that same mercy to her. The enthusiasm just was not there, they kept saying, as if enthusiasm falls out of the sky and not out of the way you choose to talk about somebody for a year and a half.

Then comes Kamala, a whole different person, younger, a prosecutor by trade, Black and Indian and Californian, and you would think a fresh face might get a fresh hearing. She did not get one. That song changed key but the melody held. What has she even done, people asked, about a person who had run a giant state’s legal machinery and sat one heartbeat from the Oval Office for four straight years. They mocked her laugh. Her sentences got clipped and labeled word salad. And somehow she had not earned the nomination, never mind the long climb behind her. The standard kept sliding away from her, the way it always does, just far enough out ahead that her fingers could never quite close around it.

Now I promised you honesty, so here it comes. Hillary made mistakes that were hers and nobody else’s. She took the industrial Midwest for granted and it cost her the whole thing. The business with the private email server was a wound she handed herself, and her response to it never once landed clean. Clinton could be guarded in a way that read as evasive even when she had nothing in the world to hide. Those are fair criticisms and I will not pretend otherwise.

Kamala carried her own weight too. Her first try at the presidency back in 2019 collapsed before a single vote got cast, and that was a failure of message and money and machinery all at once. As vice president she got handed thankless assignments and did not always rise above them in the public eye. The 2024 campaign was strapped to an administration the country had soured on, and a little more than a hundred days is simply not enough time to outrun four years of grocery prices and grievance. All true. All fair game on the table.

But here is where the honest man has to keep walking instead of stopping at the convenient spot. You can grant every one of those criticisms, every single solitary one, and you still cannot account for the whole picture with them. Because when you line up two of the most prepared candidates either party has offered this century against the welcome they actually received, the gap does not close. Something is left over. Something that has no name inside any one race but becomes impossible to ignore once you have watched it play out twice in your own lifetime.

I will tell you what that leftover thing is, since I have lived long enough to know it on sight. It is the unease this country still carries about a woman holding genuine command over it. Forget the symbolic sort. Forget the first lady sort, the supportive sort, the standing graceful beside her husband sort. The other sort. The sort where she is the one giving the orders, the one whose finger rests near the button, the one the generals salute. America says it is ready for that. America has been saying it is ready for a good while now. Its conduct keeps telling a different story than its mouth.

And I will be straight about why I read it so quick. Black folks have been measuring the distance between what this country promises and what this country delivers since long before I drew breath. We know this dance by heart. Not this one. Not now. Not yet. There is always a reason, and the reason always sounds reasonable in the moment, and the goalpost is always somewhere just over yonder, a step or two past your reach. You hear that same sliding standard laid on a candidate because she is female and the hair stands up on your neck, because you have heard the tune before, in a different room, aimed at a different soul.

What makes it sting worse, and I do mean worse, is how much of the resistance dressed itself up as friendship. The right was at least honest about its hostility. You knew exactly where you stood with it. Harder to swallow was the squeamishness rolling off the people waving the progress banner, the ones who wanted a lady in the office in the abstract but flinched from the actual flesh and blood candidates who showed up to claim it. They wanted somebody who would win without seeming to want it, who would lead without appearing to reach, who would be tough but never threatening and warm but never soft and ready but never eager. No such creature has ever existed. What they craved was a ghost.

So here we sit, two campaigns and eight years apart, and the verdict rhymes. A nation that swears up and down it has no trouble with a lady in charge has now twice declined to put one there, reaching past stacked credentials to do it both times. I am not claiming gender was the only thing standing in those rooms. Plenty was standing in those rooms. What I am saying is that it was in there too, and the people most invested in pretending it was not are the very ones who most need to look at it dead in the eye.

The denial is the tell. A country truly at ease with female authority would feel no need to keep announcing how at ease it is. It would just elect her and go on about its business. That has not happened, and the reason it has not happened is the precise thing the country keeps swearing up and down is not present. Hillary found it. Kamala found it after her. Both learned the lesson the hardest way there is, in front of everybody, on the biggest stage we have got.

The rest of us got to stand there and watch. What still hangs in the air is whether we took anything from it, or whether we are simply waiting on the next more than qualified woman to come along and teach us the same old lesson one more sorry time.

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.

What caught me off guard was how she chose to answer. Not with the kind of fire I might have wanted in my younger days, the kind that feels good for one night and costs you for years. Her answer came steadier than that. Took me a while to appreciate it, and longer still to understand it was the harder road, not the easy one.

Let me be plain about what that woman walked into. The first Black First Lady of the United States got picked apart in ways no previous First Lady had faced quite the same way. They went after her arms, of all things, like a sleeveless dress was a national emergency. They went after her face, casting her as angry before many Americans had even heard her story, painting a Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer as some kind of scowling threat. Remember that ugly business with a television network running words on the screen that turned a wife and mother into a punchline. Then came the cartoons and the comments from the lowest corners, the ones comparing her to an animal, the same old poison this country has been mixing for four hundred years, just poured into a fresh glass.

I want you to sit with that a second. Here was a woman raised on the South Side of Chicago, daughter of a city worker who went to his job with multiple sclerosis and never once complained. A woman who climbed every ladder this nation swore she was allowed to climb. And still grown men with microphones decided her only crime was existing in that house while Black.

Now here is the part the young folks need to hear. By every rule of fairness, the lady had earned the right to come out swinging. Nobody on this earth would have blamed her. Had she stood at a podium and read those people their own history, chapter and verse, I would have leapt out of my chair clapping. But something about the position got understood in her bones that most of her critics never bothered to learn. When you are the first, you stop being only yourself. You become the answer to a question a whole lot of people are asking in bad faith. They wanted rage. They were practically begging for it, leaving the bait out fresh every single morning. An angry Black woman fit the story they had already written in their heads. Give them one bad day and they would have framed it, hung it on the wall, and called it proof.

So that role they cast for her got refused, flat out. From the outside the refusal looked easy. Believe me, it was not. Anybody who has had to smile through an insult to keep a job, to keep a seat at the table, to hold a door open for the ones coming up behind them, knows down to the bone what that smile costs. It is not weakness. Call it discipline. The most demanding kind of strength there is, the sort that asks you to carry a heavy thing and never let your face show the strain.

Her own words said it best, and you have heard the line a thousand times, so hear it fresh. When they go low, we go high. People treat that now like a sweet greeting card, something you stitch on a pillow. There is nothing sweet about it. It is a strategy, and a brutal one to live by. Going high means you swallow the insult whole. You feel every bit of it and decline to hand it back, not because the other person earned your mercy, but because your dignity was never theirs to take. The camera, she knew, never stopped rolling. Two little girls were watching their mother get torn at, learning in real time how a woman of substance carries herself when the world forgets its manners. And the only lesson that lasts is the one you live out loud, so out loud it got lived.

There is a difference between being silent and being still. Silent, she never was. Up went her voice for children eating better at school, for military families holding the home front together, for young women who never figured a place like the White House kept a chair near their name. Some critics mocked her vegetable garden. Some mocked a grown woman for wanting kids to move their bodies, eat better, and cut back on junk food and sugary drinks. Imagine catching heat for that. Yet the work kept rolling, season after season, until the noise had to go find something else to chew on, because the meal it came hungry for never got served.

I have covered a mountain of public figures in my time. Most of them, once the heat arrives, you find out real quick what sits underneath the tailored suit. The bluster falls away and there stands a small frightened thing swinging at shadows. With her it ran the other direction. The harder the push, the clearer she got. Take that 2008 business about being proud of her country, where one honest sentence got snatched and twisted into something it was never meant to be. A weaker soul would have curdled into bitterness for the rest of their public life. Instead the blow passed clean through and left her shape intact. Rare, that. I do not say so lightly. Senators and presidents have come apart in front of me over far less.

Here sits the lesson she is still teaching, the one this country has not finished learning. We have built ourselves a culture where the loudest, meanest voice in the room gets treated like the strongest. We reward the clap back. We hand attention to whoever swings first and hardest, and somehow a whole generation got talked into believing composure is the same as having no spine. The truth runs opposite, and there she stands as living proof. Whoever can absorb a blow and still pick decency is not the weak party in the room. That person is the only one fully in command of themselves, and self command, brothers and sisters, is the rarest power going.

Those critics never did get their minds changed. Let me be honest about it, because I am too old to sell anybody a fairy tale. The ones who hated her for her skin hated her clear through to her last day in that house. Poise does not melt every cold heart. What it does is quieter and far more lasting. It sets the record straight for history. Years from now, when people look back and ask who carried herself with the most class through the ugliest weather, no dispute will follow the answer. The insults will have rotted away, the way insults always do, and her bearing will still be standing, plain as a monument.

That is why I keep saying the teaching never stopped. Not on account of any lecturing, since lecturing was never her habit. There is a whole stretch of young people, my own granddaughters among them, who watched a woman get treated worse than she ever deserved and never once let it shrink her into something small. They learned a body can be wounded and still be regal. You can be the target and still be the bigger person in the room without it turning you into a fool or a doormat. No classroom teaches a thing like that. You have to see it done by somebody real, under real fire, with everything on the line.

So I will say to her what an old man says to a young woman who made him proud. Thank you for not handing them the satisfaction. Thank you for showing my grandbabies what standing tall looks like when the ground will not stop shaking. This country did not always deserve the example set before it. But it needed every bit of it. It needs it yet. And whether it ever admits as much or not, it is learning from you still.

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.

A jury down in Texas just handed a teenager 35 years. Karmelo Anthony was seventeen when he reached for a blade at a school track meet and drove it into the chest of another child, Austin Metcalf, seventeen himself. Before that rainy morning was finished, one mama had lost her baby for good, and another mother stood before jurors asking them to show mercy to what was left of hers. Two households broken in the space of a few breaths. Both of them, in their own fashion, condemned to carry the weight of it the rest of their living days.

Now, I already know how the wider world wants to slice this thing up. People have turned it into a shouting contest about color, about who put hands on who first, about which corner you are supposed to go stand in. I have no use for that racket. My business here is with the youngblood reading this with his whole road still stretched out in front of him. Hear me the way you would hear your granddaddy if he set you down on the porch steps and cupped your face in both his rough hands.

Listen close. The whole thing started over a tent. Rain was falling, somebody told somebody else to get up and move, the words went hot fast, a push came, and a seventeen year old is now resting in the cold ground. That is the entire tale. No grand cause sat underneath it. Glory never lived inside it either. Just a little quarrel that two children swelled up into something neither one could ever pull back.

I need you to feel the size of that. Not the headline, not the verdict, the actual heft of it. A boy who will never come home for supper. Another who will spend the best years a man is given inside a cell, counting other folks’ holidays through a small window. He goes in a teenager and, if mercy comes early, comes out near fifty, with the strength gone out of his back and the spring gone out of his step, a stranger to the world he left behind.

Here is the part I beg you to tattoo on the inside of your skull. The thing that turned an ugly minute into a funeral and a courtroom was the object in that bag. Take the blade out of the picture and what are you left holding. A shove. Some cuss words. Maybe a busted lip, maybe a bruise to the ego, maybe a coach yanking two hot heads apart. By suppertime it would have been a story they told with a laugh years down the line. Tempers cool. Vanity heals. A wound to the body can mend. But steel does not forgive, and it surely does not care who was right.

That is exactly why I want this verdict to put a chill in you. Because the one who lost everything was not some monster the rest of us could never resemble. He was a regular kid having a regular bad moment, the same kind every single one of us has lived through. Wet and irritated, somebody got in his face, and that hot knot in his chest flared up like a struck match. The only difference between him and a thousand other angry teenagers that same day is that he reached into a bag instead of walking off mad. One reach. That is the whole gap between a free man and a number on a state list.

Let me tell you something the young rarely believe. The strong one is almost never the fellow swinging. He is the man who turns and goes while the crowd is hollering for blood. It takes nothing to throw a punch. A coward can throw a punch. Any scared child can pull out a weapon and feel ten feet tall for half a second. What takes a real spine is letting somebody think they won, swallowing that bitter lump in your throat, and choosing your mama’s peace over your bruised name. Anybody can prove he is dangerous. Precious few can prove they are wise.

The biggest lie that has buried more of our sons than any sickness whispers you must answer every disrespect, that you can never let a thing slide, that a fellow who walks off is somehow less of a man. I am here, with all my gray, to tell you that whisper is a snake. It does not love you. Won’t visit you in lockup, neither. Never once does it sit beside your mother on a hard plastic chair while she runs clean out of things to say. Nor will it write you when the appeals dry up. That snake used you and slithered right along to fill the next young ear.

Consider the arithmetic a second. The state said 35 years, with parole somewhere near the halfway mark. Picture it. Children you have not fathered yet. A wedding you will never throw. That phone call when your grandmother passes and you cannot get to her service. Fresh morning air you cannot taste whenever the notion strikes you. All of it forfeited, not for some cause worth dying over, but for a tent and a temper and a single bad reach on a rainy day. There is no version of that story you could ever tell where the trade makes a lick of sense.

And do not breeze past the other house in all this. A twin brother who shared a face with the child in the ground now wakes up alone in a quiet that will never lift. His father stood in that courtroom trembling with a sorrow so heavy it came out sounding like fury, because some grief runs too deep for gentle words. Two mothers will travel toward two different kinds of graves, one made of earth and one made of steel doors, and neither will ever stop aching. When that blade comes out, it is never only two boys it cuts. It tears clean through everybody who ever loved either one of them, and it keeps tearing for generations down the line.

I have to say a hard word about that weapon some of you keep telling yourselves you carry for protection. It does not protect you. Hear me. The very thing you slip into your pocket to feel safe is the same thing that stands up in a courtroom and convicts you. You think you are arming yourself against the world, and all the while you are quietly building the case that locks you away from it.

Let me lay this race business to rest, just between us. Grief has no color. A prison bunk has no color. Both of those mamas cried the same salt water, and both of those caskets, the wooden one and the one made of years, will swallow a mother’s joy with the same cold indifference. The world wants you fighting over the flag while it picks your pocket. Do not let anybody hand you a blade and call it honor.

So what is it I want from you, son. I want you to settle it right now, while your blood is calm and your head is clear, what kind of man you mean to be when somebody finally tests you. And somebody will. Some fool will run his mouth. Another will bump you and refuse to apologize. A third will try you in front of a crowd just to see what you are made of. The deciding has to happen long before that moment lands, because in the heat itself there is no room to think. You will simply do whatever you already trained your body to do.

So train it to walk. Teach those hands to carry nothing but your good sense. Bend that hard knot in your chest a little so your whole life does not have to snap in two. Learn the old sayings that kept your people breathing through worse than a track meet. He is not worth it. Let it go. My freedom costs more than this moment is worth. Speak those lines to yourself now, out loud if you have to, until they live in you the way a song you came up on lives in you.

I am not writing any of this to dance on a grave or pile shame on a boy already buried under the heaviest load a young life can hold. My reason is simpler. Having stood at too many caskets and pressed my palm against too much glass, I will not add your name to that list without first saying my piece. Somebody loved Karmelo. Austin was somebody’s whole world too. Both of those women held a newborn once and whispered soft dreams over him. Look how it ended. See how fast.

You are not too tough to learn from another man’s ruin. The wisest among us read somebody else’s sentence as a warning written in their own name. So read this one. Tape it to your heart. The next time that fire climbs up in your chest and the whole world dares you to prove yourself, I pray you hear an old man’s voice underneath the noise, telling you the bravest thing your hands will ever do is stay empty, stay open, and stay down at your sides.

Walk home, youngster. Just walk on home.

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.