(ThyBlackMan.com) As a little girl, I remember my mother taking her children’s hands, going into places, and being told, “You can come in, but they can’t.” 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 ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) “A people without the knowledge of their history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey 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 ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Somewhere along the way a lot of us convinced ourselves that a fat bank account and financial wisdom were the same thing. They are cousins at best, and distant ones at that. I got to thinking about this again while watching the whole Floyd situation unfold across 2026, because if ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There are many ways to measure the health of a country. One way is growth of gross domestic product. Another is economic productivity. But there’s a less conventional measure worth watching: Do the world’s most talented and ambitious people want to immigrate here? Throughout most of America’s history, the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Tuskegee University announced this month that bonnets, do-rags, and bedroom shoes will no longer be permitted in its classrooms and cafeteria, and the fuss that followed says more about us than any scrap of cloth ever could. Give me a minute with that, because the noise came fast and ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) After all these centuries and all we have been through together, we think it’s appropriate for us to show our gratitude for all you have done for us. And we start by acknowledging your wish to use an [a] instead of [er] at the end of n**ger. It took ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) American memory rarely allows complicated men to stay complicated, and few figures in our history have been flattened more thoroughly than the founding principal of Tuskegee Institute. I came up hearing two versions of Booker T. Washington, and neither one sounded like a human being. In my grandmother’s front ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) In righteously remembering and retrieving the enduring legacy of Nana Ida B. Wells- Barnett, we practice the morality of remembrance, honoring a womanist warrior who troubled and transformed the life-shaping waters of the world. She was an awesome ancestor, one of those whose name we will always honor, whose ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) The New York City Public School system is 62% Black and Hispanic. At its eight most prestigious competitive high schools, 80% of the students are Asian or White. Wait — what’s considered the most selective of the city’s schools, Stuyvesant High, 777 students were offered slots. Of those, how ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Black men have access to more information in a single day than our fathers could have imagined, and most of it slides right through us without leaving a mark. Let me tell you what got me thinking about it again. I was in the break room at work a ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) This week I am thinking about what it means to go back to school in a country that still rations opportunity. The stores are selling backpacks and dorm décor, but the deeper question is who gets access to education, who must borrow for it, and which institutions continue to ...