I understand where the feeling comes from. Truly. We watched him tumble down the board in 2025 while weaker prospects heard their names first, and plenty of us felt that fall in our own chests. Some of it looked foul. Yet there is daylight between having a brother’s back and wrapping him in so much padding that he can never move.

He is 24 now, smack in the middle of a 2026 battle for the starting job against Deshaun Watson. Second year in Cleveland, with Todd Monken running the show since he took the reins in January. The veteran got first crack at it. Cleveland’s second-year pro has been clawing to close the gap. None of that is persecution. That is a regular Tuesday in the National Football League.

Remember how his rookie run actually looked. He started the final stretch, went 3 and 4, tossed 7 scores against 10 interceptions, and his QBR settled somewhere around 18.9. Nobody calls those numbers a triumph. Branding them a scandal misses just as badly. They are a baseline. Green passers throw the ball to the wrong jersey. Peyton Manning threw a rookie-record 28 picks in 1998 and still carved out a gold-jacket career. Bradshaw? They booed him out of Pittsburgh early, benched the man more than once, and the rings came much later. Happens to the great ones all the time. They stink early, take their lumps in public, then figure it out. This league does not care what name is stitched across your shoulders.

Here is the part nobody wants to say out loud. A good chunk of the loudest voices online are not protecting the kid at all. They are protecting a storyline. If he sits, it has to be racism. Praise the veteran’s footwork and that becomes sabotage. Mention those 10 giveaways and a beat writer becomes a hater. So a competitor who by every account itches to compete gets frozen into a permanent victim by the same people swearing they love him.

That framing helps him not one bit. None. When you tell a professional that nothing is ever his fault, you are quietly informing him that he holds no power to fix a single thing. Sit with that. You strip a man of his agency and slap a bow on it and call it support.

I have coached a little, watched a lot, and lived long enough to recognize the pattern with our sons. There is a deep instinct among us to shield the young men in our lives, because the world has been swinging at them since forever. That instinct is sacred. It kept a whole lot of us breathing. Every good thing carries a shadow, though, and the shadow here is simple: a boy who never tastes a real consequence never grows into the thing he is chasing.

Losing teaches. Harshly. It mails its lessons collect. Shedeur needs to sail one over a receiver’s head on third and 6, feel that long walk back to the bench, sit in a dim film room on Monday while the tape freezes on a blown coverage read, then go repair it. That grind is how signal-callers get built. There is no elevator past it. Josh Allen handed the ball to defenses again and again before that light clicked on.

Deshaun deserves a fair mention too. The 30-year-old had barely seen live action since 2024 before this preseason, grinding back after rupturing his Achilles and then suffering another rupture of the same tendon that required a second surgery, riding a contract that finally runs dry after this season. Do not paint him as an untouchable monarch guarding the gate. Back nine of a career, the man is just trying to prove the arm still works. Should the younger option play better, that option starts. If not, the incumbent keeps studying tape and waiting a turn. Both truths can sit at the same table.

Preseason has painted a muddy picture so far. Against the Bears, neither guy grabbed the room by the collar, Cleveland ate a 34 to 10 loss, and the moment nobody wanted was a pass that nestled into the wrong colors. Then came Buffalo today, August 22nd, when the staff handed number 2 the whole first half, even though Cleveland rested most of its veteran starters and put him behind a second-string offensive line with mostly backups around him. Shedeur completed his first eight throws and finished 9 of 11 for 74 yards, one touchdown and one interception. Watson followed and went 5 of 12 for 35 yards with an interception as Cleveland lost 31 to 7. Shedeur was the better quarterback on this particular afternoon. None of that means the job belongs to him now. It means he got a fair look and did something with it.

Will he seize the job by September 13 down in Jacksonville? Maybe. Maybe not. Monken still has not named his starter, and Saturday gave him something more to chew on rather than settling the matter cleanly. Shedeur helped himself against Buffalo. Watson did not slam the door. Cleveland still has a preseason finale against New England on August 27, although the staff may make its decision before then. Fine. A clipboard is not a coffin either way. Aaron Rodgers waited 3 seasons in Green Bay. Steve Young studied behind Joe Montana and squeezed every drop from it. Waiting only wrecks a passer who chooses to pout while he waits.

What actually worries me is not the depth chart. It is the noise around it. A whole ecosystem now feeds off manufactured outrage on his behalf, because a wronged prospect prints clicks better than a developing one ever could. Each week they will dig up fresh insult. Maybe a snap count. Then some stray quote. Or a survey that placed him 35th out of 35 veteran quarterbacks entering the season, which, sure, stings, though who on earth cares in August.

The funny twist is that the young man himself seems to grasp all this. Ask about the derby and you get a shrug, plus a line about the only rival worth naming being the face in the mirror. No panic. Zero alibis. Healthier than half the folks defending him from their phones. So there stands a competitor, going hard, while the comment section litigates.

So my plea, from somebody who has watched this business chew up hyped prospects and lift overlooked ones in equal measure: turn him loose. Give him room to fail on a Sunday and answer for it at the podium afterward. A staff should hold him to a standard without anybody screaming for a firing. All of it, the sweet and the sour, is tuition owed.

Deion’s boy is not spun from glass. Locker rooms raised him. Boulder saw that program hauled across his shoulders, 4,134 yards and 37 touchdowns in a final college fall, so the glare of bright lights is old news. Our lane is not to fight his battles. His alone is to fight them.

Stumble, rise, repeat. That is the assignment handed to every kid who ever strapped on a helmet. This franchise gave him an honest shot this August. Against Buffalo, he took one more step toward making the decision difficult. Let the process breathe, and let the rest of us unclench and quit treating a plain old competition like some crime against the culture.

He will be alright. Just clear the room and let him work.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

There are not many events in history that transcend the sport landscape and make a significant cultural impact. Muhammad Ali’s name change from Cassius Clay for religious reasons, Jackie Robinson’s integration into Major League Baseball, and Jack Johnson’s World Heavyweight Championship victory are a few of the more notable events that transcended sports and made an impact on the American historical landscape. Those events also incorporated the issue of a race at a time when it was an extremely volatile issue. However, one of the events in sports history that intertwines the issues of race and sport with the most controversy is the Black Power salute by Olympic medal winning sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos in the 1968 Olympics.

Before making history in political sense, Tommie Smith and John Carlos represented the United States in 200-meter track event during the 1968 Olympics. “The gold medal that Smith won in the 200-meters on October 16, 1968, was a spectacular athletic achievement. What followed after the race would stand as one of the most powerful images in sports and Olympic history.  As “The Star-Spangled Banner” began, Smith and Carlos bowed their heads and simultaneously raised a black-gloved fist, and the stadium crowd slowly but steadily booed and jeered in reaction. Smith remained perfectly still, while Carlos raised his head slightly. In terms of an explanation for their actions, in an interview with broadcaster Howard Cosell Tommie Smith clarified, “The right glove that I wore on my right hand signified the power within black America. The left glove my teammate John Carlos wore on his left hand made an arc with my right hand and his left hand also to signify black unity. The scarf that was worn around my neck signified blackness. John Carlos and me wore socks, black socks, without shoes, to also signify our poverty,”.

The 1968 Olympics occurred during a time when race was at the forefront of American society. The Civil Rights Movement was working towards ending racial discrimination and increasing civil rights for African Americans. This made racial tension within the United States a serious problem that extended into sports. Although the boycotts by Black athletes at the 1968 Olympics were a possibility in the eyes of the American media, they never were put into effect as although black athletes did participate in the 1968 Summer Olympics, two young black men would instead make a political statement that would last a lifetime.

Before Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf in the National Basketball Association during the 1990s, before Colin Kaepernick of the National Football League during the 2010s, there was John Carlos and Tommie Smith. The Black Power Salute at the 1968 Olympics is unarguably one of the most powerful images in sport of the last 50 years. However, it is its legacy outside of sport that will have a greater impact.

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

So here I am, doing exactly that.

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

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

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

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

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

I go back and forth, honestly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Understand something plainly. This is bigger than weather. When the grid dies for a couple of hours, you grumble and light a candle. Let it stay dead for ten, twelve, fourteen days, and the whole architecture of ordinary life begins to buckle. Refrigerated insulin spoils. Oxygen machines fall silent. Food in the freezer turns well ahead of the check clearing. A working phone becomes a luxury, so folks sit in idling cars just to keep a charge alive. One woman told reporters she was caring for a paralyzed son in a home with no cooling and no internet, powering her dying phone from the dashboard because that was all she had left. She still found grace in it, saying joy comes in the morning. A mobile pantry at a local academy fed roughly 150 souls and ran completely dry, sending the rest down the road to another site. Some governments in the area said their emergency food supplies had been stretched to the breaking point.

That is what a blackout truly is. Not an inconvenience. Electricity, in a modern American city, is food and medicine and cool air and the ability to clock in and earn a living. Take it away long enough and you are not testing patience anymore. You are testing survival.

The scale of the damage tells the story. Repair crews were not simply flipping switches back on. In hard hit pockets they were rebuilding sections of the electrical system, dealing with repairs or replacement involving roughly 300 distribution poles and another 44 transmission poles in Gary. Emergency restoration work stretched deep into the month. And here is a cruel wrinkle the headlines often skip. That metal cap where the service wires meet your house, the weatherhead, is considered part of the homeowner’s equipment. If the storm ripped it loose, the company cannot safely reconnect service until a licensed electrician repairs it. Picture what that means for a fixed income grandmother on the east side. The lights stay off not because a truck never came, but because she cannot afford the repair standing between her and the switch.

Now consider where all of this is unfolding. Roughly 76% of the folks living here are Black. The population sits at about 67,000 today. That number stood above 178,000 back in 1960, so better than half of it has cleared out. Why should that stick with you? You have to know how this ground got made in the first place.

The place was born in 1906, conjured out of sand and swamp by U.S. Steel and named for its chairman, Elbert Gary. It began as a company town in the purest sense, built to shelter the men who would feed the mills along Lake Michigan. During the Great Migration, my people came north by the trainload, fleeing the terror and the sharecropping South, chasing wages a Delta field could never offer. At its peak, Gary Works employed around 32,000 hands. A solid working middle class took root, folks with union cards, brick homes, and Sunday suits. Pride hung thick in the air.

There was culture too. Some modest house on Jackson Street raised the family that gave the world the Jackson 5 and the boy who became the King of Pop. Broadway even wrote the town its own tune. For a good stretch of the twentieth century, this was a genuine showplace, proof of what industry and community could build together when given the room.

The political weight ran deeper still. In 1967, voters elected Richard Hatcher, making him one of the first African American mayors of any large city in this nation, alongside Carl Stokes over in Cleveland. Hatcher would serve five terms across twenty years. He campaigned against what he bluntly named plantation politics, and his administration brought substantial federal money into Gary for low cost housing, public housing, job training, and neighborhood improvements. Five years into his run, he opened the doors to the National Black Political Convention, drawing thousands of delegates, activists, and dreamers. Amiri Baraka was there. Jesse Jackson stood beside him. The whole gathering tried to forge a shared agenda for a people finding their footing after the Voting Rights Act, and it happened right here, not in Atlanta or Harlem, but on the shore of a working lake in Indiana. For that shining moment, this modest steel town stood at the very center of the movement’s imagination.

Then the mills faltered. Automation swallowed jobs, foreign competition undercut prices, and layoffs tore through the industrial workforce. White residents fled, taking storefronts and tax dollars with them. What remained was an aging community forced to maintain crumbling pipes, wires, and roads on a budget that kept shrinking. The bones of the place grew brittle while nobody with real leverage seemed to mind. Union Station. The Palace Theater. That grand old Methodist church. All became symbols of prosperity that packed up and left, even as preservationists and redevelopment plans now fight to give some of those landmarks another life.

So here comes the hard question, the kind every Black family in an older American city ought to chew on tonight. When a catastrophe drags past a long weekend, are our communities anywhere close to ready? Jackson, Mississippi lost reliable clean water for days on end not long ago. Flint poisoned its own children through neglected pipes and still carries the scars. Detroit, Cleveland, Newark, and Birmingham all carry some version of the same inheritance of deferred repair and razor thin margins. Their grids, mains, and roads were laid down generations back and patched ever since. Each one carried vulnerabilities well before the first cloud ever gathered.

Notice, too, how the relief arrives. Cooling stations threw open their doors. Indiana made emergency assistance of up to $5,000 available to eligible residents needing food, clothing, temporary housing, and other necessities. Down in Washington, a presidential emergency declaration cleared a path for federal support tied to response efforts and power restoration, though that was not the same thing as automatic FEMA payments to every household. Chainsaws, flashlights, and batteries came donated by businesses. Phone carriers waived some fees and helped residents find ways to keep devices charged. All of that counts for something real, and I will not pretend otherwise. Yet residents kept reaching for one aching word to describe the feeling. Invisible. “We have felt invisible,” they said, as the darkness stretched beyond a week. Schools sat closed too, every building needing inspection room by room ahead of a single child returning inside. Ask yourself honestly whether a wealthier, whiter suburb thirty miles up the road would have waited this long for its current to return.

None of this gets raised to make anybody wallow. Despair is a luxury we simply cannot afford either. I bring it up because the disaster over Indiana is a warning shot, and warning shots are meant to be heeded. Extreme weather is putting growing pressure on aging infrastructure across the country. Floods, brutal heat, and violent wind can expose weaknesses that sat hidden for decades. Meanwhile the guts beneath our oldest neighborhoods keep aging in silence. Put those two truths together and you get repeats of this exact scene, additional days in the dark, another mother charging a phone from the dashboard.

So what do we do with all of it? We pay attention, for starters, and attention from Black America has always been a form of pressure. Then we insist that utilities and governments treat grid resilience in our neighborhoods as the civil rights matter it plainly is. Beyond that, we rebuild the old muscles, the ones our grandparents refused to let go soft. Block networks. Church basements stocked with water and batteries. Generators shared across a street. A running list of who nearby leans on oxygen or dialysis, so nobody gets forgotten when the wires come down.

The people along that lakeshore built something extraordinary once, from little more than sand and sweat and faith. They elected history. Legends were raised on that very ground. They can outlast this too, and they will. The task for the rest of us is simpler and just as urgent. Watch closely. Learn quickly. Get ready, well before the next terrible wind comes looking for our own front door.

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

Charles Shearer, who was born into slavery in Virginia, and his wife Henrietta opened Shearer Cottage to African American travelers back in 1912. He understood what a safe bed meant when so few doors would open. Dorothy West lived and wrote there. Spike Lee still vacations in Oak Bluffs and has been known to grab his coffee at Mocha Mott’s. That lineage runs deep, and it built a mythology around the place, a sense that you needed a certain pedigree to belong.

Something has shifted, though. Scroll through your feed in early August now and you will see a different crowd than the one that dominated those old postcards. Younger travelers. First timers. Folks who put a little aside every check, caught the ferry from Woods Hole, and showed up plain curious about the noise. The phone in everybody’s pocket did that. What used to travel by word of mouth among a certain set now lands on the timeline of whoever happens to be scrolling that night. A cousin posts a plate of oxtail near the harbor, a college friend films the sunrise swimmers, and suddenly the destination feels less like a members only club and more like an invitation.

The African American Film Festival deserves a heap of the credit. Stephanie and Floyd Rance have been at this since 2002, and the thing just keeps outgrowing itself. Its 23rd go, back in 2025, ran nine days, screenings stacked right up against real talk, with Jennifer Hudson, Dwyane Wade, Issa Rae, and Tracee Ellis Ross drifting around town. Stephanie Rance aimed that year’s slate at joy instead of struggle. Sounds small on paper. On the ground it plays different. It tells a young cat from Atlanta or Detroit that the island is no museum of somebody else’s success. The place reads closer to a living room with the door propped open.

Ralph Lauren noticed too. The brand rolled out an entire Oak Bluffs collection last year, borrowing from the crisp style you find at Howard homecoming and along Circuit Avenue. Some folks bristled at a giant label profiting off a heritage it did not build. Sheryl Wesley, who runs HBCU Legacy Week on the island, put it plainly. The campaign only illuminated what her community had been doing there for generations. That friction, between honoring a legacy and packaging it, sits at the center of this whole conversation.

So here is the real question. Is the Vineyard evolving from an exclusive retreat into a destination that ordinary working people can actually claim as their own?

I lean toward yes, with eyes open. The gatekeeping was never only about color. Race shaped the Vineyard’s Black history from the beginning, but class eventually mattered too, especially when it came to who could afford a home on that soil and who had the family roots to feel entitled to the sand. What the newer wave brings is a democratization of the dream. You do not have to own a gingerbread cottage to walk Inkwell Beach at dawn with the Polar Bears, that morning swim circle that has met since 1946. A trust fund is not required to sit at Union Chapel on a Sunday or to catch Illumination Night glowing under the Tabernacle.

The food tells that story as well as anything. Winston and Lisa Christie run Winston’s Kitchen down by the harbor, serving jerk chicken and stew beef in portions that respect a working person’s appetite and wallet. Chef Ting cooks the whole diaspora at Black Joy Kitchen over on Oakland Avenue, plating dishes gathered from dozens of countries. Newton Waite keeps the Caribbean flame burning at his counter off Circuit Avenue, and the brown stew chicken there will make you close your eyes. Barack Obama himself once put in an order at Nancy’s on the harbor, and that same counter will serve the schoolteacher from Baltimore standing right behind him. None of these spots require a pedigree. They ask for an appetite and a little patience in line.

Now I would be lying if I claimed the change comes without tension. Longtime homeowners, the families who kept those cottages through lean decades, sometimes watch the August crowds with a wary eye. They remember when the quiet was the whole point. Prices keep climbing, and there is a genuine fear that the very families who made this place sacred could get priced clean out of it. The Cottagers, that historic circle of women who have owned property there across generations, carry that memory. Their worry is legitimate, and I will not wave it off.

Still, culture only stays alive when it breathes new air. A tradition sealed off from the young eventually becomes a headstone. What I see unfolding in the Bluffs looks more like renewal than invasion. The heritage stays put. Our Heritage Trail still marks the grounds where the ancestors labored and rose. Those old stories keep getting passed along the porches. What is shifting is the guest list, and a longer list is not a betrayal of the past. It stands as proof the past meant something.

My hope is that the newcomers arrive as students, not conquerors. Learn the names before you geotag the beach. Understand that the ease you feel walking those streets was paid for by souls who had precious little ease anywhere else. Tip Winston well. Book a table at Chef Ting’s. Sit with a hard film at the festival and let it work on you.

Just this month the festival hit its 24th run, with more than 60 films across nine days and an audience that continues to expand far beyond the island. That growth is the whole point. Nobody built this island to sit behind glass. It has always worked best as a homecoming, plain and simple, a patch of coast where tired folks could set their bags down and breathe as if they had a right to. Have you ever made the trip yourself, stood on that sand at dawn and felt what the fuss is about? If more of us are finding that water now, if a young brother from the South Side or a young sister from Houston can plant their feet there and know they belong, then the mission is working exactly as the elders intended. That door is open wider now than at any point I can recall. Come correct, and the island will keep you the way it kept the ones who got there first.

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

The government is not entitled to rummage through the political opinions, associations, criticisms and angry rhetoric of anyone merely because a government official finds those opinions offensive, threatening to an agency’s reputation or inconvenient to its mission.

Recently, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has dramatically expanded its monitoring of social media platforms and has issued administrative subpoenas seeking information identifying users whose posts have criticized ICE. The reported investigations have included Americans and aliens who have not been charged with crimes.

An administrative subpoena is not a judicial search warrant or a grand jury subpoena. It can be issued by one government official to another for investigative authorization; or to an entity legally subject to the issuing agency such as from bank regulators to a banking institution.

Absent that unique regulatory relationship, because there is no intermediary like a judge or a grand jury between the issuer and the target of the subpoena, an administrative subpoena is of no legal significance when issued to a person outside the government or because of speech.

The federal government does not possess a general police power to investigate people because of what they think, believe, say, read, write or post. The feds only possess powers delegated to them by the Constitution. Those powers do not include the authority to create a political surveillance apparatus designed to discover who dislikes them.

The government cannot investigate speech; only genuine crimes. And when a particular person is reasonably suspected of committing a particular crime, the government has investigative tools at its disposal.

But that’s fundamentally different from starting with someone’s speech and asking: Who is this person? Where does he live? Who are his friends? What other accounts does he have? What else has he said?

The proper law enforcement sequence is crime first, suspect second, investigation third. The government cannot constitutionally begin with protected expression and work backward in search of a crime.

In order to commence all federal government investigations, the Constitution requires articulable suspicion that an identifiable person has committed an identifiable crime. A vague government assertion that a social media post is concerning, hateful, extreme, anti-government or potentially disruptive to government operations is not legally sufficient. Otherwise, every person becomes a potential investigative subject simply because he has a keyboard and an opinion.

The First Amendment exists because government officials cannot be trusted to decide which opinions are acceptable.

This applies with particular force to political speech, which is at the heart of the First Amendment. The government may not investigate people simply because they condemn its policies, despise its officials, advocate abolition of an agency or use coarse and inflammatory language in expressing their political views.

And that means hate speech.

“Hate speech” is a moral and social description, not a constitutional category of unprotected expression. The First Amendment does not disappear because speech is hateful. Nor does it disappear because someone hates the government.

All in America have a constitutional right to say that the government is evil. They have a right to say that its officials are tyrants. They have a right to call government agents whatever words come to mind. They have a right to demand that an agency be abolished. They have a right to express hatred of government itself.

The First Amendment was written to protect these sorts of expressions.

The Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has repeatedly emphasized the extraordinary protection afforded political advocacy. Under Brandenburg v. Ohio, all innocuous speech is absolutely protected and all speech is innocuous when there is time for more speech to rebut or challenge it. Stated differently, even advocacy of unlawful conduct generally cannot be punished unless it is directed toward producing imminent lawless action and imminently produces it.

In order to obtain a warrant, the government must identify the crime and produce probable cause that the place to be searched or thing to be seized will likely produce evidence of that crime. It cannot simply declare that an unpleasant statement is dangerous to the government and authorize itself to identify and intimidate its author.

A person’s social media history can reveal vastly more than a single conversation ever could: political beliefs, religious views, friendships, professional associations, travel, personal relationships, affiliations and years of political expression. A government demand for that information is not some trivial request for a name and address. It can expose an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a person’s life.

That creates a profound chilling effect that will deter people from expressing their opinions.

The First Amendment was ratified to prevent chilling.

Moreover, government cannot expand its powers merely because technology makes expansion possible. Police departments cannot purchase surveillance technology and then announce that its availability means they are entitled to use it. Federal agencies cannot turn social media platforms into a nationwide surveillance database simply because contractors can build the software.

America has new technology, but the same Constitution.

The government cannot manufacture criminals out of Americans whose opinions it dislikes. A free society cannot survive if every angry post becomes an investigative lead, every government critic becomes a potential threat and every unpopular opinion becomes grounds for a government dossier.

The First Amendment does not protect only polite speech. It protects all speech — dissent, unpopular speech, offensive speech, hateful speech and criticism of government. It even protects the right to be wrong.

The government has no constitutional authority to demand that any persons first demonstrate that their opinions are sufficiently agreeable before being permitted to live free from surveillance.

So, when ICE comes asking for anyone’s social media histories because of what they have said, the answer should be unequivocal: Go get a warrant.

Until then, ICE can leave us and our speech alone.

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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

This new version might sound unfair until you listen to Rep. Ro Khanna’s (D-Calif.) pitch for an allegedly onetime, 5% wealth tax on California billionaires, tied to November’s vote on Proposition 40.

Space constraints prevent us from surveying all that’s wrong with wealth taxes here. But as a reminder, they raise very little income for the government, are an administrative nightmare, could be unconstitutional and create enormous disincentives to build the kind of wealth that creates jobs and funds government services through other taxes in the first place.

A recent dust-up on X between Khanna and entrepreneurs like Mark Cuban exposes the level of economic ignorance that makes U.S. wealth taxes so tempting to politicians. The issue at hand is implementing California’s version when a founder looks like a billionaire on paper without actually having the cash on hand.

This isn’t an obscure problem, particularly for young founders. Imagine you have a great idea and create a startup. Investors put $1 billion into your startup, and its share price rises to give it a $10 billion valuation. You own 20%, so now you’re worth $2 billion! Except that you don’t have $2 billion.

The investors have put their money into the company, not into your checking account. That capital is for hiring engineers, for building factories or data centers, for developing products and expanding the company. It makes your stake impressive on paper, and yet that could theoretically land you a $100 million tax bill without a dollar in your pocket.

Khanna suggests that the founder could sell shares to pay the tax. But that would effectively force an entrepreneur to give up a large portion of his company because a financing round has placed a high valuation on it before it has fulfilled its potential. Besides, shares in young, private companies are typically far less liquid than Apple shares.

This is where a stupid idea gets even stupider. If the founder can’t or won’t sell, he could — or so says Khanna — borrow against the shares. But what bank lends $100 million against illiquid stock in young companies that may or may not succeed?

Not to worry. Khanna has an answer for that too: The loan can be issued by the government. The founder would pledge shares as collateral, have years to repay, and “the state could sell it if he defaults on the loan.”

So, we’ve gone from taxing the billionaire to lending him money and taking his shares if he can’t repay.

There is a delicious irony to all of this. Wealth-tax advocates complain about wealthy people borrowing against appreciated stock rather than selling the stock and realizing the gains that trigger capital-gains taxes. Yet when their wealth tax creates a liquidity problem, their solution is for billionaires to borrow against appreciated stock, only now from Uncle Sam.

Cuban identified an even deeper problem: The new company doesn’t have to fail for this arrangement to become perverse. A founder could spend the next 10 years building an enormously successful company, creating thousands of jobs and paying millions in taxes, while continuing to reinvest rather than cash out. After a decade, his shares might be worth far more than when the loan was made — and he still might not have $100 million in cash to repay the wealth-tax loan.

The reason is that success and liquidity are not the same thing. In Khanna’s government-loan scenario, the government could sell the shares used as collateral not because the company failed but because the founder kept his wealth tied up in the venture. Under this system, the incentive is to cash out instead of growing the business, hiring more people and creating more corporate tax revenue over the long term.

Cuban’s response was profane but insightful: “This is the biggest f—- you in the history of entrepreneurship.” While Khanna points to founders so rich that this situation might not be much of a problem now, they made their business decisions and took lots of financial risks when they weren’t threatened by a wealth tax.

Before Republicans get too indignant, they should look in the mirror. The Trump administration helped destroy the norm against government ownership of American businesses by taking a nearly 10% stake in Intel and pieces of many other companies, including Trilogy Metals and USA Rare Earth.

When your supposedly simple billionaire-tax plan requires that the government lend money to people who are only billionaires on paper, who then use it to pay taxes back to the government, which potentially then becomes a shareholder in their companies, the answer isn’t one more clever fix. The problem is your billionaire tax.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

His murder came close on the heels of a spate of murders in Compton. And in the days in between several other murders were reported in South L.A. They all have one thing in common. The victims were Black and almost certainly their killers were other Blacks. This touched off yet another round of soul searching among many Blacks as to why murder continues to be a chronic plague in far too many Black communities.

The hand wringing over this deadly problem is even more troubling given that the overall murder rate for the nation has plunged in the past decade. L.A. is no exception. According to LAPD reports, the number of murders in 2025 dropped to near record level lows.

Yet that was not the case in South L.A. The murder rate there remains tops in the city. It’s a pattern that has remained stubbornly constant yearly.

The dangling question again is why so many young, and not so young, Black males such as Foreman, he was fifty-one, strap guns to their waists and wantonly kill or are killed by each other. Annual reports on murder violence show that the murder rate among Blacks is multiple times greater than among whites. Even more astounding if the Black murder rate was excised from the U.S. murder rate figures, the country’s murder rate would be comparable to the rock bottom murder rate in some European countries.

The hard fact is that plopping more police on the street, legions more prosecutors, the still pervasive three strikes and mandatory sentencing laws, the death penalty, and putting more than one million Blacks behind bars have done little to curb the Black-on-Black carnage. Nor will simplistic calls for tougher gun control curbs, though they should be made.  Los Angeles has one of the toughest gun control statutes on the books and it didn’t save Foreman or other victims.

Despite the pet theories of liberals and conservatives, Blacks aren’t killing each other because they are violent or crime-prone by nature, or solely because they are poor and oppressed. Or even because they are acting out the obscene and lewd violence they see and hear on TV, films and gangster rap lyrics.

The violence results from a combustible blend of cultural and racial baggage many Blacks carry.

In the past, crimes committed by Blacks against other Blacks were often ignored or lightly punished. Many studies have confirmed that the punishment Blacks receive when the victim is white is far more severe than if the victim is Black. The implicit message was that Black lives are expendable.  Though many police departments now make a much more diligent effort to apprehend suspects in Black killings, the pressure remains to put the same resources into arrests of suspects in these cases as happens when the victim is white.

Yet the perceived devaluation of Black lives encourages disrespect for the law and has forced many Blacks to internalize anger and displace aggression onto others. Many young Black males have become especially adept at acting out their frustrations at white society’s denial of their “manhood” by adopting an exaggerated “tough guy” role. They swagger, boast, curse, fight and commit violent, self-destructive acts. When many Black males indulge their murderous impulses on other black males, they are often taking out their pent-up frustrations on those whom they perceive as helpless and hapless. This is a twisted and warped response to racism and deprivation, blocked opportunities, powerlessness and alienation.

The other powerful ingredient in the deadly mix of Black-on-Black violence is the gang and drug plague. There was some speculation that the murder of Foreman may be connected to old gang beefs. There is no evidence that this is the case. Still, that possibility remains. Gang violence is still a serious problem in South L.A. and in other low income Black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

In the wake of the Foreman slaying, the calls are heard again for quick arrests, tough prosecutions, and near draconian imprisonment. That’s understandable. However, it will still take a coordinated effort by educators, health professionals, drug counselors, violence prevention specialists, gang intervention activists, victims of violence and local community activists and leaders, and most importantly parents to stem the violence. They must devise and coordinate short- and long-term strategies and programs to provide jobs, training, better education, and boost the self-esteem of at-risk young blacks. Public officials must provide the political muscle and resources to implement these programs.

If young whites were killing other whites in the same high numbers as Blacks, the public and policy makers would declare a national crisis and rush to address it. The murder of Foreman and the dozens of others in Black communities demands the same response.

Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

One can find more info about Mr. Hutchinson over at the following site; TheHutchinson Report.

Also feel free to connect with him through twitter; http://twitter.com/earlhutchins

He is also an associate editor of New America Media. His forthcoming book is From King to Obama: Witness to a Turbulent History (Middle Passage Press).