They Pack Us, They Crack Us, Then They Send Us AOC

“The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” — James Madison, Federalist No. 57

On gerrymandering, Ebenezer, and the Memphis seat the Democrats never wanted us to have

There is a story unfolding right now that the Democrat Party does not want American Blacks to look at too closely. It is the story of a single congressional district in Memphis, Tennessee, and what it reveals about who actually controls Black representation in this country.

For nearly twenty years, Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District, the only majority-Black district in the state, has been represented by Steve Cohen. Cohen is a seventy-six-year-old white Democrat. The district was drawn in the early 1980s specifically as a majority-minority district, designed, we were told, to guarantee Black political voice in Memphis. For two decades, that “Black voice” has worn the face of a white man from a party that has run Memphis into the ground.

And challenging him, election after election, has been an American Black woman from Memphis named Charlotte Bergmann. She has run against Cohen since 2010. She is a native Memphian, raised in a Christian home of ten children by a Baptist minister father, the first in her family to earn a college degree. She worked her way through State Technical Institute of Memphis and Christian Brothers University, built a career as an IT project manager at FedEx, and survived a season of her life as a single mother who lost her job and became homeless. She credits her faith with carrying her out of that valley. Her grandson was shot in the back and killed in the streets of Memphis, and crime in her community is the reason she runs. She has served on the Tennessee Republican State Executive Committee since 2018 and was named Statesman of the Year by the state party that same year.

She is, by every measure, exactly the kind of woman the Democrat Party claims it wants representing Black America. An American Black woman. Faith-driven. Memphis-born. A story of overcoming. A grandmother who buried a grandchild murdered in the very streets she now wants to fix.

There is only one problem. She is a Republican.

So the Democrat Party has spent more than a decade making sure that the American Black woman from Memphis does not win, while sending the old white man back to Washington every two years. They drew the district to guarantee Black representation, then made sure Black representation never actually arrived.

What did Memphis receive in exchange for that loyalty?

Gangs. Crime. Poverty. Violence. Failing schools. Drug epidemics. A grandmother burying a grandson shot in the back on a Memphis street. Twenty years of straight-ticket Democrat voting in one of the poorest, most violent congressional districts in America, and what did our people get for that loyalty? A representative who, when asked about crime in Memphis, told Charlotte Bergmann to her face that he “deals with Federal issues.”

He did not represent that seat. He occupied it. There is a difference between a man who holds your district and a man who carries your district. Cohen held it. He did not carry it.

Meanwhile a grandmother in his own district was burying a child in the streets he was paid to fight for, and she had to run for his seat six times just to be heard. Six times. The party that calls itself the protector of Black America watched an American Black grandmother grieve a murdered grandchild and then spent millions of dollars to make sure she never reached Washington to do something about it.

Call it what it is. Abandonment dressed in party colors.

The Bucket on the Witness Chair

If you want to know what Steve Cohen actually thought of the district he represented, you do not have to read his voting record. You only have to look at what he chose to do on May 2, 2019.

The House Judiciary Committee had scheduled an oversight hearing with the Attorney General of the United States. The subject was serious. The hearing concerned whether the nation’s top law enforcement officer had mishandled the Mueller report and whether the executive branch was obstructing the constitutional authority of Congress to oversee it. Cohen sat on that committee. He represented a Memphis district where American Black grandmothers were burying grandchildren shot in the streets. He represented a district where the federal response to crime, drug trafficking, and gang violence mattered more than almost any policy issue in Washington.

And what did Steve Cohen bring to that hearing?

A bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. A ceramic chicken statue. He set the bucket on the witness chair where the Attorney General should have been sitting. He ate the fried chicken on camera at nine in the morning. He held the chicken statue up for the press cameras. He called the Attorney General “Chicken Barr.” He turned a constitutional oversight hearing into a comedy bit.

Sit with the picture. A white Democrat representing the only majority-Black congressional district in Tennessee, on national television, performing with a bucket of fried chicken for laughs. The hashtag trended. The cable shows played it on loop. He later said the chicken “wasn’t wonderful” and admitted comedian Sarah Silverman had become his advisor “on the Twitter.”

American Blacks have spent over a hundred years fighting the fried chicken caricature. It appeared on Jim Crow postcards. It appeared in minstrel shows. It appeared in racist cartoons used to dehumanize our grandparents and great-grandparents. It is one of the oldest visual slurs in the American iconography of Black degradation. Any white politician with even basic cultural awareness understands what that image carries when a white man performs with it on a national stage.

Steve Cohen represented Memphis. He represented us. And he chose, on his own, with no one forcing him, to step into one of the most degrading racial tropes ever used against American Blacks. For a joke. For a hashtag. For attention.

Disrespect would have been the kinder reading. What he actually performed was contempt dressed in levity. That is a man who looked at the seat he held, looked at the people who kept sending him back to Washington, and decided that the picture of him eating fried chicken from a bucket on national television was an acceptable way to represent us.

He is Mr. Chicken Man. He earned that name. The Democrat Party, the Congressional Black Caucus, AOC, Raphael Warnock, every one of them who is now mourning the loss of his seat, watched him do it and said nothing. They watched him perform that stunt and kept calling him our representative. They watched him become a meme on the back of one of the cruelest racial caricatures in our history, and they sent him back to Congress three more times anyway.

Charlotte Bergmann would never have done that. Because Charlotte Bergmann actually comes from us.

The Map Finally Changes

This week, the Tennessee legislature redrew the Ninth District. The Supreme Court’s recent Callais decision held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not require or authorize states to draw congressional maps based on racial outcomes. Tennessee acted on that ruling. Steve Cohen announced yesterday that he is ending his re-election bid. Charlotte Bergmann, the American Black woman who has been ignored, dismissed, and shut out of that seat for fifteen years, is now favored to win it.

Memphis may finally elect a Black representative to Congress for the first time since Harold Ford Jr. left the seat in 2006.

The Democrat Party is calling this a tragedy.

The Ebenezer Performance

On Mother’s Day, while this story was unfolding in Tennessee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the historic church where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, the church now pastored by Senator Raphael Warnock. Warnock invited her to the pulpit. She stood before a predominantly American Black congregation, on Mother’s Day, in one of the most sacred political pulpits in our history, and delivered a speech about redistricting.

She said, and I want you to read this carefully, that legislatures in the South are seeking to “draw Black Americans out of power.” She named Tennessee specifically.

Tennessee. The state where an American Black woman is about to replace a white man in the only majority-Black district. The state where Black representation is finally arriving after twenty years of being promised and never delivered. The state where the white Democrat she was defending sat on national television eating fried chicken out of a bucket. That is the state AOC stood in a Black church and accused of erasing Black voices.

Make no mistake. This is the game. Charlotte Bergmann does not count as a Black representative to AOC and to the Democrat machine because she is the wrong kind of Black. She thinks independently. She is a faith-driven conservative. She does not belong to them.

Notice what the Ebenezer appearance actually was. AOC is not a pastor. She is not a theologian. She is a representative from the Bronx with no historical, cultural, or lived connection to the specific American Black experience descended from slavery. Yet she was elevated above the pulpit on Mother’s Day, given the stage, given the microphone, and treated as a voice of moral authority over a Black congregation.

Raphael Warnock is an American Black man. He is a senator. He is the senior pastor of that very church. The Black community needed no AOC at that pulpit. The pastor was already there. The Black senator was already there. The Black congregation was already there. So why was she elevated? Because the Democrat Party is desperate to manufacture a national figure, and they have decided that the path runs through Black churches, Black audiences, and Black trust.

Coalition does not look like this. What happened at Ebenezer was colonization of our pulpit for the political ambitions of someone the party is grooming for a 2028 run.

Her Own District Is the Indictment

Before American Blacks accept Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a national leader, we should look at what she has actually done for the district she already represents.

New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District covers parts of the Bronx and Queens. AOC has held that seat since January of 2019. That is over seven years. Seven years of social media stardom, seven years of magazine covers, seven years of cable news appearances, seven years of speeches at rallies and conventions and now Black church pulpits on Mother’s Day.

And what does her district look like today?

Roughly twenty-eight percent of the residents of her district live in poverty. That is more than double the national average. Her constituents include some of the poorest census tracts in New York City. The South Bronx, which sits inside her district, has been one of the most economically depressed urban zones in America for decades. AOC inherited that crisis. The question is what she has done with seven years of power to change it.

The answer is almost nothing.

Her legislative record consists primarily of appropriations requests for public housing. She has secured federal funding for NYCHA, the New York City Housing Authority, which runs the projects in her district. She has not authored a single major bill that passed both chambers and became law. She has not led any landmark legislation on jobs, on wealth creation, on small business growth, on educational reform, or on community ownership. Her policy footprint is project housing. That is her record. Project housing. Rentals. Dependency. Government as landlord.

That is what she has built for the poor people in her own district while she travels the country building her own brand.

And now she wants to bring that record to American Blacks in Atlanta, in Memphis, in Detroit, in Philadelphia, and ask us to make her the next President of the United States.

I want every American Black voter to read that sentence twice. The woman whose own district is twenty-eight percent poverty, whose only legislative achievement is funneling federal money into more project housing, whose constituents in the South Bronx live in some of the worst poverty in the country after seven years of her representation, is the woman the Democrat Party has chosen to walk into our churches and tell us how to vote.

If she cannot fix the Bronx, why are we letting her stand in Ebenezer?

Why She, of All People

The Democrat Party is in crisis. It has no national leader. The bench is empty. So they have settled on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the next face to push forward, not because of her record, not because of her wisdom, not because of her depth, but because she has social media reach and ideological branding. She was elevated by Bernie Sanders and the democratic socialist wing of the party. Her legislative accomplishments are thin. Her policy expertise is shallow. Her appeal is performance.

That is the figure they have decided to walk into a Black church on Mother’s Day. That is the figure they want American Blacks to accept as a leader. Not because she leads, but because she is malleable, telegenic, and ideologically obedient.

Meanwhile, the American Black senator who pastors that church, Raphael Warnock, was reduced to the role of host. The American Black male leader was the warm-up act for the Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx who came to tell us how to feel about gerrymandering. She had more authority in that pulpit than the man who actually pastors it. Sit with that for a moment.

What Gerrymandering Actually Did to Us

Here is the truth the Democrat Party has spent decades hiding. Majority-Black districts have been used to concentrate American Black voters into politically predictable, politically controlled, politically captured boxes. The strategy has a name. They pack us into a few districts so our vote is wasted on guaranteed Democrat wins, and they crack us across other districts so we have no real influence anywhere else. They call it Black representation. It is actually Black containment.

The Memphis Ninth District is the perfect example. American Blacks were told the district was drawn for our voice. The district then elected a white Democrat for twenty years while an American Black woman who actually lived in Memphis was shut out repeatedly. The district was never about Black representation. It was about Democrat representation wearing Black numbers.

When the maps were finally redrawn this week, and when an American Black Republican woman finally has a real chance at the seat, the Democrat Party went into mourning. The Congressional Black Caucus called it “the theft of fair representation.” AOC called it Black erasure. Cohen called it a racial gerrymander.

A racial gerrymander that may seat the first Black representative from Memphis in twenty years.

The mask is off. They were never fighting for Black representation. They were fighting for Democrat representation in Black-numbered districts. And the moment Black representation showed up wearing the wrong party label, they declared it a tragedy.

The Pattern Has a Purpose

Look at the pattern the Democrat Party has built and ask yourself what it is actually for.

They cry gerrymandering. They say Tennessee is erasing Black voices. They march into Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day and preach a fake sermon to a Black congregation about how the South is stealing Black power. And the messenger they choose to deliver that sermon is not an American Black senator, not an American Black congresswoman, not an American Black pastor. It is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx. The same woman they are now putting on every podcast, every magazine cover, every global stage, every late night show, building her brand week after week, positioning her as the next face of the Democrat Party for the 2028 presidential nomination.

Sit with that.

The Democrat Party has harvested the American Black vote for over sixty years. We have given them every major city. We have given them the Congressional Black Caucus. We have given them their margins in every presidential election since Lyndon Johnson. We have given them Atlanta. We have given them Detroit. We have given them Philadelphia. We have given them Memphis. We have given them our pulpits. We have given them our grief. We have given them our grandmothers, our grandfathers, our churches, and our turnout.

And when the moment comes for them to put forward the next face of their party, the next candidate for President of the United States, who do they choose?

Not Raphael Warnock, the American Black senator from Georgia who actually pastors Ebenezer Baptist Church. Not Hakeem Jeffries, the American Black House Minority Leader. Not Wes Moore, the American Black governor of Maryland. Not Cory Booker. Not anyone from the deep bench of American Black politicians the party constantly parades in front of us at election time and then files away for the next cycle.

They choose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

A Hispanic congresswoman with a thin legislative record, a heavy social media following, and an ideological loyalty to democratic socialism that the Black community has never voted for in any meaningful numbers. They are building her into the next nominee in real time, and they are using our churches, our audiences, and our trust to do it. They are running her through Ebenezer the way a coach runs a prospect through scrimmage. They are testing whether American Blacks will accept her as our voice. They are seeing how much performance we will tolerate before we walk away.

They Came for the Black Justice Too

If you still doubt the pattern, look at what AOC herself has done with her career so far.

In July of 2024, the same Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day to preach about protecting Black voices personally drafted and filed articles of impeachment against Justice Clarence Thomas. She introduced them on the floor of the House of Representatives. She called for his removal from the Supreme Court of the United States. She named him a threat to the rule of law and said his impeachment was a constitutional imperative.

Clarence Thomas is one of two American Black justices on the Supreme Court, and the only one the Democrat Party wants removed. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the American Black justice appointed by President Biden, has never faced impeachment papers from AOC or any other Democrat. She rules in alignment with Democrat policy preferences, and so her seat is safe. Thomas does not. He is the longest-serving justice currently on the bench. He grew up in Pin Point, Georgia, in a house with no plumbing, raised by his grandfather after his father abandoned the family. He fought his way from the segregated South to Yale Law School to the highest court in the land. He is also the most conservative member of the Court, and that is the real reason AOC filed papers to remove him. Not because he is unqualified. Because he is independent.

And AOC filed papers to remove him.

This is the woman now being walked into Black churches as our supposed advocate. This is the woman the Democrat Party is grooming for the presidency on the backs of Black audiences. The same woman who tried to strip an American Black justice from the Supreme Court is now standing in Raphael Warnock’s pulpit lecturing American Blacks about how the South is erasing our power. The hypocrisy is not subtle. It is on the record. It is in the Congressional Record. It has a date and a bill number.

Here is what the Democrat Party means when it says Black representation. They mean Black bodies in seats they control. They do not mean American Black voices speaking for themselves. The moment an American Black voice speaks against Democrat orthodoxy, that voice must be silenced. Clarence Thomas spoke against them. They moved to impeach him. Charlotte Bergmann ran against them. They spent millions to bury her. Winsome Earle-Sears stood up against them in Virginia. They organized the entire state apparatus of the Democrat Party to defeat her.

Virginia, 2025

Six months ago, on November 4, 2025, the state of Virginia held a gubernatorial election. The Republican candidate was Lieutenant Governor Winsome Earle-Sears. She is a Jamaican American woman, a former United States Marine, a small business owner, and although she is not ADOS, she is the first Black woman ever elected to statewide office in the Commonwealth of Virginia. She was running to become the first Jamaican American governor in Virginia’s four-hundred-year history.

The Democrat Party ran a white former CIA officer named Abigail Spanberger against her.

Spanberger won fifty-seven to forty-two. She is now the governor-elect of Virginia.

The Democrat Party celebrated her victory as the election of Virginia’s “first female governor.” The Congressional Black Caucus said nothing about the Jamaican “black” woman who lost. AOC said nothing. Raphael Warnock said nothing. The same machinery that mourns Steve Cohen’s seat in Memphis as the loss of “Black representation” had nothing to say when a real American Black woman, with a story straight out of the descendant tradition, was defeated by a white candidate they handpicked and bankrolled.

Earle-Sears was a Republican. She thought independently. She did not belong to them. So they ran a white woman against her and called the result progress.

That is the rule. The Democrat Party will support an Black candidate only when that candidate is fully owned. The moment we think for ourselves, the moment we cross the line, the party that calls itself our protector becomes the party that funds our defeat. They will run a white former CIA officer against a Marine veteran from Jamaica. They will run a white Democrat in a majority-Black district for twenty years. They will run a Hispanic congresswoman from the Bronx for President of the United States before they run any of the American Black politicians sitting on their own bench.

This is the pattern. This is what it is for. They harvest our votes. They harbor our trust. They send us their chosen messengers. And when one of us steps out of line, they erase us.

They Packed Me Too

I want to speak now in the first person, because the Democrat Party assumes the American Black voter I am about to describe does not exist.

I am a middle-class Christian American Black woman in New Jersey. I work for a living. I pay my taxes. I read my Bible. I raise my standards. I built what I have through faith, work, and ownership. I am the demographic the Democrat Party counts on at the polls and ignores in the policy room. I am the voter they assume will turn out for them every November without ever asking what I actually believe.

So let me say what I actually believe.

I believe my tax dollars should go to United States citizens, not illegal immigrants. The schools, the hospitals, the housing, the social services, the food assistance, the medical care that American Blacks fought generations to access were paid for by American workers and were promised to American citizens. I do not believe the answer to my community’s crisis is to flood that community with people who entered the country illegally and who now compete for the same scarce resources my neighbors are already fighting to access.

I do not agree with teaching transgenderism to children. I do not believe in confusing little boys and little girls about their bodies. I do not believe in surgically altering minors. I do not believe schools should hide gender transitions from parents. That is not progress. That is harm. And I will say so even when the Democrat Party calls me a bigot for saying it.

I believe abortion is a sickness in our community. I have watched my people convinced that ending Black life is freedom. I have watched the Democrat Party position abortion clinics on every corner of every American Black neighborhood in this country and call it healthcare. It is not healthcare. It is the most efficient depopulation tool ever deployed against American Blacks, and the party that calls itself our friend has been its loudest sponsor.

I believe wealth is not built in project housing. Wealth is not built in low-income rentals where my people pay landlords for the privilege of remaining poor. Wealth is built through ownership. Through deeds. Through equity. Through generational property that gets passed from one American Black hand to the next. The Democrat Party has spent sixty years offering my community rent assistance and food stamps when what we needed was mortgages, business loans, and trade skills. They built a dependency model and called it compassion.

I believe American Black children deserve the same education suburban children receive. The same books. The same teachers. The same standards. The same expectations. The same college pipelines. I have watched the Democrat Party run our urban school districts into the ground for decades while telling us this is the best we can hope for. It is not. The schools in the suburbs prove it every single day.

That is who I am. That is what I believe. And I am not represented in my community.

I live in New Jersey. American Blacks in this state have elected the same Democrats for more than twenty years. We have given them every urban district, every mayor’s office, every state house seat that touches Black neighborhoods. And what has changed in those neighborhoods in twenty years? The crime is still there. The failing schools are still there. The housing crisis is still there. The drug trafficking is still there. The same politicians keep getting elected, keep collecting their salaries, keep showing up at Black churches in October, and keep doing nothing the rest of the year.

Voters like me have to relocate to find representation. We have to leave our own communities, move into suburban districts, and accept that political alignment with our values requires geographic distance from our own people. That is the cost of independent thought in the Democrat Party’s America. You either accept what they assign to your zip code, or you move.

That is packing. That is cracking. That is what the gerrymandering this blog opened with actually does to the woman who lives inside it.

I am not the only one. There are thousands like me in New Jersey alone. American Black women who own homes, run businesses, raise children, sit in pews, and vote our values. We are not loud. We are not televised. We are not invited to Ebenezer Baptist Church on Mother’s Day to address Black congregations. We are the voters the Democrat Party packed into districts where our votes would be absorbed and our voices would be ignored.

But we are here. And we are counting.

The Question for American Blacks

This is the question every American Black voter needs to sit with this week. If the Democrat Party fought for fifteen years to keep Charlotte Bergmann out of the only majority-Black district in Tennessee, while sending a white Democrat back to Washington over and over, then what exactly are they fighting for? It is not us. It is not our voice. It is not our representation. It is their power, painted in our color, sold to us with our pulpits.

We have been packed. We have been cracked. We have been moved across the board like pawns, and the party that moved us has the audacity to send us Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Mother’s Day to tell us how oppressed we are.

I will say what needs to be said. No party owns American Blacks. No politician inherits our vote. No representative speaks for us simply because she was sent into a Black church with a microphone. Charlotte Bergmann is an American Black woman from Memphis. She has fought for that seat for fifteen years. She is not a traitor for being a Republican. She is not less Black for thinking independently. She is exactly the kind of leader the Democrat Party claimed it wanted, until she actually showed up. Clarence Thomas is an American Black man on the highest court in the land. Winsome Earle-Sears is an American Black woman who almost made history in Virginia. Each one of them was attacked, defeated, or marked for removal by the same party that claims to fight for us.

American Blacks are waking up. We see the game. We see the packing. We see the cracking. We see the pulpit performance. We see the bucket on the witness chair. We see the impeachment papers filed against the American Black justice who refused to vote the way they wanted. We see the white CIA officer chosen over the Black Marine veteran in Virginia. We see the twenty-eight percent poverty in AOC’s own district. We see who we are. And we are no longer afraid to ask the question that terrifies the Democrat Party more than any Republican ever could.

What if we all leave?