He tells a real story. Middletown, a rough childhood, a grandmother who held things together, a stretch in the Marines, then Ohio State, Yale, and a career in venture capital. Vance wrote much of his upbringing down in a book that made him famous, and he says now that Washington cast his hometown aside and left behind the folks who built things with their hands. I believe that part. Plenty of towns got hollowed out while the people at the top counted their winnings.

Here is where my patience starts to fray. When Vance names who got abandoned, the picture in his head tends to be white, rural, and male. That framing has a long history in this country. Blue collar gets treated like a code word, and the code rarely includes brothers on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bottom back home. Millions of us punch clocks, drive trucks, run wire, and pour concrete. We are labor too, forgotten long before anybody wrote a bestseller about it.

Right now, in 2026, the picture remains unsettled for the brothers. Black unemployment rose from 6.2 percent in January 2025 to 7.7 percent in February of this year before falling to 6.3 percent by July. That improvement matters, but the latest rate was still nearly twice the 3.6 percent recorded for white workers. Among Black men age 20 and older, the share holding a job stood at 63.4 percent in July, nearly unchanged from 63.2 percent a year earlier. Still, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition estimated that roughly 650,000 fewer Black men were working in May than in November 2025. The same analysis found that labor force participation declined during that stretch, suggesting that some men left the job market, though the monthly numbers cannot tell us why every one of them disappeared from the count.

So the question I keep circling back to is plain. Does his agenda reach us, or does it just repackage old populism for a fresh season?

Take the pieces one at a time. On tariffs and factory work, his bet is that walls around trade bring the plants home. Maybe some come back, and increased domestic production could help certain industries. But the Congressional Budget Office estimates that American consumers will carry much of the cost through higher prices. Its latest projections say the new duties will leave consumer prices about 0.8 percent higher by the end of 2026 than they otherwise would have been. The administration granted exemptions covering more than a third of imports, but nobody has laid out a clear plan ensuring that whatever factory work returns will reach the Black neighborhoods that lost the most.

Bring up unions and Vance claims the Republican Party now speaks for working people, member and nonmember alike. To be fair, he joined a United Auto Workers picket line and worked with Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown on a bipartisan railway safety bill. Those actions count. He also opposed the PRO Act, organized labor’s major proposal for making it easier to form unions and bargain collectively. That leaves a mixed record. A visit to a picket line carries meaning, but workers also deserve to know which protections a politician will support once the cameras leave and the legislation reaches the floor.

Apprenticeships are where the double message gets loud. The administration signed an order calling for more than one million new active apprentices, and the Labor Department awarded nearly $162 million for expansion efforts in July. That is real money and deserves acknowledgment. At the same time, one outside expert estimated that the office overseeing apprenticeships lost as much as 30 percent of its staff. The administration also proposed eliminating Job Corps and cutting about $1.6 billion from it, although Congress rejected that request and provided roughly $1.6 billion for the program in the current fiscal year. Some women focused apprenticeship grants were canceled in 2025, though the Labor Department later listed seven recipients and opened another funding round in 2026. Starting in July, Workforce Pell Grants also became available for approved trade and credential programs as short as eight weeks. The record is not empty, but it is uneven, and Black workers need to see exactly where the new opportunities will land.

Wages tell a quieter story. The federal floor has sat at $7.25 an hour since 2009, and nobody in this administration is racing to lift it. Whatever the paycheck picks up, higher prices tied to tariffs can quietly claw some of it back on the grocery run, so the bottom rung never truly climbs. Housing runs worse still. In the second quarter of 2026, 45.4 percent of Black households owned where they lived, compared with 74.5 percent of non Hispanic white households. That canyon has not closed in my lifetime, and I have heard no detailed Vance plan explaining how his working class agenda would help families cross it.

Family is his signature note, the drum he beats hardest. Back in 2024, he floated a child tax credit of $5,000 per child and wrapped it in warm talk about the American household. He called for a broad credit that would reach families across income levels, but he never supplied enough detail to show how refundable it would be, how it would be financed, or how much the poorest households would actually receive. Without those details, nobody can honestly claim to know what the lowest income parents would get. Then there was the Senate vote that would have widened the credit for low income children, the one he skipped before going on television to promote his own larger number. Vance called it a show vote that would have failed with or without him. That may explain his absence, but it does not replace a written plan.

Then comes reentry, the piece nobody with a national platform should be allowed to ignore. A staggering number of our brothers carry a record, and a record follows a man like a shadow when he goes looking for honest work. The Labor Department did announce approximately $81 million for its RESTART initiative in February, offering skilled trade training, paid work experience, and apprenticeship opportunities to people returning from incarceration. Credit where it is due. But a grant program is only one part of the road back. Second chances, expungement, fair hiring, and permanent ladders onto the payroll still need a place near the center of any serious working class agenda.

Add it up and the pattern shows itself. The Vice President has built a brand on grievance that plays well in certain counties, and he has never fully explained how his cure reaches the corner where I grew up. The Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated that Black America needed about 1.8 million additional workers in 2025 to match the white employment rate. The organization placed the resulting loss of income at approximately $87 billion. That was an estimate rather than money somebody physically removed from an account, but it measured the cost of a gap this country has tolerated for generations.

That brings me to the part we control ourselves. The midterm sitting in front of us this year is the lever, and we should quit waiting on any one man in a suit to redeem himself and start showing up where the decisions actually get made. School boards help shape career and technical education. City councils and county commissions move development money most people never hear about. Plenty of us skip the statewide races on the 2026 ballot because we only tune in when a president is on it. That is backwards. Governors and legislatures make major decisions involving training money, housing, and the road back for a man leaving prison. My grandfather knew that. He voted in every little election nobody else showed up for, and I am ashamed at how much of that lesson my own generation misplaced.

So make him prove it. Ask his people, in writing, what their plan does for a laid off brother in Youngstown or Charlotte. Push them on how the million apprentice goal will be met after staffing losses and where those training dollars will land. Bring up reentry beyond a single grant program and see whether the answer includes fair hiring and records relief. While you wait on a response that may never arrive, register your folks, run for something small, and back a candidate who knows your street. A pretty story about a hollowed out town means nothing to me until it makes room for the sons my community keeps burying and keeps trying to raise anyway.

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.

The 61^st U.S. presidential inauguration will occur on Saturday, January 20, 2029, and tradition has it that the incoming and outgoing presidents meet at the White House before traveling together to the Capitol for the formal swearing-in ceremony.

The customary practice was broken when Donald Trump, at the end of his first term, decided not to host the traditional pre-inauguration coffee or travel to the Capitol with the newly elected Joe Biden. He became the first outgoing U.S. president to skip his successor’s swearing-in ceremony in over 150 years. While broken traditions have become common place with the Trump administration, the 22^nd Amendment states that no person can be elected to the office of the president more than twice. Therefore, with a free and fair election the next president will be someone other than Donald Trump.

With Trump again serving as the outgoing president, will we have the traditional transfer of power in January 2029? How many broken traditions will continue after he leaves power, or worse, how many will become permanent beyond repair? It is not about Donald Trump the person, it is about those who have the honor of having the position also have the responsibility to uphold the institution of the presidency.

Our military has many long-held traditions.  One has to wonder what will be the long-term damage to America’s military with this current administration.  The leadership of Donald Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth during the Iran war has caused a severe strain on the U.S. military. Critics, lawmakers and military families point to the perceived erosion of institutional competence and transparency. Critics and former officials accuse Hegseth of putting aside experienced warfighters and bypassing merit-based military norms in favor of loyalists. The common practices surrounding naval deployment has rarely made national news as in the case of the USS Abraham Lincoln. The aircraft carrier spent roughly nine months on total deployment, including more than 250 to 272 consecutive days at sea without a port visit – a record for an aircraft carrier in modern times. The extended mission drew public scrutiny with reports alleging poor living conditions on the ship, including food shortages, water contamination, moldy showers and broken toilets and laundry machines. No soap, deodorant or toothpaste.

The warship, with a 5,000-plus crew, was originally intended for the Pacific but was redirected to the Middle East once the war with Iran began. Military families and Congress members began expressing concern about the intensifying mental health crisis onboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. Two leading specialist military papers, the Navy Times and Stars and Stripes reported that there were multiple attempts by sailors to jump overboard as poor conditions and mental stress reached the breaking point. Despite the scrutiny, President Trump told reporters that the USS Abraham Lincoln hadn’t been deployed “nearly long enough.” He added that the sailors spent a “good period of time” at sea, but said that “over the years, we’ve had them out there much longer,” The Guardian reported.

We should not be surprised by Trump’s comments as Commander-in-Chief. We should not be surprised that this particular president, as the supreme civilian leader of the military, is failing to ensure that troop deployment serve clear national security objectives while minimizing unnecessary risks. We should not be surprised that there are reports that the Navy is seeking to name an aircraft carrier after Trump which would be unprecedented for a sitting president. This would be another broken tradition by someone who has little or no respect for the institution of the presidency. The naming of the aircraft carrier gets worse because it means removing honor from Doris Miller and giving it to an individual who expressed little concern for the welfare and safety of the USS Abraham Lincoln crew.

The USS Doris Miller, which is currently being built, was named in 2020. It is the first aircraft carrier named after a Black American and the first to honor the heroism of an enlisted sailor. Miller served in the Navy as a Mess Attendant Third Class, one of the few positions available to Black sailors at the time. On Dec. 7, 1941, Miller was aboard the USS West Virginia when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor. Although, he was never trained as an anti-aircraft gunner, Miller reportedly took control of an anti-aircraft gun and fired at Japanese aircraft during the attack. He also helped care for wounded sailors during the chaos. In 1942, Miller received the Navy Cross for his heroism making him the first Black sailor to earn the prestigious award. Should the Navy decide to change the name, they would be naming it after a person with little regard for presidential and military traditions. It would not only be an insult to Doris Miller’s family and his legacy, but it would be another insult to the 5,000 crew members who President Trump believed had a “good period of time” at sea. Ironically, the plans to name the future aircraft carrier after Miller were announced on MLK Day in 2020 during President Trump’s first term.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.

The numbers are sobering. But whenever politicians start hyperventilating about debt, Black folks had better hold on to our wallets.

Debt matters. Deficits matter. But they do not seem to matter equally. The deficit hawks are strangely silent when Congress passes tax cuts tilted toward corporations and wealthy people. They misplace their calculators when the Pentagon wants billions for weapons it cannot adequately account for. They rarely ask whether subsidies to profitable corporations are affordable. But mention food assistance, Medicaid, Head Start, or affordable housing, and suddenly the sky is falling.

The CBO estimates that the 2025 reconciliation law and related debt-service costs will add $4.7 trillion to projected deficits. Yet some of the lawmakers who supported it now say “tough choices” must be made. Their tough choices almost always require sacrifice from somebody else.

We ought to ask three questions: Why did we borrow? Who benefited? And who will be forced to pay?

The government borrows by selling Treasury bills, notes, and bonds to individuals, banks, pension funds, the Federal Reserve, and domestic and foreign investors. The danger is not that somebody suddenly presents America with a $40 trillion bill, but that refinancing the debt becomes increasingly expensive and interest payments crowd out other priorities.

Borrowing is not automatically bad. A government may appropriately borrow during a recession, war, or public health emergency. It may borrow to modernize transportation, strengthen schools, expand broadband, or make investments that increase future productivity. Debt used to build something can generate growth that helps repay it.

But borrowing to finance tax giveaways is another matter. Borrowing while refusing to collect taxes already owed is another matter. Borrowing because politically connected corporations treat the Treasury like their private ATM is another matter. Borrowing for this President’s vanity projects is something else again.

Sunday’s Freedom 250 Grand Prix did not create our $40 trillion debt, but it illustrates the hypocrisy of people who preach austerity while spending public money on spectacle.

Corporate sponsors reportedly covered most of the racing bill, but taxpayers will absorb undisclosed costs for policing, emergency services, and traffic control. Downtown workers and commuters also endured weeks of construction, street closures, and transportation changes. Trump rode around the track in the presidential limousine and waved the green flag; the public will get part of the bill.

The federal government is not a household. Unlike you or me, it issues currency and can spread the cost of investments across generations. Still, it cannot borrow without consequence forever. The danger is not simply the size of the debt, but how our nation will respond to it.

When Washington embraces austerity, Black people feel the sharp edge first. We are more likely to work in the public sector, where cuts mean layoffs and frozen wages. We are more likely to depend on public schools, public hospitals, public transportation, and Medicaid. We are less likely to have inherited wealth to cushion a job loss, medical emergency, or rent increase.

According to the Federal Reserve, only 38 percent of Black adults had enough emergency savings to cover three months of expenses in 2025. The comparable figure for white adults was 61 percent. That gap is not the result of Black people being less disciplined with money. It reflects enslavement, exclusion, discrimination, redlining, unequal pay, and the systematic denial of opportunities to accumulate and transfer wealth.

When government withdraws, households fill the hole. A cut in college assistance becomes a student loan. Reduced health coverage becomes a credit-card balance. Inadequate public transportation becomes a high-interest car note. A shortage of affordable housing becomes punishing rent or an unaffordable mortgage.

Public austerity becomes private debt.

And private debt does not land evenly. Black borrowers are more likely to pay higher interest rates, face higher fees, and have fewer favorable credit options. Even Black people with solid incomes may carry additional obligations because we are helping relatives whom discrimination excluded from wealth-building opportunities. This is one form of the “Black tax.” The successful Black household too often becomes a miniature social-welfare system because the larger system has failed.

The national debt is measured in trillions, but Black families experience its consequences in smaller, more brutal numbers: the minimum credit-card payment, student-loan balance, late fee, overdraft charge, rent increase, and prescription that must wait until payday.

We cannot dismiss a $40 trillion national debt. But neither should we allow fiscal responsibility to become a code phrase for racial and economic cruelty. A serious debt-reduction plan would close tax loopholes, fund tax enforcement, curb wasteful military spending, and end unnecessary corporate subsidies. It would invest in jobs, education, infrastructure, and health because a stronger economy generates revenue.

Most importantly, it would not balance the budget on the backs of people who received the fewest benefits.

The debt is high. Choices must be made. But before Black America is ordered to tighten its belt again, perhaps the people feasting at the federal trough should be asked to leave the table.

Fiscal responsibility should begin at the top. And if austerity is required, sacrifice should begin there, too.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

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

The first: the dump has been there for decades. The feds, the state, and the county knew about its existence and dangerous toxicity. Yet it took decades for the state to finally act on the clean-up and then only after it had been ordered to do so.

The second: environmental hazards draw major media attention almost exclusively when there is a perilous toxic hazard such as a massive oil spell, or chemical plant explosion. The other time is when environmentalists demand greater protection for plant and animal habitats or warn of the potentially deadly impact of the greenhouse climate effect.

The third. This is the most enraging. The toxin dump that the state was ordered to clean up was in South L.A. The residents almost exclusively are low income, African Americans and Hispanics. It fits a horrid pattern that has become all too familiar in recent years. That is giving short shrift if not a deaf ear to the complaints of Blacks and Hispanics about the threat of toxic exposure in their neighborhoods.

South L.A. is a near textbook example of this tone deafness on the hazards. In June 2026, L.A. County officials posted a map on its website of the areas in the county exposed to toxins. Two years earlier an environmental advocacy group did a similar study which it headlined “Top Hot Spots in L.A. County.” One of the leading “hotspots” was areas of South L.A. The hazard contamination numbers were eye popping. Air pollution, drinking water, and the ground water in the area all topped ninety percent. There was no indication that few and state county officials had implemented any special actions to mitigate the potential hazards.

The lack of official action on the problem tossed the glare on an ugly truth which has been quietly hidden for years. Chemical toxins and waste dumping in poor Black and Hispanic communities has a long history. A 1983 federal report found that three out of four toxic waste dumping and landfills in the South, for instance, were “surrounded” by poor Black communities.

Four years later another study reaffirmed the spread and impact of toxic waste dumping in these communities. It reiterated what by then environmental justice activists and increasingly a number of federal and state agencies acknowledged that “communities with greater minority percentages of the population are more likely to be the sites of commercial hazardous waste facilities.”

The issue by then had galvanized some Black communities in the South and now other communities of color in other parts of the country to act. In 1991, activists convened the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. In Washington DC.

It was not just poor communities in the South that were the sole targets of toxic waste, chemical and garbage dumping. But Native Americans, Asians, and Hispanic told of frightening tales of and cited examples of waste and garbage dumping in their areas. “The summit was about people of color taking charge of their destiny,” said one leading activist.

Environmental activists cite several things that the high contamination areas have in common. There are fewer regulations, weaker standards of enforcement and compliance and they were located near factories, landfills, or industrial sites. The residents are more likely to live near highways or areas where industrial waste is dumped. This virtually ensures that those continually exposed to garbage and toxic waste dumping will suffer far greater rates of asthma, cancer, and other illnesses due to constant exposure to poor air quality, contaminated water, or unsafe living conditions.

They note that the toxic chemical and waste dumping problem is neither new nor accidental. The apt label for this careless and ignored practice of toxic and waste pile ups in minority neighborhoods is environmental racism. The proof of the often official indifference to the practice is that it took more than four decades to order clean-up of the toxin dump in the South L.A. neighborhood.

Despite the mountain of laws, ordinances, and state and federal laws, regulations against toxic waste and garbage dumping, the use of these communities as dumping grounds has continued unabated. The systemic burdens of race, class, political, legal, and environmental threats present a toxic mix of higher-than-average illness and death to countless numbers of persons. That is certainly the case in South L.A. And state and county officials know it.

Written By Earl Ofari Hutchinson

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

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

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

Asked recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he supports Medicare for All, Jeffries replied it is “not legislation that I am currently cosponsoring or that I support.”

In 2022, while seeking reelection, Jeffries wrote, “I have cosponsored the Medicare for All Act every Congress that I’ve been a Representative.” He entered Congress in 2013. His name appeared on single-payer legislation repeatedly, including the Medicare for All Acts of 2019 and 2021.

So, what happened? Did Jeffries take a closer look at the health systems of Canada and Britain, which the left insists America should emulate?

Medicare for All is marketed as compassionate, simple and “free.” It is none of the three. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that it would require $25 trillion to $35 trillion in federal financing over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that single-payer plans would increase federal healthcare subsidies by $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion in 2030 alone.

How would Washington raise that money? There are not enough millionaires and billionaires to foot the bill. So now what?

CRFB calculated that financing a $30 trillion plan could require a 32% payroll tax, a 25% income surtax or more than doubling the national debt. Even doubling all individual and corporate income-tax collections would not fully cover the highest estimates.

Advocates insist that families would no longer pay premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. But shifting a bill from an insurer to the IRS does not make it disappear — and does not make it free. Promising unlimited care does not create unlimited doctors, nurses, hospital beds or operating rooms.

Americans doubt Washington can keep its current healthcare promises. A 2025 survey found 80% of people not yet enrolled in Medicare worry that the program would not be there when they become eligible.

CBO warned that under single-payer, increased demand would exceed increased supply, producing more unmet demand. There is, however, a “solution” for this: waiting lines.

Look at Britain. The latest British Social Attitudes survey found only 26% satisfied with the National Health Service, while 51% were dissatisfied. Asked about NHS care over the next five years, 53% expected it to worsen — including 15% who said, “much worse.” Only 16% expected improvement; 29% expected it to remain about the same.

In England, the BBC reported in March that 16% of nearly 2,600 people surveyed used private care during the previous year, up from 9% two years earlier. Four in 10 who paid for care cited long NHS waits.

The wealthier the patient, the easier the escape. The survey found that 35% of those earning more than $108,000 used private care, compared with 10% of those earning less than $27,000.

At the time, England had more than 7 million cases on its elective-treatment waiting list. Roughly 2.5 million had waited longer than 18 weeks, and more than 100,000 had waited over a year.

Look at Canada. An Ipsos poll in 2025 found 56% satisfied with their provincial system. Yet a newer Nanos survey found 70% dissatisfied with the state of healthcare, and that nine in 10 want major change. The Canadian Medical Association acknowledges that about 20% of Canadians awaiting elective surgery wait more than a year.

Claude Castonguay, often called the father of Quebec medicare, declared the system in “crisis.” He recommended a greater private-sector role so patients could exercise freedom of choice. In 2009, incoming Canadian Medical Association president Dr. Anne Doig was more direct: “We all agree that the system is imploding.”

America’s system has problems: high prices, maddening paperwork, uneven access and too little transparency. Reform it. Increase competition. Expand portable coverage. Give consumers price information. Strengthen the safety net for those truly unable to pay.

But do not pretend government can abolish scarcity with a comforting name. Do Americans want taxes high enough to finance another $30 trillion in federal promises? Do they want Washington deciding what doctors and hospitals will be paid? Do they want British-style waiting lists and Canadian-style delays?

Jeffries apparently thinks not, too — at least “currently.” The question is whether he changed his mind after studying the costs and inconveniences Americans would not tolerate. Or did Jeffries merely change his answer — ahead of the midterm elections — after studying the polls?

Columnist; Larry Elder

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

Perhaps the pivotal moment in the campaign came this week, when Sen. Graham stumbled badly on a straightforward foreign policy question:

“Are Taiwan and the South China Sea national security issues for the United States and if so, why or how?”

That’s not a tough one. The answer is yes. Lindsey Graham could go on for hours on that one. His sister didn’t even know enough to say yes. And she told everyone that.

Her answer: Foreign policy is “not my thing. She is, she stated, “not that informed on national security.”

She isn’t. The obvious question: what is she doing in the United States Senate?

She is there for one reason alone. Who she’s related to. Sometimes, that works out just fine. Lindy Boggs, the legendary Louisiana congresswoman, stepped into the shoes of her late husband Hale Boggs when he was killed in a plane crash and became one of the most powerful and effective House members. And sometimes voters just won’t buy it, as they did recently in not voting for JFK’s charismatic grandson, notwithstanding the widespread affection and sympathy for his family.

George Will wrote a famous column years ago about how when you’ve got a plumbing problem, what you want is an experienced plumber who knows how to fix it. Why is politics so different? At a time of grave danger worldwide, can we really afford leaders who don’t understand international realities?

After the debate, Graham’s opponent responded strongly on social media: “South Carolina deserves a Senator who UNDERSTANDS Foreign Policy.” An ad, showing her struggling to answer the question, will no doubt follow.

For her part, Graham went on Fox to try to defend herself. “I don’t speak politician — I was just honest. Of course Taiwan is our friend. But I think people in South Carolina are more worried about boys in girls’ sports.”

Do voters want their leaders to be open about their ignorance? Yes, of course, Taiwan is our friend, but China complicates that friendship in ways that challenge our relationships with both countries. A Senator needs to know more than a sixth grader.

And consider Graham’s defense. Do folks in South Carolina really feel more threatened by trans girls playing sports than they do by China?

They have absolutely no reason to. South Carolina enacted its Save Women’s Sports Act in 2022, barring students assigned male at birth from competing on female-designated teams at public elementary, secondary and postsecondary schools (and certain private schools competing against them).

In other words, South Carolina has already protected itself from a largely non-existent problem. When the issue was being considered in 2021, South Carolina High School League Commissioner Jerome Singleton testified that since the waiver procedure began in 2016, only four transgender students, two girls and two boys, statewide had requested permission to compete according to their gender identity; by the time the bill was passed the following spring, the League had approved one transgender female. One trans girl on a sports team.

Me? I’d be more afraid of China.

Written by Susan Estrich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; Mark Hines

So here I am, doing exactly that.

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

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

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

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

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

I go back and forth, honestly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staff Writer; Lee Walker

This brother is a fitness trainer with 12 years of experience, focused on building strength, clarity, and real health within the Black community. Through his writing, Mr. Walker hopes to uplift younger Black men and men in general through honest conversations about fitness, financial pressure, fatherhood, discipline, mental wellness, and the importance of brotherhood.

Have questions? Reach me at LeeW@ThyBlackMan.com