Give Us A King

“And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you; and the LORD will not hear you in that day.”  1 Samuel 8:18

On the day we stopped waiting on God and started waiting on a party

I.  The Waking

This Sunday I opened my eyes with a single thought, to get to the house of the Lord.

It was not a bright morning. The sky hung low and overcast, and rain waited somewhere behind it. I went anyway, because His promises are Yes and Amen, and what He asks of us is one thing. Trust. He has never failed me and He never will. That is a small thing, going out under a gray sky, and I would not have thought about it twice except for what I heard when I arrived at the small community of believers.

The sermon was about trust.

As believers in Jesus Christ we are called to trust God, not only with our salvation but with every area of our lives. God is Jehovah Jireh, our Provider. Our provision does not come finally from the government, the system, or humanity. It comes from God.

When the Israelites came out of Egypt, God provided for them every single day. He gave them manna from heaven, but only enough for that day. He did not permit them to store up tomorrow’s portion, because He was teaching them something greater than survival. He was teaching them dependence. Every sunrise required another act of faith. Every morning they had to trust that He would provide again.

I sat with that longer than I expected to, because the manna is not the end of the story. The manna stopped. Scripture says it ceased the day after they ate of the produce of the land, and from then on they ate the fruit of Canaan. God did not withdraw His provision. He changed its form. He moved them from bread they watched fall from the sky to bread that came up out of the ground, and that is a harder trust, because the hand becomes invisible. A people can eat every day of their lives and forget who is feeding them.

That is what happened to them. In the wilderness they had nothing and trusted God for everything. Generations later they had fields and cities and harvests, and they went to Samuel and asked him for a king, so they could be like the other nations. The demand for a king did not rise out of their hunger. It rose out of their abundance.

Somewhere along the way we made the same exchange. As an American Black community we had survived and thrived despite the obstacles of Jim Crow and racism, and despite leaving the South behind and forging north into an unknown world. We traded our trust in God for trust in systems, institutions, and government. Our desire for more government has drawn us away from the One who has always been faithful and toward the belief that security is found in what man and his systems have built rather than in what God provides.

That shift is not only political. It is spiritual. When a people stop trusting God to provide, they begin trusting government to become their provider, and once that happens, dependence becomes a useful thing to the people who administer it. Useful for control. Useful for votes. Before a nation changes politically, it changes spiritually.

We are not a people waiting on God to move. We are a people standing at Samuel’s door, asking for a king.

❦

II.  Give Us a King

The elders of Israel came to Samuel at Ramah with a request that sounded reasonable. Samuel was old. His sons walked in their own ways, took bribes, and perverted judgment. Give us a king to judge us, they said, like all the nations.

Samuel was grieved, and he took it to the Lord. The answer he received did not concern him at all.

They have not rejected thee, God told him, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.

That is the verse the whole account turns on. The elders had a governance complaint and God heard a spiritual transfer. They believed they were asking for better administration. He told Samuel they were asking to be ruled by something other than Him.

Then He instructed Samuel to warn them, and the warning is not vague. Read what a king does.

He will take your sons and appoint them for himself, for his chariots and to be his horsemen. He will take your daughters to be confectionaries and cooks and bakers. He will take your fields and your vineyards and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your seed and give it to his officers. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And ye shall be his servants.  1 Samuel 8:11-17

The word repeats until it becomes the whole meaning of the office. Take. A king was not described to them as a giver. He was described, in advance and in detail, as a taker, and the taking would begin with their children and end with the tenth part of everything they owned.

Then the last warning, which is the one nobody quotes.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you, and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

Not that He could not. That He would not. There is a kind of suffering that comes from an arrangement a people asked for, and God told them plainly that He would let them keep it.

They heard all of it. Scripture says they refused to obey the voice of Samuel, and they said, Nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

Go out before us. Fight our battles. That is the exchange stated in their own mouths. They were willing to be taken from if someone else would do the fighting.

We know what the king took from Israel. The question worth asking is what he is taking now, and from whom, and whether the people paying have noticed the price.

❦

III.  If You Want to Win

A reel came across my timeline this week, posted by Native Land Pod. In it, Tequila Johnson, co-founder and chief executive of The Equity Alliance in Tennessee, a woman who has registered our people by the tens of thousands and has more field experience than most of the men who go on television to explain us, was answering a question about why Democrats will not invest in the South, given that more than half of all Black voters live there.

Her answer was that the party is not afraid of the South. It is afraid of Black leadership. Afraid of funding our media, our strategists, our organizations, our operatives, our candidates at the rates they actually require. Afraid, she said, of Black power and what it would do to their agenda.

She said something else that I have not been able to put down. Being a Black organizer in the South, she said, is full-time work, and the point of it is to humanize us in this work, to make sure we are not just a number on a door sheet. She does not want to be funded as a conduit to knock on doors when elections come. She wants to be funded so that people get fed and their needs are met, so that when elections come around, they know us and trust us.

Then she closed: invest in Black leadership if you want to win.

This was a clip, and a clip is always somebody’s choice about what to show. I am responding to what was put in front of me, and to what Native Land Pod decided was the strongest part of what she said.

I want to give her every bit of her due, because she has earned it and because I think she is right about nearly everything she describes.

We are a number on a door sheet. Anyone who has worked a cycle knows it. The vans arrive in September and leave in November, the consultants who never set foot in the neighborhood collect on the contract, and the people who actually know which house has a grandmother who will talk to you are paid in pizza and a T-shirt. Her frustration is real, it is specific, and it is the frustration of somebody who has done the work.

Sit with that last sentence, though.

If you want to win.

Who is the you?

It is not us. The entire argument is addressed to the Democratic Party, and the return on investment she offers is the party’s victory. Fund our leaders, and we will feed the people, and the people will trust us, and we will deliver them to you.

Follow the circle, because every step in it is rational and not one step produces ownership.

The party funds our organizations. Our organizations meet needs in the community. The community, having been met, comes to know and trust the organizations. The organizations deliver the community at election time. The party wins the seat. Then the party funds our organizations again, at whatever rate seems warranted by last cycle’s yield.

Turn that circle for sixty years and the party has thirty terms in office and we have thirty rounds of programming. On the day we stop turning it, we have nothing, because nothing in it was ever transferred to us. We were never buying. We were being paid, and the payment was calculated against the value of the delivery.

She is not asking for the land. She is asking for a bigger share of the crop, and she is asking the man who owns the land, and she is making her case by promising him a better harvest.

I have called this policy sharecropping before and I will call it that again. The sharecropper who negotiates his share up from a third to a half has negotiated well. He has also agreed, in the act of negotiating, that the land belongs to somebody else.

Now the part that stopped me, and it is the reason this essay exists.

She said the purpose of the funding is to feed people and meet their needs, so that they know us and trust us when the election comes.

Read that as a believer and not as a strategist.

The feeding is instrumental. It is not the end, it is the mechanism, and the product it manufactures is trust. Trust to be harvested on a Tuesday. I do not say that as an accusation against her, because I do not think she is being cynical. I think she has been so long inside an arrangement that she has stopped being able to hear what she is proposing, which is a machine that converts our hunger into our loyalty and then converts our loyalty into somebody else’s seat.

That is manna administered by a king. It comes daily, it comes from a hand you can see, and it teaches dependence on the giver. That is exactly what it is designed to do.

The difference between that and what God did in the wilderness is not the bread. It is who you are looking at when you eat it.

There is one more thing in what she said, and I am going to say it gently. She noted that white people are going to be white people, that even the well-meaning ones hold themselves a class above when it comes to political strategy because they believe they built this system and understand it.

She may well be right about the men she has dealt with. Look at what that observation concedes, though. If the people who control the money cannot help themselves, then the strategy she is proposing is to keep bringing our harvest to a class of people she has just told us cannot be changed. That is not a plan for power. That is a description of a permanent arrangement, offered by someone who has correctly identified that it is permanent.

They are not asking for Black power. They are asking for a king.

Read the mechanism again and it is Samuel 8 in modern dress. Give us someone to go out before us and fight our battles. Give us someone whose business it is to see about us. We will bring what we have and he will send back what he decides we need, and we will be like the other nations, who also have someone to see about them.

Because the faces on the mailer are ours, and the organizers are ours, and the cadence is the one we grew up hearing on Sunday, we have been taught to call the arrangement Black power.

It is not Black power. It is Democratic power with our name on the invoice.

The elders of Israel got the king they asked for, and he was one of their own. From the tribe of Benjamin, a head taller than any man in the nation, an Israelite through and through. He took their sons and their daughters and the tenth part of their seed exactly as Samuel warned, because what made him a taker was never his ancestry. It was the office. A king from among your own people is still a king, and the first thing any king requires is that you keep bringing him something.

We want a king. We have agreed to pretend that he is ours.

❦

IV.  The Best of Your Fields

He will take your fields and your vineyards and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.

On Tuesday, Michigan Democrats choose a nominee for the United States Senate. The contest is between Congresswoman Haley Stevens and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, and by the time the polls open, something close to sixty million dollars will have been spent to decide it.

Consider what that number means before you consider anything else about the race. Sixty million dollars, in a primary, in one state, for one seat.

Where it came from is a matter of public record. As of late July, the AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project had spent roughly twenty million dollars supporting Stevens, and a group called A Stronger Michigan had spent almost seventeen million more on her behalf without disclosing a single one of its donors, being funded almost entirely by an organization that does not disclose either. On the other side, the largest outside group supporting El-Sayed had spent a little over two million, and its filings show money from the Institute for Middle East Understanding. Counting everything, outside groups committed something near fifty-one million dollars to boosting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed.

He has run against that money and made it the center of his campaign. He has also pledged to refuse super PAC support while a super PAC formed to counter pro-Israel PACs spends on his behalf anyway, and he released a tax return only under weeks of pressure, and not the full ones his opponent demanded. She released hers and demanded he release his, while quietly requesting extensions on her own financial disclosures every year she has served in Congress. Each of them is transparent about exactly the thing the other is hiding.

Set all of that aside for a moment and ask a different question.

What were they fighting about?

Sixty million dollars came into Michigan, and nearly every dollar of it was deployed in a quarrel over a war seven thousand miles from Seven Mile Road. One side’s money came from people whose central commitment is the state of Israel. The other side’s money came from people whose central commitment is opposition to it. That is a real disagreement, and men of conscience hold both positions.

It is not a Detroit position. Neither one of them is.

Not one of those sixty million dollars was fighting over whether a child on the east side can read. Not one was contending over the nine in ten of us who die of overdose without ever having been reached by treatment. Not one was spent arguing about who owns the buildings on the block, or what happens to the men coming home from Jackson, or why the neighborhood clinic closed. Two armies met in Michigan, spent a fortune, and the thing they were fighting over was not us.

Both of them want Detroit, and both have spent the final weeks trying to get it. She has been working the churches in Wayne County. He points to his years as the city’s health director and then the county’s, the free eyeglasses he put on children’s faces, the polluters he went after, the lead he took out of the pipes. Those things happened. Neither one of them is a stranger here and I am not going to pretend they are.

What I notice is the shape of it.

When Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to Detroit to rally for him, the room was overwhelmingly white, in the largest majority-Black city in America. Congressman Clyburn said afterward that he saw a photograph of that rally and did not see a single person who looked like him, and that this told him all he needed to know. Meanwhile an AIPAC-funded super PAC has been running an advertisement featuring Barack Obama praising Haley Stevens, and Barack Obama has not endorsed Haley Stevens.

Our faces are in the commercial. We were not in the room.

He is down forty-six points with us. So today, two days out, he is walking our streets and sitting for our media.

Larry Nix is a sixty-three-year-old Army veteran. He pulled into a cookout hosted by the El-Sayed campaign, rolled down his window, and said he needed answers. Haley Stevens had come to his house during previous campaigns, spoken with him, and put a sign in his yard.

That is what showing up means to a man who has been here the whole time. Not a cookout in the last fortnight. A knock on the door in a year when nothing was at stake.

Tequila Johnson said she does not want to be funded as a conduit to knock on doors when elections come. She named the thing exactly, and here it is, forty-eight hours out, both campaigns on our blocks, sixty million dollars spent, and the block itself learning nothing about either of them that it did not already know.

Keith Williams, who chairs the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus, said the truest thing anybody has said about this race. He does not want to see people die in the Middle East, he said, but his people are dying every day in the hood, from gun violence and from not having the education they need to survive in this community.

He is right, and nobody spent sixty million dollars on what he just described.

That is the vineyard. The harvest of a place, gathered up and handed to the servants of a court, to settle disputes the people who grew it were never consulted about. Samuel told them the king would do this. He said the best of it, not the leavings. Then he told them the part we forget, which is that when it began to hurt, they would cry out and would not be heard, because the arrangement was one they had asked for.

I have no counsel to offer either side of that war. What I know is that our fields are being harvested for it, and that both armies will be in our churches by Sunday.

❦

V.  The Silence

On July 2, Andrew Gillum was pulled over in Daphne, Alabama, for driving erratically. An officer saw a glass pipe on the center console. The search that followed turned up rolled marijuana cigarettes and three packages of a substance that tested positive for methamphetamine. He was booked into the Daphne City Jail, transferred to the Baldwin County Correctional Facility, and released the following day.

He is forty-six. He was mayor of Tallahassee, and in 2018 he came within roughly thirty-four thousand votes of becoming the first American Black governor of Florida. He co-hosts Native Land Pod with Angela Rye and Bakari Sellers. This was not the first time. In 2020 he was found in a Miami Beach hotel room in an incident involving suspected crystal meth, and no charges were filed.

His colleagues did not abandon him. The podcast told its audience he would be absent and asked for prayer. Angela Rye spoke about it on the air, plainly and with feeling, and said she had no intention of turning her back on him, that a person should not be reduced to his worst moment. She was right. I will not pretend otherwise, and anyone who watched that segment saw something real.

Then the show went back to work.

The episode that carried the audience’s messages of support for him also covered a security breach at a concert, a governor turning down summer food funds, and a rapper who paid for a presidential pardon that never came. Two days after the arrest he appeared at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, on a panel about the midterm elections, and said nothing about it. The stage went on.

I want to be careful here, because this is not about one man’s failure. It is about what his failure reveals.

Andrew Gillum has money, a national platform, and colleagues who love him publicly. He could not get free of the addiction that runs rampant through our communities. If a man with all of that cannot get free, what do we imagine is happening to the woman on the third floor of a building nobody has repaired since 1994, who has neither the access nor the resources?

Here is what is happening to her.

In the most detailed federal analysis of overdose deaths by race, among American Blacks who died, only 8.3 percent showed any evidence of having received substance use treatment beforehand. That is the lowest share of any group measured. More than nine out of ten died having never been reached by anyone. Nationally, in 2023, an estimated 54.2 million Americans needed treatment for a substance use disorder and 12.8 million received it.

Now hold that next to this. Overdose rates were higher in areas with more treatment program availability than in areas with less, and among American Blacks the gap was 34.3 against 16.6.

Read that again. The buildings existed. The grants were awarded. The ribbon was cut and somebody stood behind a podium and called it an investment in the community. The death rate in those places was double.

That is the whole argument in a single line of data. A program is not a person. An appropriation is not an outreach. A facility down the street that no one on your block has ever walked into is not help, it is architecture, and we have been taught to accept the architecture as the answer.

I will tell you the part that complicates my own case, because you deserve it and because someone will say it if I do not.

Things improved. The CDC reported in January of this year that overdose death rates fell for every group between 2023 and 2024, and that the largest decline of all was among American Blacks, down 30.9 percent, from 48.9 to 33.8 per hundred thousand. Provisional figures through January 2026 project another 13.2 percent national decline.

That is real and I thank God for it.

It is also not what it appears to be. A rate of 33.8 still sits far above the national rate of 23.1. We fell the furthest and we are still dying at the highest rate in the country. The decline came largely through changes in the drug supply and through the distribution of naloxone, which is to say we got better at reviving people after they stopped breathing. That is worth having. It is not restoration. The bleeding slowed. Nothing was rebuilt. No father came home. No man was discipled. No young woman was taken in by anybody’s church and taught who she is.

We were revived. We were not delivered.

Through all of it, count the hours of commentary you have heard on the recovery of American Black men from addiction, and set them beside the hours on the last election, the next election, and the man in the White House. Count the segments on prison reform, on family formation, on homeownership, on business formation, on why our children cannot read, and set them beside the segments on what some senator said on a Tuesday.

The elders told Samuel they wanted a king to go out before them and fight their battles. We have people who will go out before us and fight our battles on television every week. The battle they fight is not the one that is killing us.

❦

VI.  The Name

On July 2, Native Land Pod published an episode. The description in the feed promised its listeners a case study of Clarence Thomas, perhaps the most powerful self-hating Black man.

That was not a slip of the tongue in the middle of a live conversation. It was written. It was edited. It was placed in the feed where subscribers would see it before pressing play.

I will tell you plainly that I admire Clarence Thomas, and I will tell you why, because it is not the reason people assume. It is not that I agree with every opinion he has written. It is that he reasons from somewhere. He argues from what a people are owed and what a people are capable of, and not from what a party will permit, and he has paid for thirty-four years in a currency most men will not spend.

Argue with the man. Take apart his reasoning, his method, his votes, his silences. All of that is legitimate and some of it is necessary. What is not an argument is the word they used.

Self-hating is not an argument. It is a diagnosis of a man’s interior life, delivered by people who have never sat with him, and it does a particular kind of work. It says that an American Black man who reasons his way to an unapproved conclusion is not mistaken but sick. It relocates the disagreement from what he said to what is wrong with him. Once a man’s dissent is a symptom, nobody has to read it.

It also belongs to a family. Coon. Uncle Tom. House negro. Sellout. That vocabulary was not built to help us. It was built to describe us, and we borrowed it, and we now aim it at each other with a fluency our enemies never achieved. I notice, too, that whoever reaches for Uncle Tom as an insult has not read the book, in which Tom is beaten to death for refusing to say where two women had gone.

Now consider what was actually in the record when that description was written.

Two days earlier, on June 30, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara, upholding birthright citizenship for children born on American soil to undocumented parents and temporary visa holders. The vote was six to three. Only five justices reached that conclusion on constitutional grounds.

Clarence Thomas dissented, at ninety-one pages, occupying nearly half the length of the Court’s entire opinion. His argument was that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks and has since been repurposed for political projects the Reconstruction Congress did not support. He wrote that the majority’s reading devalues citizenship. He leaned heavily on Dred Scott, the decision that held our ancestors could not be citizens at all, and argued the Court had gotten it wrong because Blacks were entitled to citizenship as Americans.

Whatever else is true about the man, that is the particularist claim. It is the argument that the covenant made after the war was made with a specific people, for a specific injury, and that it belongs first to their descendants.

Ketanji Brown Jackson concurred with the majority, in twenty pages, and she came for him directly. She noted that despite his long endorsement of a colorblind Constitution, Thomas now surprisingly suggests the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure. She called his treatment of the history myopic. She wrote that the Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery. She wrote that his account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing.

Her strongest blow is historical, and I will not pretend it is weak. She spent much of her opinion on the decades before ratification, when American Blacks organized local and national conventions and pressed a universalist vision of citizenship grounded in birth on the soil. Freed Blacks, she wrote, did not advocate for a unique set of rules that catered only to their situation.

That is a serious argument and it is aimed at people who think like me.

Here is my answer. Our ancestors argued universally because particularity was the instrument being used to destroy them. Dred Scott was a particularist ruling. It held that this specific people, uniquely, could not be citizens. A man fighting that decision could not win by requesting a carve-out, because the carve-out was the weapon. The only road to being covered was to make the rule cover everyone. That is a strategy adopted under duress, and reading it as a renunciation of what they were owed asks us to believe that a people arguing for their lives were also, in the same breath, waiving their claim.

The citizenship rule is not the same question as the debt, either. Whether every child born on this soil is a citizen, and whether this nation owes a particular people for two hundred fifty years of unpaid labor, are two separate questions. Jackson answered the first. She did not answer the second, and neither did the Court.

I will concede what should be conceded. Thomas’s reading served the position of an administration that wanted to end birthright citizenship, and that alignment is not nothing. A man can be right about the origin of a promise and still be wrong about what to do with it, and I would rather say that than pretend the alignment is not there.

His critics reach past this case for two others, so let me meet them. Shelby County did not end the Voting Rights Act. The Court struck a coverage formula Congress had not updated since 1975 and handed the pen back to Congress, which has declined to pick it up for thirteen years, and Section 2 stands untouched.

What preclearance actually produced is worth remembering. Under the rule against retrogression, the Justice Department spent the nineties pressing what were called max-Black plans, concentrating our voters into a handful of safe seats and bleaching everything around them. We got districts nobody had to compete for, held by people who never had to earn us, in states where every surrounding seat went the other way. That was the machinery, and the people mourning its loss were the ones it served. The fight over packing did not end there and has not ended now, and it is being waged over Section 2, which is still standing.

As for affirmative action, I will say plainly what many of us say quietly. A program whose beneficiaries extended far past us, and whose Black beneficiaries were disproportionately the children of immigrants and professionals, was never built for the descendants of slaves. It bought us a stigma and somebody else’s advancement.

The record is longer than a feed description, and I have read the ninety-one pages. They did not.

What I am asking you to notice is smaller and harder.

The man they call self-hating made the argument that the Fourteenth Amendment belongs particularly to the descendants of slaves. The woman they celebrate made the argument that it does not. Both of them are American Black. Both of them are serious. The vocabulary we have been handed predicted the opposite of what happened, which should tell us the vocabulary is not for thinking.

It is for sorting. It tells us who is inside and who is outside, and it saves everyone the trouble of reading ninety-one pages.

There is one more thing about that date.

The description went into the feed on July 2. That night, in Daphne, Alabama, one of the show’s hosts was pulled over for driving erratically, and an officer saw a glass pipe on the console. The word self-hating was published, in writing, on the same day, by a program that would ask its audience the following week to pray for a man in the grip of an actual affliction.

They located the sickness in the wrong man.

❦

VII.  The Cry in That Day

Somebody reading this is preparing an objection, and it is the right one, so let me state it better than they would.

The Black church built the Civil Rights Movement, and the instrument of that movement was federal power. The Voting Rights Act was legislation, not revival. Men and women who prayed all night went to Washington in the morning and demanded that the government act, and it acted, and lives were saved. An essay that says a people should not look to government would have told them to stay home.

It would not, and here is the distinction.

Moses went to Pharaoh. He stood in the court of the most powerful man in the world and made a demand of the state, and the demand was righteous, and God sent him to make it. Read what he asked for, though. He did not ask Pharaoh for bread. He did not ask to be fed better inside the arrangement. He said let my people go, and every plague that followed was an argument about departure, not about terms.

A people can approach power out of covenant or out of forgetting, and the difference is not the approach. It is what they are carrying when they arrive. Moses came to Pharaoh’s court with God behind him and a demand in his mouth. The wilderness generation, a few chapters later, wept for Egypt and remembered the fish they ate freely there, and wanted to go back. Same people. Same God. Different thing being asked for.

We have been taught to ask for the fish.

We should be honest about how it happened, because nobody chose it in a single afternoon. The manna stopped when they entered the land. God did not withdraw. He changed the form of the provision, and ordinary provision is where trust gets hard, because the hand becomes invisible. Then generations pass, and the elders walk to Ramah and ask for a king so they can be like the other nations, and the request does not come out of hunger. It comes out of having enough to be embarrassed about what they look like to everybody else.

Samuel told them what a king costs. Their sons. Their daughters. The tenth part of their seed. The best of their fields, handed to his servants. He told them and they said, nay, but we will have a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.

Go out before us and fight our battles.

We have men and women who will go out before us and fight our battles every week, on television, on podcasts, in the well of the Senate. They are good at it. Some of them love us. The battles they fight are not the ones that are killing us. Sixty million dollars moved through Michigan in ninety days over a war on another continent while nine out of ten of our dead went to the grave without anyone reaching them. A man was called self-hating in writing for saying the covenant was made with us, on the same day another man was pulled over with a pipe on the console.

And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you, and the LORD will not hear you in that day.

That is the hardest sentence in the chapter and I have carried it all week. Not that He could not hear. That He would not, because they asked for it, and He let them keep what they asked for.

I do not believe we are past hearing. I have too much history with Him to write that sentence and mean it. I believe we are somewhere in the taking, though, and I believe we have been trained not to recognize it, because the taking arrives with a press release and a ribbon and a man in a good suit saying he is fighting for us.

The question is not who we voted for. It never was.

The question is who we are waiting on.

❦

SOURCE NOTES

Scripture: 1 Samuel 8; Joshua 5:12; Numbers 11:5; 1 Samuel 9 and 10 (Saul of the tribe of Benjamin).

Tequila Johnson: Native Land Pod Instagram reel, viewed this week. Quotations transcribed by the author from the clip as posted.

Michigan spending figures: AdImpact and FEC filings as reported by Bridge Michigan, CBS News and CNN, as of late July 2026. United Democracy Project roughly $19.9 to $30 million; A Stronger Michigan $16.8 million, donors undisclosed, funded by Center Forward; Fighting for Michigan roughly $2.3 million, filings show Institute for Middle East Understanding.

Transparency: Michigan Advance and The Hill, July 2026. El-Sayed released his 2025 return in mid-July under pressure; Stevens pressed for full returns at the July 27 debate. House records show Stevens has requested disclosure extensions annually since 2019.

Detroit rally and Clyburn: Punchbowl News and WDET, July 2026. Larry Nix and the New Bethel Missionary Church appearance: CNN, July 27, 2026. Keith Williams: MS NOW, July 31, 2026. Forty-six-point deficit among Black voters: polling as reported July 2026.

Gillum arrest: Daphne Police Department release; NBC News, Detroit News, CNN, July 2026.

Overdose data: CDC SUDORS analysis, MMWR 71(29), covering 2019 to 2020 across 25 states and DC (8.3 percent prior treatment; 34.3 vs 16.6 by treatment availability). CDC NCHS Data Brief No. 549, January 2026 (30.9 percent decline; 48.9 to 33.8; national rate 23.1). CDC provisional data, June 2026.

Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, 2026. Thomas, J., dissenting; Jackson, J., concurring. Quotations as reported by Bloomberg Law, The Hill, NPR and HuffPost.

Native Land Pod episode description, published July 2, 2026, Apple Podcasts feed.

Policy Sharecropping

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.” —Frederick Douglass, West India Emancipation, August 4, 1857

What Zohran Mamdani Sold on Roland Martin’s Platform

❦

After emancipation, the men and women who had been slaves were handed something that looked like freedom and operated like a lease.

The sharecropper worked land he did not own. He supplied the labor, the sweat, the hours before daylight and the hours after. He planted the crop, tended it and brought it in. At settlement the books were read to him by the man who owned the field. He could not audit those books, could not dispute them and could not walk away, because the debt always came out just above the harvest.

He was free. He was also never going to own anything.

That arrangement never fully ended in American Black life. It changed clothes.

❦

Over the last several weeks, we have watched a widening fracture inside the Democratic Party between its centrist establishment and the Democratic Socialists of America. I must admit that it has been a joy and a pain to watch. For years, centrist Democrats tolerated the socialist wing, borrowed its language, encouraged its activists and assumed they could control its growing influence. Now the faction they helped cultivate is attempting to take possession of the party itself, and the centrists have finally begun to fight back with a vengeance.

The next several months will be critical. A number of states will hold important primaries and elections in August and September as both parties move toward the November 2026 midterm elections. These contests will help determine whether the Democratic Party remains under the control of its traditional establishment or whether the DSA succeeds in moving the party further toward democratic socialism.

At the center of this struggle stands New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He may not carry an official title as the national leader of the DSA, but he has become its most recognizable elected spokesman and one of its most valuable political organizers. In June his endorsements carried socialist and progressive candidates past established Democrats in three New York congressional primaries, and the movement is now attempting to reproduce that success in other states, including Michigan.

The DSA has recently faced damaging publicity, and its own documents have done more damage than its critics ever could. In July the organization released a program titled Workers Deserve More, drafted between April and June and approved by its National Political Committee. That program calls for a new democratic constitution. It would abolish the United States Senate. It would eliminate the Electoral College. It would replace the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and a judiciary chosen by Congress and answerable to it.

Asked whether any of that was extreme, DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique answered that they do not think so.

Even as one of the movement’s favored candidates seeks a seat in the United States Senate, the movement has now put in writing that the Senate should cease to exist.

That is not ordinary political reform. It is an attempt to reconstruct the American system.

Prominent Democrats have begun saying publicly what centrists long avoided. Van Jones, no one’s idea of a conservative, wrote this month that the youth movement he waited his whole life to see is being hijacked by people with insane, outlandish and nutty ideas.

The problem underneath is real. Mamdani won the 2025 primary without us. A New York Times analysis found that in precincts where at least seventy percent of residents were Black, Andrew Cuomo more than doubled him, fifty-nine percent to twenty-six. Black voters moved toward him in November, after months of outreach and a deliberate pivot to pocketbook language. That is a movement that had to run from its own brand to survive a primary.

That presents the DSA with a serious problem.

The Democratic Party cannot consistently win national elections without the American Black vote. Yet the socialist faction attempting to take control of that party is overwhelmingly white, advances very few American Black candidates and increasingly promotes immigrants, the children of immigrants and white progressive candidates as the new faces of the Democratic coalition. American Blacks remain the party’s most dependable voting bloc, but we are becoming less central to the leadership, ideology and candidate selection of the party our votes have sustained.

So what does Mamdani do?

He appears on Roland Martin Unfiltered, one of the most recognizable Black political platforms in the country, to sell democratic socialism directly to the American Black community.

The timing was strategic. Mamdani appeared after weeks of negative press for the DSA, and in the same week his own rhetoric collided with the limits of his office. He had said his administration was in active conversation with the city’s Law Department about arresting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he comes to New York for the United Nations General Assembly in September. Days later he conceded the city has no authority to execute a warrant from the International Criminal Court, and asked the federal government to carry it out instead. The retreat was jurisdictional. The accusation never softened.

Now Mamdani is moving through the media circuit attempting to present the DSA as reasonable, practical and far less radical than its critics claim.

His sales presentation to Roland Martin’s audience was built around familiar promises: free childcare, affordable housing, protection from deed theft, government grocery stores and a larger government prepared to provide more services. The message was clear. Democratic socialism, he argued, is not something American Blacks should fear. It is simply government working on behalf of ordinary people.

That sales presentation rests upon an assumption that deserves to be confronted.

It assumes that American Black voters can be won by promises of free programs. It assumes that we are more interested in government dependence than homeownership, entrepreneurship, educational excellence, safe communities and generational wealth. It assumes that if politicians tell us often enough what they are prepared to give us, we will not examine what their policies prevent us from building for ourselves.

Most importantly, it assumes that we will not notice the political sharecropping taking place directly in front of us.

Mamdani and the DSA need the American Black vote to capture the Democratic Party. The policies they offer do not place American Blacks at the center of their agenda. We are expected to provide the turnout, defend the coalition and deliver the election, while other groups select the candidates, define the ideology and inherit the political power.

That is why Mamdani’s conversation with Roland Martin deserves closer examination. Not simply because of what Mamdani said, but because of what he avoided, what Roland failed to press and what the entire interview revealed about the DSA’s effort to gain control of the Democratic Party through a voting bloc it has done very little to represent.

❦

What He Reached For

Asked about the shortage of senior African American leadership in his administration, Mamdani named Deputy Mayor Renita Francois and Chancellor Kamar Samuels, then said he wanted a city government that looks like New Yorkers, a gorgeous mosaic. He credited the phrase to David Dinkins. He called Dinkins the first democratic socialist mayor of New York and our first Black mayor, and called him an inspiration.

Roland Martin asked one follow-up question and moved on.

He might have asked one more. Kamar Samuels was born in Jamaica. David Dinkins, the man whose standing was being borrowed, was an American Black New Yorker who served in a segregated Marine Corps and spent a lifetime inside the party. Between the two of them sits the whole argument this movement will not have.

Understand what happened in that moment. A movement with almost no American Black leadership reached back more than thirty years to borrow the standing of a Black man it did not elect, in order to sell itself to Black voters it needs but does not intend to promote.

That is the transaction. Everything after it is terms.

❦

The Sales Presentation

Mamdani did not come before Martin’s audience to defend the hardest edges of his movement. He brought the softened version, packaged for us.

Childcare. Affordable housing. Deed theft. Groceries. Potholes.

Everything framed as something the government could give.

Childcare

He opened by saying his administration had put the city on a path to universal childcare, saving parents more than twenty thousand dollars a year for every two-year-old enrolled.

The word carrying that sentence is path.

By his own administration’s announcement, the first phase provides two thousand free seats this fall in four communities: Washington Heights and Inwood, Fordham and Kingsbridge, East Brooklyn including Canarsie, Brownsville and Ocean Hill, and Ozone Park and the Rockaways.

Look at that map. Washington Heights and Inwood, the largest Dominican community in the United States, is 8.7 percent Black. Fordham and Kingsbridge run roughly seventy percent Hispanic. Ozone Park is heavily Indo-Caribbean and South Asian, and the Rockaway peninsula is 35.1 percent white against 33.8 percent Black. One of the four, East Brooklyn, is predominantly Black, and Brownsville and Ocean Hill earned every seat they received. Brownsville’s poverty rate is 29.3 percent.

One of four. Three of the first four communities are immigrant-heavy neighborhoods, in a program his administration advertises as available regardless of income or immigration status, paid for with tax dollars including ours.

The program is expected to reach roughly twelve thousand children by the fall of 2027 and full universality by the end of his term, serving an estimated fifty-five thousand two-year-olds.

Two thousand today. Fifty-five thousand at completion. Available regardless of income or immigration status.

Martin did not ask how the two thousand families would be selected, how many qualified families would be turned away this fall, or what share of the first seats would go to American Black children. He accepted the twenty thousand dollar figure and moved on.

A promise can be universal while the benefit in hand stays very small.

Housing

Martin raised the departure of Black residents from the city, and he was right to. Mamdani acknowledged that more than two hundred thousand Black New Yorkers have left over recent decades, that the population of Black children and teenagers fell nineteen percent between 2010 and 2019, and he called it a reverse Great Migration.

His answer was to build two hundred thousand affordable homes and preserve two hundred thousand more over ten years.

Ask what affordable means in that sentence.

Affordable housing is not ownership. It is most often another regulated rental, another income-restricted apartment, another household living inside a system where a public authority, a nonprofit developer or a private landlord holds the deed and the government sets the eligibility. That housing keeps families from being displaced. It prevents homelessness. It provides stability, and stability is worth something. Stability does not appreciate, and stability cannot be left to a grandchild. It is stability administered by the government, renewable at the government’s discretion. Socialism at its finest.

New York City already holds roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments housing about 2.4 million people. In June the Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one to freeze rents on one-year and two-year renewal leases, the first two-year freeze in the city’s history. That freeze is real relief for tenants already inside the system, and Black tenants are among them. It produces no additional apartment for the family still searching, and it converts no monthly payment into equity.

Meanwhile, according to the Furman Center’s most recent figures, homeownership in New York City in 2024 ran to 45.2 percent for Asian households and 41.7 percent for white households, against 25.9 percent for Black households and 17.2 percent for Hispanic households. Black borrowers were the only group whose refinancing activity fell further that year, down 7.3 percent.

Those numbers should have driven the entire interview.

Where was the plan to raise Black homeownership? Down-payment assistance aimed at long-established working families. Affordable mortgage products. Protection of inherited property. Black-owned housing development. A pathway out of public housing and into a deed.

Martin asked the ownership question and Mamdani answered a different one.

He mentioned homeownership, then moved to what he had built to protect it. The city’s first Office of Deed Theft Prevention. A pause on the Giuliani-era tax lien sale, which he correctly noted had been applied in Black neighborhoods at six times the rate of white ones.

Both are worth having. Neither is what he was asked.

Here is the scale of what he offered. The Independent Budget Office reports that at least 1,008 lien-sale properties completed foreclosure and went to auction over the past decade. Two hundred fourteen of them were one-to-three family homes. About twenty-one small houses a year. Nearly six hundred more sit in active foreclosure now. Deed theft draws roughly three hundred complaints a year across the five boroughs, and the Queens District Attorney has recovered twenty-three homes since 2020.

Every one of those families deserves protection and every case deserves prosecution.

Now set that beside the question. Black homeownership in New York City is 25.9 percent. White homeownership is 41.7 percent. Closing that distance means tens of thousands of families holding a deed who do not hold one now.

Protecting the house a family already owns is not the same as helping a family buy one. The first defends the few who made it inside. The second is how a community builds something it can hand down. He was asked about the second and answered with the first.

He did not mention the partition suits either. Roughly 350 are filed in this city every year against families whose parent died without a will. The homes average $1.1 million and they cluster in Central Brooklyn and Southeast Queens. A speculator buys one heir’s fractional share for a fraction of its worth, then uses the courts to force the sale of the whole house. The Center for NYC Neighborhoods has identified $400 million of equity sitting in those disputes and estimates the true figure closer to $4 billion. It is asking for ten million dollars to lend heirs the capital to clear title before an investor arrives, and calculates that every dollar lent preserves thirteen to fifteen dollars in family wealth.

Ten million dollars, to keep families in houses worth a million each. He has committed seventy million to five grocery stores.

Taxes

Martin asked the right question. What happens to homeowners, especially seniors on fixed incomes, when you raise the revenue to pay for all of this? Which is to say, what happens when you draw on the middle class and the elderly to expand services offered without regard to citizenship?

Mamdani answered that the burden would fall on non-resident owners of second homes worth more than five million dollars. Very few and far between, he said.

The flip repeated itself. He had two proposals of his own aimed squarely at ordinary homeowners, and he named neither.

In March his office circulated a memo to state lawmakers proposing to cut New York’s estate tax exemption from $7,350,000 to $750,000 and raise the top rate from sixteen percent to fifty percent. It would have given New York the lowest estate tax threshold in the country. The figure is not new to him. As a state legislator he co-sponsored a bill built on the same $750,000 exemption.

The median New York City home price reached a record $800,000 in the third quarter of 2025. The median home in this city already clears the line he proposed. A family in St. Albans or Cambria Heights that bought in 1975 and held on through everything the city did to them would cross that threshold on the house alone, before a single retirement account is counted.

Council Member Phil Wong of Queens said the change would hit closer to home than people realize, and that families could be forced to sell the very homes they hoped to pass on to their children. Bloomberg Tax, writing in favor of taxing inherited wealth, called the design a policy that would land on asset-rich, cash-poor households whose primary asset is housing.

Asset-rich and cash-poor. That is the identical phrase housing researchers use for the families losing homes to partition suits in Southeast Queens. Same families. Same houses. Two mechanisms reaching for the same equity.

It did not pass. Neither the legislature nor the governor included it. He asked for it anyway, and then sat in Roland Martin’s studio and answered a question about the burden on Black homeowners by talking about five-million-dollar second homes.

Deed theft is the story he tells about Black homeowners. The estate tax memo is the one he does not.

What he did not volunteer, and what Martin did not raise, is that in February he had proposed a 9.5 percent citywide property tax increase in his preliminary budget as a fallback if Albany refused to raise taxes on high earners and corporations. It would have touched more than three million residential units. The Citizens Budget Commission estimated roughly seven hundred additional dollars a year for a typical homeowner.

Mamdani knew exactly who it would land on. He said so at the announcement. He acknowledged the increase would fall hardest on homeowners in mostly Black neighborhoods, a constituency he had struggled to win, and framed it as asking those working-class New Yorkers to fork up.

He was not the only one who noticed. Council Deputy Speaker Nantasha Williams of St. Albans said that advancing a tax increase without first addressing the underlying inequity feels deeply tone-deaf to Black, Brown, and working-class homeowners like the families she represents in Southeast Queens, who are already shouldering a disproportionate share of the property tax burden.

That is a Black Democratic official describing a Black Democratic constituency being asked to finance a program built for someone else.

Speaker Julie Menin said significant property tax increases should not be on the table whatsoever. Mamdani dropped the proposal from his executive budget in May, after Governor Hochul delivered enough state aid to close the gap.

He backed off because Albany paid, not because the constituency he named held leverage he was obliged to respect.

Martin had every element of that history available to him. He asked about the burden on Black homeowners and let the answer about five-million-dollar second homes stand.

Groceries

Five city-owned stores, one per borough, seventy million dollars in capital funding. The first is scheduled to open in the Bronx at the end of 2027. The East Harlem location is not expected until the end of 2029. The city will own or subsidize the space while a private operator runs the store.

That does nothing for the grocery bill a family is paying this week. It is a promise whose distance is concealed inside the phrase city-run grocery stores.

None of it is free. The childcare worker is paid. The bus is fueled and repaired. The store buys inventory, employs staff, runs refrigeration and carries its property costs. Government can move a cost, bury it in another account or collect it from a different taxpayer. Government cannot make a cost disappear.

❦

A Chancellor Without an Accounting

Martin raised the schools and asked the right question again. If a parent has a child in the ninth grade, that child cannot wait four or five years for a turnaround.

Mamdani answered by praising Chancellor Kamar Samuels, who is doing a very good job, and emphasized his commitment to rigor and to an integrated school system.

A very good job is not a measurement.

Samuels has a real record and it deserves examination rather than a wave of the hand. He began as a Bronx classroom teacher, became principal of the Bronx Writing Academy, served as superintendent of Brooklyn’s District 13 and Manhattan’s District 3, oversaw the NYC Reads literacy rollout that his own department credits with a five percent increase in literacy outcomes, secured more than ten million dollars for integration work across two districts and launched seventeen International Baccalaureate programs.

Five percent of what, and for whom?

There is the question Martin never asked. What happens to Black children in the districts this man has led, and in the system he now runs?

The answer is public. It has been sitting on the New York State Education Department website the entire time.

Take Brooklyn’s District 13, which Samuels ran from 2019 until 2022 and which is the district most associated with his integration work. The most recent state report card is not his tenure, and I will not pretend it is. It is worth reading anyway, because of what it says about what integration accomplished and what it did not.

In District 13, Black students were proficient in English at just under fifty percent. White students, in the same district, in many of the same buildings, sitting the same tests: eighty-seven percent. In mathematics, Black students came in at forty percent. White students, eighty-four.

A thirty-seven point gap in reading. A forty-four point gap in mathematics. Inside one district.

Now understand what makes that number land. District 13 is not a failing district. All students, grades three through eight, came in at sixty-two percent in English, above the city and above the state. The four-year graduation rate is ninety-one percent. On the aggregate it reads as a success story, and that is precisely how it gets told.

The aggregate is the disguise. A district can post excellent overall numbers while the Black children inside it are educated in a different system entirely, and nobody is ever required to say so, because press releases do not disaggregate.

Citywide the same pattern holds in the system Samuels now runs. Forty-seven percent of Black students read at grade level, against seventy-four percent of white students. Black scores rose eight points last year, the largest gain of any group, and the gap is still twenty-seven points wide.

That is the emergency. Neither man in that studio named it.

Longevity inside a struggling system can demonstrate expertise. It can also demonstrate participation. Samuels was appointed, not elected, and the case made for the appointment was assembled out of adjectives. Rigor. Integration. A very good job. When a man is handed nine hundred thousand children and the strongest public argument for him is a five percent literacy improvement in a single district, the parents asked to applaud are entitled to ask what he produced for Black children specifically, and to be handed a number rather than a word.

Then Mamdani redirected. Asked about a ninth grader who cannot wait, he returned to the investment in two-year-olds.

Early education matters, and it does not answer the question. The Black ninth grader who cannot read at grade level today will be a grown man before the first universal cohort reaches the third grade.

❦

The Interviewer Becomes Part of the Presentation

Roland Martin has built a career on one explanation of American Black life. He published White Fear in 2022, and the argument is that white anxiety over demographic change drives our politics, that the Republican Party has made itself the leader of that fear, and that what happens to us traces back to that source.

The explanation has one convenient quality. It can never be tested, and it never has to account for sixty-two years of results.

American Blacks have voted for Democratic representation in overwhelming numbers since 1964. We have delivered the presidency, the Senate, the House, governorships and city halls. In New York City the last Republican to win the mayoralty did so in 2005. Democrats hold the City Council, the state legislature, the governor’s mansion and both United States Senate seats.

Black homeownership in that city stands below twenty-six percent. Black children in the nation’s largest school system are not reading at grade level. More than two hundred thousand Black New Yorkers have left. No Republican legislature drew those numbers.

There is also a question about the platform itself.

Martin built Black Star Network with three hundred fifty thousand dollars of his own money and the backing of one sponsor, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the union of public employees. He has since leaned on viewer donations while publicly demanding that brands and agencies spend more with Black-owned media.

Set that beside the product Mamdani carried into the studio. City-owned grocery stores. Universal childcare requiring a workforce the city funds. An expanded municipal government presented as the answer to housing, food, transportation and early education. Every item in that catalog enlarges the public payroll.

A platform launched on the sponsorship of the public employees’ union is not a neutral room in which to question a mayor whose entire program grows public employment. I am not saying anyone was paid for this interview. I am saying the incentives were never aimed at a hard question, and the transcript shows it.

Martin raised homeownership and accepted deed theft prevention as the answer.

He raised taxes on fixed-income seniors and never mentioned the 9.5 percent increase Mamdani had put forward in February, the one Mamdani himself conceded would land hardest on homeowners in mostly Black neighborhoods.

He raised failing schools and asked nothing about what Kamar Samuels had actually produced.

He raised the exodus of Black New Yorkers and never asked which Black families would receive the first childcare seats.

He raised democratic socialism and then helped Mamdani peel the label off the ideology, suggesting Democrats lead with policy instead of terminology.

Then he called the campaign a model for 2026 and asked the mayor to teach other Democrats how to reach African American voters.

Somewhere in the middle, the interview stopped being journalism and became distribution.

❦

The Harvest

On the plantation the overseer did not own the land. He protected the arrangement. He kept the laborers moving, watched the field, enforced the pace and made certain the crop reached the owner before nightfall.

In this new field, Roland Martin warns American Blacks about the danger of leaving the Democratic plantation and never asks who now owns its machinery, who selects its candidates or who will collect the political harvest.

Keep voting. Keep organizing. Keep defending the party. Keep plowing as nightfall comes on.

This season the crop is being claimed by a movement that is overwhelmingly white, that draws its strength from young professionals in gentrifying districts, and that advances almost no American Black candidates while reaching back three decades to borrow David Dinkins.

I am not telling anyone how to vote. I am telling you to read the settlement before you sign it.

Ask what we own when the harvest is in. Ask whose name is on the deed. Ask whose children are reading, whose businesses opened this year, and whose grandchildren will inherit something more than a lease.

Sixty-two years is long enough to know the answer.

❦

DAHTRUTH

The Power We're Told We Don't Have

"Nothing ever comes to one that is worth having except as a result of hard work." Booker T. Washington

When I was eighteen years old I got my first car. I was determined to get my license and to own a vehicle, because I wanted to be different from my mother, who could not drive and never owned a car in her life. At eighteen I bought a Ford Mustang, a four speed, and I learned to drive a stick on that very car. That blue Mustang meant the world to me. In many ways it was the beginning of the rest of my life. It took me out of New Brunswick, north into New York, south to Philadelphia, down through Delaware and Maryland. It was the thing that set me free.

It was a Ford. Today you could not get me to drive a Ford if someone handed me the keys and the title for nothing. Somewhere between that blue Mustang and now, my aspirations changed, and I changed with them. I wanted a BMW. So did the people around me. The cars in our driveways went from Ford and Chevrolet and Cadillac to Lexus and Mercedes and BMW, and none of us called a meeting about it. We just moved our money.

That is the thread I want to pull this week. What our money does when we move it, and what it says about a power we are constantly told we do not have.

The Story They Tell About Us

There is a story the world tells about us, and I have heard it my whole life. It says American Black people are the poorest, the most dependent, the least consequential piece of the American economy. A community to be spoken about, marketed to, studied, but not a force. That story travels. You can hear a version of it abroad, where American Blacks are imagined as a permanent underclass with nothing to offer but struggle.

Look around the world and the story falls apart.

The buying power of Black Americans is estimated at more than two trillion dollars, and it has grown two and a half times over since the year 2000. That is not a rounding error in the American economy. It is larger than the entire economy of most nations on earth. And it is not passive money. Surveys of Black consumers find that more than two out of three of us will walk away from a brand that does not align with what we value. We are not only spenders. We are a community that spends with intention, and that is a different and more dangerous thing for any company that forgets it.

The culture tells the same story. Hip hop, born in the Bronx among Black American young people with nothing but genius and a turntable, is now a fifteen to sixteen billion dollar industry and the most consumed music on the planet, replicated everywhere from Seoul to Sao Paulo. Black American music is now counted among America’s leading cultural exports, a pillar of the country’s soft power abroad. Our beauty spending anchors a market that every major brand chases, nearly ten billion dollars in a single year on beauty alone. Our style sets the runways. Our movements for justice have crossed oceans and lit fires in London and Brazil and Australia.

So let me say plainly what the numbers say. The world runs, in no small part, on what Black America makes and what Black America buys. The power is not in question. What is in question is what we get back for it.

The Dollar Has Teeth

If anyone doubts that our dollar carries weight, look at what happened to Target.

In January of 2025, Target announced it was rolling back its diversity commitments, the programs meant to hire us, promote us, and stock the shelves with businesses built by us. The community answered the only way a community can. We stopped shopping there. And the retreat that Target thought would protect it did the opposite.

Target’s sales fell. In the first quarter of 2025 its net sales dropped to twenty three point eight billion dollars, down from twenty four point five billion the year before, missing every projection Wall Street had set. Its comparable sales fell close to four percent, with store sales down almost six. Foot traffic dropped month after month, as much as nine percent in a single month, while competitors who kept their commitments gained ground. And this is the part I want you to hold onto. Target’s own chief executive stood on an earnings call and named the backlash to the diversity rollback as one of the reasons the company was bleeding. He could not separate it cleanly from the tariffs and the cautious consumer. He only knew it was real.

That is the power we are told we do not have, showing its teeth in the plain language of a balance sheet. We closed our wallets and a corporation the size of Target felt it in its bones. So the question was never whether the Black dollar has power. The question, the one this whole essay is walking toward, is why an institution built on that same dollar returns so little of it to us.

Party With a Purpose

Which brings me to Essence.

For most of us the magazine faded from the coffee table long ago. What remained was the festival, held every July in New Orleans, the largest annual gathering of Black women and Black culture in the country. It draws as many as half a million people. It is our homecoming, our reunion, our marketplace, and it runs almost entirely on us. Our attendance. Our spending. Our music. Our culture. The festival calls itself the party with a purpose, and the purpose, we were told, was economic.

The dollars are not small. By the accounting of Essence’s own leadership, the festival has driven more than four billion dollars into New Orleans across three decades. A Dillard University study estimated that a single recent festival generated roughly three hundred forty five million dollars for the city in one weekend. For a Black woman selling body scrubs or edge control or lip color, Essence weekend is what one vendor called her Black Friday, the weekend she earns the capital she lives on all year. When we show up, an entire city runs at capacity. Hotels sell out months ahead. Restaurants fill. That is our money, our bodies, our culture, converting into somebody’s revenue in real time.

Now look at what came back to the community that generates all of it.

What Comes Back

Early in 2026, public records told a story that did not match the party.

Essence, through its parent company, owed the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans more than four hundred thousand dollars from the 2025 festival, over sixty percent of its charges for the convention center space, long past the thirty-day deadline to pay. A fifty-thousand-dollar payment brought it down, but the balance sat there past due. Reports also said local vendors were still waiting to be paid for their work on the festival, and cited a claim that one local production company was owed more than a million dollars, a figure the company’s owners dispute, so I hold it loosely. The convention center debt, though, is a matter of record.

Sit with the arithmetic. A festival that moves hundreds of millions of dollars, that has poured billions into one city over thirty years, that fills every hotel and restaurant downtown, could not, or would not, pay a four hundred-thousand-dollar bill to the very city that hosts it. And at the same time, Essence was going to the Louisiana legislature to ask for a larger public subsidy, taxpayer money, to help fund the next festival. The 2026 event was already set to receive at least one point seven million dollars in public money. It takes in our dollars by the hundreds of millions, asks the public for more, and leaves the local bill unpaid.

The Louisiana House Appropriations Committee chairman, Jack McFarland, said the obvious thing, that an event which does not pay its bills after receiving public funding has a problem, no matter which event it is. He was right, and he did not even need to be Black to see it.

The Debate We Started Having

The year 2025 was when many of us began to say out loud what we had been feeling. That an institution built by and for American Black women, the descendants of the slaves who built this country, had drifted from us. That the festival’s frame had widened toward a broader, pan African celebration, and that we were being moved to the edge of a room we built. The ownership itself sharpened the question. Essence passed in 2018 to Richelieu Dennis, a successful entrepreneur who is Liberian-born, an immigrant, not a descendant of American slavery. The Kenyan-born Caroline Wanga, who had previously served as Target’s chief diversity officer, was named to lead the company’s parent venture soon after.

I want to be precise, because there is a version of this conversation I will not join. Some of the loudest voices slid into open hostility toward African immigrants, and that is not my argument and I want no part of it. My argument is not about whether anyone is Black enough. It is about lineage, ownership, and accountability. It is about who an institution was built for, who owns it now, and who it answers to when the money is counted. When American dollars are gathered by the hundreds of millions and the local bills go unpaid, and when there is a sense that resources and orientation flow toward other shores while the community that fills the seats is treated as a given, those are fair questions to ask. They are questions about stewardship, not about anyone’s right to belong.

By 2026 that feeling had organized into a boycott. It drew on more than one grievance, a Louisiana voting rights ruling, the anger over Target still appearing as a sponsor, the complaint that the whole thing had gone too corporate, and the lineage grievance I am tracing here. I will be honest about what the boycott did and did not do. The festival did not collapse. It still drew crowds and still moved hundreds of millions of dollars. The full verdict on the boycott is not in, and I am not going to tell you a satisfying story that the numbers do not yet support. What I will tell you is that the boycott was a righteous instinct, the same instinct that made Target bleed, and that the deeper reckoning it points to is real whether or not one July weekend proves it.

What We Are Left With

I loved that blue Mustang. It carried me into my own life. And I walked away from Ford anyway, quietly, on my own schedule, certain my leaving would be felt. Sometimes it is felt. Ask Target. The lesson of Target is that our leaving is felt, powerfully, when we mean it and when we move together.

So here is the question I am left holding. If the Black American dollar is strong enough to bend a corporation the size of Target, strong enough to build a global culture the world imitates and monetizes, strong enough to pour four billion dollars into one city over thirty years, then what would it take to build an institution that answers to us, and only us? An institution that pays its own bills, in the community that fills its seats, because that community is not its afterthought but its owner?

I think we already know the answer, and I think we have been circling it for years without saying it. The answer is that we stop waiting for institutions built on our backs to finally turn around and reinvest in us, and we build our own. We keep the dollar. We keep the culture that dollar creates. We keep the reunion, the marketplace, the homecoming, and we hold the deed to it ourselves. The power was never the thing we lacked. We have been told we do not have it precisely because someone else has been living off of it. The task in front of us is not to prove the power exists. Target proved that. The task is to stop lending it out, and start building with it at home.

The Microphone Is Not the Truth

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows." — George Orwell, 1984

I can still remember the afternoon O.J. Simpson fled from police in his white Ford Bronco after the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman. Like millions of Americans, I sat glued to the television as helicopters followed the slow-moving chase across the California highways. I remember listening to the media replay his conversations with law enforcement and watching every new development unfold as though it had happened only yesterday.

At the time, the country was captivated by one question: Did O.J. Simpson commit the murders?

The media reported each new development as it became available, but it did not decide the case. That responsibility belonged to the courtroom. Over the months that followed, the prosecution presented its evidence, the defense challenged every assumption, witnesses were examined, experts testified, and the jury weighed it all before returning a verdict of not guilty.

Whether one believed O.J. Simpson was innocent or guilty, everyone was forced to grapple with the same body of evidence. The defense exposed weaknesses in the prosecution's case, raised questions the public had not previously considered, and reminded Americans that a criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt, not public outrage or media speculation. The verdict did not convince everyone, but it demonstrated something that now feels almost foreign: the evidence was allowed to develop before the country reached its conclusions.

That was a different era of journalism.

News traveled more slowly. Information passed through editors, producers, investigative reporters, and legal departments before it reached the public. There were certainly mistakes, biases, and sensational headlines, but there were also gatekeepers whose responsibility was to verify facts before broadcasting them to millions of viewers.

Today, that world has largely disappeared.

The media landscape has evolved into something far more chaotic. Every smartphone has become a television studio. Every social media account has become a publishing platform. Every podcast host has become a commentator, investigator, prosecutor, and jury all at once. Information no longer trickles into the public square after it has been examined. It floods our screens instantly, often before investigators have completed their work.

The result is a media environment that spreads like syrup poured from an overturned bottle, thick, sticky, and nearly impossible to contain. Once it begins flowing, separating truth from speculation becomes increasingly difficult.

History has always produced events that ignite public outrage. The Manson murders. The killing of Fred Hampton. The assassination of Charlie Kirk. Whether the hand belonged to a wicked man or to the state itself, each event set off the same reaction: enormous attention, endless discussion, and a rush of competing theories straining to explain what had happened before anyone had finished counting the evidence.

Or at least it used to.

Today we are witnessing something fundamentally different. The modern podcast has transformed speculation into a business model. The incentive is no longer to wait for evidence. The incentive is to be first, to be provocative, and to hold an audience's attention long before the facts have had an opportunity to speak.

Charlie Kirk's death may ultimately be remembered not only as a political assassination, but also as the moment America was forced to confront a troubling reality:

The microphone is no longer simply reporting the truth. For many, the microphone has become a substitute for it.

❦

To understand why Charlie Kirk's death has become such an important case study, we must first understand who Charlie Kirk was.

Charlie Kirk was the founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, one of the most influential conservative youth organizations in the country. An outspoken Christian and conservative commentator, Kirk spent years traveling to college and university campuses encouraging young Americans to engage in politics through a conservative lens. His speeches often centered on faith, limited government, constitutional principles, free markets, and personal responsibility.

He was also one of the most polarizing political figures of his generation.

His appearances regularly attracted hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of students. Some came to support him. Others came specifically to challenge him. Religion, race, immigration, gender, abortion, and American history became frequent points of contention between Kirk and the audiences who gathered to hear him speak.

Whether one agreed with Charlie Kirk or not, few could deny that he had become a significant voice within conservative politics.

That is precisely why his assassination immediately became national news.

Within hours of his death, social media had already begun constructing competing explanations of what had happened. Before investigators had completed their work, before the preliminary hearing had begun, and before a jury had heard a single witness, countless podcasters had already reached their conclusions.

Some would spend the following months attempting to convince millions of viewers that virtually every piece of evidence presented by investigators was either fabricated, manipulated, or misunderstood.

❦

To understand how those narratives spread, we must also understand the evolution of Candace Owens.

Candace Owens did not begin as the figure she is today. She first entered public life from the political left before rapidly reinventing herself as one of the most recognizable Black conservative voices in America. Long before the death of George Floyd, she had built a following by challenging the left's narratives surrounding race, Black Lives Matter, and high-profile cases such as the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

Her influence accelerated dramatically after the death of George Floyd.

At the time, I agreed with much of her criticism. I believed many media organizations and political activists had embraced a narrative that was driven more by emotion than by a complete examination of the available facts. George Floyd's death became a symbol around which an entire political movement was constructed, and Candace Owens became one of its most vocal critics.

From there, however, our paths began to diverge.

Owens became one of the most prominent Black voices within conservative media, by working alongside other conversations like Charlie Kirk at Turning Point USA and later joining The Daily Wire and alainging herself with the Ben Sharipiros, Matt Walsh and Tucker Carloson’s of the right.   Millions of Americans came to trust her willingness to challenge mainstream narratives.

Then came October 7. Her public disagreements over Israel created fractures within the very institutions that had elevated her career. Her relationship with major conservative organizations deteriorated, culminating in her highly publicized departure from The Daily Wire. Rather than disappearing, Owens returned with an independent platform reaching millions of viewers without the editorial oversight once provided by larger media organizations. It is here that I believe we begin to see the broader problem.

This essay is not about Candace Owens. She is simply one of the clearest examples of a much larger transformation taking place in American media.

❦

Half the Truth

One of the most effective forms of propaganda is not the complete fabrication of evidence. It is the presentation of only half of the evidence. The preliminary hearing for the man accused of killing Charlie Kirk offered a week's worth of examples, and it also offered a warning to anyone willing to watch the whole thing rather than a clip of it.

Consider the DNA testimony. A forensic examiner from the FBI laboratory in Quantico testified that the genetic material recovered from the rifle was at least one trillion times more likely to have come from Tyler Robinson than from any unrelated person. On the towel that wrapped the weapon, the profile was not split evenly between two men. Ninety-five percent belonged to Robinson and five percent to his roommate, Lance Twiggs. On the screwdriver, the split was eighty-nine to eleven. The combined figure the state offered for the towel and screwdriver was thirty quintillion times more likely if the two contributors were Robinson and Twiggs than if they were Twiggs and a stranger.

That is the testimony. Now here is what the clips kept.

The defense pressed the same analyst until she acknowledged that FBI policy forbids her from calling any DNA result an absolute identification, that she could not declare a zero-error rate, and that in strict terms Robinson could not be excluded as a possible contributor rather than named as the certain one. Every one of those statements is true. Every one of them is also standard. No competent forensic witness in any American courtroom is permitted to claim infallibility, because science does not deal in infallibility. The defense did its job. But a podcast that plays only the words could not be excluded and not infallible, while cutting the trillion and the quintillion, has not reported the hearing. It has edited it.

The same method reappears with the microphone. Candace Owens has spent months promoting all thypes of conspiritors.  She implicsyrf everyone to have been the murder from Israel (a nation) to  boys in caps with red shirts, to individuals that work for Turn Points USA and her most vicious implication being alledgely hurled at Erika Kirk herself.  She has theorized the weapon to be what has been called the exploding microphone theory, the claim that Kirk may not have been killed by a rifle shot at all but by a wireless microphone pack rigged to detonate against his neck. The technical version of the argument, advanced by Candace and another podcaster, Baron Colman, holds that the battery and magnetic clasp of the device were built into a shaped charge. Owens has pointed to enhanced images from the vehicle that carried Kirk away and asked her audience to look closer.

Investigators have not supported the theory. The court filings, the ballistics work, the autopsy fragments, and the recovered rifle all describe a single shot fired from distance. A body microphone is a small thing. It is also, apparently, large enough to hold an entire alternative reality, provided no one asks to see the rest of the footage.

This is the pattern, and the pattern is the point. Half the truth eventually becomes an entire lie. Not because the half that is spoken is false, but because the half that is withheld is the half that would have corrected it.

❦

The danger does not end with Charlie Kirk.

Once a personality with millions of followers advances a theory, hundreds of smaller podcasts repeat it. Those podcasts are then quoted by YouTube creators. Clips appear on TikTok. Facebook pages repost them. Soon, repetition itself becomes evidence.

Alex Jones demonstrated how conspiracy theories could survive on the fringes of American media. The podcast era has revealed something far more dangerous. Conspiracy theories no longer remain on the fringe. They have become mainstream entertainment.

❦

The question that remains in my mind is this: Where does this leave us?

How are ordinary Americans supposed to distinguish between fact and propaganda when, even after evidence has been presented, there are still people willing to sit before a camera, speak confidently into a microphone, and tell us not to believe what our own eyes are seeing?

The problem extends far beyond the question of whether Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk.

We now argue over whether biology itself is objective reality or merely personal opinion. We argue over whether a woman is defined by her chromosomes or by her declaration. We argue over whether video evidence can be dismissed whenever it becomes inconvenient. We argue over whether witnesses are automatically liars whenever their testimony contradicts our preferred narrative.

At some point, this is no longer skepticism. It is a rejection of objective truth.

A free society cannot function without a shared body of facts. Courts cannot administer justice if evidence matters only when it supports our preferred conclusion. Journalism cannot survive if edited clips become more persuasive than complete testimony. Democracy itself cannot endure if citizens lose the ability, or the willingness, to distinguish between evidence and entertainment.

Perhaps that is the greatest danger of the podcast era. It does not merely spread misinformation. It teaches us that no evidence is ever enough. That no institution deserves trust. That every inconvenient fact is part of a conspiracy.

Once that happens, truth no longer has to be disproven. It only has to be made doubtful. And when enough doubt has been manufactured, the person holding the microphone becomes more powerful than the evidence itself.

The microphone is not the truth. It never was. The question before us is whether we still possess the wisdom to know the difference.

The Real Trojan Horse

“But you, what grace you give your words, and what good sense within! You have told your story with all a singer’s skill.” — Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles

Long before social media, before podcasts, before YouTube reactions and viral hashtags, Hollywood had already learned how to tell a story.

One of the greatest examples is Gone with the Wind.

Released in 1939 with a production budget of approximately $4 million, the film became one of the greatest commercial successes in cinematic history. Generation after generation returned to theaters to experience the sweeping story of Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and a South transformed by the Civil War. People did not buy tickets because of a marketing controversy. They bought tickets because they wanted to experience the story.

I will not pretend the film was free of controversy of its own. Gone with the Wind romanticized the Old South and the institution of slavery, and Hattie McDaniel, who became the first Black performer ever to win an Academy Award for her role in it, was barred from attending the film's premiere in segregated Atlanta. The movie has been debated on those grounds ever since, and rightly so. Yet the controversy was not what filled the theaters. The storytelling was.

Storytelling was the advertisement.

Today, I wonder whether that has changed.

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey reportedly carried a production budget approaching $250 million, making it one of the most expensive films ever produced. Nolan, together with his wife and longtime producing partner Emma Thomas, has built a remarkable career through their production company, Syncopy, producing films such as Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, The Dark Knight, and the Academy Award-winning Oppenheimer. Few filmmakers enjoy the level of creative and financial control that Nolan and Thomas possess.

Yet as The Odyssey approached its release, I found myself hearing remarkably little about Homer.

Instead, I heard about the casting.

The conversation seemed to be everywhere. Social media debated the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy. Others focused on Elliot Page portraying the Greek soldier Sinon. Before I had watched a trailer, before I knew Nolan's vision for Homer's epic, before I had any appreciation for the scale of the production, I had already heard the controversy.

It caused me to wonder whether Hollywood has discovered something remarkably simple.

Controversy sells tickets.

Every article becomes free advertising.

Every podcast becomes another commercial.

Every reaction video becomes another trailer.

Every social media argument introduces the film to another potential audience.

Whether viewers purchase a ticket because they are excited or because they are offended matters very little once they have purchased the ticket.

Attention has become the product.

❦

As I thought about the controversy, I also found myself considering a larger question. Is every criticism of casting simply resistance to diversity?

I do not believe so. There are legitimate questions surrounding historical and cultural authenticity, and I say that as someone who has been on the wrong side of one of these arguments before.

The Little Mermaid provides an example I know firsthand.

When Disney cast Halle Bailey, a Black actress and singer, as Ariel in its 2023 live-action adaptation, the outrage arrived before the film did. A hashtag trended. I will be honest: I was pulled into it myself. I had opinions about the casting before I had seen a single frame.

Then I watched the movie.

It was lovely. Bailey was luminous in the role, and by the end I found myself asking a question I have not stopped asking since. Ariel is a fictional mermaid. She is not a historical figure rooted in a documented civilization. So why could a Black woman not play her? Reasonable people could disagree about the choice without a single line of the historical record being touched, because there was no historical record to touch.

The Odyssey is a different matter.

Helen of Troy is a legendary figure, not a documented historical person in the modern sense, yet she belongs to a literary tradition deeply rooted in ancient Greece. Homer distinguishes among Greeks, Trojans, Ethiopians, and numerous other peoples throughout his epics. These are not modern racial categories but rather differences of homeland, ancestry, kingdoms, and cultural identity. The world Homer presents is not culturally interchangeable, and that history is worth respecting.

I understand why some viewers questioned whether casting a dark-skinned Nigerian-born actress as Helen of Troy reflected the cultural world Homer created. At the same time, there is a real difference between asking thoughtful questions about historical authenticity and allowing outrage to define an entire film before anyone has seen it.

❦

After watching The Odyssey, I came away believing much of the public outrage was completely unwarranted.

Helen of Troy occupies such a small portion of the film that her casting hardly affects the overall experience. Months of debate suggested that Christopher Nolan had fundamentally reinvented Homer's epic around Helen's appearance. That simply is not the movie I watched.

The same proved true regarding Elliot Page's performance as Sinon.

Before the film's release, countless discussions centered upon Page portraying a male Greek soldier. Yet the role itself is remarkably brief. There was never any meaningful confusion about the character's identity within the story, and the performance occupies only a small portion of a three-hour film. By the character's later appearance, Sinon is so covered in dirt from battle that the actor is barely recognizable.

The controversy became far larger than the performances themselves.

That does not mean historical authenticity is irrelevant.

Ancient Greece possessed its own geography, ancestry, customs, mythology, and cultural identity. Those realities deserve respect whenever filmmakers adapt one of Western civilization's foundational literary works.

Still, after watching the film, I cannot honestly say these particular casting decisions damaged Christopher Nolan's interpretation of The Odyssey.

The conversation surrounding the movie was significantly larger than the issue itself.

❦

I also considered another comparison that many people raised.

What if a White actor portrayed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Or Malcolm X? Would the American Black community object?

Absolutely. And we would have every reason to do so.

Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and countless others were real people. Their identities as American Blacks were inseparable from their lives, their struggles, and the history they helped shape. Their appearance was not incidental to their story. It was part of their story.

Helen of Troy occupies a different category. She belongs to the realm of legendary history rather than documented modern history, and while the Greek cultural setting remains essential, the comparison is not entirely equivalent.

There is another sadness hidden within that discussion. There are relatively few major cinematic portrayals of American Black historical figures compared to the enormous body of Greek, Roman, medieval European, or biblical literature adapted by Hollywood over the decades. Too often our stories are reduced to slavery, civil rights, or a small handful of familiar names, while countless other lives remain unexplored.

Perhaps that is why casting conversations become so emotionally charged. Sometimes they are about far more than the character on the screen.

❦

Yet I continue returning to the same question. Was the controversy intentional?

I have no evidence that Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas, Universal Pictures, or anyone associated with the production deliberately manufactured the debate. We will likely never know what conversations occurred behind closed doors. Perhaps the controversy emerged naturally. Perhaps social media created it entirely on its own.

But I cannot ignore one simple fact.

I heard about the controversy before I heard about the movie.

That alone illustrates how dramatically Hollywood's relationship with marketing has changed. In another era, audiences discovered films through newspaper advertisements, television trailers, and word of mouth after opening weekend. Today, many films introduce themselves through outrage.

Whether that outrage is carefully planned or entirely organic almost becomes beside the point. It performs the same function. It captures attention, and attention fills theaters.

❦

If you are willing to spend nearly three hours in a theater, I believe The Odyssey is absolutely worth seeing. Christopher Nolan has crafted an ambitious adaptation filled with extraordinary landscapes, impressive performances, breathtaking cinematography, and a deep respect for the spirit of Homer's journey.

More importantly, the film reminded me of something I had nearly forgotten. Sometimes we should experience a story before allowing someone else to tell us what to think about it.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of The Odyssey. Not every online controversy deserves our outrage. Not every casting decision deserves months of debate. Sometimes the greatest journey is setting aside the noise long enough to encounter the story for ourselves.

Perhaps Hollywood has learned that controversy can sell a movie. I only hope audiences never forget that controversy should never become a substitute for watching the film itself.

The Pot of Gold at the End of Your Rainbow

“At the bottom of education, at the bottom of politics, even at the bottom of religion, there must be for our race economic independence.”
—Booker T. Washington

The builders, the beneficiaries, and the American Black inheritance

The America That Builds

When I was a girl, I loved the movie Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. I loved the color, the music, the courtship, and the picture it painted of people carving a life out of open country. Men and women met, married, raised barns, planted fields, and built a community out of little more than labor and will. It was a story about making something where nothing had been.

That image stayed with me because it described a certain kind of America, the America that builds. My own family belongs to that America, though our version of the story was never so tidy or so cheerful.

My maternal grandparents moved from sharecropping toward military service and homeownership. My paternal family emerged from slavery and helped establish County Line, Texas, a settlement of American Black families who bought land, raised churches, and buried their dead in soil they finally owned. They built a community with their hands. The generation that followed was met by drugs, poverty, welfare dependency, imprisonment, and homelessness, and much of what had been built was scattered. My generation has had to decide, deliberately, to recover the building tradition our ancestors handed us.

I begin here because everything I am about to say rests on a single conviction. America's wealth did not simply appear. People built it. That truth is the ground I stand on, and it is the truth I find increasingly absent from our political conversations. That building tradition is the inheritance I carry, and it shapes how I see nearly everything, including a conversation I had not long ago that has stayed with me since.

The Conversation That Brought the Question Back to Me

This week I had a conversation with an associate, and as we spoke I found myself thinking about the difference between an American perspective and the perspective of those who are now immigrating into this country. We were not debating. We were simply talking about the current political and economic condition of the United States. She was speaking from a set of assumptions she seemed to take for granted that I shared. As she talked, I realized we were looking at America from two different histories and two different ideas about who this country is responsible for and what government assistance is meant to accomplish.

She spoke about corporate layoffs, the rollback of diversity programs, the political climate, immigration enforcement, and the deaths surrounding recent immigration protests. I did not push back. I nodded along and let her believe I shared her sentiment, because I did not want the conversation to turn adversarial. Inwardly, though, I was noticing something. Much of what she said was not the fruit of examining outcomes. It was the familiar language that surrounds these subjects, repeated as though its conclusions were settled.

What troubled me was not that she supported these policies. It was that she seemed to repeat the approved language surrounding them without ever asking who actually benefited, and that she assumed, without a second thought, that I stood where she stood. Nowhere was that clearer than when the conversation turned to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to the reports that Black women were losing their jobs.

DEI: The Symbol and the Beneficiary

A story had been circulating since 2025 that roughly 300,000 Black women, most of them federal employees, had been fired as diversity programs were dismantled. My associate treated this as settled fact. It is not.

The figure comes from a decline in the total number of Black women recorded as employed across the entire economy during 2025, not from any count of federal termination notices. The losses were real and they were heavy. Drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the Institute for Women's Policy Research estimated that Black women lost roughly a quarter of a million jobs across much of that year. But that total counts private-sector and public-sector workers together, women who were laid off, women whose temporary positions ended, and women who left the labor force altogether. It is not a tally of federal workers fired, and it is not a tally of DEI positions eliminated. Federal reductions did fall on Black women with real severity, yet only about 5.1 percent of employed Black women work in federal jobs at all. The scale of the loss is not in question. What the talking point gets wrong is its cause. A quarter of a million Black women did not lose their jobs because diversity programs ended. They lost them across an entire economy, for reasons the single phrase DEI firings cannot hold.

It is also inaccurate to call those women DEI employees. Being a Black woman employed by the federal government does not mean she obtained her position through a diversity program, worked in a diversity office, or lost her job because such a program ended. Those are three separate claims, and the employment statistics establish none of them. To assume otherwise carries an insult buried inside it. It treats Black women's employment as evidence of DEI rather than as evidence of their education, training, and qualifications.

The deeper point is the one the numbers actually support. American Blacks became the public face of corporate diversity, but we were not consistently its principal beneficiaries.

Consider promotions into management. In 2024, for every 100 men promoted from entry level into their first management role, McKinsey and LeanIn.Org found that 99 Asian women were promoted, 89 white women, 65 Latinas, and 54 Black women. Black women held the lowest promotion rate among these groups. Their rate had actually fallen from 96 per 100 men in 2022 to 54 in both 2023 and 2024. (A more recent edition of the same study showed a modest uptick, to 60 per 100 men, still the lowest of any group.)

The picture at the top is similar. Women held 29 percent of C-suite positions, but women of color of all backgrounds combined held only 7 percent, while white women held 22 percent and white men still held 56 percent. Women of color made up 19 percent of entry-level employees and only 7 percent of the C-suite, meaning their numbers collapsed on the way up in a way white women's did not.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of roughly 13 million jobs at 250 large companies between 2020 and 2023 reached the same conclusion from another direction. After all the corporate promises that followed George Floyd's death, the demographic changes were modest. The gains among lower-level nonwhite managers were concentrated substantially among Asian employees. Only about one in twenty senior managers was Black in 2023, and white men continued to hold roughly half of senior-management positions.

One limitation matters for my argument. Neither the EEOC nor McKinsey distinguishes American descendants of slavery from Black immigrants. Their Black category combines American Blacks, African immigrants, and Caribbean immigrants together. Even the limited gains recorded for Black employees cannot automatically be credited to the American Black community.

So the story my associate accepted collapsed a series of distinctions. Black women became DEI hires. Federal reductions became DEI firings. The existence of DEI became proof that Black Americans had benefited from it. None of those conclusions follows from the facts. I did not say any of this to her. I let the moment pass. What the conversation exposed, at least to me, was the distance between representation and benefit. She was defending the symbol of DEI. I was quietly thinking about its actual results.

The Same Blindness in the Immigration Discussion

DEI was not the only subject that revealed the distance between us. When the conversation moved toward immigration enforcement, I noticed the same pattern, and again I kept it to myself. She could see the people publicly presented as the victims of government policy. She did not appear to see the American workers and communities also affected by illegal immigration. She had just spoken with real feeling about Black women losing their jobs, yet she did not connect that concern to the competition for jobs, housing, schools, healthcare, and public resources that American Black communities have been describing for years.

Immigration enforcement did not begin with Donald Trump. It operated under Democratic and Republican presidents alike. The moral emergency surrounding it grew far louder once Trump made illegal immigration central to his political identity. My point is not that any person's suffering is unimportant. My point is that public compassion has become selective, and that its selectivity consistently overlooks the same people.

A Case in Point: The Roof Over My Head

A case in point occurred recently when I had a new roof installed on my home. I am an American Black woman and a widow, and I was able to pay cash for a major repair. I mention that because American Blacks are so often portrayed as uniformly impoverished and dependent, incapable of participating in the economy as property owners. That portrait does not reflect the whole of our community.

When I began requesting estimates, every salesperson who came to my home was a white man. Not one American Black man appeared among them. These were the men who presented the products, arranged the financing, and represented the companies. Their complete lack of diversity was hard to miss.

On the morning of the installation, I woke to six or seven Hispanic men unloading materials across my front lawn. None of them appeared to speak English comfortably. A little later, a young white man, perhaps in his twenties, knocked on my door and introduced himself as the project manager. He was the overseer. He did not climb onto the roof, lay a shingle, or hang a gutter. From what I saw, he spent much of the day in or near his truck while the crew did the demanding work.

The company has asked me repeatedly for a review, and I have refused. I considered writing one that asked a single question. How can a company come to the home of an American Black woman, accept thousands of dollars from her, and operate without a single visible American Black worker as a salesman, manager, roofer, or tradesman?

One moment made the day more troubling still. While my grandson and I were looking into the backyard, one of the workers walked to the edge of my property and relieved himself near the fence, in plain view, without a meaningful effort to step out of sight. His conduct was disrespectful. It also made me think about the conditions under which these men may have been hired. His visible dental condition made me wonder whether the workers had access to adequate wages, healthcare, and benefits at all, and whether a company that advertises more than thirty years in business keeps its costs low and its profits up by leaving such things out.

I do not know whether any of them were in the country illegally. I do not know what they were paid or whether they received benefits. I cannot prove how they were recruited. What I could see was an arrangement in which white men sold and managed the service, Hispanic men performed all of the strenuous labor, and American Black workers were absent from the entire operation.

Companies have discovered that immigrant labor can hold labor costs down while the higher-paying sales and supervisory positions are preserved for others. Whether every worker is undocumented is not the only question. The larger question is that access to a workforce willing or compelled to accept lower wages reduces the incentive to recruit, train, and fairly pay American workers, including the American Black men who once found a path into the middle class through construction and the skilled trades.

We hear the argument constantly. Who will pick the crops, mow the lawns, clean the homes, care for the children, and install the roofs if immigration is restricted? American Blacks should listen closely to the assumption beneath that question. It treats an entire class of people as a permanent supply of cheap labor whose purpose is to make another group's comfort possible. The language has changed. Workers receive wages, but the expectation bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the arguments once used by southern whites to justify slavery. Rather than pay an American a decent wage, too many employers are content to pay an immigrant a much lower one. Once again, American Blacks appear in the language and disappear from the benefit.

The Pot of Gold and the Missing Taxpayer

That experience returned me to the conversation with my associate, because it exposed something larger than the practices of one roofing company. It exposed an assumption that increasingly governs our politics. America is spoken of as though its wealth exists apart from the people who work, build, save, buy homes, open businesses, and pay taxes within it.

America was once described as a melting pot. The image suggested that people arrived from different places, entered a shared national life, and contributed to what the country would become. Today, America is treated less like a melting pot and more like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. People see the abundance. They do not always consider who created it, who maintains it, or how quickly it can be emptied.

Government does not possess wealth separate from its people. It taxes what people earn, borrows against what future generations are expected to earn, and distributes what workers and businesses have produced. The treasury is not a magical source of abundance. It represents the labor, property, and future obligations of the American people.

There was another person missing from my associate's account of America, and that was the American taxpayer. When we contribute to the public treasury, most of us do not object to a safety net. We understand that families meet unemployment, illness, disability, widowhood, and low wages. We contribute because one day the system may have to help us, our children, or another American family unable to carry the whole burden alone. The system is not a private savings account. It is an intergenerational compact. One generation contributes while another needs help, and those who receive help often keep working and paying in, so that their children may become homeowners and taxpayers in turn.

That is what happened in my family. My grandparents worked, owned property, and paid into the systems under which they lived. Their children later needed some of those systems. My mother received welfare, food stamps, and housing assistance, but she was not a woman who refused to work. She worked two and three jobs at a time. Her wages were simply not enough to feed, house, and raise her children without help. The assistance supplemented her labor. It did not replace it. Her children did not remain dependent. We grew up, were educated, entered the workforce, bought homes, and paid taxes. One generation contributed, another needed help, and the next regained its footing and contributed again.

The question grows harder when government extends that compact to people who have only recently arrived, or who entered illegally and have not spent generations sustaining the institutions from which they may now draw. Defenders of the current arrangement say that newcomers contribute, that they work, pay sales taxes, and pay rent that supports property taxes. Some point out that they pay federal taxes too. What that argument leaves out is the other half of the ledger. A worker who files a federal return is often filing in order to receive money back, through refundable credits such as the child tax credit, which can return more to a household than it paid in federal income tax. It is also worth remembering how the compact is sometimes stretched. Many enter, have children on American soil, and draw on public programs through those citizen children, using resources meant for a child born here. Unauthorized immigrants themselves are generally barred from programs such as SNAP, though eligible citizen children in mixed-status households may receive benefits, and refugees and certain humanitarian entrants operate under different rules.

The more honest question concerns timing, scale, and obligation. How much can a state, a school district, a hospital system, or a housing market absorb before the people already sustaining it see their own services decline? The Congressional Budget Office examined the immigration surge that began in 2021 and found that in 2023 it produced about 10.1 billion dollars in additional state and local revenue, mostly from sales taxes, against about 19.3 billion dollars in additional direct spending, chiefly for public education, shelter, and border security. The result was a direct net cost of about 9.2 billion dollars to state and local governments in a single year. At the federal level, the CBO projected that higher revenues from the surge population would exceed higher mandatory spending over ten years, though that federal measure leaves out both discretionary spending and the local costs above, where the burden actually concentrates. The aggregate can look favorable in Washington while a particular working-class community experiences crowded classrooms, tighter housing, and fewer entry-level jobs.

Yet anyone who raises these concerns is told that America is wealthy enough to absorb everyone. America is discussed as though its prosperity were produced by some green giant who found a pot of gold and handed it to the government for safekeeping. The taxpayer disappears. The homeowner disappears. The laborer, the business owner, and the generations who built the schools and hospitals disappear. All that remains is the pot of gold and the insistence that everyone holds an equal claim to reach inside it. The pot was not filled by magic. It was filled by people, including families like mine, some of whom once needed help and kept working until their children could stand without it.

A Bridge, Not a Destination

That distinction between a bridge and a permanent destination was placed plainly before Congress in 2019. On June 19 of that year, the House Budget Committee held a hearing titled Poverty in America: Economic Realities of Struggling Families. Among the witnesses was Pastor LaTasha Fields, an American Black woman from Chicago, whose testimony reminded me of my mother's.

Fields did not pretend she had never received help. She was raised by her grandmother, a hardworking homeowner, in a poor Baton Rouge neighborhood, while her own mother struggled with drugs and moved in and out of prison. At seventeen, Fields became pregnant. She walked into a Planned Parenthood, was offered an abortion, and chose instead to keep her child, finish high school, and take responsibility for the life ahead of her. She graduated five months pregnant, kept working, and, at her grandmother's urging, went on food stamps and childcare assistance. She bought a three-bedroom home through a first-time homebuyer program at eighteen. After two years she removed herself from food stamps, though she stayed on childcare assistance while she worked and attended college. She became a licensed real estate agent, built nearly two decades of experience in the field, married, was ordained, and helped found a Christian homeschool academy. She later graduated from Trinity Christian College with a bachelor's degree in business administration and a 4.0 grade point average.

Fields never argued that government assistance should not exist. Her life demonstrated the opposite. Assistance helped her during a season when her own labor was not yet enough. What she rejected was the idea that assistance should become the permanent center of a life. She warned against families passing housing vouchers and welfare down like an inheritance, and she reminded the committee that Scripture calls us to leave our children an inheritance, not an entitlement. The system caught her. It did not become her identity.

Representative Ilhan Omar heard something different. She expressed frustration with witnesses who spoke of pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, noting that one of them had been able to finish college precisely because she received childcare assistance. Omar argued that government should more fully fund schools, healthcare, housing, and food for children, and described that provision as the moral course.

Omar was right about one thing. Fields had received help, and Fields had never denied it. That was not a contradiction in her testimony. That was the testimony. The disagreement between the two women was not whether poor families sometimes need assistance. It was what assistance is meant to accomplish. Fields described a system that held her up until she could stand on her own. Omar described government provision as a continuing expression of collective compassion. Fields measured success by what she eventually built. Omar measured moral responsibility by what government remained willing to provide.

One political philosophy measures success by how many people a program serves. The other measures success by how many people eventually no longer need it. That difference sits at the center of the argument America is having now. A nation can offer a hand without surrendering the expectation that people will one day use their own. It can feed a child without teaching that child that government is the source of all provision. The problem is not generosity. The problem is a philosophy that refuses to place any limit on generosity, refuses to ask whether its programs produce independence, and treats every mention of responsibility as an attack on the poor.

There is a sharper version of the contrast still. An American Black woman who does not ask for perpetual provision from a government that still owes her, as a descendant of slaves, stands in striking contrast to the Somali refugee who makes demands of a government that already gave her the chance at a decent life and is asked for more. The one with the deeper claim asks for less. The one with the newer claim asks for more. That inversion is worth sitting with.

The Political Opportunity Republicans Keep Missing

That difference between two philosophies is not merely a matter of private conviction. It becomes policy, and policy is written by parties. For sixty years, one party has claimed the loyalty of American Black communities while presiding over many of the very conditions it promised to end. If assistance is meant to be a bridge, then we are owed an honest accounting of where the bridge was supposed to lead, and why so many of our communities are still standing where they began.

The opportunity Republicans continue to miss is the damage that decades of Democratic policy have produced within American Black communities. For more than sixty years, Democrats have presented themselves as the guardians of Black progress. Yet in many of the cities where they have held the greatest power, American Black families remain surrounded by failing schools, persistent violence, low homeownership, dependency, and incarceration.

Our children are packed into school systems that too often fail to teach them to read, write, calculate, and compete. Many graduate from high school without the foundation needed to enter college, learn a trade, or build wealth. At the same time, those systems devote growing attention to social and political programming while the most basic obligations go unmet. Children who cannot yet read proficiently are introduced to complex debates about sex, gender, and identity before the schools have taught literacy, mathematics, history, and civics. That is abandonment dressed as enlightenment.

Our sons are overrepresented in prisons, and violence continues to consume neighborhoods that have absorbed decades of promises. The contradiction reaches into the language of life itself. Leaders proclaim that Black lives matter while encouraging American Black women to regard the lives within them as disposable, and then express confusion about declining birthrates and fractured families. A people cannot build a future while being taught that the creation of its future is a private inconvenience.

Many of these same cities now declare themselves sanctuaries for people who entered the country illegally, while the American Black citizens already there remain in failing schools, unsafe housing, and overcrowded neighborhoods. Rather than repairing the communities they were elected to serve, leaders expand the number of people competing for the same classrooms, clinics, jobs, and public resources. They add weight to structures that are already straining. Democratic policy keeps American Blacks reaching for a bootstrap while importing more hands to compete for the same strap. It offers subsidized apartments rather than ownership, benefits rather than businesses, and representation without measurable transformation.

That is the opening Republicans should recognize, but they must understand that repeating the words faith, family, and hard work will not be enough. Values have to be translated into policies that let people live by them. A party that believes in work should protect American wages and enforce immigration laws that keep employers from replacing citizens with cheaper labor. A party that believes in family should make housing, marriage, and homeownership more attainable. A party that believes in education should confront schools that pass children along without teaching them to read. A party that believes in law and order should reduce violence without treating every American Black citizen as a suspect. A party that believes in enterprise should make it easier for families to start businesses, enter the trades, obtain capital, and pass wealth to their children.

Republicans should offer pathways from public-housing dependency toward ownership. They should expand apprenticeships, vocational training, financial literacy, and first-time homeownership. They should protect the elderly, support veterans, and design assistance that restores independence rather than punishing people the moment they begin to earn more. They should also be willing to say plainly that the political arrangements governing many American Black communities since the 1960s have not produced what was promised. The schools have not improved and in many places are in steady decline. The wealth gap has not closed. Homeownership remains too low and violence too high.

Loyalty should be measured against results. No party is entitled to the permanent allegiance of a community it has failed to strengthen. Republicans can change the map only if they present themselves not merely as the opponents of Democrats, but as the party of rebuilding, and only if they can show that education leads to ownership, work leads to stability, and government can protect the vulnerable without keeping whole communities permanently vulnerable.

These are the things the associate did not even consider while we spoke. I am an American Black woman who believes this country is my home, and I want to see it grow, thrive, and sustain itself for our children. The associate I spoke with seemed to see this country as a pot of gold to draw from. She makes demands of the nation that I would never consider making, because she feels entitled enough as a first- or second-generation immigrant to do so.

The Story Beneath the Story

I began with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the film I loved as a girl. It was never lost on me that the story it told was a white American story. It was a polished account of men and women moving onto open land, building homes and forming families, colorful and musical and wonderfully uncomplicated. The American Black story could never be told that way.

Our story would not begin with wagons crossing a frontier. It would begin with a journey across a wide and violent sea, in the bottom of a great ship, with human beings chained side by side in a space where the air was filled with the stench of blood, sweat, and human waste. It would begin with names erased, languages silenced, families broken apart, and lives reduced to units of labor. We did not arrive seeking the American dream. We arrived as part of the labor on which portions of that dream would be built.

I have been reading The Count of Monte Cristo. There is a moment when Mercedes comes before the Count and calls him by the name he has tried to bury. Edmond. With that single name she reaches through the wealth, the disguise, and the years of vengeance to find the man who once vanished into the dark. Edmond Dantes had been betrayed, imprisoned, and stripped of his future. He entered the darkness an innocent man and came out of it carrying knowledge and power, but before he could step fully into the light he had to remember who he had been before the world tried to destroy him.

Something in that belongs to American Blacks. We were plunged into the belly of the darkness and were drawn back toward the light by a force we could scarcely understand. We came out of slavery and built communities before many of us could safely read. We opened schools when the law had forbidden us to learn. We bought land when violence was used to drive us from it. We built towns, businesses, benevolent societies, colleges, and newspapers, only to see some of them burned down brick by brick. We served in wars for a country that had not yet decided whether it would fully recognize us. County Line, Texas, is part of that emergence. My grandparents' movement from sharecropping toward homeownership is part of it. My mother working three jobs while relying for a time on housing assistance is part of it. My own generation's refusal to remain trapped is part of it.

That is why I reject the idea that American Blacks are merely one more interest group waiting in line before the government. We are not strangers who happened upon the pot of gold at the end of America's rainbow. Our labor helped fill it. Our suffering helped purchase it. Our taxes, our military service, our faith, and our endurance helped preserve it. Yet that history is increasingly overshadowed by movements that have little allegiance to it and little use for it, except when it can be borrowed to lend moral authority to their own claims. They invoke slavery and civil rights when those histories strengthen their cause. When American Blacks ask that our own unfinished claims be addressed, we are told to step aside for a broader coalition or a newer emergency.

Nothing in this nation came from nowhere. The schools, roads, hospitals, welfare systems, courts, and neighborhoods were built and funded by people. Some contributed through taxes, some through military service, and some through labor for which they were never properly paid. American Blacks contributed through all three. The question before us cannot be reduced to whether America should be generous. America has often been generous, and generosity has its place. The deeper question is whether a nation can keep giving when it no longer teaches people to build, contribute, and pass something forward, and whether compassion should require the descendants of those who helped create this country's wealth to accept displacement within it.

American Blacks do not need to be lectured about work. We have worked. We do not need to be lectured about patriotism. We have fought. We do not need to be lectured about building. We built while others were still debating whether we had the right to own what our hands had made. What we need is a political program that protects the communities our labor helped establish. We need schools that teach our children to read and reason. We need policies that make homeownership and business ownership possible. We need immigration laws that protect American wages. We need assistance that works as a bridge toward independence, safe streets, accountable government, strong families, care for our elderly, and honor for our veterans. Most of all, we need a nation willing to remember who helped build it.

Mercedes called the Count by his true name and forced him to face the man beneath the disguise. America must be called by its true name as well. It is not merely a pot of gold. It is an inheritance created through labor, sacrifice, suffering, faith, courage, and blood. American Blacks were not incidental to that inheritance. We were among its builders.

The Right to Have Rights

“The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.” Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting, Trump v. Barbara, June 30, 2026

Two Black Justices, One Amendment, and Whose Wrong It Was Written to Right

 On the Fourth of July, while the rest of us were thinking about cookouts and beach trips and the fireworks after dark, something else was hanging in the air. A decision had come down that seemed to deny our own history, and it drifted over the holiday like a scent you cannot place, faint at first and then everywhere, until it thickened into pure perplexity. Many of us were stunned by it. And as the Fourth approached and the flags went up on the porches, we found ourselves turning over the oldest question this country has ever forced on us. What does it actually mean to be an American? Two days before the fireworks, on June 30, the Supreme Court handed down Trump v. Barbara and struck down the president's order ending birthright citizenship. On July 3, a naturalized mayor stood at Washington's desk and told a room of new citizens they now hold the power to decide what America means. The holiday sat between the two like a hinge, and buried in that Court decision was a quarrel between the two Black justices on the bench, a quarrel that cuts closer to my people than anything said from any podium that weekend.

Let me state the ruling plainly, because it matters. The Court held, six to three, that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to nearly every child born on American soil, including the children of parents here unlawfully or only temporarily. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority. He rooted it in the old common law rule of jus soli, the right of the soil, and in the Amendment's repudiation of Dred Scott, the 1857 decision that had ruled people of African descent could hold no rights a white man was bound to respect. Roberts described citizenship as the right to have rights, the legal standing that lets a person take full part in the political community. On the constitutional question the Court split five to four, with Justice Kavanaugh agreeing only that the order broke a federal statute rather than the Constitution. Justice Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Gorsuch, in an opinion that ran ninety-one pages. Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch each filed dissents of their own.

The Amendment Was Ours First

Here is the thing the celebration will not say out loud. The Fourteenth Amendment was written for us. Not for everyone, first. For us. It was drafted by Reconstruction Republicans in 1868 for one overriding purpose, to make citizens of the freed slaves and their children and to bury Dred Scott so deep it could never rise again. The men who wrote it were answering a specific crime against a specific people, the people who had been born on this soil, held in bondage on this soil, and then told by the highest court in the land that the soil owed them nothing. The Amendment was the nation's confession and its restitution. It said, in effect, that the people this country had most brutally excluded were, and always had been, its own.

That is why Justice Thomas's dissent lands with me, whatever the wider politics of it. Thomas argued that the Citizenship Clause was built to secure the rights of the freed slaves, and that the majority had taken an amendment written to right one historic wrong and stretched it into a rule its authors never contemplated, a rule now serving political projects the Reconstruction Congress would not have recognized. He is right about the origin. The men of 1868 were not thinking about the global movement of peoples, about visitors and border crossings and the children of those who owe their allegiance elsewhere. They were thinking about Dred Scott. They were thinking about the auction block. They were thinking about us.

The Colorblind Contradiction

Now here is where it turns, and where the irony is almost too neat to believe. Justice Jackson, the first Black woman on the Court, wrote separately to answer Thomas, and she went straight for his own record. For years, she noted, Thomas has been the Court's great champion of a colorblind Constitution, the man who insists the government must never see race. Yet here he was, she wrote, suggesting the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure relating only to freed slaves such as Dred Scott and those who shared their characteristics. She called that a narrow vision that bears little relationship to the history of the Amendment's ratification. It was a clean shot. Thomas spent a career saying the Constitution is blind to color, and in this case he read a color into its most important clause.

I will grant Jackson the cleverness of the catch. It is a real tension in Thomas's thought, and she exposed it. But cleverness is not the same as being right, and on the thing that matters she is the one who misses. Because there is no contradiction in saying that an amendment can be born from the specific suffering of a specific people and still be written in principled language. The men of 1868 wrote for the freed slaves, and they wrote a clause that named the freed slaves nowhere, because they were legislators building a rule that would hold. To see the target of a law in its history is not to smuggle race into the Constitution. It is to read the Constitution honestly. Thomas is not betraying colorblindness by knowing whose wrong the Amendment was written to right. He is simply refusing to pretend he does not know.

The Insult in the Universal

What I cannot let pass is the deeper move in Jackson's reasoning, the one that should trouble every American descendant of slavery no matter how the case came out. To make the Amendment universal, she has to loosen its grip on us. She writes that the Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not, in her words, a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery. Read that again. The redress owed to my people, the specific answer to two hundred years of bondage and to the Court that said we could be owned, is the spot treatment she wants to rise above. She reaches past it toward a reset for the whole Nation, and in the reaching the freed slave stops being the reason for the Amendment and becomes merely the occasion of it. That is the polite erasure I keep meeting this week. It takes the thing that was built out of our specific agony and dissolves it into a principle for all comers, and it calls the dissolving progress.

She goes further, and this is the passage that should stop every one of us cold. She situates the whole Citizenship Clause in what she calls a Nation of immigrants, and she describes the freed Blacks as a people who came to freedom, in her phrasing, with little in the way of possessions or opportunity. I want to say this carefully and plainly. The slave did not come to freedom with little. The slave came to freedom having been the possession, the thing itself, the capital counted as three-fifths of a person for the enrichment of the man who owned him. To describe that condition in the vocabulary of a poor arrival, a matter of scarce belongings and thin opportunity, is to misunderstand it at the root. No immigrant, however brutal his passage, was ever bred as property, sold from his mother, or beaten into submission to the will of another man who held legal title to his body. We were not newcomers who started at the bottom. We were the foundation the ladder was bolted to. To fold us into a Nation of immigrants is not to honor us. It is to lose the one thing that makes our claim to this country unlike any other.

Justice Jackson anticipates this objection and tries to close it off. Thomas's reading, she writes, pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. She adds that the freed Blacks did not seek a unique set of rules catering only to their situation. I reject the charge, and I do it with respect for the history she is invoking. To say that the freed slave was not an immigrant is not to turn against the immigrant. It is simply to refuse to disappear. That our forebears chose not to exclude others, that they reached for a language wide enough to hold everyone, is a mark of their greatness, not a permission slip to erase them. Choosing not to build a wall around your own suffering is not the same as consenting to have that suffering dissolved into everyone else's. I can hold the door open for the newcomer and still insist that the house was built on ground my people were buried in. Honoring the arrival does not require dissolving the descendant. The framers wrote in the language of all men because they had decided, at long and bloody last, that we were included in the word, not because they were quietly drafting an immigration policy for a century they could not see. To read their universal language as a reason to forget whose wrong it corrected is to get the whole thing exactly backward.

What the Founders Could Not See

None of this means Thomas's reading answers every question, and I will not pretend it does. The framers of 1868, like the founders before them, wrote for the world they knew. They could not see the shape of things now, the vast movement of peoples across borders, the arrival of millions who would seek in this country not land to build on but a system to draw from. When the earlier founders spoke of invasion, they were imagining armies, not maternity wards. The Reconstruction Congress was not sitting in judgment on birth tourism or unlawful entry. They had one wrong in front of them and they meant to right it. Whatever the Amendment has since been made to cover, its authors' eyes were fixed on the freedman, not on a future none of them could have charted.

So the honest conclusion is the one that respects both the origin and the limit. The Amendment was written for the freed slaves, and it was written in words that a later Court has read broadly. If the country now believes those words reach too far, the remedy is not to pretend the words were always narrow, and it is not for a president to erase them with a pen. The remedy the Constitution offers is Congress, and beyond Congress the amendment process, the same deliberate machinery that produced the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place. Justice Kavanaugh said as much, that the people's representatives could act where the Court would not. That is the lawful road. Anything else asks the judiciary to invent a history that did not happen.

Whose Fourth, Whose Amendment

This is why the timing struck me so hard. In one weekend the nation asked its question twice, from the bench and from the desk, and both times my people were spoken about rather than spoken to. The Court fought over an amendment born from our bondage, and the one Black justice who read it as ours was accused of betraying his own principles by the other. The mayor built a nation out of arrivals and folded our story in among them. In both rooms the American descendant of slavery was the material and never the authority, the reason invoked and the people overlooked. We are forever the case study and never the constituency.

I hold the same thing I held about the mayor, and I hold it about the Court. The Fourteenth Amendment is the closest thing this country ever wrote to an apology to my people, and I will not watch it be turned into a generic welcome mat while the people it was written for are told our specific history is a narrowness to be transcended. Read it broadly if the law requires, amend it if the country dares, but do not tell me it was never really about us. It was always about us. It was written in the language of all men precisely because the men who wrote it had finally decided that we were included in that word. That was the whole point. That was the right being restored, the right to have rights, and it was restored first to the people who had been denied it longest, on the soil that had been worked by their hands, in the only country any of us have ever called home.

The Anthem Was Already Ours

“I do not despair of this country.” — Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852

What the Fourth of July Means to a People Who Were Here Before the Statue

On January 27, 1991, ten days into the Gulf War, a woman from Newark, New Jersey stood in the center of Tampa Stadium and sang the national anthem so completely that the country has never fully let go of it. Whitney Houston, backed by the Florida Orchestra, took a song written in awkward meter and turned it into the definitive American performance of the American song. The recording charted in the Top 20. When the towers fell ten years later, the nation reached for that same recording again, and the proceeds went to the police and firefighters of New York. Twice, in its two moments of deepest fear, America wanted the sound of a Black woman from Jersey telling it who it was.

I remember that January. I had graduated from high school five years earlier, and I was a single mother trying to find my footing and my place in a world that had not made room for me. There was talk of war in the Gulf, of Desert Storm, of young Americans shipping out to a desert most of us could not have found on a map. Then Whitney sang, and something in me settled that had never settled before. That performance was the first time I felt an allegiance to this nation as a fact about myself, the first time I understood that I was an American. Not tied to a place called Africa that I had never seen and that had never known my name, but tied to this place, this hard and beautiful country, this America even with all its flaws. My life was changing drastically in those years, and that song showed me exactly where in the world I was rooted.

I raise Whitney first because she settles a question before it is even asked. Whitney Houston did not sing the anthem from the window of an arriving plane. She sang it from inside. Her people did not see the Statue of Liberty and decide to begin anew. Her people were here before the statue was cast, before the harbor had a name in English, before there was an anthem to sing. When she reached the line about whether that banner yet waves, she sang a question as though it were an answer, because for American Black people the answer was purchased in a currency no immigrant has ever been asked to pay. That is the claim to this nation that no arrival story can match, and it is the claim that was quietly written out of a speech delivered this same week.

A Speech at Washington's Desk

On July 3, on the eve of the country's 250th birthday, Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, delivered a major address from City Hall. He sat behind a desk once used by George Washington. He was flanked by men and women who had recently become citizens. He spoke hours before the president gave his own address, and he framed the day as a contest over what America means. Some would argue that being fair to the speech means admitting he did not simply recite every grievance ever leveled against this country. It was, in its own register, a patriotic speech, delivered by a first generation immigrant, a foreigner who now proclaims America as home. Mamdani praised the founding ideals. He called the country exceptional. He described patriotism as an act of love expressed through dissent rather than through silence. Yet listen closely and the language he used could be spoken of any nation by any newcomer critiquing what does not belong to him but which he means to change and to commandeer. Mamdani wants the guarded reader to lower the guard and admire the picture without noticing that it is a carbon copy.

He shaped his own story as the American dream. He came to this country from Uganda at the age of seven. He recalled seeing the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane that carried his family here, and seeing in it the promise of America. He is himself a naturalized citizen, and he said the topic lives close to him. Then he turned to the others standing beside him, the newly naturalized, and told them they now hold a special power, the power to determine what America means. That is the sentence I want to sit with, because it is too generous, and for my people and other legacy Americans it is, without question, false.

He reached for a tool that Frederick Douglass once wielded, the Fourth of July oration that turns and points its finger at America. But the difference is the whole matter. Douglass pointed that finger on behalf of slaves born on this soil, the jus soli people of this American land, who had no rights though they had bled for this nation, who had lived and died right here on this ground. Mamdani takes up the same tool to speak for people who share none of that history, whose only claim to America was learning the answers to a hundred questions on a citizenship test. Douglass demanded that America keep a promise it had already made to its own. Mamdani hands the newly arrived the authority to decide what America should become. Those are not the same act, and no borrowed cadence can make them the same.

An Old Creed in Borrowed Clothes

Here is where the picture and the policy part ways. A man may love a country and still misunderstand what made it, and a man may praise the founding while building on a foundation the founders never laid. The words of Mamdani's speech reach back to 1776. The governing beneath the words reaches somewhere else entirely. To see it, you have to stop listening to the melody and read the sheet music.

Mamdani speaks the language of the founding, the Declaration, the pursuit of happiness, the ideals enshrined in 1776, but he pours a different content into those words. He is a democratic socialist, and he governs as one. His signature promises, the rent freeze, the price controls, the machinery of a city that decides how much a person is permitted to keep, all rest on a premise the founders would not have recognized as freedom. The premise is that your wealth is a public matter, that what you build belongs first to the collective and only second to you, and that a just society is one that reaches into the marketplace to level the outcome. That is not the American creed. That is a rival creed wearing the American one as a costume.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not decorative phrases. They describe a specific idea of the human person as free to labor, to acquire, to rise, and to keep what that rising earns. I am not claiming the founders built a nation of pure self-interest with no common structures. They built roads and schools and a public square, and every generation since has added to that common inheritance. The question is not whether America has guardrails. The question is which comes first. The founding put the striving person first and made the shared structures the assist, the brace that helps a free man stand and climb. Socialism inverts that order. It makes the collective the engine and the person the residual, the one who receives whatever is left after society has leveled the outcome. That inversion is the whole quarrel. A nation built on self-perseverance, aided by some social supports, is not the same nation as one built on social control, tolerating some private effort. Mamdani is selling the second and calling it the first.

The pursuit of happiness assumes that the fruit of the pursuit is yours. All of it, and not the government's to ration when it decides one person has made too much or holds too much or keeps too much. Take away the freedom to obtain unequal things and you have not perfected liberty, you have canceled it, because you have made the government the arbiter of how far any one person may climb. A creed that caps the climb in the name of fairness runs directly against the grain of the document Mamdani stood on. He can quote the Declaration all he likes. The policy he builds beneath the quotation would have been foreign and alarming to the men who wrote it, and it should be to us.

There is a deeper sleight of hand in the speech, and it lives in the way it sorts Americans. Mamdani divides the nation into two camps, the welcomed many and the guilty powerful, the oligarchs and the ones they oppress. It is a tidy division and it is a false one, because it quietly codes the people who built this country, the founding stock, white and Black alike, as the weight the nation must be freed from rather than the foundation it was raised on. A politics that makes your standing conditional on which side of that ledger you land is not a politics of belonging. It is a politics of suspicion. It asks you to earn your place in America by joining a grievance, and that is a stranger's idea of this country, not an heir's.

Who Gets to Define the Fourth

There is a reason this stings on the Fourth of July in particular. Frederick Douglass asked the question a century and a half ago and it has never been answered, only postponed. What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July. The holiday celebrates a freedom that my people were promised in the abstract and denied in the flesh for almost another century, and then denied again in practice for another century after that. When I celebrate this day, I do not celebrate an arrival. I celebrate a bill that was finally, partially, paid to a people who had already earned it many times over. That is a different Fourth than the one Mamdani offered, and it cannot be dissolved into an immigrant's gratitude without erasing exactly what makes it ours.

Look again at the picture he made. A man sits at George Washington's desk and surrounds himself with the newly naturalized, and he builds his whole America out of arrival, the pogrom, the famine, the crossing, the harbor. He even reaches for our history when he needs it, naming Weeksville and the Great Migration to give his speech the ring of the authentic American struggle. Yet the peoples with the oldest and deepest claim to that desk, the descendants of the founders and the descendants of the slaves who built the house the desk sits in, are not the face he chose to stand beside. He borrows our story and excludes our standing. He needs Weeksville to sound American, but the children of Weeksville are not who he seats at the center. That is the hypocrisy of the whole performance. It mines the American Black story for its moral weight while treating the American Black present as one more color to be folded into someone else's coalition.

I hold no hatred toward the immigrant. The family fleeing the pogrom, the family fleeing hunger, these are real sufferings and this country was right to become a home to them, lawfully and in the light. What I find telling is that Mamdani does not even represent the fleeing and the persecuted he invokes, for by his own account he did not wash up on a shore in desperation. He flew in. My quarrel is not with those who come here legally, nor with those who seek genuine refuge or asylum. My quarrel is with a movement that uses the moral weight of the Black American story to sell a creed that answers to no part of the American tradition and to no part of the American Black community. They borrow the cadence of the civil rights movement to advance a politics our grandmothers never marched for. The Black vote is courted every season and the Black community is governed for last.

There is one more absence worth naming. Mamdani built a litany of the persecuted, the Puritan and the Quaker, the Sikh and the Muslim and the Jew, all banished, he said, for praying the wrong way. It is a generous list, and it flattens something it should not. For the American Black people he borrows from, Christianity was never one more minority faith standing in line to be tolerated. It was the measuring rod we held against the nation itself. When Frederick Douglass indicted this country on that Fourth of July in 1852, he did not do it in spite of the Bible. He did it in the name of the Bible, charging that slavery had branded the nation's Christianity a lie and daring to denounce the sin in the name of the constitution and the Scripture both. He measured America against a Christian standard and found it wanting. A century later Martin Luther King did the same from a Baptist pulpit. The Black church was the engine room of every freedom we ever pried loose from this country. To fold that faith into a list of persecuted minorities is to miss that it was, for us, the very language in which we demanded America keep its word.

What the Anthem Answers

This is where I return to Whitney, because she answers the whole argument without saying a word of it. A people who were told they were anything but exceptional produced the most exceptional rendering of the nation's own anthem, and the nation knew it, and reached for it in war and reached for it again in mourning. That is not the posture of a guest. That is the posture of an owner. We do not need a newcomer, however sincere, to grant us the power to determine what America means. We have been determining what America means since before there was an anthem to sing, in the fields and the churches and the movements and the music, and the country has borrowed our definition every time it needed to remember its own better self.

That is also why it makes me cringe to hear people speak of September 11 as something this country had coming, as though the murder of thousands were a debt collected. They are talking about my nation when they say it. The same recording that first tied me to this country in a time of war was reissued after those towers came down, and its proceeds went to the widows of New York's firefighters and police. I loved this nation before that day and I loved it after, not because I believe it is innocent, but because loving a thing has never required pretending it is perfect. My people have loved this country through worse than it has ever shown a newcomer, and we have never once mistaken that love for approval. We hold it to account precisely because it is ours.

So let this be the indictment and the reclaiming both. The indictment is plain. Do not drape a creed that is foreign to this country in the language of its founding, and do not use our struggle as the moral currency for it. We did not bleed for a rent board. We bled for the plain words of the Declaration to be made true for us, the freedom to labor and to rise and to keep what the rising earns, the very freedom a leveling ideology would take back in the name of fairness. Do not borrow our story and exclude our standing. The reclaiming is simpler still. The Fourth of July belongs to us in a way it can belong to no one who came after, because we are the measure of whether its promise was ever true. Every generation of American Black people has held this nation to the words it wrote and refused to honor, and in doing so we have been the most patriotic people this country has ever produced, not because we pretended it had no flaws, but because we loved it enough to demand that it become what it swore it already was.

Whitney sang the question and answered it in the same breath. The banner yet waves. It waves in no small part because a people who were owned by this country decided to love it into keeping its word. That is our Fourth. No one at Washington's desk gets to give it to us, and no one gets to take it away, least of all Mamdani and his band of first generation immigrant socialists.

The Sweep That Wasn’t

“By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”
— James Madison, Federalist No. 10

What the New York Primaries Actually Tell Us

Primary season is upon us, and June is one of the bigger months when it comes to primary elections. I would be remiss if I did not stop to discuss what happened in New York City last week. It has left the Democratic Party in shambles, and the division between the centrist wing and the left-leaning socialist wing is growing wider by the day.

The headlines wrote themselves. A socialist sweep. A political earthquake. A movement on the march. Three candidates endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani won their Democratic primaries on the same night, two of them unseating sitting members of Congress, and the coverage treated it as the leading edge of a national wave. Yet when you look past the headline and into the body of the very same articles, a different and far less dramatic story is sitting there in plain sight. The socialist issue is not what it seems.

❦

Here is what actually happened. Brad Lander defeated Representative Dan Goldman in the 10th District. Claire Valdez won the open 7th District seat to replace the retiring Nydia Velazquez. Darializa Avila Chevalier narrowly unseated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District. Two of the three are members of the Democratic Socialists of America. The third, Lander, is not a DSA member at all, only a progressive who carried their endorsement. So even the number at the center of the story, three socialists, is loose before we begin.

All three districts are among the most Democratic in the nation. The 13th alone carries a Cook Partisan Voter Index of D plus 32, which makes it the eleventh most Democratic district in the entire country. These are not battlegrounds. They are fortresses. When a democratic socialist wins the eleventh bluest seat in America, that tells us about the seat far more than it tells us about the country. These victories happened precisely where the electorate was most primed to deliver them, and nowhere else.

❦

The deeper tell is in who actually cast the votes. In the 13th District, a June poll measured the race by race. Espaillat led among Black voters by fifteen points and among Latino voters by twelve. Chevalier led among white voters. The district she now represents stretches across Harlem and the Bronx and is majority Black and Latino, yet her strength was concentrated among the white, affluent, university-adjacent minority of that district. The neighborhood data tells the same story. The gentrified precincts around Columbia broke heavily for the Mamdani coalition, while the older Dominican and working-class corridors held for Espaillat. Chevalier carried Manhattan by several thousand votes and won the whole race by fewer than four points.

This is not a Republican talking point. It is an argument coming from inside the Democratic coalition. Black community leaders in Harlem described the movement as a gentrifying force. Espaillat himself charged that his opponent’s base was made up of transplant gentrifiers who drive up the rent. A Black empowerment fund spent heavily in the final week to reach Black voters with the warning. When the party’s own figures are making the gentrification argument, it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away.

Letitia James, the state attorney general who prosecuted Donald Trump, put it bluntly to CNN. She said the Mamdani-backed candidates do not understand the politics of New York City or the cultural differences from district to district, and that they have not been part of the history and the struggle of the very districts they will now represent. When the most prominent Black Democrat in the state describes the winners as strangers to their own districts, the claim that this was a working-class uprising collapses under its own weight.

❦

If you want proof that this was about a particular kind of district rather than a rising tide, look at the race the headlines skipped. In the South Bronx, Representative Ritchie Torres, an outspoken supporter of Israel and a candidate amply funded by AIPAC, faced a challenger who attacked him hard from the left on exactly the issues the movement claims are winning everywhere. Torres won by fifty points. Same city. Same week. Same set of issues. In the district that actually looks like the working-class, Black and Latino coalition the movement says it speaks for, the socialist lane did not just lose. It was buried.

Even Hakeem Jeffries, the House Democratic leader, explained the split this way. The socialist wins, he noted, came in the higher-income districts where wealthier voters took an outsized interest in Middle East policy. Where the district was working-class, the establishment held, and held overwhelmingly. Jeffries lost the marquee races he personally backed, Goldman and Espaillat both fell, and he is now downplaying the result. Yet his own explanation gives the game away. What looked like ideological momentum tracked the income map of the city almost precisely. The dividing line was demographics.

❦

This is where the media earned a share of the blame. The same outlets that led with earthquake and sweep buried, in their own reporting, the three facts that drain those words of meaning. These districts were always going to vote Democratic. The winners only carried the same neighborhoods Mamdani had already won a year earlier. The coalition was younger, whiter, more affluent, and more credentialed than the working class the movement invokes. One outlet watching the precinct data described the coalition as less blue-collar than boardroom-adjacent, young professionals with graduate degrees who arrived in Harlem after the rent went up. The headline wrote a wave. The body of the article wrote a puddle. The endorsement of one charismatic mayor made for a better story than the truth, which is that affluent enclaves voted the way affluent enclaves were always going to vote.

❦

The more revealing story arrived two days later, and it had nothing to do with ballots. It had to do with power, and what this movement does once it holds power. On the heels of the primary victories, the Rent Guidelines Board that Mamdani controls voted to freeze the rent on roughly one million rent-stabilized apartments, the first freeze on two-year leases in the board’s history. He had appointed six of its nine members. The vote was a foregone conclusion. The mayor called it a historic victory for working people, and the rooms full of advocates cheered. Yet here, too, the slogan and the substance do not match.

Consider who a universal, across-the-board freeze actually rewards. There are no income limits on who may live in a rent-stabilized apartment. It is common for comfortable, higher-income tenants to hold these units, a fact so well known that during the last mayoral race Andrew Cuomo called on Mamdani himself, then earning just under one hundred fifty thousand dollars, to give up his own rent-stabilized apartment so it could go to someone who needed it more. A freeze with no means test hands the same benefit to the struggling family and to the established professional who simply got lucky on a lease. The relief flows by address, not by need.

Now consider whom it leaves out. The poorest New Yorkers are not in this system at all. They are in public housing, in shelters, or in the unregulated market where the freeze does not reach. In the very week the freeze passed, tenants of a Mitchell-Lama property in the Bronx faced a rent increase of thirty-one percent. The freeze did nothing for them. It was never built to.

Worse still is what the freeze may do to the poorest tenants it claims to protect. A member of the Rent Guidelines Board, an economist who sits on the very panel that passed it, warned that the stabilized housing stock is not one thing but two. The newer and mixed buildings, where market-rate units cross-subsidize the regulated ones, absorb a freeze without much harm. The distress falls entirely on the older, pre-1974 buildings that are almost entirely stabilized, concentrated in the Bronx, Upper Manhattan, and central Brooklyn. There, costs keep climbing while revenue is frozen, and the only thing left to cut is maintenance, until the buildings decay toward vacancy and foreclosure. That is precisely where the poorest tenants live. The freeze comforts the secure tenant in a healthy building and quietly endangers the vulnerable tenant in a failing one.

❦

So this is the shape of the thing. A handful of victories in the safest, wealthiest, most credentialed corners of the bluest city in America, sold as a national working-class movement. A coalition that the party’s own leaders describe as affluent and disconnected, dressed as the voice of the poor. A signature policy that photographs as relief for working people while its benefits drift upward to the comfortable and its harms settle downward onto the very buildings the poor depend on.

I do not doubt the energy of this movement, nor its sincerity in its own mind. What I doubt is the story being told about it. The numbers describe a mirror held up to a few affluent neighborhoods and little more. The policy follows the same pattern. It carries the banner of the poor while serving, again and again, the comfortable class that actually turns out to vote for it.

The question every American Black community in this city should ask is simple. When the slogans fade and the cheering stops, who is left holding relief, and who is left holding the bill?

Temporary Means Temporary

“The Due Process Clause protects rights, not privileges.” - Justice Clarance Thomas

American Blacks, Haiti, and the Line We Refuse to Surrender

June is ending, indeed, with an unspoken war being waged against the American Black community and those of African descent in the diaspora. Once again, the possession of one thing among American Blacks, descendants of American slaves, has sparked animosity. This time, that animosity came after a single decision by the Supreme Court. Once again, the American Black community has been accused of abandoning its heritage, forgetting its loyalty to African roots, embracing Western values, and turning its back on our sisters and brothers from Haiti.

This has been a week of division in the global Black community. I say global because the spillover was not limited to American Blacks. The divide was fierce. Like an earthquake, it split American Blacks from Blacks throughout the diaspora, from Nigeria to Haiti. We were looked at as though we had created a crisis among nations simply because many of us agreed, as citizens of one nation, that we are not obligated to fight Haiti's battle.

It is not merely that we are not obligated. It is also that many of us do not want to fight this battle. Many of us agree with the Supreme Court that Temporary Protected Status means exactly what it says. It is temporary. There comes a moment when temporary must come to an end.

❦

All of this unfolded because of two decisions handed down by the Supreme Court on the same day. The first, Mullin v. Doe, addressed the Temporary Protected Status claims of Haitians and Syrians who sued the administration after former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked their status. The plaintiffs argued that the decision was unlawful and, in the case of the Haitian plaintiffs, that it was infected by racial animus. The case reached the Court by a 6 to 3 vote, with Justice Samuel Alito writing for the majority and Justice Elena Kagan writing in dissent.

The heart of the majority opinion was not a grand pronouncement about race. It was a question of who gets to decide. The TPS statute contains a provision that bars judicial review of the Secretary's determinations with respect to the designation, termination, or extension of protected status. Justice Alito concluded that this language is clear and its meaning broad. Under that bar, the courts could not review the procedural challenges brought against the Secretary. Congress gave that authority to the executive branch, and the judiciary was not free to take it back.

On the constitutional claim, the majority did not declare that race could never matter. The Court assumed, for the sake of argument, that the stricter standard of review applied, and still concluded that the Haitian plaintiffs were unlikely to prove that race was a motivating factor in the decision. The reason was striking. The plaintiffs themselves offered a race-neutral explanation. The administration had terminated every TPS designation that came up for review, thirteen in all, spanning nations across Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. To the majority, that record pointed to a policy position against the program as it had been implemented, not to a campaign against any single people.

Justice Kagan saw the matter differently. Her dissent treated the President's statements, the timing, and the human consequences as enough to keep the lower courts' orders in place while the litigation continued. The stories she told were sad. They were human. They were moving. Hardship alone, however, does not prove that the Secretary violated the Constitution, nor does it transform a temporary status into a permanent entitlement by judicial decree.

This  matters because TPS is not granted simply because a nation is poor, violent, or broken. It is granted because of a specific and temporary condition: an earthquake, an armed conflict, an environmental disaster. Haiti received protection after the 2010 earthquake. Syria received it because of the war and repression under Assad. When the triggering condition changes, or no longer carries the same legal basis, the statute gives the Secretary the authority to determine whether that protection should continue. That is not cruelty. That is the design of the law.

❦

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined the majority in full, wrote separately to make a sharper point, and it is the one that speaks most directly to the argument now being forced upon American Blacks. Thomas drew the old and unfashionable line between a right and a privilege. The Constitution protects rights. It does not convert every government benefit into one. Temporary Protected Status, like any immigration status extended to an alien, is a privilege granted by the nation, not a core private right that exists independent of the government's will.

That distinction carries more weight than the noise around it. To live in America as an alien is not, by itself, a constitutional entitlement. The nation may extend protection, and the nation may withdraw it when the temporary condition that justified it has passed. Due process guards life, liberty, and property. It does not guarantee the permanence of a humanitarian program that Congress built to be temporary from the start. Nor does it require American Blacks who reason from the Constitution to treat the end of a privilege as though it were the theft of a right. I should note that Thomas wrote this for himself, in concurrence, and not for the Court. Yet the principle is sound, and it is honest.

❦

The same day, in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, the Court took up a second question that bears directly on this debate. Federal law permits a person to seek asylum if they are physically present in the United States or if they arrive in the United States. The question was what it means to arrive. The Court held that a person standing in Mexico has not arrived. Such a person has not yet set foot on American soil, and the statute does not entitle them to apply for asylum or require an officer to inspect them. Justice Alito, writing again for the majority, was careful to say that the wisdom of the policy was not the Court's concern. The Court decided only what the words mean. A person arrives when they cross the line, not before.

There is an irony worth naming. The practice at issue, known as metering, was not born in this administration. It was first used under President Obama, and it was first used against Haitians arriving at the California border from Tijuana. The policy now denounced as cruelty toward one group was first deployed by the very side that claims to defend them. We believe, as the Court now affirms, that asylum requires presence. There must be a legal line. There must be a border. There must be a process. A person cannot declare asylum from the road, from another country, or while still on the path toward the United States.

❦

After the TPS decision, Dr. Geralde Gabeau, a prominent Haitian-American advocate and founder of the Boston-based Immigrant Family Services Institute, spoke at a press conference in Massachusetts. She rallied the crowd and declared that this country is also the country of immigrants, because immigrants helped build it. American Blacks, whose legacy descends from the slaves who built this nation without citizenship, wages, protection, or inheritance, took rapid offense to those remarks. Rightly so.

Although hundreds of men from Saint-Domingue fought for American independence at the Battle of Savannah in 1779, they did not endure American chattel slavery. They did not build the plantations of Virginia, the rice fields of South Carolina, the cotton fields of Mississippi, or the auction blocks of New Orleans. They did not live under Dred Scott. They did not survive the Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, school segregation, and the long betrayal of Reconstruction.

Haiti has its own profound history. It was the first Black republic to defeat slavery and break the chains of French colonial rule. That history deserves honor. Honoring Haiti's history, however, does not require American Blacks to surrender the specificity of our own. Haiti fought off the bonds of slavery and defeated the French, yet Haiti as a nation has not changed the unfortunate welfare of Haitians within its own borders.

That is where the wound opened. When Haitian advocates say, “We built this country,” many American Blacks hear something very different. We hear another group reaching for our inheritance, standing on our graves, and asking us to hand over the language of our suffering so they may use it for their own political claim. That insist on solidary while erasing our history. 

❦

Like so many other things, the divide was wide and the gates were open. Our social media timelines filled with Africans and Caribbeans castigating the American Black community for not standing on the side of our supposed sisters and brothers. Then came the rush of scorn against our community and our alleged lack of heritage. One sister I heard, speaking with a heavy African accent, said that she knew who her parents and grandparents were. The implication was clear.  American Blacks do not.

I have said this before, and I will say it clearly again. We know that our roots were chopped from the African continent, carried across a wide ocean, and replanted in America before 1808. We understand that whatever heritage existed on that continent was violently severed once our ancestors landed here. From that moment forward, as brutal as the circumstances were, their names were replaced, their languages were stripped, and their roots were planted in American soil.

Now there is this thinking that American Blacks have no culture. Yet if you look across time, you will see that we danced our way through slavery while picking and planting in fields that did not belong to us. We fought through the Civil War. We marched through the Civil Rights Movement on the backs of preachers, church mothers, and Christian bands. We overcame every obstacle placed before us, including heroin, crack, mass incarceration, and the system of racism that tried to keep us permanently beneath the nation we helped build.

We made mistakes, without a doubt. Among them was embracing that which did not belong to us, settling for stools in restaurants that did not want us there, and sending our children into schools that taught us another people's heritage while leaving out our own. Eventually, we figured it out. We built history in art, music, literature, sports, politics, faith, and entertainment. We opened doors that others later walked through, including people from nations such as Haiti, Nigeria, and the Congo. Yet in return, some now demand that we fight their battles even when the Constitution we believe in does not quite support their claim.

They signed up for Temporary Protected Status, and we all understand what that word means. Temporary suggests that the status may eventually come to an end. Unfortunately, for many, that day has come. To turn around and tell American Blacks that we have no culture, that we have abandoned our heritage, or that they are waiting for our day to come is a bridge too far. It reeks of unmerited disdain.

❦

There is another insult that cannot be ignored. Consider the current condition of the Haitian nation, and yet some Haitians will turn toward a camera and call American Blacks dirty Americans. Then, when they are called to account for it, they apologize as though the insult did not reveal the contempt sitting beneath the request for solidarity.

That is the contradiction American Blacks are being asked to swallow. We are told we have no culture. We are told we have forgotten our roots. We are told we are selfish, Westernized, and detached from the global Black struggle. Yet the worst of our cities are in no way the equivalent of the current conditions in Haiti, a nation that freed itself from the bonds of slavery and has been governed by Black Haitians for generations. Despite its soil, its rice, its sugarcane, its history, and its revolution, Haiti remains impoverished and unstable. That reality cannot be laid at the feet of American Blacks.

When I hear the word culture used as a weapon against us, I pause. I am told to trade the culture American Blacks built under slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, heroin, crack, and mass incarceration for a vague appeal to diaspora loyalty. I am told to bow before a heritage that has not been mine for more than two centuries. I am told to defend another nation's crisis while being mocked for loving the nation my ancestors built with their blood.

As a Christian, I do not pretend to honor gods I believe are false, and I will not be shamed into reverence for a spiritual inheritance that was never mine. My faith, however, is not the reason American Blacks owe Haiti no constitutional debt. The Constitution is. As an American Black woman, I do not confuse poverty, disorder, and political instability with the fullness of a people's culture. Haiti has history. Haiti has suffering. Haiti has dignity. Haiti's crisis does not become my constitutional obligation simply because someone invokes Blackness.

If that makes me uncultured in the eyes of those who despise American Blacks while demanding our advocacy, then so be it. I would rather be called uncultured than be shamed into surrendering my own inheritance. American Black culture was not born from ease. It formed under pressure, the way a grain of grit lodged in an oyster is wrapped, layer over layer, until the wound becomes a pearl. They tried to grind us to dust. We became something they could not.

❦

This week revealed more than a disagreement over immigration law. It revealed the ongoing tension between American Blacks and a diaspora that too often wants our political power, our history, our language, and our sympathy, but does not want to respect our national inheritance. We are expected to be Black when others need our numbers, American when others want to insult us, and silent when others claim the very foundation our ancestors were forced to build.

We are not silent. We are American Blacks. We are descendants of American slaves. We are the children of those who were brought here before 1808, stripped of names, languages, and kin, then forced to build a nation that refused to recognize them as human. We are the children of those who remained after emancipation, after Reconstruction failed, after Jim Crow rose, after redlining spread, after crack entered our neighborhoods, after prisons swallowed our sons, and after every system tried to convince us that we had no inheritance at all.

Yet we are still here. We are not rootless. We are not cultureless. We are not confused. Our roots are in American soil, because that is where our ancestors bled, prayed, labored, buried their dead, and raised their children. Our culture was not borrowed from a continent we were severed from. It was built here, under chains, under law, under church roofs, under cotton sacks, under police dogs, under fire hoses, under prison walls, and under the mercy of God.

So no, American Blacks are not obligated to carry every battle in the diaspora. We are not obligated to abandon constitutional order because another group invokes a shared skin color. We are not obligated to pretend that temporary does not mean temporary. We are not obligated to call every hardship a constitutional violation. We are not obligated to erase our own suffering so that someone else can stand inside it.

Compassion is one thing. Obligation is another. Kinship is one thing. Erasure is another. Immigration policy is one thing. Constitutional right is another. Until those distinctions are honored, this divide will only grow wider.

Temporary Protected Status was always temporary. Haiti's suffering is real, but it is not ours to constitutionalize. The American Black inheritance is real too, and it is not ours to surrender. If the diaspora wants solidarity, then let it begin with respect. Let it begin with honesty. Let it begin with the recognition that American Blacks do have a culture, a people, a history, and a claim. We are not dirty Americans. We are not lost Africans. We are not a people without roots.  We are a people with new roots.

We are the descendants of slaves who became a nation within a nation. We will not be shamed into forgetting it.

Everybody Wants a Piece of Us

“The snare is broken, and we are escaped.” — Psalm 124:7, KJV

On Being Both the Target and the Resource

There are times when it feels as though the American Black community stands in a position unlike any other in this nation. We are criticized from every direction, and yet everyone seems to want something from us. We are told we are broken, and then asked for our culture. We are told we are ignorant of our own history, and then asked to lend our moral authority to causes that are not ours. We are told we are insignificant, and then studied, imitated, and mined for profit. It is a strange kind of standing, to be the permanent defendant and the prize at the same time.

That is the contradiction I want to sit with. We are treated as a problem when someone wishes to criticize us, and as a resource when someone wants our culture, our votes, our money, our moral authority, or our history. Both at once, and from every direction.

Everyone Explains Us to Ourselves

June has been another example. The release of the man who shot a Black youth in the back, the incarceration of Karmelo Anthony, and the endless stream of social media narratives have once again created an atmosphere where truth is hard to separate from fiction. Information is amplified, distorted, and repackaged until no one is quite sure what is real anymore. And while those stories unfold, a familiar pattern emerges alongside them. Voices from outside the American Black experience step forward, eager to explain us to ourselves.

Consider the recent episode with the British actor David Oyelowo, who played Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 2014 film Selma. Asked on the One54 Africa podcast, a show built around the fifty-four nations of the continent and the experience of growing up African in America, about a comedy skit on Black British actors taking African American roles, he dismissed the objection as a product of insecurity and a scarcity mindset, as though American Blacks who notice their own stories being handed to others were simply being small. Then, asked to perform a Southern accent, he described it as a Nigerian accent slowed down with, in his words, a lot of slavery and a little subservience folded into it. The backlash from Black Americans was swift, and he later apologized. But the moment is worth holding onto, because it captures the very thing I am describing. A man from outside our experience, in a single conversation, told us our concerns came from insecurity and then reduced the speech of the descendants of slavery to a sound shaped by submission.

And one has to ask where the animosity people keep assigning to us actually lives. Most American Blacks spend little time worrying about British actors, African artists, or Caribbean entertainers. We have concerns enough of our own. You will rarely see an American Black artist go on television to attack performers from the diaspora. The resentment that is spoken of seems to be projected onto us far more than it ever comes from us. It is named by those who carry it, and then assigned to us. We are asked to embrace everyone else while being told, at the very same time, that we are dysfunctional, disconnected, and lost. Our children are singled out. Our neighborhoods are singled out. Our struggles are treated as though they were our peculiar invention rather than the common inheritance of every people on earth.

The Engine Nobody Names

Here is what the criticism conveniently leaves out. Despite decades of being portrayed as broken, the American Black community drives American culture and commerce in ways few are willing to name plainly. We shape the music, the language, the fashion, the sports, and the spending habits of this nation. Even those who mock us consume what we create. The very people who call us poor, broke, and tired turn around and build their fortunes on what we set in motion.

Take something as simple as the movies. Consider Harriet, a film about an American Black woman, produced by American Blacks, telling a story drawn straight from our own history. It came and went without ever generating the cultural force of a movie like Black Panther. Why? Because Black Panther offered millions of American Blacks an image of strength, capability, and belonging, a vision of an African homeland that resonated with something deep in us. We bought the tickets. We brought our families. We turned a film into an event. Marvel understood what many have come to understand. When the American Black community embraces something, it moves markets.

The same pattern repeats across the industry. When the Black community backs a film, it becomes a success. When we stay home, it struggles. The flop of Disney’s recent Snow White, which our community did not turn out to support, told the same story from the other direction. This is not a small thing. It is a measure of cultural power, and others have noticed it. They have tapped into the reality of American Black talent and American Black spending, and some who come here from elsewhere try to thread that same needle, even when it means crowding into and disrupting the very community whose influence they hope to borrow. When the borrowing does not go as planned, the frustration turns to insult, and we are told once again that we are less than, that we do not know who we are.

The same logic governs the recurring conversation about reparations. When the call goes up in Brazil, in the Caribbean, or in other nations shaped by slavery, the finger almost always points toward America. The expectation is that the economy American Blacks helped build, the economy we still work to sustain, should now pay for grievances that belong to other histories on other shores. But our history is not interchangeable with theirs. American Blacks did not immigrate to this country. We were sold here. We were forced to come, forced to labor, and then, having survived, we built communities under bondage and under segregation. The descendants of American slavery hold a distinct claim rooted in a distinct history, and recognizing that does not diminish the suffering of anyone else. If reparations are ever owed in America, they are owed to the descendants of American slavery, not redistributed to every nation that wishes to point at our economy and collect.

The Symbol and the Substance

If the culture shows how we are mined, politics shows how we are displayed. For years, Democrats have mocked Donald Trump for putting his name on buildings. Yet in Chicago, Barack Obama has built a monument to his own legacy in the form of the Obama Presidential Center, and to question it is treated as something close to heresy. The center opened on Juneteenth, in a historically Black part of the South Side, and the people who built those neighborhoods are now watching them slip out of reach.

This is not speculation. In the area covered by the city’s housing pilot around the center, median rents have climbed roughly forty-three percent since the project was announced, and home values have spiked around one hundred and thirty percent. In East Woodlawn, home prices doubled in a few short years to a median near four hundred and forty thousand dollars. Longtime residents and seniors have stood up in public meetings, even as the center opened, to say plainly that they are being priced out of the homes where their families have lived for generations. The shrine rises, and the people around it are pushed to the edges. So the question must be asked. Who benefits from symbolism? It does not pay a rising property tax bill. It does not keep an elderly homeowner in the house she has owned for forty years. We celebrate the pictures, the personalities, and the history. But who celebrates the people?

This is where I want to be careful and fair, because the comparison people reach for, Obama against Trump, is too often reduced to applause for one and contempt for the other. Let me set it instead as a question about outcomes. Barack Obama gave our community symbolism, representation, and eloquent speeches, and those things have real worth. They told a generation of children that the highest office was not closed to them. But symbolism alone does not build wealth, strengthen a school, or make a neighborhood safe. The Affordable Care Act expanded coverage, yet middle-class Black families like my own have watched premiums and deductibles climb while those at the bottom still receive the least. After eight years, many of us were left asking what specifically had changed for the descendants of American slavery.

By contrast, Donald Trump, a man his critics never stopped calling a racist, signed the First Step Act, which reformed sentencing and brought people home. He signed the FUTURE Act, which made funding for historically Black colleges permanent and ended the yearly ritual of HBCU presidents traveling to Washington to beg for their survival. Black unemployment reached record lows before the pandemic. One can debate how much of this any president can claim, and neither set of policies was designed specifically for the descendants of American slavery. But the contrast raises a question worth sitting with. We often celebrate those who look like us while dismissing those who may have delivered more tangible benefit. Perhaps the question is not who makes us feel proud, but who leaves our communities measurably stronger.

Without Apology

Underneath all of this runs one deeper question. Every other group in this country is permitted to organize around its own interests. Corporations lobby for profit. Unions fight for workers. Immigrant groups advocate for immigrants. Religious bodies advocate for their values. Political parties assemble coalitions to hold power, and no one finds any of this strange. But when the descendants of American slavery ask whether our interests are protected, we are called divisive. When we ask where our tax dollars go, we are told to think globally. Every group is allowed to pursue its interests. Every group except, it seems, us.

And so we arrive at the contradiction in its plainest form. We are told we are insignificant, yet everyone wants our culture. We are told we are failures, yet everyone studies our history. We are told we are irrelevant, yet our music, our language, our struggles, and even our victories become global commodities. People do not spend this much energy on communities they consider unimportant. The endless attention is itself the proof of our worth.

The American Black community does not need to apologize for being American. We do not need permission to honor our ancestors or to celebrate what we have built. We do not need to carry the insecurities and the burdens of everyone else. Loyalty should never mean silence, and unity should never mean carrying everyone else’s priorities while being told our own must always come last.

Until the descendants of American slavery advocate for ourselves with clarity, with discipline, and without apology, our interests will continue to be negotiated by people whose first loyalty is not to us. Everybody wants a piece of us. It is time we decided what belongs to no one but ourselves.

My Critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Vanity Fair Article, Why Kamala Harris Lost

At this instant a bright light shot through the mind of Dantès, and cleared up all that had been dark and obscure before." — Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

Just Beyond the Edge of the Light

This month, millions of eyes have turned toward America as the world gathered on our shores for the FIFA Club World Cup. As I listened to visitors from across the globe speak about their time in our nation, I found their words both surprising and refreshing. They marveled at our highways, our shopping centers, our restaurants, and even something as ordinary to us as central air conditioning. They described America as a place they had long dreamed of seeing, a nation whose reach extends far beyond its borders.

Their observations stood in sharp contrast to the story many of us hear every single day. We are told that America is a declining empire, a nation in retreat, a country whose finest days are already behind it. No group seems more devoted to advancing that narrative than modern Democrats and their progressive allies, who so often present America as fundamentally broken and in need of constant reconstruction. Yet the visitors walking our streets saw something else. They saw prosperity. They saw opportunity. They saw a destination, not a ruin.

That contrast stayed with me as I turned to Ta-Nehisi Coates and his recent essay for Vanity Fair, Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House? Like the visitors arriving on our shores, Coates is telling a story about America. The difference is that his America is not seen through the eyes of someone beholding possibility. It is seen through the lens of grievance, empire, and moral failure. The question is not whether America has faults. Every nation does. The question is whether those faults tell the whole story, and whether the storyteller has shown us everything, or only what serves the tale he wants to tell.

That is the question I want to sit with in this essay. Not whether Coates lies. He does not need to. The most powerful narratives are rarely built on falsehood. They are built on selective truth.

The World My Mother Knew

My personal story begins on the heels of slavery and sharecropping. One side of my family emerged from the aftermath of bondage in the great plains of Texas, a people who survived and set about building something of their own. The other side came from the fertile farmlands of Mississippi, sharecroppers who worked land that was never theirs. My history was not gathered from bound textbooks. They were stories carried to me by my great grandparents and my mother.

When I visited my paternal grandparents, I heard of their early life in Texas among devout Christians, and of their migration north to New Jersey, where they helped raise up a church. That church stood directly across the street from the building where we lived in the early 1970s. Their journey was the determination of a people who had survived slavery and meant to build something that would outlast them.

My mother’s people traveled a harder road still. She often spoke of life on the farm in Mississippi. She described the small wooden shack where the family lived, the pigs and chickens that wandered the yard, and the garden heavy with collard greens, turnips, and tomatoes that kept them fed. Life revolved around the land. Every member of that household worked from sunrise to sundown.

One story she told carried a permanent mark. As a young girl she was climbing a fence lined with barbed wire to feed the pigs their daily slop. She slipped and fell, and the wire tore deep into her foot. There was no doctor nearby. There was no program waiting to help. My grandmother and Aunt Sul saved her foot by packing the wound with a heavy dose of moonshine, cotton balls, and spider webs to stop the bleeding and draw it closed, and she carried that scar for the rest of her life. The calloused fingertips from picking cotton and the split that never fully healed were not stories we read. They were the record of a life that demanded hard labor from children and grown people alike.

This was the world Fannie Lou Hamer knew. She understood it because she lived it. She knew the weight of poverty, the demands of the field, the cruelty of segregation, and the daily struggle for dignity in a society built to deny it. When she spoke of freedom and the vote, she spoke from a life that had earned every word.

What Coates Leaves in the Shadows

When I read Coates on Hamer, I recognize much of what he describes. The poverty is real. The violence is real. The courage is real. Where I begin to part from him is not in what he includes, but in what he leaves unexamined.

Consider the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Coates writes that Hamer cofounded it in 1964 to displace the segregated delegation at that year’s Democratic convention. That is true. But notice what the sentence quietly carries past the reader. The Freedom Democratic Party was the insurgent body, the civil rights organization formed by Black Mississippians and the activists who came to register them, precisely because they were being shut out. It existed to challenge the democratic establishment that was excluding them.

Now here is the part Coates will not say plainly. The people who jailed Hamer, who ordered her beaten in that Winona cell until her body was never the same, who turned her away from the registrar and put her family off the plantation, were not Republicans. The establishment that governed Mississippi in those years, the sheriffs and registrars and the official delegation the Freedom Democrats rose up to challenge, was Democratic. Coates never says this. He names the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Democratic National Convention, and President Lyndon Johnson, who feared Hamer’s testimony would cost him the Deep South. He uses the word Democratic freely when it serves the story. But he never once tells the reader that those who stood against Hamer carried the same label.

The effect is a narrative that lets the reader assume her tormentors were white Republicans. He does not say it. He does not have to. He simply leaves the truth in shadow and lets the silence do the work. That is the method. It is not only what Hamer was up against that the reader half sees. It is who was against her. And to leave that unsaid, while drawing a line from Hamer straight to the modern Democratic Party, is to ask the reader to forget the very history the essay claims to honor.

I am not interested in relitigating the long argument over party realignment. That is a rabbit hole, and it leads away from my point. My point is about method. Coates names the institutions he finds useful and leaves the rest unlit. He shows you the heroism and withholds the full picture of who held the whip. The result is a history the reader can only half see.

Gaza, and the Things Coates Cannot See

The same method governs his account of why Kamala Harris lost. Coates reaches for Gaza. He points to the erosion of support among Arab American voters and the weight of foreign policy. A faraway crisis is given pages, and the moral weight of the essay rests on the children of Gaza, the thousands of young lives lost in that war.

I do not dismiss that grief. The loss of any child is a wound. But here is where selective emphasis stops being a matter of literary style and becomes something closer to an indictment. Coates can weep for the children of Gaza, and he should. What he cannot do, anywhere in the essay, is turn that same gaze toward the children lost in his own community at home.

Consider what the silence covers. Black women undergo abortion at a rate several times that of white women, and account for nearly forty percent of all abortions in this country while making up only about thirteen percent of women. That is not thousands. Over the years it is millions. Yet Coates, who can name a distant war in detail, says nothing of this loss at home. He grieves the children of Gaza and passes over the children of his own people in silence. Worse, he props up the very party whose legislation guards and funds the machinery of that loss, the same party whose schools precondition Black minds with the lies told from the left. He points his finger across the world and places no responsibility on the leaders who created the crisis closest to home. He aims the reader’s outrage everywhere except at the guilty.

In this, Coates sounds like the very politics he is defending. He offers narrative and moral authority while saying nothing of policy that would actually change the conditions on the ground. He says nothing of the schools that fail our children, nothing of the prisons that swallow our young men, nothing of the healthcare that remains out of reach, and nothing of what unchecked illegal immigration has meant for Black neighborhoods, Black labor, and Black wages. This is the same offer the modern Democratic coalition has made for decades. Grievance and story in place of education that lifts, justice that frees, and policy that builds. The Gaza framing is the proof of it. A distant war earns his attention while the daily realities of American Black communities earn his silence.

Biden, and the Statistics That Glow in the Dark

The pattern holds when Coates turns to Joe Biden. He writes that Biden cut Black unemployment and Black poverty to record lows, and that a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit reduced Black child poverty by half in its single year of operation. He offers these as evidence that the coalition behind Harris had won real victories and had reason to expect more.

The issue is not whether the numbers are accurate. The issue is the story built around them. A record low is not the same as a closed gap. Through those very years, Black workers remained roughly twice as likely to be out of work as white workers, a ratio that has barely moved in half a century. Black youth unemployment stayed high even at the brightest moment, while the headline figure glowed. Coates shows the reader the number at its peak and lets the rest fall back into shadow. He does not pause on what happened when the Child Tax Credit expired, the very next year. He does not ask whether record low unemployment translated into lasting wealth, into stronger families, into communities that could stand on their own once the program ended.

And here is the deeper silence. Neither Biden nor Harris ever offered policy aimed at the part of the community where the crisis is sharpest, our young. There was no plan for Black youth, no answer to the conditions that wait for them. Biden did not formulate one. Harris, for all her promises, never addressed the American Black youth in any policy that would change the dynamic. It is plain that we have a problem. What is just as plain is that the coalition Coates celebrates produced a statistic to wave and no policy to heal. We hear of unemployment but not of wealth. We hear of poverty rates but not of the lasting condition of the people those rates are meant to describe. We hear of political victories but not of whether they produced safer streets, stronger churches, or greater independence.

Hamer’s Freedom, and What Was Offered Instead

Coates draws a line from Fannie Lou Hamer to Kamala Harris, presenting Harris as the inheritor of a tradition pioneered by Black women, a tradition forged by the generations who endured slavery, sharecropping, and segregation. As an argument about representation and narrative, I find the comparison not merely incomplete but troubling, because it treats distinct histories as interchangeable and hands the specific inheritance of American Descendants of Slavery to a figure whose own story differs from it.

Consider the record Coates passes over lightly. Harris built her career as a prosecutor and then as Attorney General of California. She championed the prosecution of parents over their children’s truancy, a policy that fell hardest on Black and poor families, a policy Coates himself concedes was chilling. She campaigned as the tough prosecutor and shifted her stance on the death penalty when the higher office called for it. This is the record. It is not hidden. Yet Coates still draws his line from the woman beaten in a Winona jail for trying to register her people to vote, to the woman who built her name putting people exactly like them through the courts.

And he wants us to believe her defeat was simply Gaza. As if we are so naive that we do not know her own record. As if the community whose history he borrows cannot remember what was done in its own neighborhoods, its own courts, its own schools. The line from Hamer to Harris is not a line of inheritance. It is a line drawn by a storyteller who needs the connection to hold, and who trusts that the reader will not look too closely at either end of it.

Fannie Lou Hamer fought for freedom from systems that denied her people opportunity and citizenship. She fought so that American Blacks could stand as full participants in the life of this nation, on their own feet, determining their own future. She fought to save American Black families, not to ignore them when inconvenient. Hamer’s struggle was rooted in a specific people and a specific history. To invoke that history while overlooking what has followed, the decline of our institutions, the weakening of our families, the schools and prisons and hospitals and neighborhoods that define the lives of American Blacks today, is to tell only part of the story.

The Conflation, and the Poison We Were Fed

In the end it is more than gaslighting. It is conflation. Coates takes the particular struggle of the American Descendants of Slavery and folds it into the struggle of the people of Gaza, as though they were one story, while the condition of our own communities, grown worse year upon year and near critical today, goes unnamed. He asks us to carry a grief from across the world while setting down the grief at our own door.

And we should be honest about the nature of that grief. Today we are not held down chiefly by systematic racism. It has been proven, in our own survival, that we can rise even where racism remains. The deeper oppression now is the policy fed to our communities since 1965, a slow poison handed out by the very party that claims to defend us. By many measures our condition is worse than it was before that bargain was struck, worse in the strength of our families, the safety of our streets, and the independence of our institutions. The chains today are not only the old ones. They are the policies dressed up as compassion that have hollowed out what earlier generations built.

Here is the part that ought to trouble us most. When the Democratic Party loses, it looks to everything else for the cause. It looks to Gaza, to Arab American voters, to misinformation, to forces beyond its control. It never looks at the community it has failed. It never asks whether the conditions it created drove anyone away. And yet it needs our voting bloc to remain relevant. It requires our loyalty while declining to examine its own record with us. Coates, whatever his intentions, has written the essay that coalition needs. He points the finger outward and spares the guilty at home.

That is my disagreement with Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is not that he tells lies. It is that he tells stories in which certain truths are lit brightly while others are left just beyond the edge of the light, hidden in a shadow the reader is never invited to look into. And the truths he leaves in the dark are the ones our communities can least afford to forget. And people listen to him because he wears the elite badge with honor.

No Mercy for Our Children

"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" — Micah 6:8 (KJV)

What These Weeks Revealed About Black Life and the Right to Defend It

There is a particular kind of exhaustion settling over many American Descendants of Slaves. It is the exhaustion of grieving in public while being told our grief is either misplaced or politically inconvenient.

These have been weeks of grief, and not because we buried our children in June. It is because we watched two courtrooms, within days of each other, tell us again how little our children’s lives and our children’s fear are worth. We grieve when our children die. We grieve when our children go to prison. We grieve when we believe the justice system has looked at one of our own and decided, before the first witness was called, that mercy was for someone else.

This is a piece about that unequal measure: about who is permitted to be afraid, who is permitted to defend himself, and whose life this country is willing to count.

A Child Shot in the Back

In 2023, fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton walked into a convenience store in Columbia, South Carolina. He was wrongly suspected of shoplifting. He took nothing; the sheriff said plainly afterward that there was no evidence he stole anything at all. When he left and ran, the store owner and his son chased him roughly a hundred yards, and the owner shot him in the back with a handgun and killed him.

This month, a jury acquitted the man who killed him. The family said it as plainly as it can be said: a jury watched their fourteen-year-old boy run away from two grown men on video, knew one of them shot him in the back, and still concluded that no one was to blame. He stole nothing. He was a child, and he was running for his life.

The wound this June was not the loss of Cyrus’s life, which we have grieved since 2023. It was the verdict — the official word that a child shot in the back while fleeing is a death for which no one must answer.

A Permission Slip, Not a Reason

Days later came the other verdict. On June 9, a jury in Collin County, Texas, found Karmelo Anthony, nineteen, guilty of murder in the 2025 stabbing death of seventeen-year-old Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet, and sentenced him that same evening to thirty-five years. He will be eligible for parole only after serving at least half of it. Two families were shattered by a single terrible encounter, and there is no version of this story in which a child is not lost.

I do not write to relitigate the verdict. A jury heard evidence none of us heard in full. But there is a deeper concern in this case, and it carries a precise constitutional name. When it came time to seat a jury, prosecutors used their strikes to remove the last three Black people remaining in the pool. Karmelo Anthony’s attorneys did exactly what the law provides for in such a moment: they raised a Batson challenge, named for the Supreme Court case that forbids striking jurors because of their race. The prosecution offered a reason that sounds neutral on its face. The three were educators, they said, and this had happened at a school event. Judge John Roach accepted that explanation and let the strikes stand.

The jury that resulted was not all one color. It included Hispanic and Asian members, and its defenders were quick to call it diverse. But not one Black juror sat on it. This is a pattern American Descendants of Slaves have learned to recognize: the language of inclusion deployed in a way that includes everyone except us. A jury can look varied in a photograph and still contain no one who shares the particular history, the particular vulnerability, of the young person on trial.

And here is what the stated reason cannot survive. A white juror who also teaches was permitted to remain, an instructor at a trade school in Dallas. We are asked to believe that being an educator disqualified three Black citizens from serving, while a white educator posed no such problem. The state will say she taught adults rather than children. But the principle they invoked was about teachers, and a teacher is what she is. When a rule bends in only one direction, and that direction runs along the color line, the reason offered is not a reason. It is a permission slip.

This is not idle complaint. Within twenty-four hours of the verdict, Anthony’s attorneys filed a notice of appeal, and legal observers expect the Batson question to sit at its center. And it matters because of what came next. The jury did have lesser options before it. They could have found manslaughter rather than murder. At sentencing they could have accepted the claim of sudden passion, which under Texas law would have reduced his exposure. They reached past both, all the way to murder and thirty-five years. I cannot prove what a different jury would have done. But a jury from which every Black member had been removed was never positioned to extend a Black teenager the benefit of the doubt those lesser charges exist to protect.

Who Gets to Be a Frightened Child

Consider another Texas case. In 2022, a student named Caysen Allison fatally stabbed eighteen-year-old Joe Ramirez during a fight in a bathroom at Belton High School. Allison, too, claimed self-defense, arguing he had been forced into the fight. There, the jury reached for the gentlest charge available to it, criminally negligent homicide, declining both murder and manslaughter. The sentence was ten years, and reaching even that required prosecutors to win a special motion adding a deadly-weapon finding.

This is not about the race of the people who died. It is about how differently the system can treat the accused. In Belton, a teenager who fatally stabbed another during a fight was met by a jury willing to call it the mildest thing the law allowed. His claim that he was cornered was heard, weighed, and largely accepted. In Frisco, a Black teenager who also said he was defending himself found no such grace. The question is not who was killed. The question is which defendant a courtroom was willing to imagine as a scared child who panicked, and which one it was determined to see as a murderer.

When the Cruelty Came for the Rest of Us

When many Black Americans expressed grief and anger at these outcomes, some voices did not respond with empathy or even disagreement. They responded with slurs, reaching for the oldest and ugliest stereotypes in the American vocabulary. A clip circulated widely on the right, and was featured on Michael Knowles’s program, of a young white woman describing Karmelo Anthony’s supporters as “chimping out” while reaching for the N-word. Another agitator, Jake Lang, called for Anthony to be lynched and built a group around the protection of white Americans, later facing a felony charge after the family said he had threatened the boy’s life.

And the word in that viral clip, chimping, was no isolated slip. Only weeks earlier, a livestreamer who calls himself Chud the Builder, a man whose own videos show him calling Black people chimps and worse, was charged with attempted murder for shooting Joshua Fox, a Black disabled veteran and father of three, outside a Tennessee courthouse. He has claimed self-defense. The same vocabulary that plays as edgy entertainment online has a way of ending with a Black man bleeding on the pavement.

Notice the asymmetry. A white commentator can broadcast a woman calling Black people apes and present it as cultural reporting. Imagine the response if a Black commentator described that same crowd in the animal terms this country has always reserved for us. One is treated as analysis. The other would be a national scandal. That gap, between what may be said about us and what we are permitted to say back, is the whole point.

The mercilessness even reached into Congress. Representative Randy Fine of Florida declared that Karmelo Anthony deserved the death penalty, and when questioned he doubled down, saying an execution would send a message. It was theater, and cruel theater at that. Under the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roper v. Simmons, a defendant who was seventeen at the time of the offense cannot be executed at all, and Fine surely knew it. He called for the death of a Black teenager not because the law allowed it, but because demanding it played well. There is a particular self-righteousness in pronouncing a death sentence from the safety of a microphone, in a case where a frightened boy says he fought back.

The Measure We Are Owed

Set the scenes beside one another and the unequal weighting becomes impossible to miss. A fourteen-year-old shot in the back while running away, and a jury that finds no one to blame. A Black teenager who says he defended himself, tried by a jury his own people were struck from, sentenced to thirty-five years. A man with a documented history of racial slurs, charged with shooting a Black veteran outside a courthouse, claiming self-defense. The presumption of innocence, so elastic for some, so brittle for others.

I am not asking anyone to abandon the presumption of innocence. I am asking why it seems to stretch so generously around some and snap so quickly around our children. This is the disparity that exhausts us. It is not always the open hatred. Sometimes it is the quiet arithmetic of who is treated as dangerous and who is treated as understandable, who is granted the benefit of fear and who is denied it.

We are not asking for special mercy. We are asking for the same mercy already extended to everyone else.

We have survived slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, exclusion, and neglect. We have learned, again and again, how to grieve and still stand. We will grieve Cyrus. We will pray for Karmelo. And we will keep insisting, in the way of protest and the way of appeals and the way of telling the truth plainly, that our children are owed the same humanity this country extends so freely to its own. We do not need permission to demand it.

Whose Side Wants Our Flourishing?

"And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them. They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat... mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands." — Isaiah 65:21–22 (KJV)

On Being Politically Homeless, and the Courage to Tell the Truth from Every Direction

Last week I wrote about grief — about Cyrus Carmack-Belton and Karmelo Anthony, and the unequal measure this country applies to Black life and the right to defend it. That was a piece about how we are treated from the outside. This is a piece about something harder to say aloud: that even as we face hostility from without, we are also caught between political forces that each claim us and neither of which, I have come to believe, is truly invested in our flourishing.

The right may acknowledge our concerns about family and faith while dismissing our experience of racism. The left may speak the language of racial justice while advancing policies we believe have failed us. The message from both is the same: choose a side. But perhaps American Descendants of Slaves should stop asking which side wants our votes and start asking which side actually wants us to thrive.

The Right’s Blind Spot

We saw the right’s blind spot in full this month. When Black Americans grieved the verdicts, some of the loudest voices on the right answered not with empathy but with contempt — with slurs, with old stereotypes, with lectures about our supposed dysfunction. They spoke of our children as a problem to be managed rather than children to be protected. They condemned violence in our communities while saying nothing of the violence in their own. The pain of a tragedy became, for them, an occasion to resurrect the cruelty of another era.

I do not raise this to score a partisan point. I raise it because it is real, and because it is the kind of hostility that announces itself plainly. It is the other kind — the kind that arrives wearing the language of friendship — that is harder to name.

The Left’s Blind Spot

Many of us have grown weary of a political left that speaks fluently about racial justice while asking us to celebrate symbols in place of results. We are offered representation and told to be grateful, while our questions about failing schools, about economic dependency, about the conditions of Black family life, are treated as betrayals rather than concerns. We are expected to remain loyal regardless of outcomes, and when we ask whether the outcomes have actually served us, we are accused of being divisive or naive.

If a Black parent dares to ask whether her child might be better served somewhere other than a failing neighborhood school, she is too often met not with curiosity but with scorn, as though the question itself were a kind of treason. That is not the posture of a movement confident it is serving us well. It is the posture of one that would rather we not ask.

The Business of Hate

Even institutions that present themselves as guardians against hatred deserve scrutiny — perhaps especially those institutions. This spring, a federal grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges including wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and money laundering. This month, its interim leader was questioned about the matter before the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing pointedly titled around the manufacturing of hate.

Let me explain the allegation carefully, because it is easy to get wrong, and the truth of it is stranger and narrower than the rumor. The charge is not that the SPLC paid hate groups to commit racist acts. It is that the organization secretly paid leaders inside violent extremist groups — including the Klan — to serve as informants, routing the money through shell companies, while telling its donors that their gifts were going to fight and dismantle those very groups. The fraud alleged is a fraud against donors: promising one thing and, prosecutors say, quietly doing another. The SPLC describes the program differently, as intelligence-gathering meant to monitor dangerous groups and share what it learned with law enforcement.

From that factual core, critics have built a larger and more troubling argument — and this is the part that first caught my attention. They contend that by paying the very actors it exists to oppose, the organization helped sustain the threat that justifies its own existence. Alveda King put it bluntly in that hearing room: you pay the same people to set the bomb and then comfort the ones who were bombed, she said, and that is a kind of fraud. An institution whose funding, prominence, and relevance depend on the persistence of racial hatred, the argument goes, has little incentive to see that hatred end. I want to be fair: this is an interpretation offered by the organization’s opponents, not a fact established in court. The indictment itself alleges deception of donors, not the manufacture of hate.

And I want to be fair in the other direction too. The SPLC denies the charges and calls the prosecution political retaliation for its criticism of the current administration, and given the broader posture toward that administration’s critics, there is reason to take the claim seriously. The case has not been proven. I do not know how it will end.

But the question lingers regardless of the verdict, and it is a question worth sitting with: when an institution’s standing depends on the persistence of the evil it was built to fight, what incentive does it have to see that evil truly end? I do not claim to know the answer. I only believe the question deserves more honesty than either side has offered. Racism is real; of that there is no doubt. The harder question is whether every institution that claims to fight it is actually invested in its defeat, or merely in its management.

When a Black Woman’s Grief Is Ruled Out of Order

It is not, in truth, shocking that an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center would face these allegations; institutions chase their own survival like anyone else. What is striking, if the charges prove true, is that a body that built its name praising and protecting the vulnerable stands accused of turning on the very people it claimed to serve. And what I witnessed in that hearing room was not only the familiar divide between Democrats and Republicans. It was a divide within our own community.

Watch how it unfolded. When Alveda King raised her concerns, the white Democrat on the panel, Representative Jamie Raskin, simply dismissed her. He defended the organization, ran out his clock, and cut her off mid-sentence when she tried to press. That is one kind of disregard, and it is familiar enough. But the deeper cut did not come from across the aisle. It came from Representative Jasmine Crockett, an American Black woman like Alveda King, who chose that moment not to wrestle with King’s concern for Black children but to question whether King had any right to her own family’s name. When we lean left, our communities absorb policies many of us believe devastate them. When we turn right to protect our children, from abortion and from ideologies we did not choose for them, we are met not only with the left’s racial condescension but with the scorn of our own. That is what it means to be politically homeless: to be wounded from outside the family and from within it in the same afternoon.

Nothing crystallized this dilemma for me more than that exchange. Alveda King is the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and she is no stranger to controversy. Her delivery that day was sharp, even disruptive, and her politics are not mine on every point. But beneath the heat was a conviction many of us quietly share: that the steady loss of Black children through abortion is a wound our community rarely allows itself to name aloud.

Rather than engage that conviction, Representative Jasmine Crockett questioned whether Alveda King had any rightful claim to her own family’s legacy, suggesting that Republicans had merely paraded a woman who happened to carry the King name. As Crockett left the room, King answered her: “You have suggested that I am a bastard to the King family legacy, but I love God, and I love you.”

Whatever one thinks of Alveda King’s politics, that exchange exposed something painful and familiar — the speed with which a Black woman’s concern for Black children can be ruled illegitimate the moment it departs from the expected script. The implication seemed to be that concern about racism disqualifies concern about abortion, that to mourn the unborn is somehow to betray the civil rights tradition. I reject that choice. I do not believe we must choose between opposing racism and mourning the loss of Black children. I do not believe we must choose between demanding justice from the world outside and confronting painful truths within.

Love Requires Honesty

I would be dishonest if I pretended all our wounds are inflicted from outside. The deepest grief is watching our own community discouraged from honest conversation about the things that weaken us from within. We open our arms to others. We spend our money in other communities. We defend people who do not always defend us in return. And then, when Black people raise concerns about our own interests, we are accused of being divisive, reactionary, or selfish.

If we lean too far right, we are called traitors to our race. If we question the left, we are ridiculed and dismissed. We are told where we belong politically before we are ever asked what our communities actually need. But love requires honesty. We have to confront the violence in our neighborhoods. We have to ask hard questions about schools that fail our children, and whether families should have greater freedom to seek something better. We have to wrestle plainly with incarceration, with fatherlessness, with economic dependency, and with the loss of Black children before they are born. None of these conversations belong to any party, and none of them are comfortable. All of them are necessary.

We Must Protect Our Legacy

One of the things I admire most about American Descendants of Slaves is that, despite everything, we still know how to come together. When crisis comes, something in us remembers who we are. The political labels fall away for a moment, and what remains is the older truth: that our fate is bound together. That instinct is among our greatest strengths. But too often, once the moment passes, we allow ourselves to be divided again, pulled apart by partisan loyalties and outside influences that would have us see one another as enemies rather than family.

Sometimes I wonder whether our hope lies in reclaiming the mindset our ancestors carried through some of the darkest seasons this country ever made. I do not mean a return to the injustice of Jim Crow. I mean a return to the resilience that endured in spite of it. Our ancestors built businesses when doors were closed to them. They raised up schools and churches. They pooled what little they had and raised one another’s children. They believed in faith, discipline, sacrifice, and shared responsibility, and they understood that survival depended not only on resisting the hostility outside, but on strengthening what lived within. Perhaps that is what we need now — not nostalgia for segregation, but remembrance of the values that carried our people through it.

We must protect our legacy. We must value our children. We must invest in our families. We must tell ourselves the truth.

If American Descendants of Slaves are to flourish, we cannot allow ourselves to be dismantled by hatred from the right or paternalism from the left, nor can we ignore the choices within our own house that weaken us. We do not need permission to demand justice, and we do not need approval to tell the truth about the harm done to us from any direction. Because before we were Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, we were a people who survived the unimaginable, because we chose, again and again, to stand together. The question before us is no longer which side wants our votes. It is whether we will choose our own flourishing before anyone else asks us to.

Jersey Voting in June

"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." — Fifteenth Amendment, United States Constitution (1870)

Democracy Behind the Table

As an American Black woman, politics has always interested me. Working at the polls this week was not my first time inside the election process, but it was the first time I sat behind the table instead of standing in front of it.

Over the years I have made phone calls for candidates, walked neighborhoods recruiting voters, handed out flyers on election day, and pressed family, friends, and complete strangers to use their right to vote. When I was a Democrat I walked for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. I knocked on doors across South Jersey for local candidates whose names never made the evening news. These days I am a Republican, and this week I was the only one assigned to my polling location. There should have been a second Republican worker, but the seat sat empty all day. I mention this not to make a point about party, but because of what it taught me by the end of the day. The woman who once walked for Obama and the woman who now registers Republican were watching the same neighbors file through the same door, and not one of those neighbors could have told you which was which.

Let me say, it was a very interesting experience.

This was a primary election, so the turnout was not overwhelming. There were no long lines stretching out the door and no confusion about districts or polling locations. For the most part, everything ran smoothly. Ironically, the most complicated part of the day was not the voting machines but the manual counting of voters. The machines counted the ballots without issue. The people counting the people occasionally had a harder time.

What struck me throughout the day had very little to do with party affiliation.

What struck me were the people.

From six o'clock in the morning until eight o'clock at night, they came through the doors one by one. Some arrived on their way to work. Others stopped in after work. Mothers brought children. Husbands came with wives. Retirees arrived with the patience that comes from having seen a few decades of elections come and go. As I checked names, helped voters who needed assistance, and handed out I Voted stickers, it slowly dawned on me that the people who make up my community are, for the most part, simply regular people trying to live regular lives.

There is something grounding about watching democracy at work from behind the table. Politics often feels loud when viewed through television screens, social media feeds, and campaign advertisements. Yet inside the polling place there was very little drama. There were only neighbors carrying out a civic responsibility that many of us take for granted.

I also learned something about my community. The majority of the voters who came through the doors were Black and White. There were very few Hispanics, Asians, or members of other groups. Part of me wondered whether our community was diverse enough. Another part wondered whether I was asking the wrong question entirely. Perhaps what I was looking at was simply a neighborhood, people who share the same streets, schools, churches, and businesses, and who carry the same worries home at night, whatever party they claim.

One of my favorite moments came when an Indian gentleman arrived to register. He had not come to vote in this election. He had come to fill out his application, the one that would go into our binder and travel to the county office to be processed, so that his name would be ready the next time the doors opened. He told me he had recently become an American citizen and that registering to vote was one of the first things he wanted to do with that citizenship. We spent several minutes talking about the test and the hundred questions he had studied. He laughed about memorizing all of it, from the number of senators to the year the Constitution was signed.

I could not help but appreciate the seriousness with which he approached citizenship. Here was a man who had worked to become an American and who viewed voting not as a burden but as a privilege. In that moment I was reminded that democracy survives because people keep believing it is worth participating in.

The day also left me with a deeper appreciation for poll workers themselves. Many of the people working alongside me were elderly, retired, or between jobs. The training is extensive, the responsibilities are significant, and the day is long. We arrived before dawn and left long after most people had finished dinner. While I understand the argument that poll work is a form of community service, I also believe our election process deserves greater investment.

If our elected officials can earn six-figure salaries, then surely the citizens responsible for helping administer elections deserve compensation that reflects the importance of the work. Poll workers should be paid more. The hours are long, the training is intensive, and the responsibility is enormous. We place our faith in the election process, yet the people who help run that process are often compensated with little more than a token of appreciation.

More than anything, the day reminded me that democracy belongs to ordinary people. Not the politicians. Not the commentators. Not the consultants. It belongs to the mother carrying her child into the polling place, the retiree who has voted in every election for forty years, the new citizen filling out his first registration, and the workers who give fourteen hours to keep the process honest.

For all our disagreements and all our campaigns, the Republic still rests in the hands of regular men and women who take the time to show up. Sitting behind the table let me see that more clearly than I ever had before. Democracy is not sustained by speeches or campaign commercials or social media posts. It is sustained by ordinary citizens who keep participating, election after election, generation after generation.

For one long day in June, I had the privilege of watching them do exactly that.

The Tunicate and the Awakening

"Comfort is the rock." DahTruth

What the Music Made of Us, and What We Are Beginning to See

I tell most anyone that will listen that I grew up during the rise of Hip Hop. The shift from Kool & The Gang to N.W.A. to Jay-Z marked both the rise and the fall of the Hip Hop Generation. There was nothing better than the rap battle between Nas and Jay-Z, or the beef between Tupac and Biggie. The rise of Kanye with Graduation. Our streets were cluttered with KRS-One, Mos Def, The Roots, Lauryn Hill, OutKast, and a hundred others. We are the generation that gave Hip Hop its names, its attitude, and its street creed.

My generation truly believed we were the hustlers. The ones who made it happen. By any means necessary. I came up running from pillar to post with Jay-Z and Nas and Kanye blasting from the radio, never once thinking about what those anthems would cost the blocks they came from. None of us thought about it. That is the part I keep returning to. We were not standing outside the culture judging it. We were inside it. We loved it. It shaped us, and we never felt the hand doing the shaping.

What we never recognized was the moment hope for tomorrow turned into the poison that crippled our community.

I will not pretend our boys were not armed. The culture put weapons in young hands and called it authenticity, and that is devastating. The same songs that told one boy to pick up a pen told the boy next to him to pick up a pistol. Both of them were learning what a man was supposed to be. Both were told that toughness was the measure of it, that fearlessness was the same as courage, that wealth by any means was the same as freedom. One boy chased a record deal. The other chased a corner. The soundtrack was identical.

That is what this is really about. Not one performance, not one verdict, not one trial. It is about the messages we celebrated, the images we normalized, what those images did to our boys, and why we are surprised when the same images are later used against them.

We were the generation of the sea squirt, otherwise known as the tunicate. In its youth the tunicate swims freely through the ocean. It carries a primitive brain and nervous system that let it move and think. Once it finds a place to settle, it attaches itself to a rock for good and digests its own brain, because it no longer needs to think. It no longer intends to move.

Over the last several years, Jay-Z has become one of the main tunicates.

The Performance

This week the media was in hysteria as Jay took the stage in Philadelphia at the Roots concert with a performance mixed of freestyle, spoken word, and his own Public Service Announcement. He cut off the wicks and replaced them with an afro. It was a flashback to the Revolution, a reminder of a time when Black men challenged the system instead of becoming it.

Jay-Z has long been one of the men from our community criticized because he made it out and never really looked back. Not even to save his own clique. He got rich, then he got with Beyonce, and they lifted off and sailed straight to the moon. So when he comes home, those left behind feel cheated. Gilted. Robbed of the chance to have done the same thing.

I do not think Jay-Z set out to harm anyone. That is the heart of it. He may not have known what he was cooking any more than the rest of us knew what we were eating. The egg had already been cracked by those who came before him. Jay-Z simply scrambled it, and got rich doing it, while many of the boys who followed the path his music laid out stayed trapped exactly where they started. He is not responsible for every choice made by every young man who bought one of his albums. At some point a boy becomes a man, and a man must answer for himself. There is no denying, though, that generations of Black boys grew up believing they could climb out of the ghetto on the back of rap and crack, and for every one who became a millionaire, thousands chased the image into cells, into graveyards, and into courtrooms.

The Alarm

Still, there is hope. Hope arrived in the form of a man many of us were instructed to throw away.

Kanye West.

When Kanye began sounding the alarm about the music industry, the media did not engage his argument. They engaged his character. We were told he was crazy. We were told he had lost his mind. We were told to discard him. Yet Kanye forced many of us to stop and think about what has happened to our artists, and what is still happening to our children. From Billie Holiday to Michael Jackson, from Prince to Whitney Houston, to DMX, there is a pattern that is hard to unsee. The industry profits from Black talent, feeds on Black pain, and waits patiently while the artist destroys himself. Then it stands beneath the falling body and catches every penny that drops from his pockets. The same industry that used Black men to entertain America used those same men to trap Black boys.

Kanye saw the machine clearly and turned around to warn us. This week I watched another man see just as clearly and make the opposite choice.

A fourteen-year-old boy named Cyrus Carmack-Belton was chased down and shot in the back in South Carolina. I will return to what happened in that courtroom, because it belongs to a larger story. One piece of it belongs here, though, beside Kanye, because it is about sight. The lawyer who delivered the closing argument that helped set the shooter free was Shaun Kent, the only Black attorney on the defense team. He was not a boy raised on a soundtrack he never questioned. He was a grown man who looked at a child shot in the back and chose the payday. For Kent it was not about the life of a Black boy who could have been his own son. It was about the check. That is my opinion, and I will own it.

Kanye saw, and warned. Kent saw, and sold. That is the difference between a man the culture shaped without his knowing and a man who knew exactly what he was doing. Most of us were the first kind. We were moved by a current we could not see. Kent stood in clear water and chose the rock.

What Happens When We Do Not Stay in Our Place

I said I would come back to that courtroom. Here is what the jury was shown.

Rick Chow and his son chased Cyrus more than a hundred yards from their store and shot him once in the back, over an accusation that he had stolen four bottles of water. Authorities said the surveillance video did not support the theft. A pistol was found near the body, and the defense built its case on it, yet four separate witnesses from four separate vantage points testified they never saw the boy point a weapon as he ran. The coroner confirmed the bullet entered his lower back, consistent with a child running away. Chow was found not guilty. The question that should have led the conversation, why a grown man hunted a child and fired into his back over a bottle of water, was treated as an afterthought.

At the same time, Karmelo Anthony, a Black teenager who alleges he acted in self-defense, was dragged through the media before the jury had heard all the evidence. By his account, the other boy approached him under a tent, threw his book bag, and pushed him, and he defended himself against what he believed was an attack. A White boy died. The first question the public asked was not why the confrontation began. It was why a Black boy had a knife. As his trial opened in Texas, the prosecution struck every qualified Black juror from the panel. The defense objected. The judge allowed it. Not a single Black juror was seated. We are told it had nothing to do with race.

Then there was the Black woman in North Carolina struck again and again in the face by a White police officer while another officer had to step in and tell him to stop. The footage spread across the internet within hours, reinforcing a feeling we have carried for generations.

Taken one at a time, each story has its own facts and its own circumstances.

Taken together, they tell one story.

There are still people in this country who believe American Blacks can be chased, beaten, shot in the back, and put on trial without the same concern extended to everyone else. Stay quiet and submit, and all is well. Defend yourself, speak for yourself, or refuse the narrative handed to you, and suddenly you are the problem. Whether every reading of these cases is correct is almost beside the point. The pattern is real, the perception is real, and over time perception becomes culture.

Lyrics Until They Are Held

Here is the contradiction I cannot stop turning over. We armed our own children with a soundtrack, and that is on us. The wider country, though, treats weapons as decoration until the hand that holds one is Black. The Glock, the semiautomatic, the blade, are everywhere. They are an aesthetic, a brand, a bar in a verse, a virtue in half the country where a man can carry one openly and be called responsible. Nobody sounds an alarm. The weapon is ambiance until the hand that holds it is Black.

A knife is nothing until a Black boy uses one to survive an attack, and then it becomes the whole story. A pistol is nothing until it is found in the street beside the body of a Black child, and then it becomes the reason a grown man and his son are forgiven for chasing him down. The object was inert. It became a capital offense the moment it was his, and the moment it gave someone a reason after the fact.

Cyrus had a gun. Karmelo had a knife. I will not hide either one to make my point easier, because hiding it would be the same dishonesty the culture practiced on us. We owe our children an accounting for the soundtrack we handed them. We are also owed an accounting from a country that drowns in weapons and only discovers its fear when the trigger finger is Black.

A Bridge Too Far

I sit here having just washed my little BMW, and I will not knock the hustle. I am part of what I am indicting. That is precisely why I can say it.

I will be honest about something else. When I heard what happened to that store in South Carolina, a part of me did not grieve for it. I do not condone violence. I do not believe the answer is to tear down stores, and I will not pretend otherwise. The idea that a man can shoot a Black child in the back and then open his doors the next morning as if nothing happened, ring up his sales, count his money, and carry on as usual, was a bridge too far. Something in me refused to call that normal. The honest name for what I felt was not a wish for destruction. It was a refusal to let him have his ordinary day.

That refusal has a disciplined form, and it is the one I am choosing. It is called a boycott. After the Chow verdict, the NAACP and others called on our community to do exactly that. Normally I am not down with boycotting. This time is different, and the difference matters.

This is not the Target boycott. This is not a campaign about corporate respect or buying power or proving what our dollars are worth. Those are arguments about commerce. They say value us as customers or lose our money, and there is nothing wrong with that argument. This is not that argument. A child is dead. No redirected dollar brings Cyrus back. No withheld purchase reverses a verdict. The boycott is not about commerce. It is about life. We are not asking to be respected as consumers. We are refusing to subsidize the ordinary day of a man who took a boy's life and expected to keep it. The dollar is only the instrument. Life is the stake.

A Wider Circle

What is even more striking is that this attitude is no longer confined to one group. Some ethnic immigrant communities who arrived in America long after our ancestors fought their battles have adopted the same dismissiveness toward American Blacks. They walk through doors our struggle pried open, freedoms secured by the Fourteenth Amendment and paid for in blood they never shed, and then they ridicule the very people whose sacrifice made their welcome possible.

Shortly after the call to boycott, another Asian man went online and started drilling the Black community for daring to organize. He mocked us. He asked who would sell us liquor. Who would sell us groceries. Who would do our nails. Who would sell us our Jordans. As he disparaged us, he never realized that it is our community keeping his community in business. He was a dog barking at the table that feeds him, snapping at the very nickels and dimes that butter his bread.

The Power We Forgot We Had

When we look back over time, it has been our community that has buttered the bread of nearly every industry in this country. We drive the money in entertainment. We drive the money in fashion. We drive the money in music. We drive the money on the streets and in the arenas. We sell the books. We fill the theaters. We set the trends. We turn podcasts into platforms and platforms into fortunes. We have the power to move whole markets.

Yet we remain the ones ridiculed, scorned, shot in the back, and placed on trial for defending ourselves.

Perhaps the greatest deception ever sold to American Blacks was not that we lacked value. It was convincing us that everyone else understood our value while we stayed blind to it ourselves. That is the same blindness the music worked on us. We could not see the current while we were swimming in it.

The Awakening

That is why I keep returning to the sea squirt.

Here is the part of its story we tend to forget. The tunicate does not lose its brain because something attacks it. It loses its brain because it stops moving. Once it settles onto the rock and decides it no longer needs to go anywhere, the body absorbs the very organ that made it free. Stillness is what kills the mind. Comfort is the rock.

Perhaps the Hip Hop Generation did exactly that. We settled. We grew comfortable being consumers instead of builders, comfortable being marketed to instead of owning the market, comfortable being influenced instead of being the influence. We stopped swimming, and a people that stops swimming begins to eat itself alive.

The good news, the thing that gives me a quiet hope I did not expect to feel this week, is that I see us moving again. Regardless of politics. Regardless of who voted for whom. We placed it aside and moved together over a boy named Cyrus. That is our community refusing to call the unthinkable normal. I see us choosing the discipline of unity over the despair of going numb. That motion is the whole answer. A community in motion together does not digest its own mind, because it never settles long enough to. Unity is not only how we honor Cyrus. It is how we keep from being eaten alive.

The awakening is not about anger.

It is about recognition.

Recognition of our value.

Recognition of our influence.

Recognition of our history.

Recognition that a people who stay in motion together can never be consumed from within.

The tunicate survives by giving up its brain and clinging to the rock. A people survive by reclaiming theirs and refusing to let go of one another. The only question left is whether we will stay fastened to the rock and be eaten alive, or finally start swimming again, together.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

"The Lord was not in the wind... nor in the earthquake... nor in the fire: but after the fire a still small voice." 1 Kings 19:11-12

The Sound of Desperation

Do you hear what I hear? On the final Saturday of May, the sky over Massachusetts split with a sound like the end of something. A meteor, traveling at seventy-five thousand miles an hour, tore across the bedrock of these United States and broke apart in a blast that NASA measured at the equivalent of three hundred tons of TNT. It shook buildings and rattled windows, and the boom was heard from Delaware to Montreal. For one single second, that sound replaced every other sound. And then it was gone. What returned in its place was the sound that has been with us all spring, the sound that never truly left. The sound of desperation.

For that is the sound a party makes when it has run out of ideas. It is not the sound of vision or conviction. It is the sound of noise, of manufactured crisis, of recycled faces and borrowed fear. We are hearing that sound now, and anyone willing to listen can recognize it for what it is.

Begin with the cry about redistricting, because that is where the desperation shows itself most plainly. The Democratic Party would have us believe two contradictory things at once. They want us to believe they are winning the fight over the maps, and at the very same moment they want us to believe the maps are being stolen from us. Both cannot be true. A party that is winning does not cry foul. A party that is losing does, and loudly.

Consider what has actually happened. In California, Democrats redrew the map to gain five seats, and the courts let it stand. They celebrated. In Texas, Republicans did the same, and the courts let that stand as well. In Virginia, Democrats pushed a redistricting plan that would have handed them as many as four additional seats and reduced Republican representation to a single congressman. The Virginia Supreme Court struck it down. Democrats ran to the Supreme Court of the United States, which rejected their emergency appeal in a single terse sentence, with not one justice noting a dissent. The same tactic they praised in California they called a threat to democracy in Virginia, and the highest court in the land was unmoved.

What makes it worse is that they had already given up. Before the Supreme Court even ruled, the governor announced the state would proceed with the existing map regardless of what the justices decided. The appeal was theater. They knew it would fail, they had already moved on, and they filed it anyway so they would have someone to blame. And blame they did. When the one-sentence denial came down, the response was not reflection but outrage at the court, as though three million votes had been stolen by the justices rather than lost by a party that broke its own state's rules to draw the map in the first place.

The contradiction is not subtle. The principle is supposed to be the thing that matters. Either drawing maps for partisan advantage is acceptable or it is not. It cannot be democracy in one state and tyranny in another simply because of which party benefits.

What makes the Virginia story worth lingering on is what happened inside the party once the plan collapsed. Governor Abigail Spanberger, who signed the Virginia redistricting into law herself, has now publicly distanced herself from Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader whose allied groups poured tens of millions of dollars into the effort. When asked about Jeffries and future plans, Spanberger said that talk of some future point is a distraction from the task at hand, and that on redistricting, that time is over now.

It is obvious these are not the voices of a unified party. That is the language of a governor putting distance between herself and a failure. And it is worth remembering that this same governor once wrote that gerrymandering is detrimental to democracy and that opposing it should be a bipartisan priority. Then she signed a gerrymander into law. The voters are not required to forget what was said yesterday simply because it is inconvenient today.

There is more. After the Virginia ruling, some Democrats floated to Jeffries an idea so brazen it deserves to be named. They considered lowering the retirement age of the state Supreme Court justices to clear the bench, installing seven new justices, and rehearing the case to reach the result they wanted. Spanberger does not support the scheme. But the fact that it was floated at all tells us something. When you cannot win under the rules, you consider changing the people who enforce the rules. That is not a defense of democracy. That is the opposite.

And here is the part that should trouble every American Black voter in particular. As they lose these battles, they reach for the oldest tool in the drawer. They warn us that we are being returned to the days of Jim Crow. They invoke our grandmothers and our grandfathers, the marches, the dogs, the hoses, the blood. They do this not to honor that history but to harvest our fear. They need us frightened, because frightened people do not ask hard questions. Frightened people do not notice that the party invoking Jim Crow is the same party whose ancestors built it.

And it does not stop at fear. The same pundits who serve the party have found a new front in their war against the Supreme Court, and they are willing to spend our children to wage it. They are now suggesting that Black athletes at colleges in states with contested maps should stop playing, as though our young people should be made into instruments of a political fight they did not start. Think on what is being asked. They will invoke Jim Crow to frighten us and then turn our own sons and daughters into bargaining chips in the same breath. That is what desperation looks like when it reaches for leverage. It will spend our children to make a point.

I have written before about who wrote the laws of segregation and who defended them, and I will not relitigate the whole of it here. But I will say this plainly. A party that needs to frighten you with the past while offering you nothing for the future is a party that has run out of anything else to give.

Next listen to the outrage coming out of Los Angeles where Mayor Karen Bass may lose her seat. The race is a statistical tie. One of the candidates clustered at the top with her is Spencer Pratt, a figure who has gathered support from the right and a nod of approval from President Trump. Whatever one thinks of that race, the picture of an incumbent Democratic mayor in one of the most Democratic cities in America fighting for her political life is not the picture of a healthy party. It is the picture of a party whose own voters are no longer convinced.

How about Maine, where Senator Susan Collins faces Graham Platner. Platner is the kind of candidate a desperate party produces. He has been dogged by reports of a Nazi-linked tattoo, by resurfaced social media posts, and by reports that his own wife told campaign staff he had sent sexual messages to other women. This is who they are running. Not because he is the best they have, but because the anger they have stoked needs a vessel, and he is the vessel available.

Now listen to the sound the party makes about its own past. The leaked autopsy of the 2024 campaign, the party's own report, authored by a Democratic consultant and then disavowed by the party that commissioned it, described Democrats as incapable of projecting strength, unity, and leadership, and said voters have drifted away. The report was so damaging that party leaders tried to bury it. It was riddled with errors. It never once mentioned Gaza, despite the evidence that the war cost the campaign dearly. A party confident in its future does not hide its own analysis of its past.

And what is their answer to all of this? Who do they offer us as the way forward? The same faces. Kamala Harris, who declined to run for governor of her home state and left the door open for another presidential run, is making the rounds again. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is being positioned as a front-runner. The party that just lost is offering us the architects of that loss and calling it renewal.

Watch how Harris in particular comes back to us. She is once again presenting herself to the American Black community as one of us in the fullest sense, as a daughter of the American descendants of slavery, when her own story is more complicated than the image she sells. Authenticity is not a small thing in our community, because we have been sold counterfeit champions before. We have every right to ask whether the people who claim our struggle have lived it or merely learned to perform it when an election draws near.

And consider how Ocasio-Cortez courts the very communities she needs. She has stepped into our pulpits, and just days ago she appeared at an Eid al-Adha event in the Bronx alongside Mayor Zohran Mamdani wearing a hijab. Understand what that is. It is the putting on of a people's customs as a garment, worn for an afternoon and removed by evening, in order to harvest their support. The offense is not that she honored a community. The offense is the assumption underneath it, that we are too uninformed to see the performance, that we cannot tell the difference between someone who shares our condition and someone who has learned to dress like she does.

She was not the only one to hear the objection. Women who escaped life under compulsory hijab laws spoke up, among them an Iranian activist who has fought that very garment, who said plainly that the hijab is not cultural tourism, that women have died over the freedom not to wear it. When the people whose lived reality you are borrowing tell you that you have turned their suffering into a costume, that is not solidarity. That is spectacle.

And spectacle is the whole of it. Ocasio-Cortez believes she can win, not on the strength of any record of bringing people together, but on something as hollow as a follower count, a number inflated in places by accounts that are not even real people. She has mistaken visibility for leadership and attention for trust. Make no mistake about what she is reaching for. There is a Senate seat in New York she could pursue, the one Chuck Schumer holds, but a woman who has spent her time on the global stage and turned up everywhere a camera waits is not testing the waters for the Senate. She is testing them for the presidency. The party that lost in 2024 looks at her and sees its future, when what it is actually seeing is a mirror of the same performance that lost it the country.

Now the sounds thumping on the streets in New Jersey, where the pattern becomes impossible to miss. For months there was quiet. Now, weeks before our primary election, there is chaos outside the Delaney Hall detention facility in Newark. Sparks are flying between federal agents and protesters, and the timing deserves our attention. A party that needs energized voters has a powerful incentive to manufacture the kind of scene that energizes them.

Governor Mikie Sherrill is performing a familiar two-step. She calls the protesters peaceful while she sends state troopers into the very crowd she is praising. The state police have said that some in the crowd retrieved gas masks, fireworks, rocks, and projectiles, that they surrounded a law enforcement vehicle, and that they threatened the personnel inside. Federal officials say they agreed to pull back to lower the temperature, and that the governor refused to let state police assist them. And yet the story being sold to us is that the protesters are peaceful and the agents are the aggressors.

I want to be fair, because fairness is what separates argument from propaganda. There were two crowds outside Delaney Hall, one supporting ICE and one opposing it, but the pro-ICE presence was small and the anti-ICE crowd dwarfed it. The disorder, the fireworks and the projectiles and the arrests, came overwhelmingly from the larger side. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey has condemned the state police response and called the protests overwhelmingly peaceful, and that view deserves to be on the table. The one thing genuinely open to debate is whether the police response was proportionate. But the governor cannot have it both ways. She cannot call a crowd peaceful and deploy riot police against it in the same breath, then blame everyone except herself when the two collide. Either it was peaceful, in which case the troopers were unnecessary, or it was not, in which case the word peaceful is being used to manage us rather than to describe what happened. And it is worth noting who was arrested. The governor herself admitted that five of the six people taken in on one night were from outside New Jersey, and that national extremist groups had involved themselves. That is not a neighborhood rising up. That is something imported.

These are the sounds. The sounds of desperation. The sounds of a party that cannot win on ideas, so it manufactures crisis. It cannot inspire, so it frightens. It cannot offer new leaders, so it recycles old ones. It cannot defend its record, so it buries the report that describes it.

Pete Buttigieg, Mark Kelly, and Gavin Newsom are already maneuvering quietly toward the front of the line for 2028, each of them carrying records and policies that have done little to bring people together and less to solve the problems in front of us. They are not running toward a vision. They are running away from a wreckage, hoping we will not notice the difference.

It is the cries of utter madness, and it is the particular madness that comes when a movement has no effective policies and no ideas capable of uniting people. When you cannot build, you burn. When you cannot persuade, you panic. And when you cannot win, you cry that the game is rigged, even as you reach for the levers to rig it yourself.

We are not required to be frightened. We are not required to forget. And we are most certainly not required to follow a party off the cliff of its own desperation simply because it shouts the name of Jim Crow while marching us backward. We have eyes. We can see. And what we see is a party that has lost its way, dressing its panic in the language of principle and hoping we will not know the difference.

We know the difference.

The Annotated Bias

"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves." — Thomas Jefferson

Why We the People Hold the Pen

We are approaching New Jersey's primary election, and I have already cast my ballot and will be working the polls on June 2 as a Black woman in America exercising a right that generations before me fought to secure.

Over the last few weeks, I have been reading the Federalist Papers while also working my way through Melissa Murray's book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. Reading the two side by side has been a fascinating exercise because they approach the Constitution from very different perspectives.

Before discussing the book itself, it is important to understand who Melissa Murray is. Murray is a legal scholar, former dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, and currently the Frederick I. and Grace Stokes Professor of Law and Faculty Director of the Birnbaum Women's Leadership Center at New York University School of Law. She is also one of the hosts of the podcast Strict Scrutiny, alongside Leah Litman of the University of Michigan Law School and Kate Shaw of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.

By any measure, these women are accomplished scholars. They have spent years studying constitutional law, Supreme Court decisions, and the legal framework of the United States. Yet one of the things I have come to realize while reading Murray's book and listening to Strict Scrutiny is that scholarship alone is not enough. Knowledge, credentials, and expertise are valuable, but absent common sense, humility, and a foundation rooted in something greater than ourselves, expertise can become its own blind spot.

That realization shaped the way I read Murray's book.

Reading Murray's book alongside the Federalist Papers left me with a very different impression than I believe she intended. Rather than convincing me that the Constitution is a fundamentally flawed document in need of constant correction, the experience reinforced my appreciation for the durability of the Constitution itself. More importantly, it highlighted how constitutional interpretation is often influenced by the assumptions, cultural values, and political perspectives that readers bring to the text.

Murray's book is, at its core, a rereading of the Constitution with a heavy emphasis on the amendments. As I worked my way through the text, I found myself wondering whether that emphasis was intentional. It seemed to me that the amendments occupy center stage while the Constitution itself often recedes into the background.

I suspect this emphasis reflects a broader debate that has shaped constitutional interpretation for decades. On one side are those who believe the Constitution should be interpreted according to its original public meaning and historical understanding. This approach is often associated with jurists such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and, to varying degrees, Chief Justice John Roberts. While these justices do not always agree with one another, they generally place significant weight on the text of the Constitution and the historical context in which it was written.

On the other side are those who view the Constitution as a living document whose meaning evolves alongside society and culture. Under this view, constitutional interpretation is not limited to the original understanding of the text but must take into account contemporary circumstances, evolving social values, and modern realities.

As I read Murray's book, I came away with the impression that she largely embraces the latter view. The amendments are presented not merely as additions to the Constitution but as evidence that constitutional meaning expands over time as society changes.

What I found myself questioning, however, was whether the existence of twenty-seven amendments proves that the Constitution was fundamentally flawed. To me, the opposite conclusion seems more persuasive. The Constitution has existed for more than two centuries, yet only twenty-seven amendments have been adopted. The first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 out of twelve that Congress had proposed in 1789. Of the two left unratified, one concerned congressional pay, and it remained dormant for more than two centuries before it was finally ratified in 1992 as the Twenty-Seventh Amendment. Rather than demonstrating constitutional failure, the relatively small number of amendments demonstrates the durability of the constitutional framework.

More importantly, the amendment process itself suggests that the framers anticipated change. They created a mechanism by which the Constitution could be modified when necessary. That is very different from the idea that judges should revise constitutional meaning through interpretation based on evolving social and cultural values.

Before examining the broader constitutional debate, it is important to address what I believe is one of the central weaknesses of Murray's book: the degree to which her political and cultural assumptions shape her analysis of the Constitution.

No writer is free from bias. I certainly am not. The issue is not whether Murray has a perspective. The issue is whether that perspective is acknowledged and whether competing constitutional interpretations are given fair consideration.

Throughout the book, Murray frequently critiques positions associated with President Donald Trump and Supreme Court decisions that reach conservative constitutional conclusions. One example is the ongoing debate surrounding the Fourteenth Amendment and birthright citizenship. Murray appears to treat the issue as largely settled and views efforts to reconsider the scope of the Citizenship Clause with skepticism.

Yet it is not unreasonable to ask questions about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment was adopted in the aftermath of the Civil War to overturn the injustice of the Dred Scott decision and to establish that formerly enslaved Black Americans and their descendants were citizens of the United States. The historical circumstances surrounding its adoption are well known. The modern debate is not whether those individuals were citizens. The debate concerns whether the Citizenship Clause extends as broadly as some modern interpretations suggest.

Reasonable people can disagree about that question. My concern is that Murray often presents one side of the debate as though it is the only intellectually serious position. Yet the issue is significant enough that it has found its way before the Supreme Court. The very fact that constitutional scholars, lower courts, and Supreme Court justices continue to debate the question suggests that it is not as settled as some commentators claim.

Another example of what I perceive as selective framing appears in Murray's discussion of Jim Crow and the racial oppression that followed Reconstruction.

To her credit, Murray does not ignore the discrimination, violence, and legal barriers that Black Americans faced in the South after the Civil War. Those realities are an undeniable part of American history and deserve serious discussion. What struck me, however, was the way the political actors responsible for many of those policies were often described.

Throughout these discussions, references are frequently made to historical movements, political coalitions, or broader social forces. Yet there is comparatively little direct acknowledgment that many of the Southern politicians who enacted and defended segregation, disenfranchisement, and Jim Crow laws were Democrats. The historical record on this point is not particularly controversial. Those individuals held office, passed legislation, and exercised political power under the banner of the Democratic Party of their time. I am aware that the political coalitions of that era differ from those of today. My point is simpler. If historical accuracy matters, the identities of the political actors involved should not be obscured. Readers should be given the full picture, even when that picture complicates contemporary political narratives.

I cannot know Murray's intentions, nor do I claim to. What I can speak to is the effect. The cumulative effect of the language, examples, and historical framing throughout the book is that certain aspects of the historical record receive considerable attention while others appear less central to the narrative being presented.

I also found Murray's choice of language and examples revealing. Throughout the book, she frequently refers to a hypothetical president as "she." There is nothing inherently wrong with using a female president as an example. Nor am I suggesting that America should never elect a female president. My observation is simply that examples are rarely chosen at random. They often reveal the assumptions and priorities of the writer.

Considering that every president in American history has been male, the repeated use of "she" struck me as a deliberate choice reflecting a modern cultural perspective. By itself, this would be insignificant. However, when viewed alongside the broader themes of the book, it becomes part of a larger pattern in which contemporary concerns about gender, identity, and social change shape the constitutional analysis being presented.

Before there was a Constitution, there was a Declaration. Before there were amendments, there was the belief that human beings are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Constitution provides the framework for governing a free people, but the Declaration explains why those freedoms matter in the first place.

It is here that I find myself parting ways with Murray and many modern constitutional scholars. They frequently invoke the Constitution to defend the rights of the individual, yet when the discussion turns to abortion, the analysis often begins with the assumption that the question concerns only the rights of the woman.

If constitutional principles are rooted in the protection of individual rights, then the first question should not be whether a woman has autonomy over her body. The first question should be whether the life developing in the womb possesses any claim to protection under the law. If the answer is yes, then the constitutional analysis becomes far more complicated than a simple appeal to personal liberty. If the answer is no, then that conclusion itself must be defended rather than assumed.

What troubles me is that many modern discussions seem to bypass this question altogether. The debate is framed almost entirely around choice, autonomy, and reproductive rights, while the question of life is treated as secondary. Yet reproduction has already occurred. The issue is no longer whether life will begin, but whether a developing life will be permitted to continue.

Furthermore, I find myself wondering how the founding generation would have approached this question. The men who drafted the Declaration of Independence and later framed the Constitution were far from perfect, but they spoke often about natural rights, human liberty, and the protection of life. Their writings reveal a deep concern for limiting government power and preserving the rights of individuals.

“Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

— — John 20:29 (KJV)

Would they have viewed the unborn child as entirely outside those protections? I cannot say with certainty. What I can say is that it seems like a question worth asking.

Modern constitutional interpretation often extends certain legal protections to non-citizens because they are human beings entitled to due process and equal treatment under the law. If our constitutional tradition recognizes a measure of protection based on our shared humanity, then I struggle to understand why the humanity of the unborn is so often dismissed before the discussion even begins.

Even Christ told Thomas, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. He was speaking of belief in Himself, of the countless believers across the centuries who have never laid eyes on Him and yet hold Him as Lord. But the same principle reaches further. Before we hear his first cry, before we cradle her small body in our hands, we already believe it is a life, and we move to protect it.

After all, the unborn child is not a foreign invader, nor an outsider seeking entry into the nation. The unborn child is a developing human life, one that, absent intervention, will cross the threshold from the womb into the world and become a citizen of the United States. If constitutional principles are broad enough to recognize the humanity of those who do not belong to the political community, should they not at least compel us to seriously consider the humanity of those who are on the verge of entering it?

This question does not resolve the abortion debate, and I do not pretend that it does. What it does reveal is how incomplete the constitutional conversation becomes when one life is given consideration while the other is treated as though it does not exist. That same concern, the question of who is seen and who is overlooked, runs through the whole of how we read the Constitution.

Bringing me back to Murray's book, about the U.S. Constitution, I found it to be a relatively simple and accessible read. It is written for a modern audience and serves as a guided tour through the Constitution and its amendments. While Murray discusses some of the historical debates surrounding the Constitution, the book does not deeply explore the struggles, disagreements, and competing visions that shaped the document during its creation. Nor does it spend much time wrestling with the intellectual battles that took place between the framers and their critics during the ratification process.

To be fair, Murray does provide useful historical context and raises questions that readers should consider. There were sections of the book that I found informative and engaging. My concern is not that the book lacks intelligence. My concern is that it often presents constitutional interpretation through a particular ideological lens while giving the appearance of neutral explanation.

The danger is this: many readers, especially younger readers, may approach a work written by a respected scholar with the assumption that they are receiving an objective account of the Constitution. Yet constitutional interpretation is rarely objective. Every scholar, judge, commentator, and citizen brings assumptions to the text. Murray is no exception.

I worry that readers who have never read the Constitution for themselves may come away believing they understand the Constitution when what they have really encountered is one scholar's interpretation of the Constitution. There is a difference between the two.

If I have one recommendation after finishing this book, it is this: read the Constitution for yourself. Read the amendments for yourself. Read the Federalist Papers. Read the arguments of those who agree with Murray and those who disagree with her. Wrestle with the text before allowing anyone else to tell you what it means.

The Constitution belongs to the American people. It was not written exclusively for scholars, judges, professors, or constitutional experts. It was written to establish a government and preserve liberty for a free people. The best way to understand it is not through the lens of any single commentator, no matter how accomplished, but by engaging directly with the document itself.

After reading Murray's book alongside the Federalist Papers, I came away convinced of one thing: the Constitution is far more resilient, far more enduring, and far more capable of speaking for itself than many modern scholars seem willing to admit.

“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy.”

— — James Madison

Wiping Red Lines Off Their Faces

“Nothing could be more ill judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties.” — Alexander Hamilton

The Gerrymandering Wars and the Awakening of American Black Voters

What has become painfully obvious this week is the infighting beginning to ripple through the Democratic Party ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. Much of it centers around political gerrymandering, a tactic both parties have used for decades, but one Democrats long believed worked overwhelmingly to their advantage through modern Voting Rights Act litigation and racial bloc redistricting strategies. Republicans have now begun using many of the same structural tools with increasing effectiveness, and Democrats are suddenly up in arms.

When considering these battles over voting maps, representation, and political power, it is essential that we step back and examine the policies and historical shifts that helped create the political landscape we are living in today. Perhaps there is no better place to begin than with the conditions of the American South after the Civil War, through the New Deal era of the 1930s, and ultimately to the desk of Lyndon B. Johnson, where the modern political realignment of American Black voters accelerated in ways that still shape our politics today.

The Party Switch Myth

To keep many American Blacks voting for Democrat candidates, left-leaning scholars, commentators, and policymakers often invoke what is commonly called the party switch in the South. The argument generally goes like this. American Blacks, who were initially overwhelmingly Republican following the Civil War, gradually abandoned the Republican Party after Jim Crow, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights era transformed the political landscape.

There is truth inside parts of that history. American Blacks were historically aligned with Republicans after the Civil War. Men like Blanche K. Bruce, who became the first American Black United States Senator in 1875 representing Mississippi, emerged directly out of that Republican Reconstruction tradition. It is also true that Jim Crow violence, disenfranchisement, economic hardship, and later federal social programs changed Black political alignment over time. By the mid-twentieth century, Black voters increasingly aligned themselves with the Democratic Party, especially during and after the New Deal and the Civil Rights era.

Now before someone rushes to invoke the Southern Strategy, let me say plainly that I am aware political coalitions shifted after the Civil Rights era. Southern whites moved politically. Black voters increasingly aligned with Democrats. Electoral maps changed. None of that is disputed. What I dispute is the lazy conclusion that modern Republicans simply became the segregationist Democrats of the past. I also dispute the companion claim that Democrats transformed overnight into the moral opposite of their historical governing instincts. Neither party crossed the aisle ideologically. The coalitions shifted. The philosophies did not.

Political coalitions changed. Voters changed. Regional loyalties changed. The deeper ideological debates over federal power, economic control, dependency systems, labor expansion, local governance, and constitutional structure remained far more continuous than modern political shorthand admits. When people speak of the party switch today, it is often used less as a historical explanation and more as a moral accusation. The implication is that modern Republicans inherited the spirit of Southern segregationists while modern Democrats became the sole heirs of civil rights and racial progress. History is far more complicated than partisan mythology.

Even as voters shifted, the broader philosophical instincts of each party remained recognizable. Democrats continued expanding federal social programs, centralized economic management, and dependency-driven systems. Republicans continued emphasizing constitutional restraint, limited government, local control, markets, and fiscal conservatism, even if both parties evolved over time and often contradicted their own principles in practice.

Trapped in the Framework

Since 1965, American Blacks have largely been trapped within the framework of Democrat policies. For decades we have voted overwhelmingly Democrat, yet many of our urban communities have declined in measurable ways involving education, wealth, institutional stability, self-awareness, family structure, and economic independence. Still, we continue aligning ourselves almost exclusively with the same political machine.

This has everything to do with political power and gerrymandering. Voting maps have often been drawn in ways that pack Black communities into concentrated districts that maximize Democrat political control while limiting broader influence elsewhere. Our votes are harvested in bulk, but very little meaningful institutional investment returns to many of our neighborhoods. As Malcolm X once warned, politicians often help themselves first and only afterward return to Black communities asking, what do you need. The pattern has become painfully familiar.

Over the last several years we have also witnessed growing tensions surrounding illegal immigration and the expectation that Black communities should quietly absorb the economic, educational, and social pressures that come with rapid demographic change, often without serious public debate. These realities are not random. Many of the same voting districts are intentionally engineered and politically protected through racial bloc mapping and partisan redistricting strategies.

The Maps Begin to Fall

Earlier this month, in Louisiana v. Callais, Democrats suffered a major setback. On April 29, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision written by Justice Samuel Alito that Louisiana's congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district stretched across the state, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Court concluded that race had improperly dominated the drawing of the district lines, and that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to use race as the basis for redistricting. The decision narrowed the standard that future challenges under Section 2 must meet, and it sent a clear signal to state legislatures across the country.

The next major blow came in Virginia. On May 8, 2026, the Supreme Court of Virginia ruled 4-3 to strike down the Democratic redistricting amendment that had been narrowly approved by voters in an April referendum, finding the General Assembly had failed to follow proper constitutional procedure in placing the measure on the ballot. The new map would have shifted Virginia's congressional delegation from a 6-5 Democratic edge to a 10-1 Democratic supermajority. The ruling killed the map. Democrats were left wiping red lines off their faces.

The consequences are now creating fractures inside the Democratic Party itself. Democrats believed aggressive redistricting efforts would help them flip the House. Republicans, encouraged by the Callais ruling, have successfully redrawn maps in several states in ways that now threaten Democratic incumbents and expose internal party conflicts over race, representation, and political survival.

Crockett, Cohen, and Wasserman Schultz

In Texas, the redistricting wars helped reshape the Democratic Senate primary. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, the Dallas representative known for her sharp tongue and her loyalty to Black Democratic constituencies, entered the Senate race in December 2025 after Texas Republicans redrew the congressional map in a way that scrambled Democratic House prospects across the state. On March 3, 2026, she faced state Representative James Talarico, a white seminarian from Austin, in the Democratic primary. Talarico won, 53.1 percent to 45.6 percent.

Black voters delivered for Crockett. Polling before the primary showed her winning more than 71 percent of Black Democratic voters. Prominent Black Texas politicians lined up behind her. Yet Talarico, the white challenger, outraised Crockett nearly three to one with money largely coming from outside Texas, including a viral surge of national exposure when his interview on a major late-night show went out on YouTube after being cut from the network broadcast. The Black base showed up for Crockett. The party machinery and the donor class showed up for Talarico. The pattern is familiar.

In Tennessee, the story took a different shape but ended in the same place. On May 15, 2026, Congressman Steve Cohen announced he would not run for reelection after the Republican-led state legislature dismantled the Memphis-based 9th Congressional District, Tennessee's only majority-Black congressional district, splitting Memphis into three districts all redrawn to favor Republicans. Cohen, who is white, had held that seat for nineteen years with the consistent support of Black Memphis voters. He called the redistricting Republicans silencing the Black vote, and he was right to call it that.

The harder question is one Black Memphis must eventually answer for itself. Why did the only majority-Black congressional district in Tennessee remain represented by a white Democrat for nearly two decades. Cohen by all accounts served his constituents well, and Black voters kept electing him. That was their choice and it must be respected. The deeper truth is that the district he served is also one of the poorest, most violent, and most institutionally neglected urban districts in the country. Memphis remains plagued by failing schools, concentrated poverty, generational public housing, and the kind of chronic disinvestment that nineteen years of representation by a senior Democratic congressman did not meaningfully reverse. The conditions did not change. The representation did not change. The political loyalty did not change either.

The Democratic Party's grip on Black political loyalty meant that when Republicans came for the district, no Black Democratic successor was in position to defend it. The political bench was thin because the machine had not built one. The district was vulnerable not only because Republicans drew the lines, but because the party that claimed to protect Black representation had spent two decades comfortable with a representation that did not have to be Black, and a constituency whose conditions did not have to improve.

Then came Florida. On May 22, 2026, just two days ago as I write this, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would run for reelection in Florida's newly redrawn 20th Congressional District, a majority-minority district whose Democratic electorate is overwhelmingly Black, after Republican Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new Florida map on May 4 that carved up her current 25th District into five pieces. The 20th District seat had been vacated when Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Black Democrat, resigned in April under the weight of ethics charges. Several Black Democrats had already declared for the seat. Wasserman Schultz, who is white, announced her run anyway, framing the campaign as a fight to preserve Broward County's political influence.

Black Democrats inside the Florida party did not stay quiet. Florida State Senator Shevrin Jones, the Democratic leader in the state Senate and an American Black, said publicly that he had personally asked Wasserman Schultz not to run. He told reporters, Black representation is a non-negotiable for me, and added that everyone deserves to have a seat at the table to ensure communities are represented by those with their same lived experience. Elijah Manley, a Black Democrat already running in the primary, called her Jim Crow Debbie and said her decision was an attack on Black representation. The criticism did not come from Republicans. It came from Black Democrats inside her own party.

The Mask Slips

The same party that endlessly speaks of protecting Black representation now finds itself openly fighting over who gets to control Black districts, who gets to inherit Black voting blocs, and which communities are politically useful enough to preserve. Democrats spent decades building political power through racial coalition politics, district engineering, and dependency-driven voting blocs. The very systems they cultivated are now turning inward, producing infighting over race, representation, identity, and political ownership inside the party itself.

The consequences of this political alignment have been devastating for many of our communities. Despite decades of initiatives, political theater, symbolic gestures, and the constant invocation of slavery and civil rights during every election cycle, many urban Black communities continue struggling under the same conditions generation after generation. We continue to see failing urban schools, generational public housing, concentrated poverty, violence, declining literacy, shrinking ownership, institutional collapse, and growing dependence on federal systems that rarely create lasting independence. Housing remains a crisis. Wealth creation remains limited in both scope and accessibility. Entire neighborhoods continue living at the edge of economic survival while political leaders return every few years offering the same promises wrapped in new slogans.

The tragedy is not simply that these conditions exist. The tragedy is that many politicians have learned how to politically survive because these conditions exist.

For decades Democrats used fear to keep Black voters politically aligned in the South during Jim Crow. Today many of those same fear tactics have simply been repackaged. The language changed. The strategy did not. Fear of Republicans. Fear of losing benefits. Fear of losing protections. Fear of stepping outside the political plantation. The whip became a carrot dangling from a thread, but the dependency remained.

The Awakening

Many of us are beginning to see clearly. The cracks started becoming visible in 2020, when Donald Trump received roughly twelve percent of the Black vote nationally, a notable increase over previous Republican performances. By 2024 that number had risen further, to roughly thirteen to fourteen percent overall, and the shift among Black men was sharper still, climbing to roughly twenty-one percent according to NBC exit polling. The trend was clearest among younger Black men, who cited the economy, inflation, and jobs as their top concerns and who increasingly judged Democratic governance by outcomes rather than rhetoric.

Whether or not one agrees with the political shift itself, the underlying point is harder to dismiss. American Blacks are beginning to question the political arrangement that has existed for generations. We are the voices of the underdog in our communities. It is up to us to stop depending entirely on organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, on politicians and commentators, and on podcasters and influencers who continuously insist we are better off permanently tied to one political party no matter the outcomes in our communities.

The NAACP and the SPLC are not the organizations they once were. The NAACP, founded in 1909 by an interracial coalition that included W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Ida B. Wells, was created to advance justice specifically for the colored race in America. That mission produced real victories. Brown v. Board. Voting rights litigation. The dismantling of legal segregation across the courts. In recent decades the organization has expanded its stated mission from securing the rights of American Blacks to securing the rights of all persons. Its advocacy now includes immigration reform, environmental justice, and broad civil rights coalitions that extend well beyond the specific historic mandate that brought it into being. Whatever one thinks of that expansion, the practical effect has been a diffusion of focus at a moment when the conditions in American Black communities require more focused advocacy, not less.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has traveled a stranger road. Founded in 1971 to fight Klan violence through the civil courts, the SPLC pioneered a strategy of using wrongful death suits to bankrupt white supremacist organizations. That work was real. In recent decades the organization became better known for its expansive hate group designations, which have been challenged in court by groups across the religious and political spectrum, including settlements such as the 3.375 million dollars the SPLC paid in 2018 to the Quilliam Foundation and Maajid Nawaz after wrongly labeling them anti-Muslim extremists. More recently, on April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury indicted the SPLC on charges of wire fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges that the SPLC operated a covert network paying individuals associated with violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, and that roughly three million dollars in donor funds was paid to eight informants between 2014 and 2023 through bank accounts opened in the names of fictitious entities. The SPLC has defended the payments as standard infiltrator and informant practice and has not been convicted of any crime. The case is pending. What is undisputed is that an organization originally founded to combat the Klan stands accused of having funneled donor dollars to individuals embedded inside the very groups it publicly denounced.

Neither organization has demonstrated the political independence to challenge Democratic policy outcomes in Black communities, and neither has produced an honest accounting of why decades of political loyalty have not produced the conditions they promised.

While we are told to remain loyal, another reality is unfolding right before our eyes. The same political machinery that once relied almost exclusively on Black voting blocs is now preparing the next coalition of dependent voters to maintain political power. The strategy changes faces, but the structure remains familiar. That may sound harsh, but history often tells uncomfortable truths. Uncomfortable truths do not become false simply because they offend us.

At some point we must stop asking what a political party says about us and begin asking what decades of political loyalty have actually built around us.

It is time we counted what loyalty has cost us.

“Much depends upon us for the help of our colour.” — Richard Allen

The Document They Cannot Rewrite

“We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion.” — Frederick Douglass

Memorial Day, the Constitution, and the American Black Inheritance

May is quickly being washed away, and June is coming in with the heat of summer. Monday is Memorial Day. It is a day Americans set aside to honor those who gave their lives, not only for the United States, but for the Constitution upon which this republic stands. The flag they died under was not merely cloth. It was a document. It was a framework. It was the deliberate handiwork of men who feared concentrated power and built a system designed to outlast them.

It is not lost on me that one of the earliest such observances on American record was organized by American Blacks who had been slaves only weeks before. They did not call it Memorial Day. That name came later. They called it Decoration Day, because the act itself was the decoration of the graves of the Union dead with flowers. On May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, freed men and women exhumed the bodies of 257 Union soldiers who had died in a Confederate prison camp at the Washington Race Course. They reburied those men with dignity. They built a fence around the graves and inscribed it with the words, Martyrs of the Race Course. Then ten thousand people, most of them American Blacks newly released from bondage, walked in procession with flowers and song to honor the dead who had fought for their freedom.

You probably did not learn this in school. There is a reason for that. The Decoration Day at Charleston was buried in the American memory for more than 130 years. It was Yale historian David Blight who recovered it in the late 1990s, finding a file labeled First Decoration Day in a Harvard archive. Blight has said openly that white Charlestonians suppressed this founding from memory. When the United Daughters of the Confederacy later asked the Ladies Memorial Association of Charleston whether the May 1865 commemoration had actually happened, the response was that no official information could be gathered. The event of ten thousand people, the parade of three thousand schoolchildren, the reburial of 257 Union soldiers, the inscription Martyrs of the Race Course, all of it had been quietly washed out of the record.

Sit with that for a moment. The first hands to consecrate what would become Memorial Day in this country were the hands of former slaves, and the act was suppressed because the witnesses were Black. They understood something many of their descendants and many of their critics still do not understand. The Constitution of the United States, even imperfect, even bloodied, was the document that contained the seeds of their freedom. They honored the men who died defending it. They aligned themselves with the Union, with the framework, with the republic. And the record of that alignment was hidden because it told the wrong story about who built this country and who has bled to keep it standing.

That alignment is not accidental. It is prophetic. And the suppression of it is part of the same pattern we will trace through the rest of this piece. American Black loyalty to the Constitution gets minimized so the framework itself can be reinterpreted by people who arrived later with different commitments. Decoration Day got buried for 130 years. The Electoral College is the next thing on the chopping block. The instinct is the same. Only the century has changed.

The Federalist Papers and the Fear of Faction

I have been spending time in the Federalist Papers, and the more I read, the more I see that the framers were not naive men. They were students of history. They had watched republics rise and fall. They knew that pure democracy, unrestrained majority rule, tends to devour itself. James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned plainly about the danger of faction, by which he meant any group, majority or minority, animated by passion or interest hostile to the rights of others or the permanent interests of the community.

Madison's solution was not to abolish faction. He understood you cannot abolish human nature. His solution was structure. A republic, not a pure democracy. A union of states, not a single undifferentiated mass. Representation rather than direct mob rule. Multiple chambers, separated powers, layered checks. The Electoral College sits inside that architecture. It was placed there deliberately so that presidential selection would not be a simple headcount dominated by the largest population centers, but a federal process in which states themselves carry weight.

That design is the brake. Without it, the most densely populated and ideologically uniform regions of the country would forever decide the fate of every other region. Wyoming would never have a voice against California. Rural Pennsylvania would be erased by New York City. The framers knew this. They built a system in which competing interests must form coalitions to win, in which no single faction can run the table by sheer numerical weight.

The Seeds the Framers Refused to Plant

Now here is something worth saying plainly. The Constitution as ratified in 1787 did not free anyone. The framers wrote slavery into the document in three explicit places. The Three-Fifths Clause, which counted three out of every five slaves toward congressional apportionment, inflating the political power of the slave states in the House of Representatives without granting any voice, vote, or right to the slaves themselves. The Fugitive Slave Clause, which required free states to return escaped slaves to bondage. And the twenty-year protection of the international slave trade, which guaranteed that the trafficking of human beings would continue uninterrupted until at least 1808. So at the moment of framing, slaves did not gain. They were written into the document as property and as a bookkeeping entry that rewarded the men who owned them.

Yet the principles inside the framing contained the seeds of abolition, even when the framers themselves refused to plant them. The Declaration of Independence, which the framers treated as the philosophical ground of the constitutional project, asserted that all men are created equal. The Preamble of the Constitution itself named the blessings of liberty as a constitutive purpose. The Bill of Rights named due process and equal protection under law as foundational. None of this applied to slaves in 1787. The framework was built such that, once the moral and political will arrived, the document could be extended to honor what its own principles already declared. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments did exactly that. The framework absorbed the correction without breaking.

Frederick Douglass made this exact argument in 1860. On March 26 of that year, speaking before the Scottish Anti-Slavery Society in Glasgow, Scotland, in an address titled The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery, Douglass broke with the Garrisonian abolitionists, the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, the prominent white publisher of The Liberator, who held that the Constitution was a covenant with death and an agreement with hell. Douglass had once agreed with that view. He changed his mind. He came to argue that read on its plain text, the Constitution contained no explicit endorsement of slavery as a permanent institution, that the document had to be accepted at face value rather than read through the secret intentions or political compromises of its writers, and that its principles were ultimately incompatible with chattel bondage. He argued that the Constitution, properly read, was an anti-slavery document whose own logic would eventually break the institution that the framers had compromised with.

Douglass was right. The compromise did break. The principles held. And the people who held the principles to their own text, against the compromise written around them, were overwhelmingly American Blacks and the abolitionists who stood with us. We were not strangers to this document. We were its most insistent readers. We took the framers' words at face value and forced the country to honor them. We held the Constitution to its own oath.

So when I say American Blacks have a peculiar and prophetic relationship to the Constitution, I am not being sentimental. I am being accurate. The document was not written to free us. It was written with us already inside it as property. But the principles it contained were larger than the compromise its writers made with our owners, and we have spent the entire history of this republic insisting on those principles against that compromise. Every gain we have ever made in this country has come from holding the Constitution to its own stated commitments. That is the inheritance. That is the witness. And it is exactly the witness now being shrugged off by scholars who would rewrite the document and officials who treat their oath as one consideration among many.

Melissa Murray and the Interpretive Bias

A few weeks ago, on May 5, Melissa Murray appeared at NYU's Kimmel Center for a live recording of The Briefing with Michael Waldman, promoting her new book, The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader. Murray is a professor of constitutional law at NYU and a co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast. At the end of the conversation, she was asked what single thing she would change about the Constitution. Her answer was the Electoral College.

Let me say first that Murray's book is not, in my judgment, a book worth your serious time if you are looking for a faithful guide to the document itself. It is an annotated guide filtered through a particular ideological lens. It is the Constitution as Murray wishes to interpret it, not the Constitution as the framers wrote it. That distinction matters.

This is the problem of interpretation. Interpretation is the move people make when a document does not say what they wish it said. You see it constantly with the Bible. When a passage cuts against a person's preferred belief, they reach for interpretation rather than submission to the text. The text does not change. The reader changes the text in their own mind to fit their own life. The Constitution suffers the same fate at the hands of modern legal scholars who treat it less as a binding framework and more as a living suggestion to be rewritten by each generation's sensibilities.

Murray is the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. She was born in Brooklyn and raised in Florida. I do not raise her background to dismiss her. I raise it because it is honest to name where a person's instincts come from. Her family arrived in America by choice, into a system built by others, and her scholarly career has been spent reinterpreting the foundations of that system through frameworks she finds more congenial. When she says she would change the Electoral College, she is saying the quiet part out loud. She would remove the very constitutional safeguard that prevents her preferred ideological coalition from running the country uncontested.

She is a scholar, yes. She is also a partisan. Both can be true at once.

Invasion By Other Means

The framers feared foreign invasion. They wrote about it. They built provisions into the Constitution against it. When most people hear the phrase foreign invasion, they picture armies and warships. The framers understood the threat was broader than that. A republic can be invaded by ideas as well as by armies. A republic can be reshaped from within by populations who do not share its founding commitments. A republic can be hollowed out by representatives who serve the interests of other nations or other ideologies more loyally than they serve the Constitution they swore to uphold.

We are watching that happen now. Sanctuary policies in states like New Jersey, where I live, divert the resources of citizens to support populations who entered the country in violation of its laws. Foreign born officials are seated in legislatures and city halls while still holding the passports of the countries they came from. The constitutional framework is being tested not by armies at the border, but by the slow ideological reshaping of the country from within its own institutions.

Dual Loyalty in the People's House

Let me be precise here, because precision matters. American law currently permits dual citizenship. A naturalized citizen may legally retain the passport of the country they left. A sitting member of Congress may legally maintain ethnic, cultural, or international attachments. None of what I am about to describe is, strictly speaking, illegal under current law. That is not the argument I am making.

The argument I am making is constitutional and cultural, not criminal. The oath taken at naturalization and the oath taken upon entering Congress both demand the same thing. To support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. To bear true faith and allegiance to the same. Without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. Those words are not procedural. They name a hierarchy of loyalty. They say that whatever else a person may also be, attached to, descended from, or culturally aligned with, the Constitution sits first. Everything else sits below.

What has changed in this country is not the oath. What has changed is the cultural assumption that constitutional allegiance is the primary frame at all. We now live in a political culture that increasingly treats constitutional loyalty as one option among many, sitting alongside ideological loyalty, ethnic loyalty, transnational loyalty, religious loyalty, and a vague global cosmopolitanism. These competing frames are no longer subordinate. They are openly named and openly preferred, and the Constitution is treated as a procedural backdrop rather than the binding hierarchy it was written to be.

Consider Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. She was born in Somalia, fled with her family during the civil war, spent four years in a Kenyan refugee camp, and immigrated to the United States in 1995. She became a naturalized citizen. She swore the oath. In January of 2024, she stood in a hotel in Minneapolis and addressed a Somali audience in the Somali language. The translation she herself reshared has her telling that audience that for as long as she is in the United States Congress, Somalia's waters will not be taken, that she sits in Congress to represent their interests, and that they should sleep in comfort knowing she is there to protect the interests of Somalia from inside the United States system.

Her defenders point to context and to translation disputes, and that is fair. The argument is not that she has committed a crime. She has not. The argument is that a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives stood before a foreign-language audience and described her congressional seat as a platform for advancing another nation's interests, and the framing did not strike her, her audience, or much of her party as a contradiction. That is the cultural shift. A generation ago, that framing would have ended a career. Today it barely registers.

Consider Zohran Mamdani, the new mayor of New York City. He was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1991. He came to the United States at age seven. He was naturalized in 2018. He swore the oath. He was elected mayor of the largest city in the United States and took office on January 1, 2026. He still holds Ugandan citizenship. He chose to retain it. That choice is legal. It is also revealing. A Ugandan journalist who mentored him as a teenager told the Associated Press that Mamdani is basically global, not so much Ugandan and not so much American.

Global. Not so much American. Again, that framing came from a friend, not a critic. And again, it is not illegal. What it is, is symptomatic. The mayor of New York City describes himself, and is described by those closest to him, in transnational rather than constitutional terms. He campaigned on freezing rents, fare free buses, city run grocery stores, and aggressive taxation of wealth, a platform openly drawn from democratic socialist tradition rather than from the American constitutional order. He has refused to clearly condemn slogans calling to globalize the intifada. He has positioned himself rhetorically against the closest American allies in the Middle East. All of this is legal. All of this is also a portrait of a political culture in which constitutional allegiance is no longer the primary frame.

The framers anticipated this risk. They did not anticipate it in the form of dual passports or hyphenated identities, because those categories did not exist in their world. They anticipated it in the form of faction. They knew that men would form attachments to particular interests, particular regions, particular causes, and that those attachments would compete with loyalty to the constitutional whole. Their answer was structure. The oath. The federal design. The separation of powers. The Electoral College. The deliberate friction that prevents any single faction from running the table.

What we are watching now is not the violation of those structures. It is the quiet abandonment of the assumption that those structures matter most. When a Representative names a foreign nation as the interest she serves from inside Congress, when a mayor of New York keeps the passport of the country he left, when a constitutional law professor announces she would erase the Electoral College, the issue is not that they have broken the law. The issue is that they no longer treat the Constitution as the document that ranks above their other loyalties. They treat it as one consideration among several, and often not the highest.

That is the invasion the framers feared. Not armies. Not ballots alone. The slow cultural displacement of constitutional allegiance by every other available identity. And when that displacement is complete, the document does not need to be repealed. It simply stops being the frame anyone is arguing from.

Who Is An American

The deeper question underneath all of this is the question of identity. Who is an American. The answer cannot only be legal status, because legal status can be granted to anyone who clears a procedural bar. The answer must include something about allegiance. Allegiance to the Constitution. Allegiance to the framework. Allegiance to the principle that no faction, no ideology, no foreign attachment, takes precedence over the document that holds this country together.

American Blacks, the descendants of those who were brought here in chains, have a peculiar and prophetic relationship to that question. We did not arrive by choice. We did not arrive with another country in our pocket as a backup loyalty. We were built into the soil of this nation by force, and we fought for the Constitution to be honored on our behalf. We bled for the Union. We organized the first Memorial Day. We marched, sat in, sued, voted, served, and died to make the Constitution mean what it said. We are not strangers to this document. We are its most insistent witnesses.

That is why it should disturb every American Black who reads carefully when a constitutional law professor announces she would erase the Electoral College, or when a sitting member of Congress describes her seat as a platform for protecting another nation's interests, or when the mayor of New York City keeps the passport of the country he left. The issue is not whether any of these acts crosses a legal line. The issue is that they reflect a political culture that has stopped treating the Constitution as the binding hierarchy of loyalty. They are not breaking the framework. They are quietly walking out of it, and inviting the rest of the country to walk out with them. The federal structure is what gave smaller and dissenting communities room to fight back through the long civil rights struggle. Hollow out the cultural commitment to that structure, and you hollow out the protections that came with it.

Memorial Day and the Watch Ahead

On Monday I will think about the soldiers buried at Hampton Park in Charleston. I will think about the freed slaves who washed their graves and laid flowers on the soil. I will think about the men and women in uniform who have died since, defending not a piece of cloth but a written document. I will think about the framers who feared faction and built a republic instead of a democracy, knowing that pure democracy is one of the surest paths to tyranny.

The Constitution is not yours to rewrite because you do not like the outcome. It is not Murray's to rewrite. It is not Omar's to rewrite. It is not Mamdani's to rewrite. It is not the sanctuary movement's to rewrite. It is the inheritance of every American who has paid in blood, in labor, in struggle, in faith, for the promise contained in those pages.

American Blacks have stood with this document longer and harder than its current critics. We will not be the ones to hand it over.

Memorial Day exists because somebody died for it. Honor that. Read it. Defend it.