For many readers the shift toward deeper study builds slowly. A chapter leads to another then a new writer catches the eye and soon a new line of thought takes shape. In this way for many users Z lib enhances the overall reading experience by keeping every book within reach and encouraging wide exploration without any sense of pressure. A small spark becomes a steady flame and the mind grows brighter with practice.

Expanding Personal Knowledge Paths

Growth often starts with a single step then becomes a trail and then a map. Z-library supports this with a layout that makes long term study feel smooth. A reader can pick a theme like ancient history moral philosophy or modern science and follow it at any pace. The act of choosing each next book builds a habit of deliberate study that strengthens focus and memory.

This kind of steady reading creates a powerful sense of direction. Every writer adds a new layer of insight. Every story or study plants a seed that grows over time. A reader who returns often begins to move with more confidence because the mind has learned to connect ideas in fresh ways. Z-library becomes a quiet partner in this journey because the right book always waits nearby.

A shift in routine often helps to keep thoughts lively so here is a compact set of ideas worth exploring:

• Curated Reading Tracks

A curated track acts like a gentle guide for anyone shaping long term growth. It gathers books that speak to one another and forms a narrative thread. A reader who follows such a track begins to build deep context and remember details with ease. This helps the mind connect cause and effect while also revealing gaps that invite further study. Over time the track becomes a backbone for personal learning and fosters a sense of progress that feels real rather than rushed.

• Author Focused Exploration

Studying several works by the same writer opens a window into patterns of thought. Tone rhythm and argument become easier to detect. As these patterns grow familiar the reader begins to understand the writer as a full thinker rather than a single voice on a page. This encourages sharper analysis and leads to more informed reading choices. It also builds patience because complex works feel less intimidating once the writer’s style becomes part of the reader’s internal landscape.

• Cross Genre Discovery

Mixing genres strengthens the mind by stretching it in multiple directions. A reader might move from a science text to a novel like “Invisible Cities” or from a biography to a book of poetry. These shifts spark creativity because each genre asks the mind to work in a different way. The effect is similar to switching gears on a bike. The ride becomes smoother and the journey stays interesting.

This kind of mix keeps reading fresh and widens the range of ideas that feel accessible.

Building Long Term Intellectual Habits

Sustained reading shapes long term habits that echo far beyond the page. Over time the act of choosing and finishing books builds grit. Even shorter works carry lessons that linger in memory. Z-library supports these habits by making every next step easy to follow. Readers begin to trust their own instincts and select books that match present goals or spark new ones.

This steady exposure to ideas also increases confidence in discussion. After reading varied works the mind begins to form opinions based on lived study. Each title adds a new thread to the tapestry. A reader might pull from a novel a scientific paper or a cultural study and feel comfortable moving among them.

A Growing Landscape of Ideas

Reading shapes character in subtle ways. It sharpens the inner voice and makes thought more agile. Z-library offers a landscape where that voice can stretch and strengthen without haste. With each book the mind gains a bit more clarity. With each session patterns emerge and knowledge settles into place. The journey continues without fanfare steady and quietly rewarding.

Staff Writer; Lou Brown

Across the country, reading achievement continues to decline. Nearly 40 percent of fourth graders read below the basic level and roughly a third of eighth graders are reading below basic, the highest share ever recorded.

Taken together, these numbers reveal a national literacy crisis that threatens economic opportunity, educational equity, and our nation’s future competitiveness.

Reading is not merely another subject in school. Reading is the foundation upon which all learning rests. A child who struggles to read struggles to learn history, science, mathematics, and civics. A young person who cannot effectively read and analyze complex information faces barriers to college completion, workforce success, and informed participation in our democracy.

That is why the growing literacy crisis is fundamentally an opportunity crisis. Behind every percentage point is a child whose future opportunities hang in the balance. Persistent achievement gaps mean that Black and Latino students continue to bear a disproportionate share of the consequences when reading instruction falls short. If we are serious about economic mobility and educational justice, literacy must be at the center of the conversation.

For more than two decades, many schools embraced Balanced Literacy approaches that sought to cultivate a love of reading by putting books in students’ hands and encouraging independent reading. The approach was well-intentioned, but too often foundational skills instruction, particularly phonics and decoding, suffered.

The evidence is increasingly clear that explicit, systematic instruction helps more children become successful readers. States and school districts that are embracing these principles deserve credit for moving in the right direction. But millions of students are already in middle school, high school, and even college struggling to read complicated texts, analyze difficult arguments, and complete entire books.

What is our plan for them?

Too many students arrive in high school lacking the reading stamina necessary to engage deeply with literature, history, or complex informational texts. College professors increasingly describe students who struggle with lengthy assignments that previous generations navigated more comfortably.

To be clear, Balanced Literacy alone cannot explain these trends. Increased screen time, constant digital distractions, shortened attention spans, and the dominance of algorithm-driven content all influence students’ reading habits and learning experiences.

Yet recognizing these factors cannot become an excuse for inaction.

Instead, it should compel us to think more broadly about literacy.

The challenge before us is not simply helping children sound out words. It is helping them develop the capacity to wrestle with complex ideas, sustain attention, evaluate evidence, and build knowledge through reading. It is helping them become informed citizens and lifelong learners.

And that requires a comprehensive, systemic strategy.

We need high-quality literacy instruction beginning in early childhood settings and extending throughout elementary school. We need to strengthen early intervention so that struggling readers receive support before learning gaps become entrenched. We must carefully examine the quality and effectiveness of programs serving our youngest learners, including Head Start and other early childhood initiatives.

At the same time, we need a national commitment to literacy recovery for older students. Districts and states should be developing evidence-based strategies that help adolescents strengthen comprehension, vocabulary, knowledge-building, and engagement with complex texts. Students who fell behind during the pandemic and those who continue to struggle deserve intensive support, not lowered expectations.

We should also have serious conversations about the role of technology in children’s lives. Restricting unnecessary screen exposure, particularly in the early grades, should be part of a broader effort to rebuild reading habits and attention spans that support learning.

More concerning than the decline in reading scores is the absence of a clear, large-scale strategy to address the growing crisis. Every year that a struggling reader falls further behind increases the likelihood that they will face lifelong educational and economic disadvantages.

The recent reading results from New York City are a warning. The national NAEP results are an even louder one. Together, they tell us that incremental change is not enough.

We know more about how children learn to read than ever before. We know that literacy is the gateway to opportunity. What remains to be seen is whether we have the collective will to act with the urgency this moment demands.

Our children cannot afford for us to wait.

Written by Marc Morial

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

My Mom held onto our hands and took us out of the place. I was born in Louisiana, but as a young person, I can remember a lot of situations I now know as racism. In many ways, Louisiana hasn’t changed. Louisiana has always been a place where color matters.

Many in our family are of various colors—but we have always had the One-Drop rule in Louisiana. That means if you had one drop of Black blood, you are Black. The one-drop rule was a legal principle of racial classification that was prominent in the past. It asserted that any person with even one drop of Black blood was Black. Of course, we were called Negro or colored in historical terms.  Because my mother had no Black blood, but my Dad is Black, so my Mother’s children were called colored.

That leads me to a story where after growing up, I became the first Black person in the State of Louisiana to run a viable campaign for the U.S. Congress I was named the winner, and had the race called back and told I had lost by a tiny bit.  I became known as Louisiana’s Congresswoman in Exile.  Cleo Fields won the seat later with some changes in the District he was able to do while he was in the state’s legislature. He didn’t last long before they took the seat from him recently.

I mention that background to say when I ran, I wanted to share with you a bit about how I, a Black woman, was still referred to.  One night after speaking for a mixed crowd, a man walked up to me and said, “Young lady, that was the best speech I ever heard, but it must be awfully difficult to have all that education and still be colored.” I thanked him because he was telling the truth, however, he said it.  During the same period, a person who knew me said another man told him he never thought he’d have to choose between a “nigger“ woman and a Republican (I’m a Democrat), but he believed he was gonna vote for the “nigger” woman (That’s me!) I appreciated the fact that he would vote for me despite my color! I never learned how the first gentleman was going to vote!

I don’t think Louisiana has changed a lot.  I know for the first time there is a Black man who is running for the United States Senate on the Democratic ticket.  Just as I ran first for the United States Congress, he is the first to run for the United States Senate. Not that Louisiana has changed a lot,  but it sounds like he has a pretty good chance to win. His name is Jamie Davis, so please keep him in your prayers.

Now the point I started to make is that things have changed in some places and some Black people have a real chance of winning important seats—if only we’d come out in great numbers—so please look out for the seats in which Black people are running, but be sure to check out what they stand for. The one Black male on the Supreme Court has been deceptive. With the Black woman, it’s been different. “Just look at the Supreme Court now!” Obviously, I am talking about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and if she were not on the Court, we wouldn’t have anybody there who votes fairly for us other than Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan. We thank God for them.

Now, in the last Presidential election, too many of our White sisters voted against our interests and theirs, but I believe many are ready to get it right and rebuild what we lost.

Written By Dr. E. Faye Williams

Official website; http://www.efayewilliams.com/

When I graduated high school in New Orleans, America was a different place. Black Americans were all but locked out of economic opportunity because of the color of our skin and the racial caste system that saw us as no more than servants to White Americans; many of whom benefited financially and socially from our enslavement for centuries.

Growing up in a city rife with segregation, I channeled my frustrations into my studies. When I enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution that was built in part by enslaved people, my people, I knew the best way to reengineer the system was by understanding how it worked and its connection to the conditions of Black Americans in this country. My double major was in economics and African American Studies.

That education prepared me to become a leader who understood that, for America to progress as a nation, it had to provide pathways to financial independence, safety, and sustainability for the people who built it. It was clear to me that at every juncture in this nation’s history where African Americans began to create opportunity for themselves, the efforts were cut off systemically or with physical violence, as we saw in the case of the bombing of Tulsa in 1920.

The fallout from these events, and from policies that blocked the ballot box like literacy tests and poll taxes, has shown us that every effort to stifle us leads to cultural disarray and stalls our ability to move forward.

Yet, today, we find ourselves once again succumbing to infighting about the same struggles we could have extinguished generations earlier by tackling systemic racism and its impact on our economy, our standing in the world, and our collective understanding of one another.

We have an administration that entered a zero-sum game targeting diversity initiatives with executive orders that so thinly veil their racism it’s laughable. The result of those orders has been a massive spike in unemployment, creating a ripple effect through our entire economic system. It’s been cuts to university budgets and to schools that are simply trying to uphold our nation’s values of ensuring that all Americans have access to the American dream regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or faith. Those cuts have stifled essential medical breakthroughs, cancer research, clean energy development, and the development of equitable, ethical artificial intelligence.

The next victim in the cutting spree is African-American studies.

The University of Texas at Austin, the University of Iowa, and the University of Kansas are just a few institutions that are shuddering or consolidating their African-American studies programs in this climate. Some are citing low enrollment as a reason for their reductions. But it is impossible to ignore the threats of budget cuts and the evaporation of essential federal dollars from an administration circling diversity programs like a hawk.

The restrictions have been so significant that simply mentioning the words “black,” women,” “disabled,” or “inclusion” can risk financial ruin.

But as Dr. Marcus Garvey stated, “A people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” I’d take it a step further and say that a nation without knowledge of its past, its origins, and its culture is like a tree without roots.

African-American studies teaches college students, the young people preparing to lead us into the future, why our country operates the way it does today and provides a blueprint for how to leverage our Democracy and constitutional rights to drive change.

African-American history is not only about the challenges that Black Americans have faced since we arrived in the 13 colonies in bondage; it shows the power of protesting, the endurance of community, and the meaning of community.

It’s a field of research that challenges harmful narratives, as Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois did in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America, overturning the prevailing racist Dunning School narrative, proving that post-Civil War democratic experiments failed not because of Black incompetence, but because white elites deliberately fractured multi-racial labor solidarity to re-establish control.

It was also the focus of Kevin Roberts’s Ph.D. dissertation, the President of the Heritage Foundation. The irony of studying slave communities, kinship networks, and survival strategies in Louisiana during the 18th and 19th centuries, while authoring Project 2025, a document designed to strip Americans of our Constitutional rights, cannot be overlooked.

There’s power in these programs and understanding Black history. There is also power to be gained by blocking an increasingly frustrated population’s access to historical practices, thereby demanding more from our leadership and government.

Philosopher George Santayana once said that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

We are at a critical juncture in our history, inching toward repeating the worst parts of our past and recreating a system that serves only a few. And the only way we will survive it is by standing together. And we can only stand together by understanding and accepting the flaws of our past to build a better future.

We cannot allow a field as precious as African-American Studies to die because of political pressure. Not now, not ever.

If we do, it will be at our own peril.

Written by Marc Morial

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

Let me rewind for the younger brothers who might not know the full weight of what this fighter pulled off. Over two decades in the sport, Floyd Mayweather earned an estimated $1.1 billion to $1.2 billion from his fights. That is not a typo. Billion, with a b. His 2015 night against Manny Pacquiao brought him close to $250 million. Two years later, his bout with Conor McGregor reportedly produced another $275 million. Few athletes have ever squeezed more money out of a single event than this fella did. He built an entire brand off the nickname and sold folks on the notion that watching him get rich was worth the price of admission.

So how is it, then, that the same champ spent the first half of this year tangled up in lawsuits, a federal tax lien, felony charges and public questions about his financial arrangements?

That question sits underneath everything here. At the end of 2025, a lengthy Business Insider investigation reported that Mayweather had borrowed $54 million at roughly 9 percent interest, using 14 homes, his Las Vegas strip club and his jet as collateral. It also reported that two of his commercial properties had been foreclosed and detailed several lawsuits and liens alleging unpaid bills. His attorney denied that Mayweather was experiencing financial strain. That investigation must be kept separate from his defamation case against the publication. Mayweather filed that lawsuit in April 2025 over an earlier story questioning his public claim that he had purchased 62 Upper Manhattan apartment buildings for $402 million. In May 2026, he voluntarily dismissed his claims with prejudice, Business Insider dismissed its counterclaims, and both sides agreed to cover their own costs. No judge ruled on the truth of the underlying reporting. In March, the IRS filed a lien for approximately $7.28 million in unpaid federal taxes from 2018 and 2023. Mayweather also sued Showtime and former Showtime Sports president Stephen Espinoza, alleging that at least $340 million from his fights was missing or unaccounted for. His complaint claims money was routed into accounts controlled by former manager and adviser Al Haymon, although Haymon was not named as a defendant. Paramount, Showtime’s parent company, rejected the allegations as lacking legal and factual merit. Mayweather and several of his companies later filed another lawsuit accusing Jona Rechnitz, Ayal Frist, Frist Apex Ventures and attorney Alexander Seligson of participating in a scheme involving at least $175 million. Those accusations remain allegations that have not been decided in court.

There is more still. In April, Clark County prosecutors filed two felony charges based on allegations that Mayweather used one $200,000 check to purchase a luxury watch in Las Vegas in December 2024 even though the account lacked sufficient funds. The charges are theft and drawing or passing a check with intent to defraud. Mayweather has not been convicted, and his attorney represented him at a June court appearance. Another hearing was scheduled for September. That still stings. A fighter who once collected purses the size of a small nation’s budget is now defending himself against criminal allegations involving a check that prosecutors say would not clear the bank.

Now I am not sitting here in judgment of a grown man’s ledger. I do not have his books and neither do you. Borrowing against property does not automatically mean a person is broke, and allegations written in a lawsuit do not become facts merely because somebody filed them. Mayweather’s representatives have disputed the idea that he is under financial strain. Still, strip away the speculation and a pattern of complicated debts, tax obligations, disputed payments and questionable advisers remains visible, the kind far too many Black men recognize from our own kitchen tables and the old running buddies who hit a lick and could not hold it.

Bringing in cash and stewarding it are two entirely separate crafts.

The champ mastered that first craft better than nearly anybody who ever entered a boxing ring. Earning was his art. His sense of timing had no equal in the business. Put him across a negotiating table and he read the leverage in a room the way a seasoned preacher reads a restless congregation. Somehow he got the wider world to line up and pay just to watch him get richer. That part deserves its flowers. But the second craft, the quiet and unglamorous work of protecting what you built, lives in a different classroom. The tax code has never once been impressed by footwork. Estate planning will not respond to a shoulder roll. Figuring out where your dollars actually land once they leave your hands is a whole other education, one that means sitting with people who speak a language most of us were never taught at home.

That is the real ache in this story for me. Nobody handed our grandparents a course on trusts, tax planning and lasting protection. Plenty of us grew up in houses where the entire financial lesson amounted to keeping a little something in a coffee can and paying the rent on time. Honorable, sure. Nowhere near sufficient for the kind of figures a Mayweather generates, though. When a person travels from a rough block to a private jet without building the knowledge and oversight needed to understand compound interest, capital gains, debt and asset protection, trouble can arrive quickly even when the checks were enormous.

I want the Black men reading this to hear me clearly. Go and get the education. I do not necessarily mean a four year degree, though Lord knows there is nothing wrong with one. What I am pointing at is the deliberate study of how money behaves once you have some of it in hand. Read the boring material, the pages that make your eyelids heavy. Find yourself an accountant who is not your cousin doing you a favor over the holidays. Learn what a fiduciary actually is and why that title ought to matter to you personally. There sits a genuine difference between an asset that feeds you and a liability dressed up to look like arrival. The chain, the whip, the watch that costs more than somebody’s house, all of it whispers wealth while quietly draining it out the side door.

Here is the piece that troubles me most about this entire affair. If the allegations in Mayweather’s own lawsuits carry any truth, then a fella who generated more than a billion dollars may not have maintained a firm grip on where a massive portion of it wound up. Sit with that for a minute. You can become one of the highest earners in boxing history and still find yourself in a courtroom trying to locate money you say belongs to you. That is no knock on his intelligence. It is a warning about what can happen when you hand off your own understanding completely and trust the wrong people to guard the vault.

Money himself is 49 now and continues to train while trying to arrange more appearances in the ring. His proposed September 2026 rematch with Pacquiao was postponed indefinitely, with tentative discussions shifting the contest into 2027. A planned exhibition against Mike Tyson has faced delays as well. None of us standing outside his circle can say whether the motivation is legacy, money or some combination of the two. Either way, the image of a champion his age preparing to climb through the ropes again tells its own quiet story about how thin the line can become between earning a fortune and holding onto one.

Take this lesson without paying the tuition he may have paid for it. Earning is something our people have demonstrated across every generation you can name. What got kept from us, and what we too seldom went out and found for ourselves, was the knowledge of how to make a dollar stay put. Learn the game underneath the game. Then sit your children down and pass it along before the world teaches it to them the rough way.

Staff Writer; J.G. Lacour

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

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

The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities. It requires that any vessel moving cargo between two American ports must be built in an American shipyard, be American-owned and be at least three-quarters American-crewed. Miss any one of these marks and the shipper is barred from carrying a single barrel of fuel from Houston to Honolulu.

The stated justification for the act is national security. We need American ships and American sailors to fight wars. But 100 years in, it’s hard to repeat this justification with a straight face.

An American-built cargo ship costs $190 million to $250 million to build; the same vessel costs about $30 million from a foreign shipyard. U.S. shipyards now build less than 1% of what China and South Korea do, and roughly 300 U.S. shipyards have closed since the early 1980s. Legislation meant to sustain a merchant fleet has presided over its collapse.

Fewer than 100 oceangoing ships qualify under the Jones Act today, and the American tanker fleet is so thin that moving oil from Texas to the Northeast costs about three times what it would to ship it from Africa. Michael Bloomberg recently called the act “a national sales tax” — except that Washington never sees a dime. Instead, the premium is captured by a few U.S. shipyards and carriers operating relatively free of competition. Economist Thomas Grennes found that consumers lose more than what the statute hands to sailors, shipbuilders and carriers.

In March, the Trump administration suspended the Jones Act for energy and fertilizer shipments. It’s not the first waiver of its kind, but it is the longest in recent history. With the waiver’s expiration looming, the administration just announced a 90-day extension along with stricter terms.

The numbers speak for themselves. The Cato Institute’s Colin Grabow documented that in under five months, Puerto Rico took in more mainland fuel than in any full year since 2015. Shipments to the West Coast, Alaska and Hawaii hit nearly 14 million barrels, about 170% of the recent annual average. Whole trade routes quickly appeared: Gulf Coast fuel to Hawaii, New Jersey jet fuel to California, propane to Puerto Rico.

America’s government-protected fleet seldom served these locales. Remove a prohibition and the market pours resources where they are needed. As Grabow noted, “That’s strong evidence for the longstanding critique that the Jones Act suppresses domestic commerce by preventing economically viable trade between Americans.”

The question then becomes: Why won’t the Jones Act die? The answer, as the oldest story in political economy tells us, is that it benefits a few special interests at the cost of all the rest of us.

The handful of shipyards, carriers and labor unions that profit from the Jones Act defend it vigorously. The average person pays just a few cents more at the pump or the register. It adds up, but not many people trace it to a statute they’re mostly unaware of. One side is lobbying. The other is you, and you’re busy.

The lobby mobilized against a limited waiver as if the republic were under siege. Grabow described a national ad campaign drawing millions of views from an account with just a few hundred subscribers, a 10-state media blitz, a form-letter-writing machine and roughly one op-ed or letter per week, mostly written by people on the industry payroll.

Two influencers who had never mentioned shipping policy, Kaya Jones and Olivia Krolczyk, posted identical lines about “protecting 650,000 Americans” a day apart, and one disclosed a paid partnership. A commissioned study for the Transportation Institute warned, with gross exaggeration, that 100,000 jobs were “at risk.” Fifty-two House Republicans, the speaker among them, bought into the economic illiteracy and urged the White House to let the waiver die.

Such machinery does not stop at persuasion. A few years ago, documents pried from the Maritime Administration revealed that an advisory committee meeting participant suggested, probably half in jest, that every past and present Cato Institute and Mercatus Center scholar (presumably including me) be charged with treason for criticizing the Jones Act. As economist Art Carden observed, that dragnet would have to be enormous, since the critics run from free-market economists to the far-left Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz.

Unfortunately, the Jones Act is representative of much American legislation: a narrow group harvesting a fortune while the costs are spread across hundreds of millions of us. By design, those costs are all but invisible. Whether it’s protectionist sugar quotas, occupational licensing laws or bespoke tariffs for connected companies, you, dear taxpayer and consumer, fund them all.

Ask yourself how many statutes you are paying for right now. It’s more than you think.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

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

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.