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.

Let me say this plain, and let me say it with love. You were never required to become Barack Obama to have lived a life that counts.

Understand me here. This is no swipe at the man from Chicago. His journey deserves every bit of the honor it receives. The law degree, the long odds, two terms in the highest office, that calm he kept while folks threw everything at him. He carried it well. What I am wrestling with is the quiet falsehood that slipped into too many of our hearts, the one whispering that anything less than history amounts to nothing.

Think about the men who raised you. Was your granddaddy president? Mine surely was not. He drove a delivery route for 30 years. Came home wrung out most nights. He would settle onto that porch anyway, and out came whatever the day had taught him. Watch people close before you trust them. That was his big one. A promise stayed a promise with him, even the ones that dug into his pocket. He had no patience for anybody who could not meet his eyes. Nothing the man ever said made the news. Somehow he built something anyway. And what he built was me.

Here is a fact the headlines rarely hand you. A landmark federal study based on data collected from 2006 through 2010 found that Black dads who lived with their children were among the most involved fathers in America on much of the daily work that actually raises a child, the feeding, the bathing, the reading at night, the homework, the showing up. Black fathers living apart from their children also showed strong involvement on several measures. The CDC says comparable figures are no longer collected, so those numbers should not be mistaken for new 2026 data. Still, the findings challenged a stereotype that had been repeated for generations. That old story suggesting Black fathers simply do not show up never told the whole truth. And right this minute, across your city, fathers are quietly doing the holy, thankless work of simply being around.

No cameras rolling. Not a lick of applause. That is a victory. Write it in capital letters somewhere in your mind.

Winning wears plain clothes most days. It looks like a man who keeps a job he does not love because his family eats from it. Sometimes it is a husband who chooses the same woman on the rough mornings, not only the sweet ones. Other times it is an uncle who slides a nephew twenty dollars and a straight talk about staying out of trouble. None of that trends online. All of it holds a neighborhood together.

We have to unlearn the habit of clapping only for the extraordinary. A boy watching his father honor a promise learns more about manhood than he ever will from a documentary about a senator. The old head at the barbershop who tells a teenager to pull his grades up is doing nation work. That deacon who fixes cars for widows at cost is doing the same holy labor. Greatness in our tradition was never reserved for the famous few. It lived in the many who simply refused to quit.

Hear me right, though. None of this is about telling you to play small or go sit down somewhere. Just the opposite. I want you to take that gift of yours and aim it at a target you can actually hit.

Here is where we truly need to grow. Too many of us pour all our political fire into the White House once every four years, then go quiet while the decisions shaping our daily lives get made down the street without us. Your school board helps shape district priorities, curriculum choices, and what happens inside local schools. City council decides which roads get fixed and which blocks get ignored. The county commission moves tax dollars from one place to another. Down at the statehouse, lawmakers write the rules on ballots, on policing, on the very ground under your feet. Those rooms sit half empty of us, and that has to change. In 2026, with the whole country pulling in a dozen directions at once, that kind of ground game matters more than it has in a long while.

You may never sit behind the desk in Washington. So what. Serve on a zoning board. Run for a seat on your local school board. Knock the doors down your street and get folks registered. Give the widow two houses over a ride to the polls come November. When the mayor holds his next town hall, be the voice in the back that will not let him dodge a straight question. Coach a youth team on Saturday. Show up to the county budget hearing where hardly anybody thinks to look, because that dull little meeting decides whether your park stays open. Win a county race, steer real money back into your community, and you have arguably done more tangible good than a thousand speeches delivered from some faraway podium. Statewide power gets built the same way, one county and one district at a time, by Black men willing to do the slow work between elections.

The ones getting this right already walk among us. Look at the mayors quietly running major cities, the organizers building strength all year round in places like Chicago and Mississippi rather than waking up only for the presidential contest. They grasped a truth all of us need. Power that changes your street lives close to home, not a thousand miles up the road.

So grade yourself by a wiser ruler. Can your children count on you? Is your word still worth something when nobody is watching? Are the young ones around you steadier because you exist? Has your corner of the world grown a little more just because you refused to sit on your hands? Those questions carry far more weight than any comparison to a leader whose road was never meant to be yours.

Barack earned his page in history, and we thank God we lived to see it turn. But his life was his assignment. Yours belongs to you. The daddy, the laborer, the neighbor, the mentor, the local official who lands on no magazine cover, that man holds up more than he will ever fully know.

You do not have to be him. Just aim to be a little better than the person you were yesterday. Kinder, maybe. Steadier. Somebody your folks can lean on when the roof starts leaking. Keep at it, one plain day and then the next, and I promise you this much, my brother. That life of yours will have counted for something real. It has always been enough. And it always will be.

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.

So here I am, doing exactly that.

Let me start with what cannot be argued. The Naples Republican won his primary on August 18th, and if he beats David Jolly this November, the 2026 race makes him the first African American ever to lead the Sunshine State. Only three Black Americans have ever been elected governor of a state in this country’s long life. Three. In two and a half centuries. Whatever you make of the congressman’s politics, and I have my thoughts, that number ought to stop you where you stand.

Now his story. Donalds came up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, raised by a single mother during the crack years, walking to baseball practice past whatever the morning left on the sidewalk. His mama scraped together tuition for Catholic school. He rode a one-way Greyhound down to Florida A&M and soon found himself struggling academically and financially, selling plasma with his boys, working odd jobs and calling home when the money ran out. Trouble found him young, desperation younger still. Then came church, then finance, then the Republican Party, and a rebuild into a congressman whose gubernatorial campaign raised more than a hundred million dollars and who had the president’s blessing.

That is a hard road. I will not let anybody pretend otherwise. The brother earned his seat at the table the old fashioned way, through failure and grind.

Here is the knot, though, and it is a real one. Donalds rarely centers the subject of color. He calls his adopted home a meritocracy, a place where anybody willing to work can rise. By his own telling he is a “Trump-supporting, liberty-loving, pro-life, pro-Second Amendment” Black man, and he seems to want that last part to sit as just another fact about him, no heavier than his zip code. He has acknowledged the landmark nature of what he is doing. Policy, he insists, matters more to him than pigment.

Which raises the question chewing on me since Tuesday. Does a fellow in his position owe something to the folks whose struggle made his candidacy imaginable in the first place? Or is winning while refusing to be boxed in its own quiet kind of freedom?

I go back and forth, honestly.

There is an argument, no foolish one, that the point of the marches and the beatings and the murdered organizers was to reach a day when a poor kid from Crown Heights could grow up to run a Southern state and talk tax policy instead of tragedy. From that angle, the congressman standing up there refusing to make his skin the headline is not a betrayal at all. It might be the destination. Wes Moore up in Maryland, a Democrat opposite our man on nearly every issue, likes to say his own milestone is “not an applause line.” Moore means the achievement is not the finish. It is the start of harder work. Different party, similar wisdom.

And 2026 has turned into a singular year for the whole question. Counting our congressman, a record eight Black major-party nominees for governor stand before voters this cycle, women and men, Democrat and Republican, most of them choosing to let the milestone speak for itself.

The other voice in my head refuses to hush, though.

Meritocracy sure is a pretty word. Problem is, I have never once set foot in the country it describes. My grandfather could out-work any man in his county and was still barred from voting in it. So when a politician stands up and swears the field is level now, that plain hard effort decides who eats, I catch myself wondering. Does he really buy that, or does he just need to, so he can sleep easy at night? Back in 2024 the congressman faced a Philadelphia crowd and said the Black family held together during Jim Crow. He later swore he never called the era good, only pointed to higher marriage rates, and I will grant him that clarification. Yet reaching all the way back to segregation to make a point about your own kin strikes me as a peculiar way to lift them up.

That brings me to the part I most needed to say.

A Black man is allowed to think for himself. He does not have to fall in line behind whoever the crowd says to follow. Being Republican is no sin. A free thinker is exactly what our grandparents bled for. So that trap where we decide there is one true way to carry this heritage, and read anybody who wanders off out of the family, I reject it, and I reject it hard. Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall shared a complexion and almost nothing else, and both were, whatever you make of them, fully themselves. The Naples fellow gets to be himself too. He gets to favor charter schools and low taxes and a smaller government. And he gets to be wrong, in my estimation, without turning in his card.

Here is the one line, though. Vote however you please, argue with your uncle at the cookout till the ice melts, believe whatever your own mind leads you toward. Just do not run down your people to do it. There is daylight between an independent thinker and somebody who trades on tearing his community apart for applause from a room that was never truly his. The former earns my respect even in disagreement. That second kind breaks my heart.

So could Byron Donalds make history without ever running on identity? Sure. He might. The ballots do not ask a candidate to file his feelings about ancestry. And there would be something almost poetic in a son of Crown Heights taking Tallahassee on nothing but ambition and argument, proving the thing his critics swore impossible.

I just hope, if that morning comes, he remembers the Greyhound. The plasma bank, the overdue rent, the woman who sacrificed so a hard-headed boy might get somewhere. And that his personal climb and the collective climb of a whole people are not the same tale, though they surely rhyme.

A leader can honor where he came from without campaigning on it, and without ever running it down. That, to me, is the milestone worth making.

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.

Right now she is one of the early frontrunners. As of August 18, Kalshi and Polymarket, the two big prediction markets, both had her out front for the Democratic nomination. A University of New Hampshire poll released in July put her at 22 percent, just ahead of Pete Buttigieg at 21 percent. And when reporters push her on whether she is running, she does not shut the door anymore. AOC calls the support humbling while insisting her focus for now is on the midterms. You have heard that dance before.

Here is the thing about being progressive and young and good on camera. None of it pays a light bill in Baltimore or fixes a school in Jackson. Those are vibes. Vibes are not policy. A whole generation of us learned that lesson watching politicians promise the moon every four years, snap the picture at the Black church, then vanish until the next cycle. Charles Barkley put it about as bluntly as anybody. He said Democrats only seem to care about Black people every four years, when they want the vote. He was not wrong to raise the question.

So before anybody fits AOC for a crown, let us look at the record with clear eyes.

Start with where she comes from. Her seat is New York’s 14th, running across the Bronx and a piece of Queens. Working class. Immigrant heavy. According to 2024 American Community Survey estimates, the district is about 53 percent Hispanic and 13 percent Black. That is not a knock on her. It is context. She built her career representing a heavily Latino and immigrant district, and by most accounts she has done right by the people who keep sending her back to Washington. But representing a district that is roughly one part in eight Black is a different thing from a career spent primarily answering to Black voters, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

Then there is the accent. This one stung a lot of people, and the criticism keeps resurfacing. Down in Memphis this summer she showed up to stump for a candidate and conservative critics accused her of slipping into a Southern, churchy cadence. Similar accusations followed her appearance at the National Action Network convention back in 2019, when critics said she had put on a drawl for a predominantly Black audience. Her answer back then was that she was born and raised in the Bronx, that she talks like it when she gets fired up, and that people who grow up navigating different linguistic environments understand what is happening. Maybe so. But when a Puerto Rican woman from New York sounds noticeably different in front of certain audiences, grown people are going to notice and make up their own minds about whether it feels natural or performed. And performance is exactly what Barkley was warning us about.

There was also the reparations business, and a BET commentary took her to task over it years ago. AOC waded into the question of who even counts as Black in America while answering a reparations question, tangling up the definition into something the writer argued erased the very folks the fight was supposed to be for. That is not a small thing to fumble. This past spring she said on Ilana Glazer’s podcast, while talking about the civil rights and voting rights movements, that Black Americans “really created democracy in this country.” Glazer agreed. I understand the sentiment behind it. Black Americans forced this nation to expand the meaning of democracy in ways its founders never intended. But history deserves precision. At the founding, slavery was embedded in American life, most Black people in the country were enslaved, and free Black communities also existed while being denied anything close to equal citizenship. What our people did across generations was force this country, through struggle and buried bodies, to live closer to words other men had written without us fully in mind. Getting that history soft and flattering does us no favors. It tells me she reached for the applause line when the fuller truth was stronger.

Now let me be fair, because fair is the whole point. To her credit she has backed reparations study. AOC is a cosponsor of H.R. 40, legislation that would establish a federal commission to examine the legacy of slavery and develop reparations proposals for descendants of enslaved African Americans. During the pandemic she also argued that COVID relief should be drafted through a lens of reparations because Black and brown communities were being hit disproportionately hard. On paper her platform lines up with plenty of what our community says it wants. I am not calling the woman an enemy. My point is that platform language comes cheap and specifics come dear, and the specifics are what I want.

We have been here before, and history ought to teach us something. Think about who actually moved the needle. Shirley Chisholm never asked anybody to trust a vibe. Unbought and Unbossed was the whole pitch, and she dared the party to catch up when she ran for president in 1972. Barbara Jordan? During Watergate that woman stood up in front of the entire country and made the Constitution ring like a bell, just her voice and her spine. Then Jesse Jackson ran twice, built the Rainbow Coalition, and used those campaigns to push the Democratic Party toward proportional delegate rules that gave insurgent candidates and Black voters more leverage. None of them inherited a thing. They earned the room by grinding for it, and not one of them got there just by being the loudest voice against the other side.

That is the standard. It is not charisma. A viral clip stomping on JD Vance does not cut it either, and neither does being the anti Trump the internet keeps asking for. The standard is a question. What specifically are you bringing to our table? Name the policy. Give the timeline. Tell us what you will spend your capital on when the honeymoon ends and the hard trading starts, because that is when you find out who a politician really is.

Some folks will read this and say I am being too hard on a young woman who is on our side. I hear that. But going easy is how we got taken for granted in the first place. Loyalty that costs nothing to earn is loyalty nobody respects. If AOC wants one of the most dependable voting blocs the Democratic Party has long counted on, she can come get it the honest way, by making a case and keeping receipts.

2028 is a long way off. AOC may run for president. Or she may aim at Chuck Schumer’s Senate seat instead. She has publicly left both possibilities open. Either way, the smart move for Black voters is the same one my uncle preached on that porch. Keep your hand on your wallet, smile back, and say show me. Not because she is the enemy. Because that is how you make sure the person asking for your trust actually plans to earn 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.

I’ve been watching politicians talk about us for a long time now. Long enough to know the difference between a man who studies the numbers and a man who found a phrase that plays well at a rally. That “Black jobs” line was the second kind. It was built to make a certain crowd nod along, and it was built to make some of our own brothers think somebody finally noticed them. Neither of those things is the same as noticing.

So let me do the thing he never did. Let me put the numbers on the table.

Take the freshest report, the one that dropped this month. On paper it reads like relief. Black joblessness came in at 6.3 percent for July, down from 7.2 percent a year before, nearly a full percentage point lower. You could almost believe somebody fixed something. Then you look underneath the headline. The economy shed 23,000 payroll positions that month, while a separate government survey showed the Black labor force shrinking by roughly 204,000 people. Black employment itself fell by about 123,000, and our labor force participation rate slipped to 61.3 percent. Fewer of us landed in the jobless column partly because fewer of us were participating in the labor market at all. That is not the kind of recovery anybody ought to celebrate without reading the fine print.

Here is the part that ought to keep a grown man up at night. Break the thing out by the men and it gets uglier. Brothers sat at 6.2 percent unemployment in July, but that headline does not tell the whole story either. Nearly half a million fewer Black men over the age of twenty were employed in July than in December of last year. Our slice of who actually has a job has been sliding while the broader picture looks steadier for plenty of other Americans. A couple points here, a half point there. Sounds like nothing until you remember each little tick is somebody’s father, somebody who used to punch a clock and now sits at the kitchen table trying to figure out how to tell his people he got cut.

And a lot of the pressure on those jobs didn’t come from any immigrant. Some of it came from the government he runs.

That’s the piece nobody at those rallies wants to sit with. For generations, federal work was one of the few honest ladders a Black family could climb without somebody kicking it out from under them. The post office. The agencies. Steady wages, a pension, a way into the middle class that didn’t depend on some manager liking the way you talked. Our people built lives on that. Then the new administration came in swinging at the federal workforce, and Black workers had plenty at stake because we have long been represented in federal employment at levels above our share of the civilian labor force. Washington has been cutting federal employment since early 2025, removing positions from one of the sectors our families historically used as a path toward stability. That is not immigration. That is a policy decision made at a desk by the same administration telling us to keep our eyes fixed on the border.

I want to be fair here, because fairness is how you keep your credibility. The trouble facing Black men and work did not start with this president, and any writer who tells you it did is selling you comfort instead of truth. Prime-age Black men have run about eleven percentage points below prime-age white men in employment going back a quarter century, through Democrats and Republicans both. Some quarters, the median full-time Black male worker brought home a little over a thousand dollars a week while the median for white men ran three to four hundred dollars higher. This is old. This is structural. This was here before him and it’ll take more than one election to move it.

But naming an old problem doesn’t excuse a man for making choices that can deepen it and then pointing at strangers.

That’s really the sleight of hand, isn’t it. You take a wound that’s been there for decades, you press your thumb into it, and while we’re wincing you tell us the man responsible is climbing over a fence with a work permit in his hand. Meanwhile some real jobs, the kind with benefits and a future, are being eliminated by the very government you handed him. He counts on us hurting too much to check the receipts.

So check them.

When somebody stands in front of you and says immigrants are taking your work, ask him a simple question. Which job. Name it. Point to the plant, the office, the agency where a brother got walked out and a migrant sat down in his chair the next morning. Research does not support such a simple one-for-one story across the American labor market. Immigration can put pressure on some workers, especially where skills and occupations overlap, and economists still debate how large those effects are. But that is a far more complicated reality than saying immigrants simply came here and took “Black jobs.” What the government’s own numbers clearly show right now is weakening employment and labor force participation among Black workers. That deserves more than a slogan about who supposedly replaced whom.

That’s the real crisis, and it doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

This isn’t about telling you how to vote. Grown men make up their own minds, and I’ve got more respect for you than to herd you anywhere. My point is simpler than that. I’m tired of watching us get used as a prop. Tired of a phrase like “Black jobs” getting tossed around by a man who couldn’t give the phrase much meaning when a room full of us asked him to his face. We deserve better than to be somebody’s applause line.

So the next time you hear him say it, don’t just nod. Ask the question that actually matters. If these are our jobs, where did they go. Who cut them. Who profited. And why is the man doing some of the cutting the same one telling us to blame the fellow at the bus stop who looks a little different than we do.

Answer those honestly and you’ll know exactly where you stand. That’s worth more than any speech.

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 have lived long enough to watch good men get sorted into piles by folks who never sat at their table. Some clerk in a campaign office, a strategist with a spreadsheet, decides that the fellow across the street belongs to the other tribe now, and just like that a friendship of thirty years is supposed to cool. I refuse it. You should too.

Let me tell you what nobody running for office will admit out loud. They need us divided. A united bloc of Black voters who talk to one another, who share resources across the aisle, who compare notes at the barbershop instead of shouting past each other on the internet, that is a nightmare for any campaign built on fear. Fear is the product. They sell it wholesale every October and hope we buy retail. Watch 2026 run that worn script one more time, the money landing early, the warnings turning shrill about how those people are coming for everything you hold dear.

Back when I was coming up, my father worked beside a man he disagreed with on nearly everything. Politics, church doctrine, how to raise a boy, they argued about all of it on the porch. But when my father’s car died in the middle of a January freeze, that same fellow drove twenty miles before sunrise to jump the battery. Nobody asked how he voted. That is what kinship looked like where I come from. The bond was never a poll. It was a promise.

Now watch how the game runs today. A young brother posts something you find foolish, and before you even finish reading it you have filed him under enemy. You have never met his mother. He might be pulling two jobs. On Saturdays he coaches a Pop Warner squad full of boys who are not even his, then drives home and reads his own girl to sleep. All you really have is a tag some stranger pinned on him, and you have worn it for him ever since, no questions asked.

Here is the hard part, and I say it with love. Both crews are guilty of the same trick. The blue side tells you that any Black man who leans right has lost his soul. Meanwhile the red side whispers that the ones who lean left are sheep who cannot think for themselves. Neither crowd wants you to notice that they are running the identical play from opposite sidelines. Keep him angry at his own reflection and he will never ask why his neighborhood still looks the way it does after 50 years of promises from both.

Some bonds outlast every argument, and you never know it until the day it counts. I learned that at a funeral, of all places. Two men who had not traded a word in ten years ended up in the same pew, close enough to touch, both of them wrecked, because the one in the box had loved the pair of them and never made either choose. Whatever they had been fighting about did not survive the room. Death does not check registration.

So let me be plain about what I am asking. When a fellow needs a job and you have the power to hire, hire him if he can do the work, and let the ballot he cast stay his own business. A boy on your block with no father steering him deserves a mentor, and you can be that even if his uncle wears a hat you cannot stand. Somebody stumbles in front of you, reach down and help him up. Argue with him later, once he is back on his feet, if there is any argument left worth having.

I am not telling you to abandon your convictions. Lord knows I have mine, and I will argue them until my last breath. Conviction is good. A man without a spine is no use to anybody. What I am warning against is letting a political machine monetize your idea of who deserves your loyalty. Campaigns, parties, and their allies will spend billions trying to convince you that your cousin is the threat. Meanwhile, plenty of the people writing those checks move in the same elite circles regardless of party. The division is for us. Not for them.

Think about the elders who built the road we walk. Did they screen the marchers by ideology before locking arms on that bridge? They came from churches, neighborhoods, activist groups, and every walk of life. They did not agree about everything, but they still marched together because the goal towered over any single opinion. We inherited that road. Now we hand a quick television ad the power to decide we cannot share a sidewalk.

There is a cost to all this sorting, and our sons are paying it. A boy watches his father cut off an old friend over a yard sign, and he learns that people are disposable. He learns that belonging is conditional, that love comes with a questionnaire. Then we wonder why the young ones feel so alone, why they trust nobody, why they build walls before they build anything worth keeping. We taught them that. And we can teach them something better.

I want you to try something this week. Call up somebody you have written off. Not to argue, not to win, just to check on him. Ask about his knees, his mama, his job. You will remember, somewhere in that conversation, that he is not a party. He is a person you once knew, made of the same clay, carrying the same weight in a country that never made any of it easy for either of you.

The powerful stay powerful by keeping the rest of us fighting over scraps and symbols. That is the oldest arrangement there is. Our answer cannot be to sort harder. It has to be refusal. We hold the line on who belongs to us, no matter how loud the noise gets in the season when they need our anger most.

Nobody in Washington gets to hand out your kinfolk like campaign buttons. You decide who your people are. That was always your call. Do not let a stranger with a fundraising quota tell you otherwise.

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.

Give me a minute with that, because the noise came fast and the reasoning limped in behind it.

Dr. Mark A. Brown laid it out in a letter to parents of the freshmen headed his way this fall. Not a scolding. A heads up. Show up prepared for the room you claim you want to walk into someday. That was the whole spirit of the thing.

Now, I earned my degree at Howard. Bison to the marrow, and I won’t pretend otherwise. So when folks online started hollering that the Alabama institution had declared war on our heritage, something old stirred in me. Seen this picture before, and it rarely holds up by the second act.

Here is where I split from a lot of my younger cousins on the timeline. Somewhere down the road we decided that any rule handed to our kids must be a boot pressing on the throat. Expectation got treated like a cage. A simple guideline about attire got recast as shame wearing a necktie. The reflex makes plenty of sense to me. Our grandparents were told to shrink, to grin, to make white people comfortable in exchange for a paycheck and a little peace. That wound is real. No, I would never wave it off.

But grief can turn lazy if you let it. And lately the phrase respectability has become a spell folks say to end a conversation instead of starting it. Somebody asks a freshman to leave the sleep cap in the dorm, and suddenly we are back in 1955. That flattening does us no favors.

There is a difference, a wide one, between a hostile society demanding that we erase ourselves and a house of our own asking eighteen year olds to rise to an occasion. Tuskegee is not the sheriff. It is the grandmother straightening your collar before church, telling you that you are worth the effort. Brown did not say the bonnet is ugly, nor call our grooming shameful. What he said is that the classroom is a rehearsal for a life these young folks swear they want.

Let me speak plainly about that head covering, since it sits at the center of all this. Overnight it guards the curls, the waves, the locs, the work our women and men put into looking sharp. Nobody with sense is coming for your edges at midnight. Protecting your style while you sleep and strolling into a noon seminar in the same wrap are two separate acts, though. The first is simple care. Its twin is a habit the working world will quietly punish, and I would rather a professor correct it in September than a hiring manager bury the résumé in June.

Here is the part that makes some folks wince, so I will say it slow. Truth is, I am proud to be a Black man, and Black folk have always carried ourselves like somebody, prouder than I can say. That is exactly why I sweat how our young present themselves. The world arrives already holding a picture. It clocks a durag, a hood tugged low, denim sagging off the hip, and reaches for the word thug before it ever learns your name. Unfair to the bone. True anyhow. Dressing for the win instead of feeding that stale lie bows to nobody. It refuses to hand a stranger the excuse. We can love the block and still show a freshman that a clean collar opens the door a slouch keeps shut.

The sharper objection deserves an honest answer, and I hear it plain. Some argue that these caps shield textures that European grooming standards never respected, so barring them in class smuggles in an old prejudice through the side door. That is a serious point, not a silly one. Hair has been a battleground for our people a very long time, from the CROWN Act fights to little girls sent home from grade school over braids. History like that stays close to me.

Still, the answer to unfair scrutiny is not to abandon every standard. It is to be excellent on our terms, drawing the finish line ourselves rather than letting somebody else set it. That is what these campuses were built to do. Booker T. Washington did not raise that place in the red clay so his descendants could show up to organic chemistry dressed for a nap. The man believed labor and dignity walked together. Agree with all of his methods or not, that thread runs straight through the school’s marrow.

I think about my own four years on the yard. We had elders who checked us. Straighten up. Speak up. Iron that shirt. Nobody mistook it for hatred of self. We understood it as love with a spine. Somewhere we traded that spine for the comfort of feeling perpetually wronged, and I do not believe the swap served our children well.

Character grows inside boundaries. A jazz player learns the changes before he ever breaks them. Liberty without form is just noise, and these kids are drowning in noise already, phones welded to their palms, which Brown also addressed, bless him.

None of this hands the school a blank check. If the policy gets enforced with cruelty, if it becomes an excuse to humiliate a poor kid who cannot afford a blazer, then I will be first in line to raise hell. Grace has to ride shotgun with any rule. Fairness lives in how you carry a thing, not only in whether you meant well by it. The alumni ought to watch that closely, and so will I.

But the core idea, that a proud institution can ask its people to present themselves with intention, is not betrayal. It is inheritance. My grandmother would have grasped it in about four seconds flat, no essay required.

We do our young no kindness by teaching them that every boundary is an insult and every insult is oppression. Life will hand them plenty of the genuine article. Ready them for it. Let them learn the gap between a warm demand and a cold one, because the warm kind, the sort that says I believe you can rise, is the rarest thing a person ever receives.

Wear the bonnet home, and wear it proud. Just let that future you keep talking about meet you halfway at the door, dressed and standing tall.

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 hearing two versions of Booker T. Washington, and neither one sounded like a human being. In my grandmother’s front room, his portrait hung near the mantel like a distant uncle who had done well for himself. Over at my cousin’s place, the college students had another name for him, and it was not affectionate. Sellout. Handkerchief head. The man who swapped a ballot for a bricklaying certificate.

Both houses argued over the same photograph and saw entirely different faces.

Here is the part nobody enjoys sitting with. He entered this world as property, in Virginia, back in 1856. Freedom arrived while he was still small, and by the time he reached manhood the nation had already started clawing back what it briefly extended. Reconstruction fell apart. Federal troops packed up. Men who lost the war were rewriting the peace with rope and legislation, and they were winning that fight. That was his room. Not a lecture hall. No courtroom up in the capital either. Alabama in the 1880s, where a colored fellow who spoke out of turn might be found swinging from a limb before Sunday service.

Start there, or do not bother starting.

What he assembled in that environment deserves plain description. His school opened in 1881 inside a one-room shanty provided near Butler Chapel AME Zion Church, with about thirty pupils and no campus of its own. In the years that followed, students dug the clay, fired their own bricks, raised campus buildings, then sold surplus bricks to white neighbors who needed building material. Nobody handed that operation a finished campus. It got put up by hand, in a county where the sheriff was nobody’s friend.

Now, about the caution.

Critics then and since have described his public posture as bowing. Consider the physics of his position instead. He ran a Negro institution in the heart of the Black Belt, increasingly financed by Northern philanthropists and still dependent on an Alabama political order that could cut support, obstruct its work, or turn the state against it. One inflammatory sentence from him could threaten funding, invite political retaliation, or endanger the people working and studying there. Teachers were run off, schools were attacked, and Black education was routinely treated as a challenge to white authority. His caution was not a personality defect. It amounted to insurance on a property full of somebody’s children.

None of which excuses September 1895 in Atlanta.

Frederick Douglass had died that February, leaving a vacancy at the top of colored leadership that everybody felt. Before a largely white, racially segregated audience at the Cotton States Exposition, he told the country that agitating over social equality was foolishness, that in purely social matters we could be as separate as fingers on a hand. Cast down your bucket where you are. White newspapers crowned him spokesman for Black America practically overnight, and he wore that crown for twenty years without much complaint.

Understand what actually happened in those minutes. He did not merely make private peace with segregation. What he handed segregation was an endorsement, delivered by the most prominent Black spokesman in the country, quotable forever afterward by every governor and editor hunting for justification while the door swung shut.

Celebrity of that grade converts into resources, and he spent his shrewdly. The National Negro Business League followed in 1900, knitting grocers and barbers and undertakers into something resembling a bloc. Money arrived from industrialists who would never have written a check to an agitator.

Notice, though, that the care he took bought him no safety at all. October 1901, he ate supper at the executive mansion with Theodore Roosevelt, and Southern editors lost their minds for weeks over a shared plate of food. Politeness protects nobody. Several who had applauded Atlanta now wanted him horsewhipped.

Du Bois named the trade correctly in 1903. Swapping political power, civil rights, and higher learning for vocational training, economic advancement, and white goodwill could only pay off if white America honored its end, and white America never had the slightest intention. Lynching remained endemic. Voting collapsed throughout the South. Talented youngsters got steered toward the anvil and the plow while medicine, law, and politics stayed locked. Northern philanthropists and Southern politicians found something to agree on for once, which should have been the warning nobody heeded.

Then came the machinery, which did its own damage. Friendly newspapers received subsidies and returned the favor in print. Presidents consulted him about federal appointments, meaning ambitious men learned that his blessing could help open a door and his opposition could close one. When William Monroe Trotter heckled him in Boston that same summer, the meeting descended into chaos, Trotter was arrested, and he later served thirty days for disturbing the peace. Washington’s network monitored his opponents, subsidized friendly newspapers, invested in publications willing to attack his critics, and sometimes pressured publishers or printers to deny those critics a platform. A leader who deserved honest disagreement had constructed a system where disagreement carried a price, and that is no longer strategy. That is a boss guarding territory.

Even so, he kept a second set of books. Working through intermediaries and confidential correspondence, he bankrolled legal challenges he could never claim publicly. He secretly supported voting rights litigation, attacks on the exclusion of Black citizens from juries, and the broader legal campaign against Alabama’s system of coerced labor. That campaign culminated in decisions including Bailey v. Alabama, the 1911 Supreme Court ruling that struck down Alabama’s peonage law under the Thirteenth Amendment. Historians pulled that paper trail out of his files decades after the funeral. So the great accommodationist was quietly paying attorneys to sue the very people he flattered from a stage.

His final stretch produced the largest thing he ever touched. Around 1912 he talked Julius Rosenwald into a partnership that began with six Alabama schools. It eventually helped build nearly five thousand schoolhouses across the South, most of them completed after his death. Black communities supplied much of the money, land, materials, and labor themselves. Generations of children learned their letters because of it, including plenty who later marched.

By the time they lowered him into the ground in 1915, his campus held about a hundred structures and fifteen hundred enrolled students. Roughly two hundred faculty members drew a salary there, and the endowment approached two million dollars, making Tuskegee one of the largest and best funded Black educational institutions in the country.

Still, I notice something about the gentlemen who wrote the indictment. Some of his most prominent critics composed it from Boston, from Atlanta’s university district, and from New York. Distance from Macon County is not a moral failing. It remains worth remembering when we sit down to grade the courage of somebody teaching inside it.

So where does the ledger land? He was a survivor who confused survival with philosophy. His method fit one decade and one latitude, and he kept applying it long after conditions shifted and younger folks had earned the right to try something louder. Refusing to step aside was his genuine failure, larger than any single speech. Older leaders rarely surrender the microphone gracefully.

We repeat this argument every generation, only the names rotate. Somebody works inside the institution while somebody else hammers on it from outside, and pretty soon we are questioning each other’s souls instead of debating tactics. Our people needed both hands working then. We need both hands working now. That man was not a traitor and he was not a deliverer. He was gifted, ambitious, frightened, and calculating, doing arithmetic under conditions I would not wish on my worst enemy, and he got several of the sums wrong. Such a verdict is harder to chant at a rally. It happens to be accurate, though, and accuracy has always served us better than comfort.

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 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.