When AOC first came to Washington, she was the belle of the ball. Bernie Sanders was the only open socialist, or “democratic socialist,” in town. He was hairy, old and ugly, she – buckteeth and whiny voice aside – is easier to watch…on mute, at least.

Sandy Cortez, as she was known before wrapping herself in identity politics, survived saying incredibly dumb things and a naiveté about the basics of foreign policy and American exceptionalism through a fawning press and the adulation of fanboys. She was a pin-up girl for unshowered virgins and violent ANTIFA alike.

There wasn’t a left-wing event not clamoring to get AOC to show up, or even just tweet about it. The entire left was her playground.

But, like a Hollywood “It Girl” who turned 35, she got old (metaphorically) and the adulation began to wander. After several years of no accomplishments and a series of soundbites that would embarrass anyone with a pulse, the extreme left saw her star fade.

All the fanfare, and all the money raised, hadn’t amounted to anything. What’s the point of power if you don’t use it to impose your will on a public that doesn’t want it…in the name of “democracy,” naturally?

Then along came Zohran Mamdani.

The amount of attention Mamdani got lapped AOC, even as she campaigned with him. His star out-shined hers in ways she wasn’t prepared for and hasn’t recovered from. As a Member of the House, AOC can’t do anything – one of 435, even a “famous” one, does not matter. But the Mayor of New York City, no less, can get things done.

He was the new belle of the ball, she was the old ex who still came around, trying to be friends. The tarnish was building.

Now there are three newer socialists, all acolytes of Mamdani’s (not AOC’s) heading to DC. These aren’t “squad” members looking to rock the boat, they want to blow a hole in it and sink it. AOC helped rile up the radical left, but she never advocated or excused violence, nor did she push for extreme anti-American policies. Un-American, sure, but not designed to deliberately hurt the country, or at least she didn’t think they would.

This new batch is openly seeking to “destroy Western civilization.” AOC is crazy, but in a naïve way because, well, she’s naïve and ignorant. These people know exactly what they’re pushing and why, and they are indifferent toward the harm their policies will inflict.

Under AOC, individuals harmed by policies for “the greater good” are a tragedy, for this new group they are a feature, not a bug. Individuals are expendable to the new left and they aren’t interested in what people want and don’t, they’re going to force their will on them either way.

AOC seems quaint compared to these people.

The leftist corporate media is focusing on them like they’re the cure of cancer, burning all the calories it takes to walk back their past statements and sugar coat their racism and anti-Americanism. All those calories that used to be burned defending and propping up AOC are now going elsewhere, as the revolution has passed her by.

While it’s funny, and in a couple of years it’s likely she will be a back-bench answer to a trivia question, it’s also a warning for the country. If a person who was a radical just a couple of years ago is now seen as too tame and lame for the next wave of loons, that does not bode well for the Democrat Party or the country, when they regain power (and they will, at some point, regain power).

The old leftist saying of “Lead, follow or get out of the way” has run over AOC. Laugh all you want. I will, but we all have to make sure the rest of the country isn’t next.

Written by Derek Hunter

Official website; http://twitter.com/derekahunter

Johnson said the Democratic-Socialist effort to take over the party and re-fashion it in their image is not limited to deep blue New York City, but is surfacing around the country, especially among younger people who have never had to live under these systems, mostly because they have been taught little about their cruelty and failures.

Johnson said: “Across the country, Democrats have candidates winning primaries and rising through the ranks.” He said there were many more than the few he mentioned. He cited Sacramento City Council member and former congressional candidate Mai Vang. Videos resurfaced showing Vang refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and intentionally turning her back on the American flag during municipal meetings.

Johnson also mentioned Adam Hamawy, a New Jersey Democrat seeking to succeed retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. The New York Post reported Hamawy once volunteered in Bosnia with a Chicago-based nonprofit whose offices were raided by the government in 2002 after it was determined to be a front for al-Qaeda. Hamawy was born in Egypt and was a combat surgeon in the Iraq War. He had promoted his time interning in 1994 for the now-defunct “Benevolence International Foundation” (BIF). The U.S. Treasury Department designated BIF as a financier of terrorism due to its financial and operational associations with al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban.

“(Joanne) Mendoza in Arizona wants to decriminalize trans prostitution,” Johnson said. “Apparently, that’s the thing.” Johnson added that Democrat Iowa congressional nominee and State Representative Lindsay James, “wants to apologize for being white.” Rebecca Bennett, a New Jersey Democrat running for a House seat, said she “stopped going to church” because there were too many people there who voted for Donald Trump. Johnson said State senator and U.S. House candidate Sarah Trone Garriott, who is also an ordained Lutheran minister, participated in a satanist wedding in Iowa.

Other Democrats want to erase the border, empty the prisons, abolish ICE, pack the Supreme Court, and do other things that would guarantee Democrats hold power forever. Too many are antisemitic and hate Israel.

Johnson said, “This is just a sampling” of how the Democrat Party is being hijacked by people who hate and want to destroy America. He might have also mentioned biological men playing on biological women’s teams and sharing locker rooms and bathrooms with them. Those issues were losers for Democrats in the 2024 election.

Contrast this nonsense with the Democrat Party of John F. Kennedy, who was for lower taxes and an ardent anti-communist. Labor Unions, though largely supportive of Democrats, were once strongly pro-American. Public schools once taught the real history of America, opened the day with the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America (not foreign flags), and were allowed to pray and even read from the Bible until the Supreme Court ruled prayer and Bible reading unconstitutional. How has that worked out, as anti-capitalist teaching and poor achievement in math, science, and reading are now the norm in many schools? Did I mention growing violence in especially inner-city public schools and in the streets among teens?

Andrew Jackson is often credited with founding the Democrat Party in 1820. The party’s principles then included agrarianism, states’ rights (code for slavery), limited federal government, and opposition to corporate and banking monopolies. Such were those principles until the early 20th century, when things began to change—some for the better, like the battle for civil rights and Social Security, and some not so great, such as higher taxes and bigger government.

As the saying goes: “This is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party.” It has clearly gone off the rails.

Written by Cal Thomas

Official website; https://x.com/CalThomas

That math has followed me my whole career. I write for a living, have done so for decades, and even among educated people who consider themselves fair, the pressure to make myself smaller never fully lifts. Not just physically, though that comes too. I mean softening the voice, tucking away the confidence, dimming the style, flattening the face, swallowing an honest thought so it can come out gentle enough to be tolerated. Younger brothers learn this same lesson the hard way, and it grieves me every time, because nobody hands it to you plainly. A man simply starts bleeding from a wound he cannot see, and in time he locates the knife.

Take the voice, since that tends to be the first thing held against us. A deep register carries. It fills a space whether or not its owner wants it to. The timbre I was given was no more my choosing than the shape of my hands. Yet I have sat in meetings where a white colleague repeated the very point I had made minutes earlier, and his version landed as insight while mine had landed as something people needed a beat to recover from. Same words. Same idea. Only the vessel differed. When my voice carries, the word for it is intense. When theirs does, the word is passionate. One of those is a compliment, and we both know which one skips past me.

So a man learns to shave the edges off his own speech. Up goes the pitch, just a hair. A small laugh gets tacked onto a hard truth to help it down. Statements bend into questions so nobody feels cornered. Years of that wore a groove in me. Few things drain a person like translating himself in real time, standing as his own interpreter in his own native tongue.

Confidence gets read wrong next. Knowing my craft is not a boast, it is a fact I earned. Certainty about the work ought to register as competence, the way it does for everyone else who put in the years. But for a Black man, sureness of self has a way of getting renamed. Arrogance, they call it. An attitude problem. That fellow thinks he is better than everybody. Sitting through a performance review where the only real charge was believing in what I brought and saying so without apology is a peculiar kind of insult. Stay quiet and the label is disengaged. Show conviction and the label is difficult. The gap left for a man to stand in runs about the width of a coffee stirrer, and heaven help him if he leans.

Style earns the same treatment, though people love to pretend clothing is neutral. It never has been. What goes on my body is a language, and I have always spoken it fluently. A sharp suit, a good hat, colors that carry meaning, shoes shined the way my father taught me. Dressing this way honors where I come from, and looking good has long stood as an act of dignity in communities that were told for centuries they possessed none. Still, the sharpness gets watched sideways. Put together, and the read is flashy, or worse, a man reaching to be something he is not. A rumpled figure in the corner, meanwhile, gets called authentic. Care for oneself somehow reads as suspicious, when love is all it ever was. Showing up looking like a man who respects himself is nothing to apologize for.

Facial expressions deserve a moment too, because that one cuts quiet and deep. A face at rest is only a face. It carries no message. Even so, more times than can be counted, someone has asked whether everything was alright, whether something was troubling me, when the plain answer was that I happened to be thinking. A Black man deep in thought, brow settled and mouth easy, gets read as brooding. Read as angry. A whole economy of assumption has been built around what our features supposedly announce, and not one of us signed the paperwork. So we smile past the point of feeling it. We perform ease so nobody mistakes a neutral face for a menacing one. Ask yourself how tiring it is to manage your own eyebrows for the comfort of people who will never once consider managing theirs.

Then directness, which may have cost me the most of all. Saying what I mean was never a choice so much as an inheritance. The people who raised me had no room for hinting, because the price of being misunderstood ran high. Name a concern, they taught me, and call a wrong thing wrong. Clarity like that should be a professional asset, and in plenty of rooms it is treated that way when it comes from somebody else. Coming out of me, though, it curdles into aggression in the listener’s mind before it clears the air. Feedback delivered in the flattest, calmest register I own has still drawn the verdict that I came across as hostile. What reached them was not what left me. What reached them was what they already expected, filtered through generations of images that had nothing to do with the man in front of them.

Here is what I need younger brothers to hear, since it took me too long to grasp it myself. Shrinking does not protect you. Believing it will is the trap itself. Make yourself small enough, quiet enough, unthreatening enough, the thinking goes, and the ordinary respect handed to others for free will finally come your way. It does not arrive. A man can fold himself down to almost nothing and still be seen as too much, because his size was never the trouble to begin with. What warps the picture is the eye doing the measuring. No amount of self-erasure repairs a broken measuring stick. All it costs is the very qualities that made a man good in the first place.

None of this is a call to recklessness. Nobody should go hunting a fight or ignore the genuine politics of survival in a workplace, and those are calculations each man weighs for himself, since some rooms carry more danger than others. My point is simply that disappearance cannot be the aim. Building a career where a man stands fully present as himself, and finding the people and places that permit it, has to be the aim instead. Such places do exist. I found a few. Getting there took time, and it took a willingness to walk away from tables that only wanted a smaller version of me. Walking away holds its own quiet power, and it is one we are rarely told we may use.

An old man now, or close enough to it, I have arrived at a certain peace. My voice will go on carrying. Nobody is buying my confidence off me. Sharp clothes will follow me right up until they lay me down, a resting face will keep on resting, and a true thing, whenever I have one, gets said straight. If that reads as attitude to somebody, the reading is information about them and not about me. Too many years went to believing the reverse, treating another person’s discomfort as proof of my flaw. It never was.

Take up your space, son. The world has no shortage of brothers folded into shapes small enough to keep everyone else comfortable. What it lacks is men standing at full height, doing the work, sounding like themselves. Let the room run its arithmetic. You were never the equation it took you for.

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com.

Temporary Protected Status is not a gift. It is a recognition of reality. It says that when a country is overwhelmed by violence, disaster, political collapse, or humanitarian emergency, deportation is not simply enforcement. It is endangerment. To strip Haitians of this protection now is to pretend that paperwork matters more than human life.

Haiti is facing one of the world’s most severe humanitarian crises. Armed groups control much of the country, violence has disrupted ordinary life, hunger is widespread, and humanitarian assistance remains far short of the need.

So what kind of country sends people back into that? What kind of country says to people who have built lives, paid taxes, raised children, staffed hospitals, opened businesses, cared for elders, cleaned rooms, cooked meals, driven trucks, and strengthened communities: your labor was welcome, but your life is disposable?

Cruelty is not an accidental byproduct of this policy. Cruelty is the point.

Haitians have long been punished for being Black, free, defiant, and inconvenient. The first Black republic in the world was born of revolt against slavery, and the nations that profited from slavery never forgave Haiti for proving that enslaved people could liberate themselves. France extracted a ruinous indemnity. The United States occupied Haiti. International lenders, foreign governments, and domestic elites have repeatedly treated Haiti as a problem to manage, not a sovereign nation to respect; a profit center, not a proud and sovereign nation. The present crisis cannot be separated from that long history of extraction, intervention, and contempt.

Now that contempt appears in the sterile language of immigration law. “Temporary” becomes the excuse. “Protected” becomes the promise broken. “Status” becomes the thin legal thread holding families together.

The Supreme Court’s ruling did not create the hatred of Haitian migrants, but it gives official permission to act on it. We have seen the ugliness before. Haitians have been accused of disease, criminality, dependency, and disorder. They have been stereotyped, detained, deported, and scapegoated. During the 2024 campaign, Springfield, Ohio became a national symbol of anti-Haitian hysteria after false claims about Haitians eating pets were amplified for political gain. That lie was not just ridiculous; it was dangerous. It turned neighbors into targets.

Springfield tells another story. Haitians came there to work. They filled jobs. They opened businesses. They joined churches. They enrolled children in schools. They helped revive a struggling city. After the Court’s ruling, many now face fear and uncertainty. Even Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, reportedly called ending Haitian TPS a mistake, pointing to the conditions in Haiti.

That matters. Because the question is not whether Haitians belong in Springfield, or Boston, or Miami, or New York, or Washington, D.C. The question is whether the United States will acknowledge that Haitians already belong here because they are already here, already contributing, already woven into the fabric of our communities.

The numbers tell part of the story, and they are overwhelming. But they do not tell the whole story. Behind every number is a family deciding whether to pack, hide, fight, or pray. Behind every number is a child who may know no home but the United States. Behind every number is an employer wondering who will show up for work, a landlord wondering whether a tenant can stay, a congregation wondering whether its members will disappear. Behind every number is a disabled elder wondering whether the care attendant will come to bathe her, feed her, and help her live with dignity.

TPS holders are often described as if they are temporary people. They are not. They are people with temporary legal protection, many of whom have been here for years or decades because the conditions that displaced them have not been resolved. Temporary status can become a permanent limbo. It allows people to work but not fully settle, to contribute but not fully belong, to live under the shadow of a government decision that can turn a lawful worker into a deportable person.

That shadow is now darker.

We should be honest about what this is. It is not simply immigration enforcement. It is not simply administrative discretion. It is a choice to make vulnerable people more vulnerable. It is a choice to destabilize families and communities. It is a choice to ignore Haiti’s suffering while benefiting from Haitian labor. It is a choice to act as if Black migrant lives are expendable.

The United States has legal power. That has never been in doubt. The deeper question is whether it has moral sense. Haiti has been punished for its freedom, exploited for its labor, burdened by debt, occupied, stereotyped, and scapegoated. Sending Haitians back into danger continues that long, ugly pattern.

But cruelty does not have to have the last word. Congress can act. The administration can halt deportations. Communities can protect their neighbors. Churches, unions, employers, advocates, and people of conscience can refuse to let Haitian families disappear quietly into deportation machinery. At minimum, this country should extend TPS, halt deportations to Haiti, and create a path to permanence for people who have already built their lives here. The opposite of cruelty is not sentiment. It is solidarity, organized and insistent.

A humane nation would not send people back into danger. A just nation would repair some small part of the damage it has helped create. A grateful nation would recognize Haitian workers, families, caregivers, students, entrepreneurs, and neighbors as part of its own story.

Cruelty may be the point of this policy. Resistance must be the point of our response.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

Official website; https://www.juliannemalveaux.com

As America’s 250th birthday approaches, it’s not untimely to consider her message. It has not only inspired hope for uncountable people desperately in need of it, but helped shape America’s proud, even lofty self-image as a refuge for the beaten down, where those threatened by persecution might yet have a chance for a decent life. After all, virtually all of us are descendants of those given the blessed opportunity to come to this country from elsewhere. Virtually all of our ancestors were “the Other,” strangers forced to navigate poverty, and hatred, and ostracization and loneliness when they arrived.

That self-image has been the fuel for America’s greatness. In his farewell address to the nation in January 1989, former President Ronald Reagan invoked the image of America as “the shining city on a hill.” Reagan had a story in mind, that of an American sailor on the aircraft carrier Midway, patrolling the South China Sea in the 1980’s. As Reagan told it, the sailor’s crew “spied on the horizon a leaky little boat. And crammed inside were refugees from Indochina hoping to get to America. The Midway sent a small launch to bring them to the ship and safety. As the refugees made their way through the choppy seas, one spied the sailor on deck and stood up, and called out to him. He yelled, “‘Hello American sailor. Hello, freedom man’.”

Ronald Reagan would certainly be disgusted at President Donald Trump’s derisive, belittling, bullying war on Emma Lazarus’ and his own vision of America, a vision that has nurtured us since our founding. Last week featured another example.

In 1990, former President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, signed legislation creating the Temporary Protected Status program, designed to provide safe harbor here for refugees from countries deemed unsafe. Trump has set about dismantling the program, country by country.

When the administration terminated the program for the hundreds of thousands of Haitians here, litigation ensued. They argued that Haiti has long been unsafe, so the program could not be considered “temporary” as to it. The plaintiffs challenging the termination pointed out that nothing in Haiti had changed since its original designation; the administration itself has recently warned that no one should travel there due to kidnapping, terrorist activity, rampant crime and civil unrest.

A federal court sided with the plaintiffs, temporarily blocking the deportation of Haitian refugees until those challenging the government had had the opportunity to prove that racial discrimination was at least “a motivating factor in the decision to terminate the program for Haiti — which was all they were required to show to legally nullify the termination decision. The court noted statements by Trump himself that Haitians “probably have AIDS,” were eating the pets of residents in American communities, came from a “s—-hole country” which was “filthy, dirty, disgusting” and were “poisoning” American blood.

The Republican-dominated U.S. Supreme Court reversed, ruling that the plaintiffs should not even be permitted to prove their case. There was nothing in Trump’s language, they held, with any racial overtones, ruling that these statements were merely “heated.” Justice Elena Kagan saw things differently, writing that Trump’s language was “shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes.”

Here’s what’s not disputable: Team Trump simply doesn’t see America the same way Americans have traditionally seen it. “America’s doors are closed, fully, to asylum seekers,” crowed Trump advisor Stephen Miller after the Supreme Court reversal. Conservative media host Megyn Kelly spoke for those who believe they are making America great again. “We don’t want you,” proclaimed Kelly to the Haitian community after the ruling. “We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to your f—-ing country.”

Not exactly “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Not exactly Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.” But on our 250th birthday, that is where, and who, we are.

Written by Jeff Robbins

Official website; https://x.com/jeffreysrobbins

I came up on his music the way most of us did, secondhand and everywhere at once. It played in my mother’s house and at every family gathering, less an artist than a feature of the air. Which is why it took me years to actually listen rather than simply absorb. When I finally did, what struck me was not the exuberance. It was how plainly, and how often, he was telling us that he felt isolated in the middle of one of the largest audiences any performer has ever commanded.

Consider “Stranger in Moscow.” It remains one of his most underrated recordings, and the reason it gets overlooked says more about us than about him. The song appeared on HIStory in 1995, after the first wave of allegations had damaged his name and after a settlement the press treated as an admission, regardless of what it actually was. The coverage had stopped being curious and turned openly hostile. Rather than answer the noise with volume, he chose stillness. The production hardly moves. Rainfall, a slow and deliberate groove, a melody that seems to shiver. He sings of wandering a foreign city, soaked and anonymous, watching his name decay in public while a planet that recognizes his face looks straight through the person behind it. The Russian voice that enters near the end, cold as a locked door, sounds like an interrogation from the other side of the world, asking why he came from the West. It works as interrogation and confession at the same time. There is no warmth anywhere in the mix. The most recognizable figure alive recorded a meditation on invisibility, and he meant every frozen second of it.

“Who Is It” sits on Dangerous behind its flashier singles, which is precisely why so many listeners passed it by. On its surface the track is a tale of romantic betrayal, a woman who lied and disappeared. Listen more closely, though, and the paranoia takes over. He is not merely heartbroken. He is surveying a room full of faces he cannot trust and cannot identify, asking again and again who is responsible. By 1991 he was surrounded by handlers, attorneys, accountants, and a wall of agreeable men several rows deep, and you can hear the suspicion working its way into every line. Which of these figures loved him, and which of them loved the revenue. Near the close, the arrangement drops away entirely and leaves only his breath, beatboxing his own pulse into the silence, holding himself together because no one else intends to. The wound was never really about romance. It was about a life in which affection and commerce had grown so entangled he could no longer separate the two.

“She’s Out of My Life” is the recording that undoes me every time. Tom Bahler wrote it, Quincy Jones brought it into the sessions, and the story behind the vocal has earned its place in legend. By several accounts Michael wept at the end of every take, and after enough attempts Quincy stopped resisting and preserved the break in his voice on tape. You can hear precisely where it gives way, on the final word, “life,” the note fracturing so badly he can barely complete it. Most of his love songs were performance, beautifully executed emotion. This was the emotion itself, the performance stripped clean off. He was twenty one and already understood, somewhere beneath language, that ordinary love, the kind most people stumble into without effort, might never be available to a person living the life he lived. He was not portraying a farewell. He was rehearsing a loss he could already feel approaching.

It is worth remembering how young he was to carry that knowledge. By the age most of us are navigating a first serious relationship, he had been working since he could walk, had served as his family’s livelihood since grade school, and had grown up under a father who drilled perfection into him with discipline close at hand. So when he sings about someone leaving, part of what reaches you is a person who was never granted the unhurried years required to learn how to keep anyone.

“Human Nature” is the loveliest thing in his catalog and, once you stop drifting on its surface, perhaps the saddest. Steve Porcaro and John Bettis supplied its frame, those luminous synths laid out like a skyline observed from far too high. On the radio it passes for a gentle ode to the city after dark. Attend to what he is actually confessing, however. He is gazing down at all that light and movement, at everyone below living the unremarkable nights he will never have, and every instinct in him wants to descend into the crowd and disappear like anyone else. He cannot. He keeps asking why, and the song offers no reply because there is none. That falsetto is not desire. It is homesickness for a life he was never handed. The melody is exquisite and the longing beneath it runs straight to the floor. He wanted the street, and the street had already turned him into a legend, which is merely a polite term for someone the public observes rather than knows.

“Leave Me Alone” reverses the whole posture. Here he pushes back, finally swinging at the din. The arrangement moves with an almost giddy bounce while he calls out the tabloids, the rumor mill, and the spectacle that had taken up permanent residence in his life. The video is the masterstroke, an elaborate funhouse in which he rides a roller coaster through every fabrication ever printed about him, the hyperbaric chamber, the purchased bones, the chimpanzee in a suit, all of it converted into an attraction he is strapped into and cannot exit. It reads as comedy right up to the moment you register the desperation beneath the bounce. Consider what it means to require an international hit single simply to ask the world for room. He was not protecting his pride. He was struggling to breathe. The cartoon he built was the most truthful statement he could offer, because the only way to endure life as a spectacle was to climb on top of it and dance as though it cost him nothing.

Place those five recordings beside one another and a pattern emerges that the blockbusters obscure. The frozen man in Moscow. The suspicious one encircled by people he cannot trust. The young man grieving a love he was never allowed to keep. The dreamer pressed to the window. The hounded figure pleading for space. The same person throughout, occupying different rooms of the same empty house.

And here is what lingers. He possessed everything we assure one another will solve it. Wealth beyond accounting. Fame vast enough to reshape the culture around him. A talent that will not recur in our lifetimes. Millions who would have done nearly anything for him. None of it touched the wound he kept circling in record after record. It may even have deepened the thing. Perhaps when you become that famous, the barrier between you and a single honest connection grows so thick that genuine affection can no longer reach you. You become an object people own a fragment of. A poster, a headline, a piece of someone’s childhood. Everything except an ordinary person another human being can simply sit beside.

We had a hand in that, and honesty requires admitting it. We purchased the records and the scandal sheets with the same dollar. We sang along to “Human Nature” and turned the page to laugh at whatever lie ran that week. The very culture that crowned him was the one he was begging to be left alone by. He told us throughout, in the music itself, in unmistakable language, positioned right between the hooks we were too busy enjoying to hear.

There is one truth here I can only speak to from the inside. Whatever the wider world decided about him in any given season, Black folks never let go. He belonged to us in a way no headline could revoke. He stayed on the radio at the cookout, in the church parking lot, on the stereo in somebody’s kitchen, defended at dinner tables long after the rest of the country had moved on to the next verdict. We watched him change, watched the press hunt him, watched a generation try to shrink him into a punchline, and we kept playing him anyway. That devotion was never blind. It was a loyalty this nation rarely extended to him in return, and it is part of why his body of work has outlasted nearly everyone who profited from his troubles.

That is the cruel design of his catalog. The sorrow was never concealed. It sat in plain view, across his most beloved work, dressed attractively enough that we could keep moving and slide past the message. He hid nothing. We simply failed to listen, or we listened and let a beautiful melody carry the truth down without our ever tasting it.

I keep returning to that voice giving way on the word “life.” I hear him asking who is it, fully aware that no one in the room would answer honestly. I picture a grown man so exhausted by surveillance that he recorded an international hit single merely to request some distance. And I watch the rest of us, decades later, still debating him, still observing, still unwilling to let him rest.

He gave us an enormous amount, far more than we returned. The least we owe him now is to hear what he was telling us. The party records and the after hours ones always belonged to the same man. We simply preferred one half of him to the half that was trying, the entire time, to tell us the truth.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother loves poetry, music, and the culture that raised him… His words come from somewhere honest, and they speak to everyday Black folks just living their lives… Reach him at JJackson@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.

The President’s allies on the Supreme Court have had to jump through some hoops to justify their decisions supporting his reckless and discriminatory policies. But Justice Samuel Alito’s claim not to see racism in the effort to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians defies belief.

As Justice Kagan noted in her dissent, even the President’s own lawyers avoided repeating his shocking slur against Haiti and other predominantly Black nations when he demanded, “Take them out.” But even more telling than the slur was the response in the room: ““Because if you do, it will be obvious why.”

“Obvious” to everyone but Trump’s allies on the Supreme Court, apparently.

The Trump administration did not decide to deport protected Haitian and Syrian immigrants because it determined those nations are safe. It arbitrarily determined they were “safe” so that it could deport those immigrants.  The Department of State maintains a strict “Level 4- Do Not Travel” advisory due to the risk of “crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care” in Haiti and “terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict” in Syria.

Haitian and Syrian TPS holders are now expected to do what Americans are explicitly warned against.

Just as troubling as the human consequences of the Court’s ruling is its reasoning. The public record is littered with examples of the President’s animus toward Haitians. He stunningly advanced a baseless – and widely debunked – claim that Haitian immigrants were “eating the pets” of residents in Ohio. At other times, he suggested Haitian immigrants were bringing disease into the United States and accused them of “destroying” a community’s way of life.

As Kagan noted, these statements “fairly shout” that race played a role in the decision. Justice Alito and his colleagues in the majority have turned a deaf ear.

The administration has made no secret of its intent to base immigration policy on race. It has turned our refugee program into a “Whites only” pathway to the United States – even planning a welcome bag” containing racist literature.  The President has invoked Nazi terminology to dehumanize immigrants from South America, Africa, and Asia.  He’s expressed a preference for immigrants from nice countries” like Denmark, Switzerland, Norway, whose populations are more than 90 percent White.

Just as it did with its egregious Callais decision, the Court has embraced the fiction that blatant racial bias can somehow be walled off from policymaking, as long as its not explicitly written into the law itself.

When leaders repeatedly vilify a particular group and then act in ways that strip that group of legal protections it is not unreasonable to ask whether those words and actions are connected. The Court’s majority, however, demands a level of proof so narrow that it is nearly impossible to meet. In doing so, it effectively immunizes decision-making from scrutiny, even when there is clear evidence of bias in the public sphere.

The consequences of the Court’s decision are not abstract. They will be measured in families torn apart, in lives upended, and in the erosion of a principle as old as the Constitution itself: that justice must be blind to race, not blind to racism. When the highest Court in the land refuses to confront discrimination so clearly etched into the public record, it does more than misinterpret the law—it signals that some forms of prejudice can be ignored, excused, or even sanctioned. And that is a precedent far more dangerous than any single decision.

Written by Marc Morial

Official website; http://twitter.com/MARCMORIAL

Creating these environments requires long-term thinking and a commitment to investing in both people and places.

Safety Starts with Strong Communities

Some of the safest and most resilient communities are not necessarily those with the most resources. Instead, they are often communities where people know one another, look out for each other, and take pride in their neighborhoods.

For many African-American families, churches, community centers, local organizations, and neighborhood groups have historically played a vital role in creating support networks. These institutions provide mentorship, educational opportunities, and safe spaces where young people can learn, socialize, and develop positive relationships.

When residents feel connected to their communities, they are often more invested in protecting and improving them.

Investing in Young People Creates Long-Term Results

Children who have access to positive role models, safe recreational spaces, and educational opportunities are more likely to grow into confident and engaged adults.

After-school programs, sports clubs, arts initiatives, and mentorship schemes all provide valuable environments where young people can develop skills, build friendships, and explore their interests. These opportunities can also help reduce exposure to negative influences while encouraging personal growth.

Creating safer environments means recognizing that prevention is often more effective than intervention. Supporting young people today can help build stronger communities tomorrow.

The Role of Thoughtful Infrastructure

Physical environments influence how people interact with the spaces around them.

Well-maintained public areas, adequate lighting, secure facilities, and clearly defined community spaces all contribute to a stronger sense of safety and belonging. Schools, community centers, apartment complexes, and local businesses increasingly use modern security solutions to help protect visitors and staff while maintaining accessibility.

For example, many organizations now implement access control systems to help manage entry points and improve security without creating unnecessary barriers for those using the facilities. When implemented thoughtfully, these technologies can support safer environments while helping communities remain welcoming and inclusive.

Education Remains a Powerful Tool

Knowledge empowers individuals to make informed decisions and contribute positively to society.

Communities that prioritize education often see benefits that extend far beyond academic achievement. Educational opportunities can improve economic prospects, encourage civic engagement, and create pathways to leadership.

Parents, educators, and community leaders all play important roles in helping young people understand their potential and providing the support they need to pursue it.

Investing in education is one of the most effective ways to create lasting change across generations.

Creating Spaces Where Everyone Feels They Belong

Safety is not just about physical protection. It is also about feeling respected, valued, and included.

Children thrive when they see positive representations of themselves in leadership positions, educational settings, and community organizations. Inclusive environments encourage participation, foster confidence, and help individuals feel connected to the communities around them.

Whether in schools, workplaces, places of worship, or neighborhood organizations, creating a culture of belonging strengthens communities and helps people feel more secure.

The Importance of Community Leadership

Positive change rarely happens by accident.

Throughout history, African-American leaders, activists, educators, business owners, and volunteers have worked tirelessly to improve opportunities within their communities. Their efforts demonstrate the impact that dedicated leadership can have on creating safer and more supportive environments.

Future generations will continue to benefit from individuals who are willing to invest their time, knowledge, and energy into strengthening the communities around them.

Leadership does not always require holding a formal position. Small actions taken consistently by ordinary people often have an extraordinary impact over time.

Looking Ahead

Creating safer environments for future generations is not a single project or initiative. It is an ongoing commitment to building stronger communities, supporting young people, investing in education, and creating spaces where everyone has the opportunity to succeed.

While technology and infrastructure certainly play important roles, the foundation of every safe community remains the people who live there. By working together, supporting one another, and focusing on long-term progress, communities can create environments where future generations are not only protected but empowered to thrive.

Staff Writer; Carl Carter

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.