(ThyBlackMan.com) Tenants’ groups and leftwing activists are cheering New York City’s newly announced multiyear rent freeze. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent scheme is headed for a judicial smackdown at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2023 and twice in 2024, a hesitant Supreme Court declined to hear challenges by building owners ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There is a particular arithmetic that greets a Black man before he has spoken a word, and I have spent the better part of my life on the wrong end of it. Many brothers who look like me know the moment I mean. A room adjusts. Folks measure height ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Haiti is not an abstraction. Haiti is a nation whose pain has too often been treated as policy collateral, a people whose labor is welcomed when needed and whose lives are discounted when convenient. Now, with the Supreme Court clearing the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the iconic welcome to the world’s oppressed inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus, the poet who penned those words, had herself helped Jewish refugees from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe who had ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There are records made for the party and others made for the hours after, once the house has emptied and there is no longer any reason to perform. Michael Jackson built his legend on the first kind. The moonwalk, the glove, the stadiums that shook on cue. Yet the ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) My grandmother kept receipts. Not only the paper kind, though a shoebox of those sat beneath her bed. The ones that counted she kept in memory, in the long private ledger a person compiles after a lifetime of learning whether the world means to deal fairly. The grocer who ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) “The majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision. But the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.” The President’s allies on the Supreme ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Every generation hopes to leave the world a little better than it found it. Across African-American communities, this goal has often involved creating opportunities, strengthening neighborhoods, and building environments where future generations can thrive. While discussions about safety frequently focus on crime statistics or physical security, creating safer environments ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) Plenty of presidents have come and gone in my lifetime. A few earned my vote with pride. A couple I would have crossed the street to avoid. Across all those years one lesson stuck, and I wish more of our young people held it close before they get swept ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) There’s a thing that happens when you get a group of us together in a room. Could be a barbershop, could be a backyard with the grill going, could be somebody’s basement after a long week. The energy is good at first. Laughter, old stories, somebody lying about how ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) I’ll say the quiet part first. Tyler Perry drives me crazy. He also amazes me. And I gave up a while ago trying to pick one, because watching his stuff feels like arguing with a cousin you love who keeps making the same mistake at every cookout. My auntie ...
(ThyBlackMan.com) When I think about what these two have done, I don’t start with the songs. That feels strange coming from somebody who has loved this music his whole life, but stay with me a second. Music was only ever the front door. What Beyoncé and Jay-Z actually constructed is ...