Let that word sit for a second. Earned.

We are talking about a kid from Akron who walked into the league as a teenager carrying the weight of a whole city on his back, and who somehow carried more each season after. Four rings across three franchises. Regular season MVP trophies, four of them. Twenty two All Star selections, a run longer than plenty of careers last from the first whistle to the goodbye. The all time leading scorer in NBA history, a number nobody thought would ever fall until he simply refused to slow down. Twenty three seasons already completed, with a record twenty fourth waiting for him in Philadelphia. Two full decades as the face of a billion dollar business, the poster on the wall, the reason casual fans tuned in at all.

And still hated.

That part deserves honesty, because it is the strange truth sitting underneath his whole run. Plenty of grown men cannot stand the guy. Some of them look just like us. Brothers who came up watching him, who own the jersey, who quote the highlights, will turn around and tell you with a straight face that they never rocked with him. Ask them why and the reasons get thin fast. Something about the way he left Cleveland that summer. Maybe it is that he got handed too much too soon. For others it comes down to him not being that other fella who wore forty five and twenty three before him. Scratch any of those excuses and the same thing sits underneath. Resentment. Plain old resentment. A brother kept betting on himself, kept cashing those bets, and it drove people crazy that he never once waited on anybody’s permission to do it. For a certain type of person, that alone is unforgivable. We watch that jealousy dress itself up as basketball opinion, and we nod along as if it fools anybody.

Now here comes the last chapter, and watch how the same crowd handles it.

He did not chase a bag to Philadelphia. Eight million dollars over two seasons is pocket change for a man who prints money in his sleep, and the King knew that the moment the pen hit paper. What LeBron wanted instead was a feeling. A locker room stacked with All Star talent, Joel Embiid anchoring the middle and Tyrese Maxey buzzing on the wing, plus rising second year guard VJ Edgecombe soaking all of it up. Even Jaylen Brown is there now, the former Boston rival who used to trade playoff scars with him, an All Star and a proven champion, suddenly wearing the same jersey. A packed arena filled with a fan base that has been starving for another reason to believe. One real shot at a banner before the body finally says no more. Rich Paul called it basketball happiness, and honestly that phrase says everything. None of this is running away. He is walking straight toward the thing that still makes his heart pound inside a gym.

That is his business. Nobody voted on it. No panel in a studio needs to bless it.

Which brings me to the loudest room in all of this, the sports media machine that treats every move the King makes as a crime scene. For more than twenty years these people have built entire livelihoods off his name. They scream about his clutch gene one night, then question if he ducked a rival the next, then argue his jewelry count against a ghost from the 90s. A villain moves the needle. Outrage sells, plain and simple, and they manufactured plenty of it. So they poked and prodded and framed his choices as betrayals when the truth is much simpler. A working professional went where he wanted to go. That is it. Nothing else to the story. Yet somehow the panels will burn a week deciding whether he owed it to Los Angeles to fade away in purple and gold, as if that franchise ever owed him a graceful exit in return.

Let me say the quiet part plainly. He does not owe any of us a thing.

Not a farewell tour. No tidy finish in the city we picked for him. And certainly no retirement podium scheduled around our convenience. This is a person who gave the sport everything for more than two decades. No major off court scandal ever swallowed his career. His sons grew up watching their father put in work. There is a public school back home created through his foundation’s partnership with Akron Public Schools. Whole neighborhoods the country wrote off saw real money from him. And through all of it, the shots kept coming and he kept standing. If somebody like that decides his final act happens in a red and blue uniform on the other side of the country, the only correct response from the rest of us is respect.

I think about my own father when this stuff plays out. Forty years he gave to that job. When his time came, the old man did not poll the room about the proper way to bow out. He shook a few hands that meant something to him. The rest he left behind without a second thought, then pointed the car home for good. No one demanded an explanation. Everybody understood the exit was his call and nobody else’s. We grant that grace to plumbers and teachers and bus drivers without blinking. Why the greatest to ever lace them up somehow has to justify his last stop is a question worth sitting with, and the answer usually reveals more about the person asking than about the fella they are dragging.

So he is a Sixer now. Wild to type, but here we are. Maybe it wraps with a parade down Broad Street. Or maybe it ends with a first round exit and a soft goodbye. Either way the pen belongs to the King, and it always did. The rest of us are just readers hoping to catch the final pages before the book shuts. We do not get a vote on the closing lines, and honestly, we never should have.

More than two decades bought him that. Every bruise, each buzzer, all those late nights dragging a roster past its ceiling, every summer somebody swore he was cooked, added up to a plain privilege that too few folks want to hand over. The freedom to decide when the story ends, and the freedom to decide where.

Let the man write his own last page. He paid for that ink with his whole life.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

Covering the NBA, NFL, college basketball, college football, and Major League Baseball from a Black man’s perspective. He loves the full world of sports, but the NFL remains his favorite.

Need to contact this bro, feel free to use this email address; JGLacour@ThyBlackMan.com.

For anybody who missed the story, the retired Celtics great is in a Los Angeles courtroom with Princess Santiago, an events director and the mother of his youngest boy, King. She asked a judge for $29,811 a month. He fired back that approximately $4,145 felt more reasonable, leaning on an income picture that he says is changing. His filings reportedly put his average monthly income during the first half of 2026 near a hundred and sixty five thousand, although Pierce argues that amount will fall sharply once his remaining Fox payments end. Read that twice and let it settle.

I am not here to referee whose attorney wrote the sharper brief. Grown folks disagree about dollars constantly, and courts exist for that reason. My trouble runs beneath the arithmetic.

The detail that stuck in my throat came from Santiago’s earlier statement. She says she went through all nine months of the pregnancy without financial support or an in person presence from Pierce. Then he acknowledged paternity and requested joint legal and physical custody after DNA testing confirmed that King was his son. Sit with that timeline. A whole human being was made, grown, and brought into this world while dad allegedly kept his distance, and his legal effort to become involved began after the results came back. To be fair, Santiago later acknowledged that Pierce had started making an effort to see King and was developing a relationship with him. That progress matters, even if it does not erase the pregnancy she says she faced alone.

That is the part nobody at the sports desk wants to slow down and name. We have turned a sacred obligation into a spreadsheet fight, and too many of our brothers with means and platforms are leading the way down that road.

Here is what I need my people to hear, especially the athletes, working or retired. A boy does not need only a settlement. He needs a presence. You cannot wire love through direct deposit and call the account balanced. Visitation is not a line item you haggle over to protect your comfort. It is time, the one thing your bank cannot manufacture and your son cannot get back once it is spent.

Pierce reportedly disclosed roughly $121,000 in legal expenses during the first half of 2026, though the available reporting does not establish that all of it was connected to this particular case. Still, one day his boy may discover that lawyers and accountants were publicly debating his support before he was old enough to understand his own name. That kid is going to grow up, learn to Google, and find each filing, each proposal, and each argument over what amount should be considered reasonable. Picture that for a second. Your own father discussing the cost of caring for you in documents available for strangers to read. Not because the court process is unnecessary, but because children eventually see how the adults around them handled their arrival.

Let me be fair here, because a one sided rant does nobody any good. No man owes a check he has no way to cover, and sure, some mothers run their own games too. Pierce alleges in his filing that Santiago earns more than $400,000 a year, so his position is that she is not without considerable resources of her own. High earners can face support requests that deserve careful review, and a man is allowed to ask a court for something sane. All true. None of it touches the heart of the matter, though, because the heart of the matter was never only the figure. It was the disappearance she says came first.

See, child support and custody and emotional availability are not three separate negotiations you can win or lose independently. They are one covenant, and you cannot ace the money portion while flunking the showing up. A father who mails the check but skips the recitals has not fulfilled everything. He has purchased a clean conscience on layaway, and the interest on that debt comes due in a grown child who never quite trusts him.

Our community knows this wound intimately. A lot of us grew up under a father who mailed his money on time and never once walked through the door, or the flip of that, one hanging around plenty who let the rent slide. Years later we were still working out which of those left the deeper mark. So a brother who earned generational wealth and entered the Basketball Hall of Fame on his first ballot having every resource to break that cycle carries a special responsibility. Pierce has requested joint custody, and that willingness to participate should be acknowledged. Still, the public fight over support cannot be separated from Santiago’s allegation that she endured the entire pregnancy without his financial help or physical presence.

The athlete part matters here, and I will not soften it. You men are watched. Little Black boys wear your jersey and study how you move, on the court and off it. When you retire, that gaze does not retire with you. It follows you into the courtroom, into the podcast studio, into the choices you make about the children you helped create. Plenty of famous names let this exact pattern define them, and it repeats until somebody with a platform breaks it loud and on purpose. Pierce still has an opportunity to do that by building a genuine relationship with his son, accepting where he fell short, and making sure King never has to wonder whether his father truly wanted him.

Instead, much of the public conversation has centered on litigation. We got a man detailing meal expenses, travel costs, declining income, and legal bills while the needs of his own boy sat at the center of the dispute.

Money is real, and I will not pretend otherwise. A support order that ignores what he actually pulls in helps nobody. But the moment your baby becomes a bargaining chip, something precious gets placed at risk. You can teach your own bloodline that everything, including his care, has a price adults will argue over until a judge chooses a number.

To every brother reading this with a kid on the other side of a courtroom, I say this without malice. Pay what is right and pay it without theatrics. Then show up. Show up sober, show up early, show up when it is inconvenient and the game is on and you would rather be anywhere else. Answer the phone. Learn the teacher’s name. Down the road you want to be the story your kid tells proud at the cookout, not the name they punched into a search bar to find out who you really were.

King Rafael is going to remember who fought for him and who fought over him. So will the rest of them. That distinction is the whole ballgame, and no amount of money has ever settled it.

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.

This annual pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard and more specifically, The Inkwell is as predictable as Democrats ignoring the Black vote.

Martha’s Vineyard is a 112 square mile island in Massachusetts, known for its mix of coastal beauty, historic towns, and cultural heritage. The Inkwell (officially Town Beach) is a specific, historically significant beach in Oak Bluffs, MA, on the island, celebrated for its role in Black history.

Martha’s Vineyard is a summer resort destination with a rich history dating back to the 18th century when Methodist and Baptist revivals drew visitors. It has evolved from whaling, brickmaking, and farming into a scenic, cultural hub with towns like Oak Bluffs, Edgartown, and Falmouth. The island offers beaches, historic sites, art galleries, and seasonal events, and it has a diverse cultural fabric.

The Inkwell is a small, sandy stretch of beach in Oak Bluffs, MA near the ferry terminal, popular for its gentle waves and central location. Its name comes from a derogatory nickname used in the late 1800s for the Black community that frequented it.

Blacks began visiting the Inkwell during the Great Migration, attracted by Oak Bluffs’ openness during this time of segregation.

The Great Migration, sometimes known as the Great Northward Migration or the Black Migration, was the movement of six million Black Americans out of the rural Southern United States to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1910 and 1970.

In 1912, Charles and Henrietta Shearer opened the first Black owned inn on the island, catering to Black vacationers.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

I had the fortune of knowing many of the legendary families who were foundational to the Inkwell.  The ones I knew are all dead, but sitting at their feet and learning history from their lived experiences was phenomenal.

When these very wealthy, successful, influential Blacks made their annual August trek to the Inkwell it was not only for vacation, but also to discuss solutions to what ailed the Black community.  Let me reiterate—SOLUTIONS, not complaints about white folks.

They did not spend their precious time talking about how racist presidents like Roosevelt, Truman Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, or LBJ were.  They believed in the Colin Powell doctrine of “constructive engagement.”

These Oldtimers from the Inkwell believed in talking through their disagreements with people in power, both Democrats and Republicans.

They were focused on solutions that would make life better for the whole of the Black community; not simply flexing and self-congratulating each other about their latest material purchases—their new vacation home, their new Rolls Royce, or their latest million-dollar contribution to the boule!!!

I have had many opportunities to go to the Vineyard, but up now have refused all offers because I have to be in a certain mental frame of mind to be around these types of arrogant, uppity Black folks.

I am not there yet.

I know many who are about to make this annual pilgrimage.

These are the who’s who of corporate, political, and Black high society in America.  These are some of the highest-level executives in Fortune 500 companies.  These are some of the most successful entrepreneurs in America.

They are the talented tenth, the bourgeoisie, and the boule.

The talented tenth was made famous by W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Black historian and civil rights legend from the early nineteen hundreds.

In his 1903 essay The Talented Tenth, Du Bois argued,  “That for the Black community to rise from the vestiges of slavery and systemic oppression, a small group of the most talented and educated individuals must be trained as leaders, intellectuals, and professionals…They are supposed to serve as role models, uplift the masses and advocate for civil rights, education and political participation.”

Du Bois would be very disappointed that the opposite is occurring today.

The bourgeoisie and the boule will use the occasion of this annual tradition to pair off their young adult children with what they deem to be suitable potential spouses for marriage.  They want to keep their bloodlines pure, socially, financially, and politically.

There will be multiple millions of dollars spent during the month of August on hotels, housing, and exotic catered parties to talk about how bad America is!

There will be no mention of the steady Black on Black killings in Chicago, Baltimore, New York City, or St. Louis; there will be no mention of the out of control out of wedlock birthrates in our community. Despite their protestations to the contrary, these pathologies have nothing to do with Donald Trump, racism or poverty.

It has everything to do with the destruction of the Black family and more specifically the Black male.  The supposed talented tenth do not want to have the discussion about how these radical liberal Democrat policies have and are continuing to destroy the very group they claim to speak for and represent.

There will be no mention of how illegal immigrants are devastating the Black community with murder, increased housing cost, and rising unemployment.

But there will be sunup to sundown conversation about how racist Donald Trump is; how America is racist towards Blacks, and how the legacy of slavery is at the root of all that ails the Black community.

The founders of the Inkwell would be totally ashamed of the state of the Black community today.  They had less opportunity in their time but lived a better quality of life than we are living today.

Make it make sense!!!

Today’s Blacks are doing very well financially, but I would argue that we have a lower quality of life than our forefathers.

We have more material possessions, but our families are in an alarming state of dysfunctionality.

Our sons are suffering from major mental diseases like thinking they can become girls; and their parents are co-signing on this foolishness.  Ask Earvin Johnson and Dwyane Wade.

Our daughters may as well be high-class streetwalkers.  But this would be an insult to real streetwalkers.  Ask Angel Reese and Tyla!

These elite Blacks are overwhelmingly radical liberal Democrats who refuse to engage in the politics of self-interest versus simply following Democrat Party orthodoxy.

These Blacks do more harm to our community than anyone with a white sheet over their face.

I challenge my readers to name me one “media approved” Black organization that is making a meaningful difference in the Black community.

It surely is not radical liberal groups like the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Certain People), the National Action Network (the National Reaction Network), the National Urban League (the National Disturbing League), the Black Economic Alliance (the Lack of Economic Alliance), the Congressional Black Caucus (the Con Black Caucus), the National Association of Black Journalists (the National Association of Whack Journalists), to name a few.

The Black community is always REACTING to change; they are never the change.  Blacks are living in a digital world but operating with analog thinking.

These media appointed Black organizations and their leaders refuse to think new thoughts.  Liberal approaches to business, government, civil society is over, dead, finished.

Whether you like it or not, the U.S. and the world is slowing drifting back to a slightly right of center mindset.  The dead body of liberalism is already at the funeral home; the funeral simply has yet to take place.

We have had sixty years of liberal policies unleashed on America and well over twenty trillion dollars spent on various social experiments and they have failed.

The challenge for Black folks is how can and or they willing to craft solutions to the problems that ail the Black community from a right of center perspective?

What does that picture look like and or they willing to form alliances with people like me who have a proven track record of navigating the halls of power at the highest levels?

Black folks have ninety-nine problems but Trump ain’t one!

Staff Writer; Raynard Jackson

This talented brother is a Pulitzer Award nominated columnist and founder and chairman of Black Americans for a Better Future (BAFBF), a federally registered 527 Super PAC established to get more Blacks involved in the Republican Party. BAFBF focuses on the Black entrepreneur. For more information about BAFBF, visit www.bafbf.org. You can follow Raynard on Twitter; RealRaynardJ; on Gettr: RaynardJackson.

Can also drop him an email at; RaynardJ@ThyBlackMan.com.

]]> https://thyblackman.com/2026/08/01/donald-trump-is-not-what-ails-the-black-community/feed/ 1 https://thyblackman.com/2026/08/01/enough-is-enough-war-trump-ice-america-leadership-crisis/ https://thyblackman.com/2026/08/01/enough-is-enough-war-trump-ice-america-leadership-crisis/#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2026 07:34:22 +0000 https://thyblackman.com/?p=141758 (ThyBlackMan.com) I can remember the time we had horrific wars where family members and numerous friends died. That was a sad period in our lives and we prayed that wars would end as quickly as possible. We didn’t have a cheerleader making constant threats about killing people casually. We still support our troops and grieve with the families of those who’ve been killed or injured in the war of the 2 leaders in which they’re willing to collect endless taxpayer money for the war. Add the ballroom, the pool and no-bid contracts to friends, but not for the people’s healthcare, education or ways to deal positively with the economy.

Previously, we didn’t have to listen to the daily news questioning the sanity of our leaders who told us so many things that were not true. Yes, we wanted the old wars to end. We even protested then. I don’t remember our Presidents then calling us communists! The current one has no problem doing that when several of those who are his best buddies make no mistake are real communists! Vladimir Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China, Kim Jung Oun of North Korea and others. Never before did our leaders talk like a child who’d just learned a new word. The word popular now is HOT! He constantly talks about everything being HOT and how we are the HOTTEST country in the world. Recently he added the city where I live to be HOT!

The Chief jokes about affordability and mocks our concern as the price on everything goes up! He’s still more concerned about his rich friends and known fellow criminals than about the least of our people.

After basically thanking criminals for attacking the U.S. Capitol, while costing taxpayers to have to come up with millions for clean up, he just told the perpetrators he loved them and to go home. After some of them were convicted, and sent to prison, he pardoned them with no regard for the taxpayers and loss of lives and injuries caused by his friends. They came out of their brief incarceration, then we were asked to pay them, and he treated them like beloved citizens of our country! Despite killing and injuring some of our police officers in the District of Columbia, the man made sure they were not punished and even tried to extract more money from taxpayers to pay them!

What a nightmare the man has been for the world! Many ICE agents have illegally attacked, arrested and killed people while the victims were simply being Good Samaritans trying to help others. Some ICE members seem to  be trained to be killers! Good people have been hurt and others killed for no reason.

Some people have been illegally deported or dragged into prison having to take their minor children with them. After the bodies of some of our brave soldiers were returned to Dover, the war leaders showed no grief. Their family members were not involved in these wars—at least none of their children served our country in the military. The leader personally dodged the military by indicating he had a bone spur! This seems to be a joke for him. I wonder how long it will take for these men to end their dangerous war?

They can and they must stop the war, stop the killing and truthfully acknowledge all who’ve been killed. They’re too busy dropping women from the promotions list, firing men with years of experience—including the great Chaplin, Major General William Green, Jr. without cause, as had already been done with General Lloyd Austin.

Now, the man in direct charge of war is demanding a testosterone test to help him achieve a more macho service! One can only wonder what the women he has not yet named or has refused to promote will have to do to gain his favor!

Who will say ‘ENOUGH IS ENOUGH?

Written By Dr. E. Faye Williams

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

Throughout most of America’s history, the answer has been an emphatic yes. Scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, artists and strivers from around the world have chosen the United States because they believed they could build something, discover something or start a business while making a better life in this country.

We should worry about the day when this is no longer true.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration seems determined to make that day arrive sooner rather than later. Its destructive embrace of protectionism is not merely directed against foreign goods and capital. It’s not limited to low-skill immigrants, either. It’s also directed against in-demand foreign talent.

For instance, a rule finalized in early July replaces “duration of status” for foreign students, exchange visitors and foreign journalists with fixed admission periods. In other words, it forces international students to seek government approval to stay beyond four years, regardless of whether their studies can be completed that quickly. It also makes it more difficult for international graduates of American universities to stay and work after graduation through the Optional Practical Training program.

A recent brief by Amy Nice, Michael Clemens and Jeremy Neufeld of the Peterson Institute for International Economics highlights the stakes. The authors examine the pipeline through which international students — particularly those studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics — enter American universities and eventually the American workforce. It is an enormously valuable pipeline for all of us.

The authors found that America’s science and technology workforce depends heavily on talent from abroad. Immigrants fill almost one in three advanced STEM positions and nearly one in two requiring a doctorate. People who first entered the country to study represent about one-fifth of degree-holding STEM workers and more than one-third at the Ph.D. level.

Clemens explains that the STEM students who stay in the U.S. after graduation “patent new inventions at four times the rate of typical college graduates and are responsible for around 10 percent of all new inventions patented in the United States. They found high-growth startup companies at six times the rate of US-born graduates.”

That means we can dispense with the idea that if a foreign engineer gets a job, an American engineer must have lost one. Protectionism applied to human capital relies on the same economic fallacy that underlies other forms of protectionism: the belief that the economy is like one pie, and hence, allowing foreign interests to take a seat hurts those already at the table.

Economies don’t work that way. Talented people don’t merely fill existing jobs. They create them by inventing products, starting companies, conducting research and making the people around them more productive. In the process, they create opportunities for other people that otherwise wouldn’t exist.

Giving a cold shoulder to foreign students is particularly absurd when you consider Washington’s obsession with competing against China. Politicians insist that America is engaged in an existential technological race. They spend billions of dollars subsidizing semiconductors and other favored industries. They develop elaborate industrial policies intended to make America dominant in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced manufacturing.

Then, when a potentially brilliant young scientist from India, China or anywhere else earns an advanced degree at an American university and wants to stay and contribute to the American economy, our government says perhaps they should leave.

You can throw billions of taxpayer dollars at a semiconductor factory in Arizona. You cannot manufacture genius through an appropriations bill.

The Peterson researchers estimate that discouraging just one-third of international STEM graduates could leave the American economy 0.7% to 1.3% smaller, or roughly $200 billion to $400 billion in GDP over a decade — equivalent to losing the entire economy of Utah or South Carolina.

Those estimates necessarily depend on assumptions about future immigration and productivity, but we don’t need to know the precise numbers to understand the effect. When productive people leave — or never arrive — we lose their ideas, businesses, discoveries and all the related economic activity.

There is also something deeper at stake. One of America’s greatest strengths is that people vote for this country with their feet. They leave familiar places, sometimes traveling thousands of miles, because of possibilities unavailable elsewhere. It’s an extraordinary vote of confidence in American institutions: our markets, rule of law and culture of entrepreneurship. We should never take it for granted.

Indeed, the possibility that the world’s brightest young people will decide that America is no longer worth the trouble should terrify us. Not simply because we will lose their economic contributions, but because their decision will tell us something about what America has become.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

What to do about a nominee as chief law enforcement officer in the land who has and will not disavow this conflict? Reject him.

Here is the backstory.

For America’s first 100 years, there was no Department of Justice. Federal laws were enforced by state authorities in federal courts. This was part of James Madison’s genius to divide governmental power between the states and the feds.

The modern presidency sits at the intersection of two powerful and often conflicting ideas. One is the unitary executive theory, which argues that because Article II of the Constitution vests “[t]he executive Power” in the president, every official exercising executive authority ultimately answers to him.

The other is the longstanding expectation that the DoJ, while undeniably part of the executive branch, should administer the law impartially and according to facts, evidence, caselaw, precedent and professional ethics rather than presidential preference.

Today, the tension between these principles has become especially visible in the nomination of Blanche.

Supporters of the unitary executive theory argue that the president cannot faithfully execute the laws if subordinate officers are free to disregard his lawful directives. In this view, all executive officials exercise authority only because the president has delegated it to them. If DoJ lawyers become independent centers of power, democratic accountability suffers because voters elect only one chief executive.

The DoJ, however, has always occupied a somewhat unusual position. Legally, there is no constitutional independence. The attorney general serves at the pleasure of the president. United States attorneys are presidential appointees. Federal prosecutors exercise executive authority. Nothing in the Constitution establishes the DoJ as a fourth branch of government insulated from presidential supervision.

Yet, over many decades, norms have developed to preserve public confidence in criminal prosecutions. Presidents of both parties have generally avoided directing individual prosecutorial decisions. Attorneys general have frequently emphasized that charging decisions should be based upon evidence, applicable law and the likelihood of obtaining a sustainable conviction — not political advantage.

Adding another layer to this tension are the professional obligations of DoJ lawyers themselves. Federal prosecutors are not simply political appointees. They are attorneys licensed by state authorities and bound by professional rules of ethics. Their paramount duties include candor toward tribunals, honesty in representations to courts, disclosure obligations, fidelity to their client and the prohibition against presenting evidence they know to be false.

Those ethical responsibilities do not disappear because a president expresses a preference. If a presidential directive would require an attorney to violate professional ethics or mislead a court, a prosecutor should resign rather than participate in conduct believed to be unethical.

That is precisely where the theoretical collision occurs. A strong version of the unitary executive theory suggests the president should ultimately control every exercise of executive discretion. We know from history and common sense, however, that certain prosecutorial judgments require legal expertise and professional competence inherently independent from political influence. Neither principle entirely eliminates the other. Instead, both coexist in uneasy tension.

Blanche finds himself squarely within that difficult intersection. Two notorious cases, one involving government murders of innocents and the other involving a swindle of taxpayer dollars, came across Blanche’s desk recently, and in both cases, he rejected the rule of law and bowed to presidential whim.

Blanche surely knows the basics of due process — notice, hearing, right to appeal — whenever the feds want life, liberty or property. Yet he permitted and accepted as appropriate the presidential order to enforce U.S. laws against drug trafficking by murdering 221 persons in 67 speedboats on the high seas. Needless to say, none of these folks received due process, and Blanche must answer for that.

The better known of Blanche’s ethical failures involves Trump suing the IRS for $10 billion because an IRS employee criminally revealed the contents of Trump’s tax returns. Two weeks ago, the U.S. District Court in Miami excoriated both Trump’s present personal lawyers and his former lawyers for engaging in a false cause of action — one where there was no adversity between the parties because both sides wanted the identical result.

In response to the lawsuit, Trump’s DoJ lawyers agreed to give his personal lawyers a fund of $1.776 billion from the federal Treasury to disburse to Trump’s supporters at Trump’s personal discretion; and Trump’s IRS lawyers agreed that neither Trump personally nor his family or closely held corporations could be audited by the IRS.

According to the DoJ, none of the $1.776 billion has been spent and the fund is now dormant. But Blanche refuses to renounce it or negate his own signature on a document he filed establishing the fund. The federal court ruled the lawyers on both sides of this matter did not act in good faith because all sought to please Trump at taxpayer expense.

Lawyers in litigation have a duty of zealous advocacy and unimpeachable loyalty to their clients. They cannot secretly or openly aid their client’s adversary. If they are morally or personally or legally conflicted, they must withdraw from the case.

Blanche remains bound by the same ethical obligations governing every federal prosecutor. He cannot simply substitute presidential preference for legal analysis.

If Blanche can’t do the right thing on cases where the law is obvious and unambiguous, how can he be trusted with complex decisions? Courts, disciplinary authorities and history judge attorneys according to established legal standards rather than partisan loyalty. In the case of Todd Blanche, the Senate should do the same — and reject his nomination.

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Official website; https://twitter.com/Judgenap

On July 23, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) proposed abolishing the EEO-1 report and five related workforce reports. For nearly sixty years, EEO-1 has required large private employers to report the race, ethnicity and sex of their employees across major occupational categories. The information helps us see who gets hired, who advances, who remains clustered at the bottom and who never gets through the door. Now the federal government proposes to stop collecting it.

This is far more than bureaucratic housekeeping. It is the deliberate destruction of evidence. Without data, disparities cannot be adequately documented; without documentation, discrimination becomes more difficult to prove. An administration already committed to declaring our nation colorblind will then be free to point to the absence of evidence—an absence it created—as evidence that inequality no longer exists.

First they deny inequality. Then they destroy the evidence. Finally, they declare the problem solved.

The EEO-1 report has been collected since 1966, just two years after passage of the Civil Rights Act. Private employers with at least 100 workers, along with certain federal contractors with at least 50, have been required to provide workforce demographic information. Approximately 110,000 employers are covered. While that is less than 2 percent of the nation’s nearly 6 million employer firms, these are among our largest employers and collectively employ a substantial share of the American workforce.

The proposed rule goes beyond private employers. It would also eliminate reports covering unions, state and local governments, public school systems, apprenticeship programs and institutions of higher education, as well as some of the recordkeeping requirements associated with those reports. The administration is not simply turning off the camera; it is also proposing to throw away the film.

The EEOC contends that these reports are burdensome, of limited usefulness and potentially unconstitutional because they classify workers by race and sex. That reasoning turns civil-rights enforcement on its head. In the twisted logic of this political moment, counting racial inequality is treated as a form of racial discrimination, while actual discrimination is rendered invisible.

Collecting information about race is not the same as discriminating by race. A thermometer does not cause a fever, nor does a scale cause weight gain. Data do not create inequality; they reveal it. Indeed, without data, claims of equal opportunity are little more than corporate advertising.

The EEOC estimates that eliminating the reporting requirements would save employers and the federal government about $278 million annually, including approximately $273 million for private employers. That sounds like a large amount until it is compared with the economic cost of workplace discrimination. Wage disparities, occupational segregation, biased hiring and blocked promotions cost workers—and the larger economy—far more than employers spend completing a report.

Furthermore, businesses already collect much of this information through their payroll and human-resources systems. The real burden may not be gathering the numbers but being held accountable for what those numbers reveal.

EEO-1 data are hardly perfect. The report does not tell us everything about pay, promotions, discrimination or workplace culture; it offers a snapshot rather than a full biography. Still, snapshots matter. They can reveal whether Black women are concentrated in administrative and support positions while white men dominate senior management. They can expose the distance between a company’s carefully worded commitment to diversity and its actual employment practices.

Such patterns do not prove every individual allegation of discrimination, but they tell investigators where to look. They allow employers to identify problems before those problems become lawsuits, while giving researchers and policymakers a way to measure progress—or the lack of it. Eliminating the data will not make workplaces more equal; it will simply make inequality easier to conceal.

This attack on EEO-1 reporting is part of a broader war on facts. The Trump administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs, weakened federal contracting protections and attempted to purge race-conscious analysis from government. It apparently wants a nation in which racial inequality may be experienced but not measured, described but not documented, protested but not proved.

Black workers know better, and so do women who continue to encounter occupational segregation and unequal opportunity. We know that fairness cannot be measured by a corporate slogan or a glossy photograph featuring a carefully assembled rainbow of employees. It must be measured by who is hired, what they earn, where they work, whether they advance and who holds power.

Data are instruments of democratic accountability because they allow ordinary people to compare promises with performance. That is precisely why those who resist accountability want the numbers buried. The proposed elimination of EEO-1 reporting is not colorblindness but willful blindness—a declaration that the federal government would prefer not to know what is happening inside American workplaces.

Inequality does not disappear when government closes its eyes. When the people charged with enforcing equal opportunity stop collecting the evidence, they are not being neutral. They are choosing concealment over accountability and darkness over the illumination that data provide.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

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

While they both harm democratic representation, they do so at different stages of the process. Voter suppression places barriers that make it harder to vote or prevent voting altogether. Vote dilution weakens the power of votes. It happens when an election system, district map, or policy lets people cast ballots but denies a group an equal opportunity to elect the type of candidate that would be supportive of their true concerns and needs. The vote is counted, but it has less practical impact because the system spreads, packs, or otherwise weakens the community’s political power. In other words, voter suppression targets whether you can vote, while vote dilution targets how much your vote matters once you do vote. A suppressed voter may never get to the ballot box; a diluted voter gets there, but their community still may not have fair electoral power.

In a newly released framework, U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock is calling for Congress to investigate whether states that redrew congressional districts after the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision illegally discriminated against Black voters. Warnock argues the decision has opened the door for lawmakers in several Southern states to redraw congressional maps in ways that weaken the political influence of Black communities. “Across the Deep South, partisan actors have manipulated their maps to silence the voices of Black voters,” Warnock said in a statement announcing the proposal. “Even this Supreme Court has made it clear that intentional racial discrimination remains illegal. We owe it to voters to root out whether any illegal actions or discrimination occurred.” The senator tied the health of American democracy to broader economic concerns, arguing that issues such as affordability and wealth inequality cannot be fully addressed without stronger protections for voting rights. I believe that those who are elected to represent majority-Black districts are more likely to be defenders for the poor and oppressed not only in Black communities, but all communities regardless of race.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, representing the 6^th congressional district, has been a longtime fixture in Louisiana politics. Rep. Fields served two stints in Congress: one from 1993 to 1997, and another since 2025.  It was Rep. Fields’ district that was the center of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais ruling. The Supreme Court ruled that a previous state map with two majority-Black districts was an “unconstitutional racial gerrymander.” As a result, Fields’s majority-Black congressional district was redrawn by the state legislature to favor Republicans in November’s midterm elections. Rep. Fields announced he will retire and not seek reelection to his redrawn congressional district. While the Supreme Court’s decision and the subsequent loss of a majority-Black district may be perceived as a victory for Republicans in their attempt to maintain control of the House, Rep. Fields’ retirement is a major loss for Trump’s MAGA supporters in Louisiana.

A typical MAGA supporter in Louisiana is most likely white, older, Christian, and without a four-year college degree. They tend to live in rural or small-town areas rather than metropolitan areas. The truth of the matter is that a large number of MAGA supporters living in Louisiana are poor because Louisiana itself has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. Many MAGA residents live in distressed areas where economic decline has left many white families with low wages, unstable work, and having to rely on Medicaid, SNAP, housing aid, and other public support to make ends meet. Despite their personal poverty and the poverty of their families, they support Republican lawmakers who have anti-poverty agendas. They applaud the ruling of the Supreme Court. They applaud the elimination of Louisiana’s second majority-Black district. They applaud the retirement of Cleo Fields and the fact that the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has one less member. For many of these MAGA residents and voters, poverty is a form of social oppression that they have succumbed to. Racism is a form of social oppression they continue to perpetuate and promote.

Rep. Cleo Fields, like other men and women of the CBC, represents communities where degrees of urban and rural poverty exist. Poverty is not limited by race or geography. Where members of the CBC have taken stands to defend the economically oppressed in Black communities, by default they are also fighting for the poverty-stricken residents in white areas. MAGA supporters throughout Louisiana benefited when Rep. Fields supported anti-poverty programs. Despite Rep. Fields being Black and a Democrat, he gave white MAGA supporters “meaningful representation” as he responded to the needs of impoverished individuals and families living in all districts in Louisiana. His retirement means there is one less voice and one less moral vote supporting white struggling communities.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.

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.

We look at our economic times and see the hardship and difficulty all around us. Hence, we are all looking for a good deal and want to get the things we need at the cheapest cost possible. So, we buy only if it is on sale or discounted. Well, with this mind set in place, it can be easy to treat people the same way and soon we begin seeing the effect.

When people do not feel they are worth much, they begin selling themselves at a discounted price. I have heard of single mothers in desperation turning to work at strip clubs to obtain an income to support their children because the father has run off. How sad in every respect!

But, what about the drug addict selling themselves for another hit or even the alcoholic trading his reasoning for another drink. Sure, it can be clearly seen in the obvious down and out but it runs rampant beyond what we consider obvious. Take for example the executive at the corporate office who seems to have everything like a wonderful home and loving family who is willing to compromise his time with his family to work seventy or eighty hour weeks for an increase in the bottom line. Perhaps it’s the manager on the manufacturing line who sells his morality when they look the other way as product is taken home by an employee rather than inventoried. Why do people feel these things are justified? I believe it’s because they are attempting to increase their value in their subconscious.

Somewhere, someone perhaps told them things like; they were stupid, worthless or would never amount to anything. Therefore, it hurts, it wounds and it devalues – I know because I’ve been there. Maybe they were made to feel like they did not measure up to others, when sly comments were uttered or comparisons were made. So they viewed themselves as cheap and their value declined – I know since I have experienced that too. It could be as simple as one small seemingly innocent trade off that began the ball rolling down hill when a supposed friend said just try it once, it won’t kill you. And so the one small theft, the one small puff, the one small sip began the leak of one’s self worth until it was hard to plug the hole and now maybe you’re not even sure it can be fixed, repaired or restored.

Let me tell you it can! Instead of repeating the phrases you’ve heard perhaps all of your life about how terrible you are, you need a new script and it can be found already written out and well rehearsed for thousands of years now in the Bible. Countless others have found the means through God’s word to encourage a turn around in their lives and it can help you out as well!

Sure, we can assume that Scripture was written for the masses but it was dedicated to the individual – YOU. When God authored the words, He had you in mind! He designed you with such creativity and specialty that there has never nor will there ever be anyone exactly like you.

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” (Psalm 139:14 KJV)

I know you say but you don’t know me, and how can God be concerned about me when there are billions of people living on earth right now. Well, to respond to that I have to ask you to think about the snowflakes. Scientists will confirm that there are no two alike and yet how many fall each winter? There are thousands of bird species alone and yet if you lined up a thousand cardinals or robins or sparrows, no two of them would look exactly alike. Think of all the thousands of animals and fish and insect species there are and yet no two of them look exactly alike. Do you think it is all coincidence or could perhaps a creative God like to express Himself uniquely with each design of His.

Then think about each blade of grass and each flower and each tree or plant and how on the surface they may appear similar but in the smallest of details, they are each different. Why does God create all these differences? To show or to demonstrate His love to each one and that includes YOU! You are unique and special to Him and if you need more encouragement here:

“Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee: therefore will I give men for thee, and people for thy life.” (Isaiah 43:4 KJV)

God has allowed others to pass away over the course of time to allow you to be here today. In America, we have had countless brave men and women fight to the death to provide the very freedoms we experience. However, even above and beyond that God gave His one and only begotten son – Jesus Christ for our eternal redemption.

God wasn’t looking for a bargain or a deal when He suffered and died for our sins. He was willing to pay the greatest most expensive price there was for our salvation. To pay anything less would have been to discount His creativity, His love and our worth. Knowing this then, you need to view yourself as worth a gazillion dollars or a billion times that or else you’re giving the devil the steal of a lifetime when you sell out for a few dollars, a line of coke, a drag or a ten finger discount at work.

I would encourage you to remember this from Luke 12:7 (kjv): “But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than……” (you fill in the blank). If God is concerned about even the hairs on your head, don’t you think He values the rest of you? I sure do!

This is just something I thought you should know!

Staff Writer; Rick S.

One may contact this man of God at: RS@ThyBlackMan.com.