The trouble is not treatment alone. Access matters. Insurance matters. The distance between a man and a good hospital matters. Delayed treatment and unequal care matter. So does the calendar we have quietly agreed to use, because that calendar was not necessarily drawn with us in mind.

Ask a healthy man in his forties about prostate cancer screening and you will usually get a wave of the hand. No symptoms, no problem. Blood pressure might be a little high, sure, but nothing worth making an appointment over. That prostate business belongs to older men. Retirement stuff. Something to think about after the grandkids come.

That belief is costing us.

For decades, the number fifty floated around as the unofficial starting line. It stuck because it was simple and because much of the major trial evidence involved men who were fifty or older and considered at average risk. Those studies gave doctors useful information. PSA screening can help detect cancer before it spreads and can produce a modest reduction in deaths from the disease over time. Useful information, certainly. It just was not built around the timeline Black men face.

Here is what newer evidence says, and it is worth sitting with. Research reviewed by the Prostate Cancer Foundation suggests the disease develops in Black men three to nine years earlier than it does in non Black men. Read that again. Three to nine years. Waiting until fifty simply because that is the age we have heard most often may not be arriving on time, and for some brothers it could mean arriving after the tumor received a head start nobody agreed to give it.

In 2024, the Prostate Cancer Foundation brought together primary care doctors, urologists, oncologists, researchers, specialists in health disparities, and Black patient advocates. The group reviewed nearly two thousand publications before narrowing the evidence to the studies most relevant to screening Black men. Their recommendation was clear. Black men who choose screening should consider receiving a baseline PSA test between the ages of forty and forty five, and depending on that first result and the man’s overall health, annual testing should be seriously considered.

The modeling behind the recommendation was not a shrug either. Lowering the age of the baseline PSA test from fifty or fifty five to somewhere between forty and forty five, followed by risk based screening through about age seventy, could reduce prostate cancer deaths among Black men by roughly thirty percent in relative terms without substantially increasing unnecessary diagnoses. Thirty percent. That is somebody’s father still sitting in the recliner on Thanksgiving.

That position has since received broader support. The American Urological Association’s 2026 guideline says clinicians should offer prostate cancer screening beginning between forty and forty five for people at increased risk, including men with Black ancestry, a strong family history, or certain inherited genetic variants. Not every medical organization draws the line at the exact same age. The American Cancer Society currently recommends that Black men begin the screening conversation at forty five, while the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the American Urological Association support beginning between forty and forty five. That difference should not become another excuse to wait until fifty without saying a word, because the central message is the same. Black men should be having the conversation earlier than average risk men.

Understand what this guidance actually asks of you, because the rumor mill will twist it into something scarier than it is. Nobody is saying every brother who turns forty must rush to a clinic and submit to a needle. The recommendation is built around shared decision making, which is a formal way of saying you learn what the test can and cannot tell you, talk it through with somebody who understands medicine, and then make a choice. The PSA test is a blood test and is considered the first line of screening. Some doctors may offer a digital rectal examination as an additional tool, but the physical examination is not the whole screening process and does not automatically come first. A conversation is not a procedure. It asks for a little time and perhaps a little pride.

Pride is part of what we are fighting here, if we are being honest with one another. Ask around and you will hear the same jokes in every barbershop, locker room, family cookout, and group chat. Men laughing about the glove. Men acting as though getting a blood test somehow threatens their manhood. Brothers who will let a toothache rot for a year rather than admit something feels wrong. Under the humor sits real fear, and beneath that fear sits real history.

Nobody has to explain why a Black man might look sideways at a hospital or question whether a doctor is listening to him. That distrust was earned honestly. The United States Public Health Service study in Macon County, Alabama, ran from 1932 until 1972. The Black men involved were not given informed consent, and researchers failed to offer treatment even after effective treatment became widely available. We did not imagine that history, and our families did not invent it.

Still, there is a cruel irony in allowing that memory to keep us out of the examination room now. The thing placing brothers in danger today is not a secret experiment. It is silence. It is delayed care. It is the man who never had his PSA number checked, walking around with a tumor that might have been found while it was still small, quiet, and treatable.

Look at where we stand. Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among Black men in the United States, accounting for about forty four percent of expected cancer diagnoses among us, and approximately one in six Black men will receive the diagnosis during his lifetime. Our incidence rate is about sixty seven percent higher than the rate among White men, and we die from the disease at more than twice their rate.

Those numbers are not the product of biology alone. Access to screening, insurance coverage, delayed treatment, environmental conditions, trust, communication, the quality of the hospital, and whether a doctor takes a man’s concerns seriously can all influence what happens. Black men have shown comparable and sometimes better prostate cancer survival when receiving care within equal access health systems, yet research has also found that we can be less likely to receive definitive treatment. That tells us something important. The disparity is not destiny. Care matters. Timing matters. Treatment matters.

There is another trend worth naming. Advanced cases are climbing again. Nationally, diagnoses of prostate cancer that has already spread beyond the gland have been increasing across every age group, and among men younger than fifty five, distant stage diagnoses have been rising by nearly three percent per year. Younger than fifty five. The disease is not politely waiting for retirement parties. Meanwhile, the decline in prostate cancer deaths that the country celebrated during the nineteen nineties and two thousands has slowed from about three or four percent per year to roughly six tenths of one percent annually over the past decade, and researchers believe the increase in advanced diagnoses is partly connected to years when routine screening was discouraged and fewer men were tested.

What actually happens when you begin the conversation? Usually, it starts with a vial of blood. The test measures prostate specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate, and a PSA result cannot diagnose cancer by itself. The number can rise because of cancer, but it may also increase because of an enlarged prostate, inflammation, infection, certain medical procedures, recent ejaculation, or even vigorous cycling. There is no single number that separates every healthy prostate from every cancerous one.

A baseline test between forty and forty five can do two things. It can identify an unusual result that deserves attention, and it can give your doctor an early reference point for future testing. The timing of the next test depends on your PSA level, age, family history, overall health, personal preferences, and the screening plan you develop with your doctor. It should not be reduced to one schedule for every man.

If the first PSA result comes back elevated, that still does not mean cancer. A doctor may recommend repeating the blood test after several weeks or months to confirm the result, depending on the PSA level and whether an infection, recent procedure, or another temporary factor could have affected it. If the level remains high or continues climbing, the next step might include another blood or urine test, a physical examination, an MRI, continued observation, or a biopsy. An elevated PSA does not automatically send you to an operating table, and even a prostate cancer diagnosis does not automatically mean surgery or radiation.

Many men with slow growing, low risk disease are managed through active surveillance, meaning the cancer is monitored carefully with PSA tests, examinations, imaging, and sometimes repeat biopsies, with treatment beginning if testing shows the disease is changing. Active surveillance is not ignoring cancer. It is a medical plan designed to protect a man from unnecessary treatment and its possible urinary, bowel, and sexual side effects while still watching the disease closely. Knowledge does not obligate you to choose one treatment. It removes the blindfold and gives you choices.

Family history sharpens every part of this discussion. If your father, brother, or son had prostate cancer, especially at a younger age, your own risk may be higher, and certain inherited genetic variants, including changes involving BRCA1, BRCA2, and genes connected to Lynch syndrome, can also raise concern. The Prostate Cancer Foundation says Black men with a strong family history or known high risk genetic variants should consider annual PSA screening as early as forty.

That means the first step may not happen in a clinic. It might begin with calling your uncle. Ask your mother what her brothers were diagnosed with. Ask why your grandfather kept going back and forth to the hospital. Ask whether the relative everybody said died of old age had cancer nobody wanted to name. A lot of us grew up in homes where sickness was handled behind a closed bedroom door. Adults lowered their voices. Children were told not to worry. Nobody said the diagnosis out loud, and now some grown men are walking around without half of their own medical history. Go get it. Write it down. Bring it to your next appointment.

Let us also be plain about the message, because it can be distorted in either direction. This is not a warning that every Black man at forty is a ticking clock. Most men in their early forties do not have prostate cancer. Fear does not save lives, and it often makes people avoid doctors even harder. The evidence says something quieter and more practical. Our risk can arrive earlier, so our questions should arrive earlier too. The conversation belongs somewhere between forty and forty five, not after symptoms appear, and it belongs in the same discussion as blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes, colon health, and everything else a grown man has to manage.

Bring it up at the next physical. Bring it up with your barber, your pastor, your line brothers, your coworkers, and the men in your fantasy league. Say the words prostate cancer out loud at the dinner table so your sons hear them and grow up understanding that taking care of their bodies is not embarrassing. It is simply part of being an adult. The people who love you would rather sit through an awkward five minute conversation now than sit through a funeral later, and they mean it.

Forty is not too young for the conversation. It might be exactly on time.

Staff Writer; Mark Brooks

This brother writes about faith, money, brotherhood, and the real work of being a man from one day to the next… He keeps it plain, with his attention on home, community, and helping brothers do a little better…

Contact him at MarkB@ThyBlackMan.com.

But it’s really the second reason Glover’s public disclosure hit like a sledgehammer, and I rejoiced. He is one of the more than one in five African Americans who are either at risk or likely to be afflicted with Alzheimer’s. A 2007 study by Boston University researchers focused specifically on African Americans and the higher incidence of Alzheimer’s They confirmed the alarming disparity.

The researchers sought an answer to why that was. The researchers zeroed in on genetic causes. However, they found no conclusive evidence of differing genetic malfunctions in the brain between Blacks and whites.

A more recent study also examined differences in dementia by race. It tracked a broad sample of nearly forty thousand persons nationally drawn from nearly forty different Alzheimer’s research centers across the U.S. A substantial number of participants had dementia. The study found a smaller percentage of Blacks than whites with a dementia diagnosis. However, the gaping flaw was that Blacks were far less likely than whites to be tested specifically for dementia in follow-up visits to a doctor.

Both the earlier Boston University study and the more recent study fell back on the standard explanation for the gaping racial disparity in Alzheimer’s between Blacks and whites. That is unequal access to healthcare, lower quality education, and higher rates of other health problems such as heart disease and diabetes. It’s the unequal access to health care, though, that ultimately determines who and what kind of treatment an individual suffering from a catastrophic disease such as Alzheimer’s receives. The picture here isn’t pretty.

A major university research study in 2000 on the impact of racial bias on mental health diagnosis and treatment, Racism and Mental Health: the African American Experience, noted, “The stigma of racial inferiority may also adversely affect the treatment of black patients in the mental health system. Black clinicians have long argued that popular misconceptions, inaccuracies, and stereotypes of the psychology of African Americans could lead to the misdiagnosis of Black patients.”

The study went further and observed that African Americans were more likely to be misdiagnosed. It specifically cited schizophrenia. Blacks were more likely to be diagnosed with the malady of paranoid schizophrenia. And at the same underdiagnosed with other affective disorders. The researchers chalked this up to “conscious or unconscious acceptance of negative stereotypes of Blacks.” The inaccurate diagnosis clinicians seemingly routinely made over time of many Blacks with a mental health affliction had serious consequences in terms of tailoring the correct and most effective treatment to the patient. More recent studies on racial health disparities confirm the pattern is still widespread.

That certainly applies to Alzheimer’s diagnosis and treatment. A 2019 study that looked at nearly three thousand people with Alzheimer’s that spanned twenty years confirmed that. It also found that the prevalence of Alzheimer’s in Blacks was about twice that of whites. But it also found in addition that they had worse symptoms. They included delusions, hallucinations, agitation, aggression, anxiety, mobility, poor sleep, and eating. They pointed to the lack of a timely diagnosis of Alzheimer’s that Blacks get as the major cause. That ensures the symptoms worsen.

Glover has drawn massive media and public attention to his battle with Alzheimer’s precisely because he is a famed and highly acclaimed actor, and activist. The same can’t be said for the huge number of Blacks who are at heightened risk from the disease. They largely fall through the media and public looking glass crack.

This compounds the tragedy. Alzheimer is a dread disease with yet no cure. I can testify to that from watching in almost helpless agony the many behavior, personality, and physical changes that my family member goes through. It is not named the long goodbye for nothing. It is long, persistent, debilitating, and takes a toll on other family members and those tasked with caregiving.

Glover is fortunate in many ways. He has a warm, supportive family, and legions of concerned admirers. He has the resources to ensure he receives top quality treatment and caregiving.

Unfortunately, many others who suffer from the disease do not have that advantage. That certainly includes many African American sufferers and their families.

Fortunately, Glover, and my afflicted family member, are receiving the best medical attention available. And even more importantly, the love and support of family members. Hopefully Glover’s public coming out about this condition will ensure that others in need get the same support and attention.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

That is the room Russell walked into.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

My mama had Off the Wall spinning on Sunday mornings while the greens cooked, and back then I was small enough to believe that voice lived somewhere inside the walls of the house instead of inside a body with a hard father, impossible expectations, and a heart built to break. That is the first lie fame sells you about a star. It says he is only sound and light. It swears he came out of the womb glittering, that he never once bled on the floor like the rest of us.

He bled plenty.

Long before the surgery jokes, before the papers turned his features into a national sport, there was a little boy in Gary being corrected, measured, rehearsed, and shaped until childhood had no room left to breathe. Joseph Jackson did not raise a singer so much as manufacture one, the way you weld a machine together, with discipline, fear, correction, and a belt always close enough to haunt the room. Grown, Michael would speak in that soft careful voice about how the sight of his own father could make his stomach turn. Boyhood got taken from that child before his hands were big enough to hold it.

That is the ugliest math in the whole story. The thing stolen from him became the thing millions of us cherished. His stolen play paid for ours. We danced on the grave of his childhood and called it a good time.

So when the man grew rich past counting and went and built an amusement park with a Ferris wheel, animals, a train, a theater, and a candy-store kind of fantasy that never seemed to close, half this country pointed and cackled. Weird, they said. A grown man playing with toys.

Run it back, though. What does anybody do after being charged admission to his own life at nine years old? Neverland was not just spectacle. That ranch was a receipt. It was a wounded soul trying to buy back an April that Motown, show business, and family pressure had already sold off wholesale. Many of us could not see it because seeing it meant admitting we helped sign the bill of sale.

There sits the ache under all of it. The public worshipped the glove, the fedora, the white socks, and the way Michael could fold gravity clean in half, spin like a top, then glide backward like the earth itself owed him a favor. What that same public did not want was the tired, damaged, ordinary human standing behind the trick once the building emptied out and the last scream died in the parking lot. Folks fell in love with the illusion, then turned around and resented the magician for being mortal enough to sweat, ache, hide, worry, and need rest.

The punishment for changing shape was savage. His skin lightened, and overnight the whole nation played amateur dermatologist, hollering that Jackson hated his reflection, that he was scrubbing the Blackness off himself to please white folks. Vitiligo was real. His health struggles were real. But set every diagnosis aside for one second and stare at the trap he was born inside. A dark-skinned Black boy came up in an America that never, not for one lousy afternoon, told a dark-skinned Black boy his face was the measure of beauty.

Mirrors surrounded that man for his entire working life. Cameras studied him. Critics dissected him. Magazines enlarged him. Jokes followed him. Every feature became public property. Whatever got done to that face happened inside pressure, not outside it. Yet we treated his body like it belonged to the ticket holders. We felt entitled to inspect it, roast it, judge it, and autopsy it while blood still moved through him.

The papers sniffed out something profitable and rotten early. They figured out that the same crowd that would weep at Man in the Mirror would also pay money to watch a Black genius get turned into a sideshow. Bubbles the chimp. The oxygen chamber stories. The nicknames that stuck like tar. They fed the public a cartoon, and the public gobbled it because a cartoon is a whole lot easier to hold than a lonely thirty-year-old millionaire who could not sit right around regular people, on account of never once being regular a day in his life.

We wanted the man strange so we would not have to feel the shame of how alone we helped make him.

Nobody prints that part on the poster. Fame at that altitude is solitary confinement with room service. Michael could not walk into a corner store. He could not sit on a bench in a park. He could not fall for somebody without cameras, lawyers, managers, reporters, and opportunists circling like buzzards. Everybody in the room seemed to need a cut, a signature, a favor, a photograph, a percentage, or a piece of meat off the bone.

Picture every relationship you own arriving with an invoice stapled to it. Picture trusting nobody while needing everybody all at once.

His closeness to children became one of the most painful and disputed parts of his life and legacy. Jackson denied wrongdoing, and in 2005 he was acquitted in a criminal trial. Later allegations kept the argument alive, and people will continue fighting over what they believe happened. I will not sit here and try the whole matter in one paragraph. I know only this much. Whatever answer a person reaches about those accusations, the loneliness underneath the man was flat real, and this country mocked that loneliness right up to the second it stopped being a punchline.

June of 2009 arrived, and Michael Jackson was found unresponsive in a Los Angeles bedroom after his doctor administered propofol, a surgical anesthetic, in an attempt to buy him a few hours of sleep. Chew on that. One of the most famous entertainers breathing could not purchase the one thing a broke teenager gets for nothing, which is rest.

And the instant that heart quit, the entire planet pulled a shameful stunt. It grieved.

The same outlets that had barbecued Jackson for twenty years ran wall-to-wall tributes. Folks who had cracked wise about his nose stood in candlelight singing his catalog. Records flew. Vigils bloomed. Radio stations went deep into the albums. Strangers cried like they had lost kin. All that love, that ocean of devotion, showed up on the exact afternoon the man could no longer feel a single drop.

There is the tragedy stripped naked. Not that Michael was misunderstood, since plenty of people go misunderstood and survive it. The wound is that the affection was real and gigantic and aimed dead wrong the whole time. We dumped it all on the performer, the product, the phenomenon, the moonwalking ghost we could summon off a screen anytime we craved a hit of wonder. We never poured enough of it on the person, the shy, generous, terrified soul who wanted, to the last breath, to be held by somebody who did not want one thing back.

He gave us joy that outlived him and will outlast us too. I still play the records. I still catch my breath when that bassline drops. I still know what it means when a room full of Black folks hears the right Michael Jackson song and everybody’s age falls away at once. The music still works because genius does not expire.

But the innocent way I heard those songs on that kitchen floor is gone for good. Now I hear the price tag. I hear a child who never got permission to be a child, singing his lungs to shreds so the rest of us could shake something loose and feel alive.

We got the miracle we hollered for.

Michael got the bill.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

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

I have seen a grown man shut down in real time over that. Watched him pull the mask back up and say “nah I’m good, just talking” when he wasn’t done. You could feel he had more to say. He just learned in about four seconds that this wasn’t the place.

I’m middle-aged now. Buried friends. Sat in more hospital waiting rooms and funeral homes and divorce attorney offices than I care to count. And the older I get, the more I’m convinced that one of the quietest crises among us is loneliness wearing a strong face. There are plenty of people around most of us. What we don’t always have is a place to set the load down.

Most of us were raised to be solid. To provide, to protect, to never let them see you sweat. That training kept a lot of us alive and kept a lot of families fed. I’m not here to spit on it. But somewhere along the way, being strong got tangled up with being silent, and silence has a cost that shows up later in the body and the marriage and the mind. You can be the most dependable man in your whole family and still feel like nobody actually knows you.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. A lot of us are starving for a space where we can talk without being mocked, corrected, or turned into a debate.

Think about how rare that actually is. You say you’re struggling at work and somebody immediately tells you what you should’ve done differently. You admit you cried watching your kid graduate and somebody calls you soft. You float a half-formed thought about therapy or faith or fatherhood and three voices come at you ready to argue the point like it’s a panel discussion. None of that is malice. Most of the time it’s just how we learned to relate to each other. Competition. Roasting. Topping the last guy’s story. It’s fun until you actually need somebody to hear you, and then it leaves you out in the cold.

I had a friend, I’ll call him Mike, who carried a thing for almost a year before he told anybody. His business was failing. He was pulling money from one account to cover another, smiling at church, posting wins online, dying on the inside. When he finally said something to me, the first thing out of my mouth almost was advice. I almost reached for the spreadsheet voice, the let me solve this voice. But I caught it. I just said, man, that sounds heavy, how long you been carrying that alone. And he broke. Right there in my truck. Because he didn’t need a consultant. He needed a witness.

That moment changed how I move. I stopped treating every hard conversation like a problem to be closed out and started treating it like a person to be sat with. Big difference.

Now somebody reading this might think I’m saying we should all go soft and just agree with everything and never challenge each other. That’s not it at all. If anything it’s the opposite. The space I’m talking about isn’t a space with no accountability. It’s a space where accountability finally has room to land, because it’s coming from love instead of judgment.

There’s a difference between a man who calls you out because he wants to look right, and a man who pulls you aside because he wants you to be right. One is showing off. The other is showing up. When you trust that somebody is in your corner, you can hear hard things from him. He can tell you that you’re wrong about your wife, that you’re being a coward about your money, that you need to apologize to your son, and you’ll actually receive it. Not because he was harsh, but because you know he loves you and isn’t trying to win.

That’s the thing the judgment crowd never figures out. You cannot correct a man into trusting you. Pressure makes people perform, it doesn’t make them honest. A man does not change much under a spotlight. He changes in the presence of somebody who saw the worst of him and stayed.

So what does building this actually look like, day to day, for regular guys who aren’t trying to start some formal group with a name and a logo?

It starts small. It starts with one of us deciding to be the safe one. The guy who, when a friend says something tender, doesn’t reach for the joke. The guy who asks one more question instead of giving one more opinion. You’d be amazed what opens up when you simply ask “how are you really doing” and then shut your mouth long enough to let him answer past the first polite lie.

It looks like being the kind of presence where confessions don’t get repeated. What he tells you in the truck stays in the truck. Loose lips have killed more friendships among us than disagreement ever did. If a man can’t trust you to hold his business, he will never trust you with his heart, and you’ll get nothing but the surface version of him for the rest of your lives.

It looks like normalizing the check-in. A text on a random Tuesday that just says thinking about you, you good. Not because something’s wrong. Just because. Truth is, a lot of us are great at showing up for the funeral and terrible at showing up for the slow grind before it. A man going under usually doesn’t send up a flare. He just gets a little quieter, a little more distant, laughs a little less. You have to be paying attention.

And it looks like letting yourself be the one who needs help sometimes too. This is the hard part for a lot of us, myself included. We’ll happily be the rock for everybody else and never let anybody be the rock for us. But a friendship that only flows one direction isn’t real closeness, it’s charity, and eventually the man on the receiving end feels like a burden. You give your friends a gift when you let them carry something of yours. You’re telling them they matter enough to be trusted.

I think about the young ones coming up watching us. My nephews, the kids in my neighborhood, my own son. They are learning what manhood sounds like from how we talk to each other. If all they ever hear is roasting and one-upping and never a moment of real tenderness between grown men who respect each other, that’s the only language they’ll have when their own load gets heavy. There’s something better we can hand them. We can show them that you can be tough as nails and still tell another man you love him and mean it.

None of this requires money or a building or a perfect plan. It requires a decision. A decision to stop performing for each other and start being honest with each other. To trade the constant low-grade competition for something that actually sustains a life.

There are already enough people ready to judge us. The world keeps a running tally on us from the day we’re born. Last thing we need is to do that same thing to each other in the few spaces that are supposed to be ours.

What we need is to be each other’s soft place to land and each other’s straight line back to the truth, at the same time, from the same person, because that person loves us. That’s the whole thing. Hold each other accountable, yes. But do it with arms open, not arms crossed.

Pour into the men around you. Let them pour into you. Watch what happens.

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 data have never left much question. The answer is economic growth. Nonetheless, many development economists have spent decades arguing that growth isn’t enough or as important as development aid. The French report is simply a radical expression of a popular view. So, it’s worth reviewing the evidence again.

Stated plainly, every country that has gotten richer overall has also reduced poverty. More importantly, no poor country has ever achieved decent living standards without first getting genuinely richer. Obviously, wealth and basic human wellbeing move together, but the relationship is so reliable that it’s more like a physical law than a social-science finding.

People in poverty have little access to food, clean water, decent shelter, basic medical care and schooling. Adequate amounts do not exist in nature; they must be produced. As an economy grows, it produces more of these things. This enables more growth which, in turn, lifts the masses out of poverty.

Two centuries ago, roughly three-quarters of the world could not afford more than tiny living spaces, enough food to avoid malnutrition and some minimum heating capacity. Since then, the share of people in this type of poverty has fallen dramatically. The reason is an explosion in production that began with the Industrial Revolution and has yet to stop.

Unfortunately, the belief that economic growth in poor countries benefits richer residents and bypasses the needy remains commonplace. A large body of economic literature shows that this is nonsense. For instance, the work of World Bank economists David Dollar and Aart Kraay and others finds that when average incomes rise, the incomes of the poorest 20% of a population rise at essentially the same rate. In other words, growth is not systematically biased against the poor.

Further, even in the worst cases where growth skews toward elites, the impact on wellbeing in poor countries is too powerful to ignore. In a recent Substack post, development economist Lant Pritchett showed that elite-skewed growth in Ethiopia does four times more to improve basic human wellbeing — clean water, child survival, schooling — than uniform growth in Denmark. Denmark has already achieved those basics. Ethiopia has not.

As such, the most important question for poor countries is not who gains most from growth. It is whether growth happens at all. The countries that are home to most of the world’s remaining extreme poor — places like Madagascar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mozambique, Malawi and Burundi — have not grown for decades. Our World in Data’s Max Rosen points out that Madagascar’s GDP per capita today is roughly the same as it was in 1950.

The reason isn’t a lack of development aid. These are among the world’s most aid-dependent economies. The DRC has received tens of billions of dollars in foreign aid over decades and $1.3 billion in 2024 from the U.S. alone. In past years, Mozambique received as much as half of its government budget from foreign aid. These countries have been the focus of development programs, nongovernmental organization activity, World Bank projects, bilateral donor attention and charitable intervention for generations.

Countries don’t get stuck in extreme poverty because the world has ignored them. They get stuck because they do not produce. And they do not produce because the institutional conditions that make production possible — secure property rights, the rule of law, open markets, protection from predatory government — are largely absent. Countries ranking at or near the bottom of economic freedom indexes are also the poorest. Those that liberalize experience across-the-board income increases.

Economist Vincent Geloso’s research finds that economic freedom is one of the strongest predictors of who escapes persistent poverty and who stays trapped. Colin Doran and Thomas Stratmann have found much the same. The mechanism is straightforward: Property rights give people an incentive to produce. Lower regulatory barriers let businesses form and labor move toward opportunity. Freedom from predatory government encourages long-term investment. Remove these conditions and countries stagnate, no matter how much aid they get.

Growth is both necessary and sufficient. No country has escaped poverty without it. Every country that has achieved higher GDP per capita has also achieved high levels of basic human wellbeing. Targeted aid can be useful at the margin, but it’s no substitute. Although many supposed poverty fighters are blind to this reality, serious policymakers shouldn’t be.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

Tax season brings these details into sharper focus because every figure must be organized, supported, and ready for review. For many growing brands, handling this work internally can take time away from planning, operations, and customer experience. Tax preparation outsourcing gives businesses a more structured way to manage tax-related documentation and preparation. 

It helps organize financial records so owners can stay focused on growing the brand. Let’s look at why this approach is becoming relevant for beauty and fitness businesses. 

5 Reasons Beauty and Fitness Brands Need Tax Preparation Outsourcing

Beauty and fitness brands handle fast-moving sales, campaigns, and customer demand. A structured tax process can help owners manage these records with better clarity. 

    1. Manage Multiple Income Streams

Beauty and fitness brands often earn through several channels. A beauty brand may manage product sales, treatment packages, subscriptions, gift cards, retail partnerships, and promotional campaigns. 

A fitness brand may handle membership plans, digital programs, product sales, merchandise, wellness packages, and recurring customer payments. Each income stream needs proper classification during tax preparation. 

When service revenue, product sales, and recurring payments mix, review work can take longer. Tax preparation outsourcing helps organize these categories with a clearer process. It supports cleaner reporting and gives accountants better context while reviewing business activity.

     2. Payroll, Tips, and Contractor Payments Need Careful Tracking

Beauty and fitness brands often work with mixed team structures. They may work with full-time employees, commission-based teams, consultants, creators, trainers, product specialists, and independent professionals.

Each arrangement creates different payment records. Payroll, commissions, reimbursements, contractor payments, and incentive payouts need clear documentation throughout the year.

Tax preparation outsourcing can support a more organized workflow for these details. It helps teams collect payment summaries, staff records, and supporting documents in one place.

     3. Busy Seasons Can Overlap With Tax Deadlines

Beauty and fitness brands often experience demand spikes during specific months. Beauty brands may see stronger sales around holidays, weddings, seasonal launches, and gifting periods. Fitness brands may see higher demand around New Year, summer, and wellness-focused campaigns.

Tax season can arrive while teams already manage campaigns, customer demand, inventory planning, and daily operations. Owners may need to review reports, collect receipts, track payroll details, and answer tax questions together.

Tax preparation outsourcing helps create a defined support process during these demanding periods. Experienced professionals can help organize records, prepare working files, and manage document requirements.

     4. Expenses Need Proper Documentation

Beauty and fitness brands usually manage several business expenses. These may include rent, utilities, insurance, supplies, product inputs, packaging, equipment, software, uniforms, and marketing costs.

Every expense needs reliable support before accountants can review it properly. Invoices, receipts, vendor records, and payment confirmations help create a stronger preparation base.

Tax preparation outsourcing can help arrange these documents into clear categories. It can also help identify missing records early, giving teams enough time to collect them before filing season.

     5. Growth Can Make Tax Preparation More Detailed

A growing beauty or fitness brand may manage records with a small internal team at first. Growth changes that process quickly. New locations, sales channels, added staff, more vendors, and larger customer volumes can create extra reporting needs.

Each channel or business unit may have separate revenue reports, payroll details, sales records, expenses, and operating patterns. Tax preparation outsourcing helps standardize how records are collected and reviewed.

It can support consistent workflows for sales reports, payroll summaries, expense files, and supporting documents. This helps owners prepare for filing with better control.

Key Tax Preparation Services Beauty and Fitness Brands Should Consider

Choosing the right outsourcing support starts with understanding which services can match your business structure, systems, and growth plans.

     1. Individual and Business Return Preparation Support

Beauty and fitness brands may operate as sole proprietorships, partnerships, Limited Liability Companies, S corporations, or C corporations. A tax preparation partner should be able to work with the right return type and organize the records needed for review. 

     2. Account Finalization and Financial Statement Support

Year-end tax work depends on complete and accurate financial records. Support with account finalization and financial statements can help create a clearer base for filing. 

     3. Multi-state and Local Filing Coordination

Brands operating across multiple locations or channels may need added coordination for filing requirements. The right partner can help arrange federal, state, and local records in a structured way. 

     4. Technology-friendly Workflows

Beauty and fitness brands often use accounting, payroll, booking, sales, and customer management systems. The outsourcing process should work smoothly with these platforms to make data collection easier. 

     5. Quality Checks, Security, and Clear Pricing

Tax preparation involves sensitive financial information, so the process should be secure and well defined. Look for quality checks, clear timelines, transparent pricing, and proper control over shared data. 

Make Tax Preparation Easier for Growing Brands 

Beauty and fitness brands need tax preparation support that understands service operations, team structures, customer demand, and multi-stream revenue. A structured process can help owners manage records, reporting, documentation, and coordination with greater confidence. 

It can also help accountants review cleaner information and spend more time on meaningful guidance. The right partner should offer skilled tax professionals, secure workflows, smooth system integration, transparent pricing, and quality-focused support. 

Outsourcing partners like Befree can help beauty and fitness businesses create a more organized approach to tax season. With the right support, owners can keep financial preparation aligned with daily operations, customer experience, and long-term growth.

Staff Writer; Larry Harris

WIC is not cash welfare. It is not a giveaway. It is one of the most efficient and humane nutrition programs this country has ever created. It provides targeted food support, breastfeeding support, nutrition counseling, and health referrals to pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and children up to age five. It helps families buy milk, eggs, cereal, formula, fruits, vegetables, and other basics that make the difference between nourishment and hunger.

Now the House has decided that these families should do with less.

On June 4, the House passed the FY2027 Agriculture appropriations bill, including a $200 million cut to WIC and a reduction in the fruit-and-vegetable benefit. For a family already stretching every dollar, that is not an abstraction. That is fewer apples. Fewer greens. Less formula. Less food at the very moment when food matters most.

The numbers are stark. The House bill cuts WIC by $200 million and reduces the fruit-and-vegetable benefit. The White House proposal goes even further, slashing the monthly produce benefit for young children from $26 to about $10. That is a $16 cut per child each month — more than 60 percent — in the very part of WIC designed to put fresh food on the table.

Some will say that $16 a month is not much. But $16 is only “not much” to people who have never been down to their last $16. For a family living on the edge, $16 is milk and bananas, eggs and apples, bus fare to the grocery store, or the difference between buying fresh food and buying the cheapest calories available. A cut does not have to be large to be cruel. Sometimes the last $16 is the last straw.

This is what cruelty looks like when it wears a green eyeshade.

We are told, endlessly, that this nation cares about children. Politicians pose with babies, praise mothers, salute families, and campaign on “values.” But values are not measured by slogans. They are measured by budgets. And a budget that takes food from women and children tells us exactly whose lives are expendable.

WIC also supports farmers, grocers, and local food economies. When a mother uses WIC dollars to buy fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, eggs, cereal, or formula, that money does not disappear. It goes to grocery stores, farmers markets, dairy producers, food distributors, and growers who depend on regular customers. Less WIC money means fewer purchases of healthy food. It means fewer dollars circulating in local communities. It means that a cut aimed at poor women and children also reaches farmers and small businesses. Nutrition dollars are economic dollars, too.

That is especially important because healthy food is already too expensive for too many families. Fruits and vegetables are often the first things to disappear from a household budget when money gets tight. WIC helps keep those foods on the table. Cutting the fruit-and-vegetable benefit does not simply reduce choice; it narrows possibility. It tells a mother to stretch, substitute, and make do. It tells a child that fresh food is optional. It tells farmers that the public dollars that helped families buy their produce are no longer a priority.

What kind of country negotiates over the nutrition of infants? What kind of Congress looks at pregnant women and toddlers and says, “You cost too much”? What kind of moral arithmetic takes fresh fruit and vegetables from a child’s plate while protecting tax breaks, weapons contracts, corporate subsidies, and political theater? What kind of Congress spends nearly $2 billion a day on an undeclared war against Iran, then skimps on food for children?

The House has acted, but the Senate has not finished its work. Final negotiations are still ahead. That means advocacy matters now. Not next month. Not after recess. Now.

The ask is simple: fully fund WIC. Reject cuts to the fruit-and-vegetable benefit. Preserve the virtual and remote services that make WIC accessible to working mothers, rural families, and those without easy transportation. Do not balance the budget on babies.

The United States can find money for tax breaks, weapons, walls, corporate subsidies, and billionaire giveaways. Surely it can find money for bananas, carrots, milk, cereal, formula, and breastfeeding support.

The families who rely on WIC are not asking for luxury. They are asking for food. They are asking for nourishment. They are asking for a basic public commitment that babies should not go hungry, that pregnant women should not be undernourished, and that children should have access to the building blocks of health. That should not be controversial. It should be the floor beneath our politics.

When children are hungry, delay is a decision. When pregnant women are undernourished, silence is complicity. And when Congress chooses austerity for babies while protecting abundance for the powerful, we should name it for what it is.

This is not fiscal discipline.

It is moral failure.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

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

Yet the elders in McIntosh County, with Ashley as its county seat, frequently live into their 90s, and sometimes beyond. It had the highest proportion of people 85 and older in the country. Doesn’t make sense until you see why it does.

Stress levels are low. The farmers pursue a lifetime of physical exercise. When they retire in town, they still mow their small lawns and grow vegetables in the backyard. The numbers may be skewed by the many young people who leave town for economic opportunity in bigger places, but they’re hard to dismiss.

A big factor in this longevity, researchers found, was social connection. Every morning the old men would gather at the Dakota Family Restaurant for coffee and breeze-shooting. The women had their own table.

“The cafe is where the networking takes place,” the county’s director of social services said. “If somebody doesn’t show up for coffee, it would cause a lot of chatter, and someone will check on them.” The pattern repeats itself across the Northern Plains.

The most recent National Vital Statistics report lists the states for the highest life expectancy at birth: No. 1 is Hawaii, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah and New Hampshire. What these very diverse places have in common are relatively strong social infrastructures.

A New York psychiatrist known for running group sessions would tell his patients: “You don’t need me. You need friends.” He’d put together people with little in common by age, ethnicity and income level. Forced at first to air their angst before absolute strangers happy to be critical, the group members developed fast friendships that flourished decades after official therapy stopped.

Loneliness has been declared an epidemic leading to sickness and self-harm, and rightly so. The pandemic deepened isolation, but the shrinking personal ties began well before. Robert Putnam’s 2000 book, “Bowling Alone,” documented an ongoing collapse of American community.

Recent research found that from 2003 to 2022, face-to-face socializing among American men fell by about 30%. But for teenagers, it shrunk 45%. (Reporters covering youth sports have long bemoaned driving past beautiful baseball fields with no one on them.)

Email, texting and posting have not replaced in-person socializing. And the result appears to be increased depression, especially among teenagers. And if their communication swims in anger-provoking social media feeds, small wonder so many are drowning in despair.

Are there remedies? Some are being tried. Several cities run activities fairs, where attendees can look over groups to join. Interests can be books, oil painting, choral singing, cooking, whatever. We now read of adult sleep-away camps designed to spark new friendships. Attendees piled into a room of bunk beds have little alternative at night to yakking with new acquaintances.

It’s bit of a shame that these encounters seem more mechanical than the simple act of saying hi to the neighbor taking out garbage at the same time. But let’s give them a try.

The early 19th-century French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans’ fondness for joining associations: political, neighborhood, labor. He famously wrote, “Nothing in my view deserves more attention than the intellectual and moral associations in America.”

And in many ways, they were superior to the social groups in old Europe, largely rooted in fossilized class distinctions. Americans, unplug your monitors, open the door to the fresh spring air and strike up a conversation. People need people. You, too.

Written by Froma Harrop

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

Some of us were trained before we had words for it. Do not smile too much. Do not look too happy. Do not let folks think you are soft. Do not let strangers read you. Watch your mouth. Watch your hands. Watch your face. Boy, that is a lot to put on somebody who is still learning how to be alive. Yet many of us grew up hearing warnings wrapped in love, because our fathers, uncles, coaches, and grandfathers knew the world could mistake an open spirit for weakness.

I understand why they taught it. I am not sitting here acting brand new. There are places where a Black male has to pay attention. A wrong look can cause trouble. A wrong tone can invite foolishness. A wrong step can turn a simple day into something heavy. We know that. Still, I wonder what all that caution has cost us. A man can spend so much time protecting himself that he forgets what his real face looks like when nobody is threatening him.

There is a certain kind of smile I miss seeing. Not the picture smile. Not the one people use when they are trying to sell something. I mean that slow, easy one that comes when a man is at peace for a minute. You might see it when he is holding a grandbaby. You might catch it when old school music comes on at a cookout. You might notice it when he tastes something that reminds him of his grandmother. Nothing big happened. No trumpet sounded. His soul just had a small opening, and something good walked through it.

We need to stop acting like a good moment has to be earned. That is where many of us get trapped. We tell ourselves we can rest later. Laugh later. Sit down later. Enjoy our people later. After this bill. After this repair. After this doctor visit. After this school issue. After this job stops acting crazy. But later is slippery. Later will let a man chase it for forty years and still not turn around. At some point you have to take the mercy sitting right in front of you.

I am not talking about being careless. A grown man ought to handle his responsibilities. Nobody who loves his family wants to be lazy, childish, or absent. That is not the point. Responsibility was never meant to rob a man of his light. You can pay bills and still laugh at the table. You can be firm and still show warmth. You can correct a son and hug him afterward. You can lead a home without walking through it like a storm cloud. Some of us think we are showing strength, but the people close to us may only feel distance.

A wife can feel that distance. Children can too. They may know you love them, but they may not know how to come close. They hear the car pull in and start checking the mood in the room. They know whether the chair squeaks, whether the keys hit the counter hard, whether the television goes on before anybody gets a word in. That is not written to shame any man, because I know work and pressure can drain the best of us. Still, we ought to ask ourselves what our homes feel like when we enter them.

A father’s smile can change the weather inside a house. It can tell a little girl she does not have to perform for affection. It can tell a boy manhood does not have to look like silence and a clenched jaw. It can tell a wife that her husband is still reachable, not just present. That matters. A lot of families have men who provide, but everybody tiptoes around them. Provision is important, but warmth is part of covering a family too.

I think about the older men I grew up around. Some of them laughed loud at the barbershop, then went quiet the minute they got home. Some could joke with friends, but struggled to speak gently to their own children. Some had been hurt so long they did not know how to soften without feeling exposed. I see them differently now. Back then, I thought they were just hard. Now I know many were carrying things nobody ever asked about. Grief. War memories. Racism on the job. Debt. Failed dreams. Bad knees. Regret. Pride. A man can bury a whole life under the words, I am fine.

That is why brothers need other brothers who will tell the truth without clowning pain. We need friends who can say, “You alright?” and mean it. We need circles where a man can admit he is tired without somebody calling him weak. We need older men who can show younger ones that faith is not only about enduring. It is also about receiving. God did not breathe life into us just so we could grind ourselves into dust. There is blessing in a quiet meal, a child’s laugh, a decent night of sleep, and a sunrise you actually stop to notice.

Southern folks know how to stretch a small blessing when we let ourselves. A plate from somebody who can cook. Shade under a tree. A neighbor waving from the porch. Rain hitting a tin roof. Somebody at church singing off key but meaning every word. A fish fry where nobody is in a rush. These things may not impress the world, but they have carried our people through many seasons. Maybe that is the lesson. Gladness does not always come dressed up. Sometimes it shows up in work pants, with a paper plate in one hand and a folding chair waiting in the yard.

There are times when a smile will not come easy. Loss can sit on a man’s chest. Bad news can steal the taste from food. Money trouble can make sleep feel impossible. Marriage strain can turn home into a place of tension. Sickness can humble anybody. I would never tell a hurting brother to pretend. Pretending is not healing. But I would tell him not to give all his days to sorrow. Even in a hard season, one honest laugh is not betrayal. It is not denial. It is a small reminder that pain is not the owner of the whole house.

So I am saying this to myself as much as anybody else. Stop waiting until every problem is solved before you let your face soften. Stop treating gladness like a paycheck you have not earned yet. Stop thinking your family only needs your labor. They need to see you live. They need to know you can feel good without apologizing for it. Brother, you do not have to prove you suffered enough. You do not have to win every fight first. Black men, joy is not something you have to earn. Sometimes it is already near you, waiting for you to stop pushing it away.

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.