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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

We have chastised you, criticized you, punished you, and in some cases even apologized to you, but we have never formally nor publicly thanked you for your never-ending allegiance and support to our cause.

This is an open letter of thanks. We will always be in your debt to you for your labor. You built this country and were responsible for the great wealth we still enjoy today. Upon your backs, you carried our nation, laden with the stripes we often-times had to apply for disciplinary reasons, hopefully there’s no hard feelings, but we had to do what we did to break down your resistance, if ONLY your ancestors were the good lil n**gahs you all are today. They would give us the hardest, gosh darn time not responding to their name…n**ger.

We publicly acknowledge you n**gahs for raising our children, attending to our sick, and preparing our meals while we were occupied with the trappings of the good life.

You were there when it all began and you are still with us today [protecting] us from those Black people who do not appreciate being called n**ger.

 Rappers whose music projected self-destructive messages upon the minds of your youth have done a good job, helping to dumb down your race, keeping your women in line showing them no respect; your attractiveness to violence, drugs and mistrust among yourselves is commendable after-all this is what n**gahs do; someday all the other n**gahs will see the error in their ways, and will accept the fact that it’s okay to be a good lil n**gah with pride. Thanks to the hip-hop movement, we’ve been able to sit back, grab some popcorn, prop up our feet and enjoy the show.

Have yourselves a good time, and this time we’ll take better care of you. It’s the least we can do considering all you have done for us. Heck, you n**gahs deserve it. For all your labor which created our wealth, for your resisting the messages of trouble making Blacks like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, for fighting and dying on our battlefields, we thank you because you never once forgot your place as a good lil n**ga. And though we demonstrated our appreciation by hanging some of you upon your return home from WWII, we had to make sure that those of you who survived didn’t forget your place as a n**ga.

Things could not be better and all because of you. For all you have done, we thank you, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Along with our dogs, you are the best friends any group of people could ever have. At night, back when you were enslaved, many of you would often sleep on the floor next to our bed, protecting us from trouble-making n**gahs.  Once again thank you!

Sincerely,

All Other Americans

P.S. Some present-day Black/African Americans [resent] being referred to as Black or African, yet… incredibly enough…proudly refer to themselves and other members of their race as the n-word…a n**gah.

During the 60s Black America decided, to denounce the practice of being referred to with the slave terms “Colored” and “Negro”. Usage of the terms Black and African Americans were a decision made by responsible Black Americans…NO ONE else. Psychologically, White America wanted to destroy Black America’s self-esteem by any means necessary.  They took such words as Black and Africa and presented them to our ancestors as something dark and evil. Slave terms, such as “Negro”, “Colored” and n**gah, were embedded into the minds of Black/African Americans to associate themselves with. Whereas positive terms such as Black, African, Africa were terms the oppressors didn’t want Black Americans to identify with.

Black implies self-control and discipline, independence and a strong will; pride, dignity, honor, and integrity are part of the equation, exuding authority and power. It gives an impression of elegance, sophistication and confidence. Black can be intimidating, unfriendly and unapproachable because of the power it exudes; radiating authority and creating fear in the process.  Black when used as an ethnicity transcends color and should [always] be spelled with a capital “B”.

Self-knowledge is crucial because it enhances well-being, leads to better decision-making, fosters stronger relationships, and promotes personal growth by providing a deeper understanding of our emotions, beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses. The only way to know ourselves is to…know our history. It serves as a moral compass. The wealth of man is in his mind, in his consciousness, and for the past 400-years Black America’s consciousness have been deliberately [impaired].

Black History is pervasive extending beyond the reaches of African American History which serves as a mere footnote to an all-encompassing Black History. Albeit, African American History began with slavery, Black History…in general…DID NOT.

A level playing field gives the advantage to Black people because we would dominate, which explains why we don’t have an equal education. The present system is designed to maintain white dominance, and to dumb down Black folk.

The ruling class would have African Americans believe that the Black experience is limited to grass and mud huts, spears and jungle life with no trace of civility, culture, organization, and self-sufficiency, ultimately painting the white man as our saving grace. Research exposes this chronicle as a gross fabrication. The following list of names, apart from one, are reputable Black historians: Dr. John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Chancellor Williams, Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop, Dr. Asa Hilliard, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, George G.M. James, Dr. Amos Wilson, psychologist/historian and Basil Davidson who is British and not Black.  All these people are notably deceased. Dr. Amos Wilson, who also was an Activist trying to unite Black America was unalived, back in the mid-90s under some very mysterious circumstances.

John Henrik Clarke, Amos Wilson, Asa Hilliard, Cheikh Diop, and Basil Davidson all have YouTube Videos available.

Staff Writer; H. Lewis Smith

This brother is the author of Bury that Sucka, a Scandalous Love Affair With the N-word, and Undressing the N-word, Revealing the Naked Truth About Lies, Deceit, and Mind Games, which is available on Amazon .

Also follow Mr. Smith on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/thescoop1.    

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

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

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

Start there, or do not bother starting.

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

Now, about the caution.

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

None of which excuses September 1895 in Atlanta.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

Resisting the separation and parceling out of her sisters and brothers, she decided, against all odds and advice, to quit school, get a job and take care of them. It was a sign of the commitment, courage and will that would carry her through and beyond the many difficulties and fierce opposition she would face. And she rose in the ranks of African American leadership through an extraordinary combination of intellect, strategic planning, insightful writing, hard work in critical areas, audacious self-assertion, admirable resiliency and an iron and resistant will.

Certainly, she lived in a critical period in Black history, the reversal of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, Caveman Charlie and “Beast-Lady Lynch,” savage White terrorism and the brutal burning of Black towns, and racist mob murder as a way of life. It is her work in the muck and mire of this racist South and compliant North that Ida B. Wells came into her own and taught us audacious African ways to walk, work, struggle and stand tall in the world.

Nana Ida was a tireless journalist, organizer, lecturer, teacher and activist in numerous organizations and had collaborated with the major leaders of her time. Her ideas foreshadowed and prefigured womanist, Black Power, armed self-defense, civil and human rights, and related discourse and initiatives in our contemporary conversations. In fact, she made a major contribution to Africana womanism which is clear in her commitment to self-definition, ethical grounding, male/female partnership in equality, family, community and social action. It is obvious also in her refusal to place in conflict the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Black women. Indeed, she insisted on joining the two in a total liberation of all, as exemplified in her work with her husband and partner in struggle, Ferdinand Barnett.

Embodying the self-defining womanist, she asked in an article on the mission and meaning of women, “What is or should be woman?” And she answered: “Not merely a bundle of flesh and bones, nor a fashion plate, a frivolous inanity, a boundless doll, a heartless coquette – but a strong, bright presence, thoroughly imbued with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fill it; an earnest, soulful being, laboring to fit herself for life’s duties and burdens, and bearing them faithfully when they come; but a womanly woman for all that …”

It is this stance as an aware, socially active, self-assertive, and “womanly woman,” willingly bearing the burdens and obligations at hand, that was a source of the inner strength that gave her courage to struggle for both racial and gender justice. These struggles were pursued in her work as an organizer, institution-builder, anti-lynching, civil rights and human rights advocate and in her collaborating with other leaders whose names we know and also honor – Nanas Douglass, DuBois, Garvey, Bethune, Terrell, Randolph.

Nana Ida was a “race woman,” uncompromisingly committed to the freedom and well-being of her people. Like Nana Marcus Garvey, whom she admired and who admired her, she was for “race first.” She argued there was no substitute for unity, self-help, self-reliance, and constant struggle. And she stressed strong community institutions, the essentiality of education and economic strength, constant vigilance and ceaseless struggle.

In an article, “Freedom of Political Action,” she criticized African Americans for being too tied to one party or the other without critical assessment. Prefiguring a similar position of Nana Malcolm X, she declared she was neither a Democrat nor Republican, but an African American seeking justice and freedom for her people.

Wells-Barnett also argued against uncritical allegiance to leaders and for critical assessment of leadership in terms of how it furthered the objective desired above all others: “the well-being of (Black people) as a race, morally, socially and intellectually.” And in another article on “Functions of Leadership,” she asked of leaders “how many of them are exerting their talents and wealth for the benefit or amelioration of the conditions of the masses?” Moreover, she asked “What material benefit is a ‘leader’, if he does not, to some extent, devote his time, talent and wealth to the alleviation of the poverty, and misery and elevation of his people?”

It is Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s courageous, constant and uncompromising struggle against lynching which brought forth the best of her virtues and values, and reaffirmed her role as a leader of great merit and meaning. Clearly, she played a crucial and vanguard role in exposing the racist terrorism and savagery of lynching, traveling widely in the U.S. and speaking internationally. Her anti-lynching lectures and writings were vital witness against this brutal and barbaric practice. She defined lynching as a “national crime,” “a color-line murder,” and “the cold-blooded savagery of White devils under lynch law.”

Also, Wells-Barnett raised the issue of armed self-defense and argued that in other places lynching had been prevented by this strategy. She stated that “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” Thus, long before Nanas Robert Williams and Malcolm X had argued the right to armed self-defense against murderous mobs in face of the failure of law, she had raised the option publicly.

Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a towering woman and leader of her time, an extraordinary person which, as her Memphis Diary shows, was self-questioning, self-critical and caught up also in the ordinariness of life and living. And yet, she had a historic sense of herself and the moral meaning of the freedom struggle of her people. Her commitment, she said, was to constantly “trouble the waters” and transform the status quo. Indeed, an oppressor has no right to peace, if he dares to deny a people’s right to freedom and justice. And when we are attacked by the oppressor in our fight for freedom and justice, we are to remember her defiant words of wisdom: “with me it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people which is at stake.”

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

The selections are entirely based on performance on a 4-hour test in English and math, for which these incoming freshmen literally study for years. Proponents of the testing regime argue that it is entirely merit-based; opponents point to the results and argue that there is more to future success than can be measured by a 4-hour test, and that the test itself is racially discriminatory.

I’ve always been a great fan of tests and merit systems, as I was a kid from a middle-class background with no special connections who was very good at taking tests and writing papers. Let the preppies inhabit their elites; I had better grades. My mother was a secretary, but I got into Harvard. I bartended my way through law school, but I made Law Review president. Merit, or what passed for that, got me the scholarships I desperately needed. They opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to me.

Asians make up 19% of all public-school students and 69% of those offered places at Stuyvesant. I celebrate those Asian families, many with first-generation children who study long hours to take their places at schools, which will open more doors to them. I don’t want to take away a system that rewards their incredible accomplishments and drive.

But I do want to spread it around, and that’s the problem. Are New York’s leaders of tomorrow really going to learn what they need to in classes with — at most — three blacks in them? Won’t their educations be poorer as a result? And what of the opportunities these schools provide, not only for college, but for future success? Can anyone really be comfortable with the disproportionate denial of those opportunities based on numbers that correlate with race? We need more Blacks and Hispanics moving up the ladder, and so do they.

Mayor Mamdani, a graduate of one of those schools, Bronx Science, who at one point before he ran for Mayor said the test should be abolished, now says the issue is a “struggle” for him. Mamdani’s two predecessors both condemned the test — Bill de Blasio called it a “monumental injustice,” and Eric Adams called it “a Jim Crow school system — it’s the state legislature that would have to change it. The alumni groups are reportedly fierce in their opposition and have spent millions on lobbying efforts. They are full of people like me, and who am I to tell them they’re wrong?

And yet there’s something very wrong with the result — some things rather — and if we don’t dare talk about them, they will never change.

Written by Susan Estrich

Let me tell you what got me thinking about it again. I was in the break room at work a few weeks back, standing there waiting on the microwave, and a younger brother at the table hadn’t looked up from his phone since he sat down. Thumb moving. Thumb moving. Every few seconds his face changed a little. Something funny, then something that irritated him, then something that got him hyped, then a clip of some guy in a podcast studio explaining what women want, what the government is hiding, and why the market is going to crash by Friday. Whole lunch hour, gone like that. When he finally opened his mouth, he told the room exactly what was wrong with the economy, and he said it the way a man says something he’s studied. He hadn’t studied a thing. He’d been fed.

Now I’m not about to sit here acting holy, because I’ve been him. I’ve killed entire evenings on my phone while a stack of hardcovers sat on the nightstand collecting dust and quiet judgment. That’s the trap right there. It doesn’t feel like laziness. It feels like being plugged in. You close the app convinced you learned something, when really you just swallowed a hundred pieces of other men’s conclusions without ever seeing how they got there.

Here’s the difference nobody bothers to explain to us. Your feed will tell you what happened. Tells you fast, tells you loud, wraps it in music and a stitched reaction and big bold letters across the screen. What it almost never gives you is why. Nobody in your timeline sits you down and explains how the neighborhood your granddaddy bought into is suddenly worth four times what he paid, while his grandson can’t get approved two streets over. Nobody walks you through how the same policy comes back around under a new name every twenty years, or how a man works steady for thirty of them and still retires with nothing. That kind of answer doesn’t fit in fifteen seconds. It lives in chapters. It lives in the long boring middle that makes you set the thing down and stare at the ceiling awhile.

The staring at the ceiling is the whole point.

Attention works a lot like a muscle, and most of us haven’t trained ours since high school. I know brothers who can bench two twenty five and can’t sit with one argument for thirty straight minutes. We’re strong everywhere except the one place somebody’s actively working to take advantage of us.

Because that’s what this really comes down to. Not culture. Not being fancy or respectable. Money, power, and who gets to tell you what’s real.

Ask yourself who profits when you can’t concentrate. The predatory lender does. So does the finance office at the dealership, every time a man signs paperwork he only skimmed. That crypto boy in your DMs with the rented Lambo is counting on it. So is the politician who needs your anger this season and your silence the next. Throw in the influencer selling a mindset course while you’re at it. Every last one of them wants the same thing out of you, which is a reaction instead of an examination. A man who’s used to sitting with hard text gets a lot harder to work. He starts catching it when an argument’s got nothing underneath it, and after a while he can hear the difference between somebody who knows a thing and somebody who’s just performing knowing. That doesn’t come from watching more clips. It comes from pages.

Now let me say the part that stops most brothers before they ever start.

Nobody’s asking you to knock out fifty books this year. All that challenge talk is fine for folks who already love the habit, but for a working man with kids, a commute, a side hustle, and a body that hurts in three new places, a goal that big is just failure with a calendar attached. I’ve watched grown men buy a beautiful hardcover, get eleven pages in, feel guilty about it for two months, then start avoiding the whole subject like it owed them money.

So make the bar low enough that quitting would embarrass you.

Ten pages a day. That’s it. Ten while the coffee brews, or in the truck before you clock in, or in the fifteen quiet minutes after the house finally settles. Ten a day adds up to 3,650 pages a year, which could land you somewhere between ten and seventeen books depending on what you choose, without ever once feeling heroic about it.

Can’t sit still? Run audio. Some brothers turn their nose up at that and I think they’re being silly. Your commute is dead time. So’s the treadmill, so’s cutting the grass. Fill it. I’ve gotten through more history in traffic than I ever did in a recliner, and nobody’s grading you on posture.

And if even that’s too much where you are right now, then give yourself one every two months. Six a year. Six ain’t nothing. Six good ones, picked on purpose, will carry a man further than three hundred hours of scrolling ever could.

Now, what to pick, and this is where we overthink it worse than anywhere else.

It doesn’t have to be heavy. Nobody said your first one in fifteen years has to be political theory. Start where your interest already lives. If music’s your thing, there are whole volumes about the men who built the sound you came up on and the money that got taken from them. If it’s ball, read about the leagues before the leagues, or the front office moves that shaped the team you’ve been hollering at since you were twelve. Cars, war, cooking, boxing, the church, science fiction, whatever it is. Somebody wrote a serious one about the thing you already talk about for hours.

The subject isn’t the point at first. The stamina is. You’re proving to yourself that you can hold a long thought without your hand crawling toward your pocket, and any decent title will teach you that much.

Once you’ve got the habit though, here are four I’d hand my own son, my nephews, and about half the men I came up with.

Start with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Everybody thinks they know this one because they’ve seen the poster and heard the quotes. Very few have actually sat with it. What’s inside isn’t a slogan. It’s a man remaking himself over and over, teaching himself to think in a prison library with a dictionary, and then finding the nerve to change his mind out loud at the exact moment it cost him the most. That last part is the lesson. Certainty is cheap. Revision takes spine.

Next, Black Boy by Richard Wright. Hard reading, in the best way. Wright shows you what it does to a young man’s insides when the world keeps insisting he stay small, and what it costs him to refuse. There’s a hunger in that memoir that goes way past food. I came to it late, in my thirties, and I was angry for a week after. Good. Some anger clarifies things.

Both of those, by the way, appear on the Schomburg Center’s 2026 100 Black Voices Centennial Reading List, sitting alongside fiction, memoirs, poetry, political history, and other work about Black life. That matters. It tells you these aren’t sentimental picks. They’re load bearing.

From there, get your history straight with Black AF History: The Un Whitewashed Story of America by Michael Harriot. Funny, sharp, and thoroughly researched, which is a rare combination. He tells the American story the way the receipts tell it. You’ll laugh, and two paragraphs later you’ll stop laughing, and that whiplash is what learning the truth actually feels like.

Then handle the money, because the money is where they get us. The Black Tax: The Cost of Being Black in America by Shawn D. Rochester lays out in plain numbers what discrimination has cost us over generations and what it’s meant for our ability to build anything and keep it. It isn’t a hype book. It’s arithmetic. Sit with the arithmetic.

Four titles. Two on what pressure does to a man, one on the record nobody taught you, one on the money. Add whatever you actually enjoy and you’ve got yourself a year of real education for often less than a weekend out costs.

I’m not telling you to delete your apps. I still laugh at the same foolishness you laugh at. But there’s a difference between eating and being fed, and a grown man ought to know which one he’s doing.

The goal was never to become the brother quoting books at the cookout. It’s to be harder to fool. Harder to sell. Harder to steer. To sit across from a man who wants something from you and hear the hollow spot in what he’s saying.

Put ten pages between you and the algorithm today. Do it again tomorrow.

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.

The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we commemorate through commerce and celebrate through retail activity, so even though we are just a few days into July, back-to-school signs are already shouting from store windows and websites.

Who is going back to school, and under what circumstances?

As with every milestone in this country, inequality roars. Some students will return to school with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid tuition, and networks that cushion every stumble. Others will return carrying debt, doubt, family obligations, food insecurity, transportation challenges, and the accumulated disadvantages of underfunded schools and under-resourced communities.

The back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh start. For too many students, it is also a reminder that opportunity in America has always been rationed.

That is why Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) still matter. Indeed, that is why HBCUs remain the vanguard.

The vanguard is not always the largest part of the army. It is the front edge. It moves first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path. By that definition, HBCUs have always been the vanguard. They were built because this country’s higher education system excluded Black people by law, custom, violence, and contempt. Their founding question was not, “How do we reproduce privilege?” Their founding question was, “How do we cultivate genius where America has refused to see it?”

That question remains urgent.

HBCUs enroll only a fraction of Black college students, but their impact is outsized. In 2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of Black college students, yet they produced 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, support more than 136,000 jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating class is projected to earn $146 billion over their lifetimes.

These are not sentimental institutions. They are economic engines, leadership factories, and community anchors.

Still, HBCUs are too often asked to do transformative work with transactional support.

That contradiction is especially sharp now, as federal student loan policy shifts under the feet of students and families. The Biden-era SAVE plan — Saving on a Valuable Education — was designed to make repayment less punishing by tying payments to income and family size, reducing monthly payments for many borrowers, limiting runaway interest, and creating a shorter forgiveness path for some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has ended, and millions of borrowers have been told to move into other repayment plans.

The change lands first on borrowers already in repayment, but current students are not untouched. Undergraduates will face a narrower repayment landscape when they leave school. Families will confront new Parent PLUS limits. Graduate and professional students will face new borrowing caps just as advanced credentials remain expensive and often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed many graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, are being phased out for new borrowers. Grad PLUS was the backstop many students used when tuition and living costs exceeded unsubsidized loan limits.

These numbers are not abstractions. They determine who can become a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a professor, a public health leader, a lawyer, a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They determine who can move from the first degree to the next rung. They determine whether talent is nurtured or stranded.

For Black students, the stakes are higher because the debt burden is heavier. Black students are more likely to borrow for college, more likely to borrow more, and more likely to struggle in repayment because the racial wealth gap follows them from home to campus and from campus to workplace. A loan policy that may look race-neutral on paper can still deepen racial inequality in practice.

That is the context in which HBCUs do their work. They educate students through inequality, against inequality, and beyond inequality. They do not merely polish privilege. They cultivate possibility. They take seriously the students America too often treats as afterthoughts, and they turn potential into leadership.

Having led an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math, and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students close, and insist that Black women’s futures were worth fighting for. I know the devotion of faculty, the exhaustion of administrators, the anxiety of families, and the constant scramble for resources. I also know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in February and underfunded in July. They cannot be applauded at commencements and ignored in appropriations. They cannot be celebrated as cultural treasures while their students are left to navigate a debt system that punishes aspiration.

The country loves the symbolism of back-to-school season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New slogans. But the real question is not what is on sale, it’s what is at stake.

If HBCUs are the vanguard, then the question is not whether they have earned our admiration. They have. The question is whether they will receive the investment, protection, and respect that their record demands.

Back to school should not mean back to debt, back to rationed opportunity, or back to the same old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail packaging. It should mean back to possibility. Back to purpose. Back to institutions that have carried us when the broader society would not.

HBCUs are still carrying us. The question is whether public policy will finally carry its share.

The Connection Between School Quality and Neighborhood Vitality

Research consistently shows that the quality of local schools is one of the top factors families consider when choosing where to live. When a neighborhood earns a reputation for excellent public education, it tends to attract and retain residents who are deeply invested in the long-term health of that community. Property values stabilize, local businesses benefit from consistent foot traffic, and civic organizations gain the engaged membership they need to function effectively. This dynamic creates a virtuous cycle in which strong schools produce informed, motivated graduates who go on to become the teachers, entrepreneurs, and community leaders of tomorrow.

In Los Angeles specifically, this pattern plays out across dozens of neighborhoods. Families who once felt they had no choice but to relocate in search of better educational options are increasingly finding that high-quality public schools exist closer to home than they realized. Identifying those schools, and understanding what makes them successful, is the first step toward making informed decisions for children and communities alike.

What Sets the Top Public Schools Apart

Not all schools that perform well share the same formula, but the most consistently successful institutions tend to share a few core characteristics. Strong instructional leadership, a stable and experienced teaching staff, high expectations for all students regardless of background, and genuine family engagement are recurring features of schools that outperform their peers. Equally important is a school culture that treats students as capable individuals rather than passive recipients of information.

For parents navigating the complex landscape of public education in Southern California, resources that aggregate and contextualize school performance data are invaluable. A thorough look at the best schools in los angeles reveals that high performance is not limited to any single zip code or demographic. Charter schools, magnet programs, and traditional neighborhood schools all appear among the top performers, which speaks to the diversity of educational models that can succeed when the right conditions are in place.

The Role of Community Investment in School Success

Schools do not exist in isolation. Their success is deeply intertwined with the communities they serve and the broader networks of support that surround them. Parent-teacher organizations, local business partnerships, nonprofit foundations, and city government all play meaningful roles in determining whether a school can sustain its performance over time. When these stakeholders align around a shared commitment to student outcomes, the results can be transformative.

Community investment also takes more tangible forms. Volunteer tutoring programs, after-school enrichment activities, mentorship initiatives connecting students with working professionals, and fundraising campaigns for technology and arts programs all contribute to an educational environment that goes beyond what standardized test scores can capture. Schools that thrive in Los Angeles are almost always embedded in networks of community support that extend well beyond the classroom walls.

Education as an Engine of Economic Mobility

The economic argument for investing in public education is compelling and well-documented. Students who receive a strong foundational education are significantly more likely to complete high school, pursue post-secondary credentials, and enter the workforce with the skills employers actually need. Over a lifetime, the income differential between those who complete a quality education and those who do not is substantial, and those individual outcomes aggregate into measurable effects on local and regional economies.

As Pew Research Center has documented through decades of social and economic analysis, educational attainment remains one of the strongest predictors of economic security and upward mobility in the United States. In a city as economically diverse as Los Angeles, where the gap between high earners and low earners is among the widest in the nation, the stakes of educational access are especially high. Every student who gains access to a quality school represents not just an individual success story, but a concrete contribution to the city’s long-term economic resilience.

Looking Forward: Building on What Works

The encouraging news is that Los Angeles has no shortage of models worth scaling. Schools that have managed to close achievement gaps, raise graduation rates, and send first-generation college students to four-year universities are demonstrating every day that the obstacles are not insurmountable. The challenge now is ensuring that the lessons learned in those high-performing environments can be applied more broadly, and that families across the city have the information they need to advocate for their children effectively.

Policy conversations about school funding equity, teacher recruitment and retention, and the expansion of successful school models are all part of this larger picture. So too are the quieter, less headline-grabbing efforts of individual principals, counselors, and classroom teachers who show up every day committed to making a difference. Progress in public education rarely arrives in dramatic leaps. It accumulates through sustained effort, honest evaluation, and a willingness to learn from both successes and failures.

Los Angeles is a city with enormous potential, and its schools are both a reflection of that potential and one of the primary means of realizing it. When communities rally around the goal of educational excellence, the benefits extend far beyond any individual student or classroom. They ripple outward into neighborhoods, economies, and generations, shaping the kind of city Los Angeles is capable of becoming. The work is ongoing, but the evidence that it matters could not be clearer.

Staff Writer; Walter Jones

In the House, it narrowly passed 218-214.

Not one Democrat voted for it in either chamber.

President Donald Trump signed it into law on July 4, 2025.

One provision in this narrowly passed law had the potential to help school children all across the country. It was the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program. This program, now set to begin in 2027, will give Americans a nonrefundable tax credit of up to $1,700 per year for making donations to support school-choice scholarships set up in the states.

“Under the program,” explains the Congressional Research Service, “taxpayers will be eligible to receive a tax credit of up to $1,700 for the value of cash contributions to certain scholarship granting organizations (SGOs). These organizations, in turn, will be required to use these contributions to grant scholarships to students at private and public elementary and secondary schools located within their states.”

Recipients of these scholarships would be subject to a family income limit. “Eligibility for scholarships,” said the CRS, “will be limited to students whose family income is below 300% of their area median income.”

Recipients will be able to use the money from these scholarships to cover basic educational costs, including tuition and books, at elementary and secondary schools, whether they are “public, private or religious.”

Whether or not to participate in this school-choice scholarship program was left to the states themselves. “States (and the District of Columbia) may choose whether to recognize eligible SGOs within their jurisdictions,” explained the CRS report. “To qualify for the credit, a contribution must be made to a state-sponsored SGO (which need not be located in the same state as the taxpayer), and the organization must only provide scholarships to students located within the state that recognized it. This effectively allows states to decide whether to make students who live within their borders eligible for the program.”

Why would the political leadership of a state prevent students in their state from receiving scholarship money voluntarily contributed by individual Americans? Because they want to prevent families, who would otherwise lack the necessary resources, from choosing to send their children to private or religious schools rather than to government-run schools.

By contrast, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen of Nebraska wasted little time in signing his state up for these scholarships. On Sept. 29, 2025, he went to St. Teresa Catholic School, not far from the Nebraska capital, and signed an executive order backing his state’s participation in the program. “This program is a game-changer for Nebraska students and their families, generating funds that will help send students to the school of their choice,” he said.

South Dakota soon followed Nebraska. Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden announced on Nov. 14, 2025, that his state also would be joining the school-choice scholarship program. “Parents should have the freedom to choose the learning environment that sets their kids up for success,” he said. “I am grateful that President Trump has the same conviction and is helping us create more opportunities for our students.”

Yet it was not just Republican governors who had their states join the program. The Colorado Sun reported on Dec. 5, 2025, that Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis “said it was a no-brainer for the state to take advantage of the federal tax credit scholarship program, describing it as ‘a real boom of investment in kids.'”

“I mean, it would be crazy not to,” he said.

When the Kentucky state legislature passed a bill in March that opted their state into the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear took a different approach. He vetoed the bill. “Kentuckians have been firm that public dollars should only be used for public education,” Beshear said.

“Kentuckians love our public schools,” he said.

The Kentucky legislature overwhelmingly disagreed — with the state senate voting 31-5 and the state house voting 77-14 to override Beshear’s veto.

What did California, the nation’s most populous state, do about the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program? Republican Rep. Vince Fong of California sent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom a letter in January urging him to bring their state into the program. “By electing to participate, you would ensure this new federal education benefit will flow to California students, regardless of whether they attend a public or private school, and at no cost to the State,” Fong wrote to Newsom.

The IRS published a list indicating that, as of June 22, there were 28 states that had signed up to participate in the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit Program. Newsom’s California was not one of them.

Newsom, as this column has noted before, attended Notre Dame des Victoires, a Catholic grammar school in the heart of San Francisco.

When that school marked its 100th anniversary in 2024, Newsom recalled the remarkable opportunity it had provided him.

“Attending Ecole Notre Dame des Victoires was a transformative experience,” he said. “It was here that I learned not only how to conjugate verbs in French, but also about the rich tapestry of French Catholic history. This foundation has stayed with me throughout my life, and I am grateful for the lifelong connections and values instilled in me during my time at NDV.”

So, why is he not supporting a program that would provide funding to help children in San Francisco today embrace a similar experience?

The 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress “long-term trend” tests showed a continuing pattern in American education: Catholic school students outscored public school students in reading and math. Among 13-year-olds, the average reading score among public school students was 255 out of 500. Among Catholic school students, it was 276 out of 500. The average mathematics score among 13-year-olds in public schools was 269 out of 500. Among Catholic school students, it was 291 out of 500.

Embracing unlimited school choice, where every student gets a voucher equal to the full per-pupil expenditures in the local public schools, would be good for students and for our country.

Written by Terence P. Jeffrey

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