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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is only one problem. She is a Republican.

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

What did Memphis receive in exchange for that loyalty?

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

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

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

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

The Bucket on the Witness Chair

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

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

And what did Steve Cohen bring to that hearing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Map Finally Changes

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

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

The Democrat Party is calling this a tragedy.

The Ebenezer Performance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Her Own District Is the Indictment

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

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

And what does her district look like today?

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

The answer is almost nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

Why She, of All People

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

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

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

What Gerrymandering Actually Did to Us

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

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

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

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

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

The Pattern Has a Purpose

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

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

Sit with that.

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

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

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

They choose Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

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

They Came for the Black Justice Too

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

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

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

And AOC filed papers to remove him.

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

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

Virginia, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Packed Me Too

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

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

So let me say what I actually believe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But we are here. And we are counting.

The Question for American Blacks

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

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

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

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

What if we all leave?

The Pill, the Panel, and the Lottery

“Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones.” - The Lottery, Shirley Jackson

This Mother’s Day finds the country in an uncomfortable position. On the same Sunday that we set aside to honor the women who carried us, fed us, walked the floor with us through fevers and disappointments, and offered up parts of themselves they will never get back, the Supreme Court is preparing to decide by tomorrow afternoon whether the chemical ending of pregnancy may continue to be ordered through the mail. The two events sit beside each other on the calendar without apology. We light candles for our mothers in the morning and read the legal briefs in the evening. We post tributes online to the women who chose us and scroll past headlines about the drug that ends the choosing. The strangeness of it ought to stop us in the doorway, and yet for most of the country it will not.

I am writing this on Mother’s Day for that reason. The juxtaposition is not an accident of the news cycle. It is a window into what we have become, and what we are still becoming, as a people who once knew how to call motherhood sacred without irony.

On May 1, 2026, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling in Louisiana v. FDA that required mifepristone, the drug used in roughly six out of every ten abortions in this country, to be dispensed only in person at a clinic or pharmacy. Two days later the manufacturers, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro, raced to the Supreme Court asking for emergency relief, and on Monday, May 4, Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay that paused the Fifth Circuit’s ruling until tomorrow, May 11, at five o’clock in the afternoon. By the time most readers see this piece, the country will already know whether the high court intends to keep the pill flowing through the mail or whether it will allow the appellate ruling to stand. Either way, the argument I want to make today does not depend on which way the justices rule. It depends on what we have already become as a society long before the ruling arrived, and on what we will choose to remember about motherhood once the news has moved on.

“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children...— ”

— Genesis 3:16 (KJV)

Reading the briefs filed by the drug companies, you would think the matter at hand is purely technical. Telehealth, dispensing protocols, regulatory chaos, the orderly function of the Food and Drug Administration. I do not dismiss the procedural questions as merely cosmetic. There are real arguments to be made about how a federal agency should regulate a drug, about the limits of agency discretion, and about the chaos that follows when courts and regulators contradict one another. Reasonable people, including some who share my convictions about the unborn, will disagree about whether the Fifth Circuit panel reached the right legal conclusion. What I am after today is something the briefs themselves cannot say out loud. The language is corporate and procedural, as it always is when the subject is one we no longer wish to confront in plain terms. The state of Louisiana, for its part, says in equally measured language that the telemedicine pathway undermines its laws protecting unborn human life and forces it to spend Medicaid funds caring for women injured by the drug. Every word in the case is carefully chosen to keep the reader at a distance from what is actually happening, which is the chemical termination of a developing human being inside a woman’s body, sometimes alone in a bathroom, sometimes after a fifteen-minute video call with a clinician hundreds of miles away, sometimes ordered through the mail like a prescription for blood pressure medication.

The legal complexity is real. The federal questions in this case are real, the Trump administration’s own FDA review of the 2023 dispensing policy is real, and the conflict between Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban and the federal regulatory framework is real. None of that, however, is the question I sit with on this particular Sunday as a believer and as an American Black woman watching this country argue about the unborn the way it once argued about us. There is a deeper question underneath the legal one, and it is older than the Fifth Circuit, older than the Comstock Act, older than mifepristone itself. It is the question first whispered in Eden, and it has not changed in form even though the speakers and the institutions have multiplied beyond counting.

Hath God said. That is the original challenge. The voice in the garden did not deny that the tree existed or that the fruit was real. It only suggested that what God had clearly said about the tree could be redefined, softened, reframed into something more reasonable, more sophisticated, more compatible with what the human creature wanted to do anyway. Surely you shall not die, the voice said. Surely God did not mean what you think He meant. The pattern has not changed. When I read the legal arguments and the public commentary surrounding the abortion pill, I hear the same refrain dressed in newer clothing. Surely that is not a life. Surely this pill represents healthcare. Surely this is simply part of the reproductive process. I am aware that thoughtful people, including some who would call themselves pro-life in their own way, hold a gradualist view, arguing that early development represents a different moral category than later development and that the chemical ending of pregnancy in the first weeks should not be weighed the same as the ending of a born life. I respect the seriousness of that position more than I respect the slogans, and I still cannot accept it, because the line drawn at week six or week ten or week twelve is a line drawn by the convenience of the one drawing it, not by anything inherent in the developing life itself. The institutions change and the intellectual frameworks become more elaborate, but underneath the layered language is the same redefinition of reality so that we may live at peace with what we have decided to do.

We are told, in the most credentialed voices we possess, not to trust what is plainly unfolding inside the womb. Not to trust the moral intuition that has belonged to mothers and grandmothers across every culture and century. Not to trust the continuity of human development that any honest embryology textbook will describe in the first chapter. Instead we are encouraged to trust the language of the pharmaceutical companies that profit from the continuation of this market, the legal theorists who construct the scaffolding around it, and the commentators who appear on our screens to assure us that the ritual is humane and the women are heroic and the question of what is being ended is, somehow, beside the point. That is what troubles me most. Once a society becomes comfortable redefining life itself in order to justify what it has chosen to do with that life, truth becomes increasingly difficult to recognize anywhere else. The same culture that cannot say what is in the womb will eventually struggle to say what is in the prison cell or the nursing home. These are the places where life is most easily questioned, because the people inside them cannot stand up and answer back. We have already watched this happen in our own lifetimes, as the man in solitary confinement became a case number, as the grandmother in the nursing home became a billing code, and each redefinition was defended by people who believed themselves to be reasonable. The redefinition does not stay in one place. It never has.

I have thought often, in the years since the public conversation around abortion shifted from the language of tragedy to the language of celebration, of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery. Most American readers encountered it in high school. A small village gathers on a clear summer morning. The children are gathering stones. The adults are chatting about the weather and the planting. Old Man Warner reminds everyone that there has always been a lottery, that to abandon the ritual would be to abandon civilization itself. The proceedings are calm, orderly, even cordial. Names are drawn. A slip of paper is unfolded. With the same neighbors who had been laughing a few minutes earlier, the stoning begins. What Jackson understood, and what made the story unbearable to the readers of The New Yorker in 1948 who cancelled their subscriptions in protest, is that violence does not require monsters. It only requires a community willing to ritualize what it cannot bear to face directly, and a vocabulary respectable enough to keep the face from showing.

When I listen to the most credentialed voices in our culture defend the abortion pill as a matter of healthcare access, when I watched, during the last presidential cycle, the public celebrations of women who had ended pregnancies and been brought forward to tell their stories as acts of empowerment, when I hear the language of liberation applied to the chemical ending of a developing human life, what I am hearing is the calm and orderly procedure of a village that has decided the ritual is necessary. The participants are not cruel. Many of them are kind, educated, and sincerely persuaded that they are on the side of progress. The vocabulary is sophisticated. The framework is humane. The procedures are regulated by federal agencies and reviewed by appellate courts and defended by manufacturers in well-written briefs. Everything is in order. At the center of the ritual, no matter how many layers of language we wrap around it, a developing human life is being ended, and we have decided collectively that we will not look at that fact directly. The selected, in this version of the lottery, are the ones who cannot speak.

I want to be careful here, because I know that women who have walked through this decision often carry it for the rest of their lives, and many of them carry it with grief that the public celebrations do not acknowledge or allow. My argument is not against those women. My argument is against the cultural machine that requires their stories to be sorted into the approved categories of empowerment and liberation, that cannot make room for the fuller and harder truth, and that recruits the language of medicine and law and progress to keep us from facing what is actually being done. I have known women who were broken by what was sold to them as freedom, and I have known women who believed it was the right decision and still wept when no one was looking. The cultural ritual cannot account for either of them honestly, because the ritual depends on the redefinition holding firm.

The Fifth Circuit’s ruling, whatever its legal fate by the end of the day tomorrow, did one useful thing. It interrupted the smoothness of the procedure. It made the country argue, briefly and uncomfortably, about how a drug that ends a pregnancy should be obtained, and in arguing about the how, the country was forced for a moment to remember the what. That is why the manufacturers’ briefs sound so urgent. Not only because of the logistical disruption, real as that is, but because the public attention itself is dangerous to the ritual. Rituals work best when no one looks too closely. The whole point of the mail order pathway, beyond convenience, is that it removes the act from the clinical setting, removes it from the in-person encounter, removes it from the place where another human being might ask a question or pause a moment, and relocates it to the privacy of a bathroom where the woman is alone with the pill and the consequence and the silence. Whatever one thinks about the legal questions, that relocation is not a neutral act. It is the further refinement of a ritual that has always preferred not to be witnessed.

I do not know how the Supreme Court will rule. I do not know whether Justice Alito’s stay will be extended, dissolved, or replaced by a more substantive order. I do know that the deeper question, the one that has hovered over this republic since long before mifepristone was approved in the year 2000, will not be resolved by any panel of judges or any FDA review or any executive order. The court will decide tomorrow what the pharmacy may do. The older question is what the people will do, and that question is not on any docket. It is whether a people who once held that all human beings are endowed by their Creator with the right to life can keep that conviction alive while simultaneously building a sophisticated infrastructure for the chemical ending of human life in its earliest and most defenseless form. I do not believe a people can hold both. I believe that one will eventually overtake the other, and that we are watching, in real time and at considerable speed, which one is winning.

The voice in the garden has never stopped speaking. It has only learned to use better lawyers, better doctors, better marketers, and better legal briefs. The question for those of us who claim to follow the One who answered that voice with the cross is whether we will keep saying what God has said about the human person made in His image, even when the saying of it costs us our place at the cultural table.

So as we celebrate the sacrifice mothers make today, the women who carried us when carrying was hard, the foremothers who labored under conditions this country has still not fully reckoned with, the women in our own families who chose us when choosing was not the easy or the celebrated path, the daughters now becoming mothers themselves and learning what their own bodies can give and forgive, let us also remember what motherhood actually is. It is the willingness to receive a life that is not yours and to spend yourself for it. It is the original sacrament of the human story, written into the body itself before any law was ever written about it. The women I am thinking of this morning, including the one who carried me, did not ask whether the life inside them was convenient. They asked what was required of them, and they paid it. That is the older lottery, the one in which the mother accepts that her own ease will be drawn against the life of another, and offers herself instead. We used to know how to honor that. We are forgetting, and the forgetting is showing in our laws, our pharmacies, our headlines, and our hearts.

The pill, the panel, and the procedure may all hold for now. The truth still stands. The mothers still stand. So do I.

By Jacqueline Session Ausby | DahTruth, LLC | @dahtruth.com

Much Ado About Nothing

Article XV.

Section 1. 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—

Section 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

Louisiana v. Callais and the Manufactured Crisis

May did not arrive with the sweet scent of spring flowers but with the stench of bad ideology and heat of rhetoric.  It arrived with a chorus of outrage so loud, so coordinated, and so emotionally charged that you would think the country had been hurled back into the 1950s, complete with fire hoses, police dogs, and the open defiance of basic civil rights. The alarm has been sounded as if Jim Crow itself were making a full return, as if American Black people are on the brink of losing the fundamental voting protections secured in the 1960s. That framing demands scrutiny. We are being asked to accept, without question, that this moment represents the collapse of civil rights in America. That claim does not just raise concern. It raises the temperature of the conversation to a level that does not match the legal reality of what the Supreme Court actually decided in Louisiana v. Callais.

The Chorus of Alarm

Within hours of the decision, the rhetoric was deployed in nearly identical form across multiple platforms and from multiple voices. Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP, called the ruling “a devastating blow to what remains of the Voting Rights Act” and accused the Supreme Court of betraying American Black voters, betraying America, and betraying democracy itself. He compared what the Court did to the dismantling of “the most significant piece of policy legislation of the civil rights movement.” The NAACP convened an emergency Zoom town hall the following day. The President of the NAACP joined that call from a booth in an airport, framing the moment as so urgent that he could not wait until he reached his destination. During that call, the decision was compared to Dred Scott v. Sandford.

Congressman Bobby Scott of Virginia, Co-Chair of the Congressional Voting Rights Caucus, declared that the decision “sets voting rights back decades” and accused the Court of creating “a nearly impossible standard to challenge racial gerrymandering.” Kristen Clarke, speaking through the NAACP, called Callais “one of the most consequential and devastating rulings issued by the Supreme Court in the 21st Century.” Ellie Mystal, appearing on the Dean Obeidallah show, went further. He argued that without the Voting Rights Act of 1965, only four American Black members would have served in Congress in the 1960s, and that the very ability of women, particularly American Black and Hispanic women, to be politically represented flowed almost entirely from that legislation. He framed the entire decision as the culmination of John Roberts’ lifelong crusade against the Voting Rights Act, traceable to his work in the Reagan administration. He declared that racism in America has now been made “unprovable” under federal law.

On the Native Land podcast, the ruling was described as a step back toward Jim Crow, framed as weakening and even dismantling Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Much of that argument leaned heavily on the dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan, with portions of her dissent presented as if they directly resolved the majority’s reasoning.  As if a dissent, is more than an opinion.  They treated her words as a one-sided understanding of what the Court actually decided and why.

What the Court Actually Decided

To understand whether this rhetoric matches reality, you have to understand what actually happened in Louisiana. After the 2020 census, Louisiana redrew its congressional districts, as every state is required to do. Plaintiffs argued that the state needed to create a second majority-Black district under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. A federal court agreed and signaled that the state would likely be found in violation of Section 2 if it did not comply. In response, Louisiana redrew its map. The new configuration created a second majority-Black district by connecting geographically distant American Black populations, stretching roughly 200 miles across the state, winding through Shreveport, Alexandria, Lafayette, and Baton Rouge.

That map was challenged. The challengers argued that the district was drawn predominantly on the basis of race, that race had become the dominant organizing principle of the map, and that this constituted an unconstitutional racial gerrymander under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, and the question became this: when does compliance with the Voting Rights Act cross the line into unconstitutional race-based redistricting?

The Court applied the framework established in Thornburg v. Gingles, the long-standing three-part test that governs Section 2 claims. The first prong asks whether a minority group is large and geographically compact enough to form a majority in a reasonably drawn district. The Court found that the plaintiffs failed this prong because their illustrative maps did not satisfy the state’s legitimate non-racial districting goals, including political objectives. The second and third prongs ask whether minority voters are politically cohesive and whether majority voters consistently vote as a bloc to defeat their preferred candidates. The Court found that the plaintiffs offered evidence that American Black and white voters supported different candidates, but their analysis did not separate race from party. In a state where race and party often track closely together, that distinction matters. Finally, on the totality of the circumstances, the Court found that the plaintiffs relied on historical evidence and broad claims about societal discrimination rather than evidence of present-day intentional racial discrimination in Louisiana’s voting system.

“Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create an additional majority-minority district, the State had no compelling interest to justify the use of race as the predominant factor in drawing its congressional map.”

— Justice Alito - Majority Opinion

The Court did not strike down Section 2. The Court did not eliminate the Voting Rights Act. The Court raised the evidentiary bar and clarified that race cannot be used as the dominant organizing principle of a congressional map without satisfying every prong of the legal test. That is a meaningful shift, but it is not the end of voting rights. It is a redefinition of what plaintiffs must prove in a political landscape where race and party are deeply intertwined.

The Asymmetry No One Wants to Talk About

Here is where the rhetoric begins to collapse under its own weight. The loudest voices framing this decision as catastrophic are concentrated in states where the Democratic Party already holds significant power. Within hours of the ruling, Politico reported that some Democratic strategists were already discussing the possibility of diluting their own majority-minority districts in blue states in order to spread American Black voters across more districts and pick up additional Democratic seats. Read that again. The same political coalition that is publicly mourning the loss of Section 2 protections was, in private, already discussing the strategic dismantling of majority-Black districts when it served their partisan interests.

That is the asymmetry. In red states, the political map was already going to be redrawn after the next census, with or without this ruling. Republican legislatures in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and elsewhere have been redistricting aggressively for years, and they will continue to do so. The Callais decision does not fundamentally change that trajectory. What it does change is the strategic landscape in blue states, where Section 2 has often been used as a shield to preserve majority-minority districts that, in some cases, also serve as reliable Democratic strongholds. Strip away the legal protection, and those districts can be redrawn, repackaged, or repurposed by either party, depending on who holds the pen.

That is why the rhetoric feels so disproportionate. If the concern were truly about American Black political representation, the response would be the same regardless of which party benefits from the maps. Instead, the response is sharpest where the partisan stakes are highest. The defense of Section 2, in much of the public commentary, has begun to look less like a defense of American Black voters and more like a defense of a political coalition that has assumed American Black voters will always vote one way.

The Monolith Assumption

That assumption is the heart of the problem. Justice Kagan’s dissent, while legally serious, rests on a framework that treats racial voting patterns as stable and predictable enough to function as a legal proxy for political behavior. Ellie Mystal’s commentary goes further. He treats the political alignment of American Black voters as essentially fixed, framing any disruption to that alignment as either suppression or manipulation. He argues that without majority-minority districts, American Black political power evaporates, because the assumption built into the entire framework is that American Black voters will vote together, vote Democrat, and vote in a way that produces a single political outcome.

““Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was designed to root out voting practices that deny minority voters an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.””

— Justice Kagan - Dissent

That assumption is increasingly hard to sustain. The 2024 election demonstrated measurable movement among American Black voters, particularly among American Black men, toward Republican candidates. Donald Trump received the highest share of the American Black vote of any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. That shift did not happen because of voter suppression. It happened because American Black voters, like every other group of voters in this country, are not a monolith. We have political diversity within our community. We have theological diversity. We have economic diversity. We have generational diversity. To build a legal framework that assumes otherwise is to flatten the very people the framework claims to protect.

There is also a piece of history that is rarely mentioned in these conversations. American Black Republicans existed in the South long before the Voting Rights Act. They were oppressed, disenfranchised, and silenced, often by the very Democratic political machines that controlled Southern states. To now turn around and argue that American Black voters must be packed into specific districts because they will reliably vote Democrat is to repeat, in different language, a version of the same assumption that silenced American Black Republicans for generations. It treats American Black political identity as fixed by race rather than shaped by conviction.

The Comparisons That Do Not Hold

Comparing Callais to Dred Scott is not just inaccurate. It is irresponsible. Dred Scott v. Sandford declared that American Black people could be treated as property and denied citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment was passed specifically to overturn that ruling. Nothing in the Callais decision approaches that territory. Nothing in the decision touches citizenship, personhood, or the legal status of American Black people. To suggest otherwise is to use one of the most morally serious rulings in American history as a rhetorical prop, and that cheapens the memory of what Dred Scott actually was.

The Jim Crow comparison is similarly overstated. Jim Crow was a regime of poll taxes, literacy tests, white-only primaries, lynch mob enforcement, and explicit legal segregation. The Callais decision does none of that. It does not reinstate poll taxes. It does not reinstate literacy tests. It does not strip American Black people of the right to vote. It addresses how districts are drawn and how race may be used as a factor in drawing them. Reasonable people can disagree about that legal question, but to call it Jim Crow 2.0 is to suggest that the protections won in the 1960s have been erased, and they have not.

The Question We Should Actually Be Asking

The question worth asking is not whether racism still exists. It does. The question is what kind of nation we are now, and whether the legal frameworks built to address the racism of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s still describe the country we actually live in. We have 67 American Black members in Congress.  A man allegedly considered American black but not ADOS has served as President of the United States. We have even had a women serve as VP and although she pretended to be ADOS and will go down as one of the worse vice presidents in American history, it is worth nothing she did serve Vice President of the United States.  Harris attempted to pass as ADOS to win an election, and she came very close to winning.  Clearly, we have measurable shifts in political alignment within our own community. We have economic, geographic, and theological diversity that simply did not exist in the political imagination of 1965.

None of that means racism has been eradicated. None of that means the work of justice is finished. What it does mean is that treating the political landscape of 2026 as if it were the political landscape of 1965, is not honesty. It is rhetoric. And when rhetoric replaces analysis, the people who suffer most are the very people the rhetoric claims to protect, because they are denied the dignity of being seen as full political agents capable of making their own choices.

“The Constitution does not tolerate the use of race as a proxy for political belief.”

— Justice Thomas - Concurring Majority

Much Ado About Nothing

That is why, when I look at Louisiana v. Callais, I do not see a constitutional rupture. I do not see Jim Crow returning. I do not see the death of the Voting Rights Act. I see a legal dispute about how race interacts with redistricting, how far Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act can be extended before it collides with the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. There may be legitimate debates about fairness and representation, but those debates should be grounded in what the Court actually decided, not in assumptions imported wholesale from a different era.

What must be restated is the reality that we are not living in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s. The political landscape has changed, including within American Black communities themselves, where political affiliation is not as uniform as it is often portrayed. Reducing that complexity to fixed assumptions about how we vote, or how we must vote, flattens reality in ways that ultimately weaken the very argument being made. The hard-won protections of the Civil Rights Movement have not vanished. The question is how those protections are being interpreted, applied, and contested in a modern political environment where race and partisanship are deeply intertwined.

For all the urgency in the public response, the legal outcome in Louisiana looks less like a constitutional rupture and more like a disagreement over how race should function in modern districting. In that sense, much of the reaction surrounding it begins to feel, at least in legal terms, much more like rhetoric than reality. Much ado about nothing.

When the Violence Comes From Within

Reflections on a Bloody Week in the American Black Community

When I was growing up, we did not hear stories like the ones we are hearing now. There were no mass shootings inside our homes. There were no fathers walking through bedrooms killing children in their sleep. There were no headlines about former officials murdering their wives and then turning the gun on themselves. The neighborhoods were not perfect, but they were not graveyards either.

The older I got, the more violence began to invade our streets. It came in slowly at first, then all at once. The drugs arrived like weeds pushing through cracked concrete. Vials, needles, and broken glass scattered across sidewalks where children once played. Nobody could quite explain how it all got there. We were young, but we were not stupid. We knew the drugs did not grow in our neighborhoods. Somebody brought them in. Somebody profited. Somebody allowed it. The music shifted with the streets, and a generation that wanted out of the projects ended up celebrating the very things keeping them trapped.

That is the long backdrop. That is the soil. What grew out of it is what we are now forced to confront.

Here is what I have come to believe after watching this last week unfold. The deepest crisis in our community is no longer simply the violence done to us from the outside. It is the moral and spiritual violence we have learned to accept against ourselves. Until we name that honestly, no policy, no program, and no protest will save us.

A Week That Should Stop Us Cold

The middle of April 2026 was one of the bloodiest weeks the American Black community has seen in recent memory. A young woman traveled to an island for her birthday, met someone, and ended up dead. A Black podcaster went away with her white boyfriend to another island and never came home.

Then came the two stories that broke something inside me.

In Shreveport, Louisiana, a 31-year-old man named Shamar Elkins entered the homes of the two women who had borne his children and opened fire. When the morning was over, eight children were dead. Seven of them his own. The youngest was three. Most were shot in the head while they slept. He carjacked a vehicle, fled, and was killed in a confrontation with police a few miles away. In one act, he more than doubled the city's homicide count for the year.

That same week in Annandale, Virginia, former Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, in their home. He then turned the gun on himself. Their teenage children were inside. Their oldest son made the 911 call. Court records released afterward described a man who had been ordered to leave the house by April 30, who had already lost custody of his children, who was drinking daily, and who had spent years obsessed with restoring a reputation damaged by a sexual assault scandal. He was, by every available measure, a man losing everything.

Two stories. Two households. Two communities forever marked. One carried out by a man the people around him describe as struggling with mental illness and untreated trauma. The other carried out by a man who once stood at the second-highest seat in Virginia government. Different worlds. Same outcome. Black families destroyed by the hands of Black men who were supposed to protect them.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying this kind of violence belongs only to us. It does not. White men, Latino men, Asian men, men of every background commit horrific acts of violence every day in this country. If you measured per capita, the picture would shift dramatically in places the cameras rarely visit. There are rural counties, suburban subdivisions, and quiet small towns where domestic violence is a way of life and nobody is reporting on it. The media zooms in on us because our urban centers are easy to map, easy to film, and easy to turn into a story. That is its own injustice, and I will not pretend otherwise.

Still, when the camera does find us, we have to look honestly at what it shows.

How I Knew Before I Knew

Before I saw a single face or read a single name in either case, something in the shape of those stories told me exactly what I was hearing. Not because Black men are more violent. They are not. The reason I knew was because of what the violence was aimed at. Not strangers. Not enemies. Not rivals. Their own. Their wives. Their children. Their households. That registered immediately. That sounded like us.

There is a particular pain when violence is directed inward. The Shreveport councilman said it plainly: more than thirty percent of homicides in his city are domestic in nature. That is not a statistic about strangers in the dark. That is families. Bedrooms. Kitchens. Front porches. People who shared a name and a meal and a child.

The Mental Illness Conversation

Whenever something like this happens, there is a rush to explain it away. Commentators like Roland Martin and others move quickly to mental illness, to systemic racism, to historical trauma. I do believe mental illness was part of what happened in Shreveport. The reporting confirms Elkins had been hospitalized for mental health treatment, had attempted suicide just two months earlier, and had told family members he was having dark thoughts. Something was wrong. Something was unaddressed. That is real.

Annandale feels different. That feels like a man who, faced with consequences he could not control, chose annihilation over accountability. He could not keep the marriage. He could not keep custody. He could not keep the house. He could not keep the reputation. So he took the only thing left he could control. That is not mental illness in the clinical sense. That is rage. That is pride. That is the refusal to be made small. That is what happens when a man decides that if he cannot have the life he wants, no one else gets to live either.

We must stop sanitizing every act of destruction by calling it mental illness. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it is moral collapse. Sometimes it is generational sin finally walking into the open. We do ourselves no favors when we refuse to name what we are looking at.

What Our Children Are Being Taught To Want

Our community has become desensitized to self-destruction. We see it in domestic violence, in fathers abandoning children, in mothers suffocating under the weight of raising kids alone. We see it in drug culture, where poison is sold to people who look like us, live beside us, and trust us. We see it in the exploitation laid bare in the cases surrounding Sean Combs and R. Kelly, where countless American Black women and girls were used and discarded by men from inside the same community. We see it in how casually life itself is treated, as if children are disposable, as if family is optional, as if responsibility is a burden instead of a duty.

None of this stays inside our homes. It is being taught, hour by hour, to our children through the screens in their hands. Walk through any teenager's TikTok feed and tell me what you see. The rapper flashing a Draco at the camera while his toddler crawls across the floor. The athlete with three baby mamas, each one filming her side of the drama for content. The young woman explaining how she made fifty thousand dollars on OnlyFans last month and calling it entrepreneurship. The trapper teaching little boys how to count a stack and bag work in the kitchen, set to music, looped on a fifteen-second clip. The influencer who has never been in the streets pretending she was raised in them because that is what gets the views.

This is what our children are being taught to want. Not character. Not covenant. Not craft. Not calling. They are being taught to want clout, currency, and the appearance of power. They are being told that the fastest path there is to look dangerous, sound dangerous, and be desired by the dangerous. The boy who picks up a gun at fifteen did not invent that image. He saw it ten thousand times before he ever held one. The girl who sells her body at nineteen did not come up with that on her own. She was being marketed to since she was twelve.

The platforms know. The algorithms reward what destabilizes. Outrage, lust, violence, and humiliation move faster than virtue ever has. The companies count the money. The labels count the streams. The brands count the engagement. We count the funerals.

Why I Am Reading Nietzsche

If you want to understand why a culture that has discarded God ends in funerals, you have to sit with the philosopher who told us, more than a hundred years ago, that the discarding was about to begin. So I have been reading him.

I have been reading Friedrich Nietzsche lately. Will to Power, specifically. I will be honest. When I first picked it up, I was opposed to him. He writes from hindsight. He writes without God. He writes as a man who believes the entire moral structure of Christianity was a long lie told to keep the strong from being strong. He called Christian morality slave morality. He believed humanity could move beyond God and create its own values through will, power, and self-definition. He believed people could decide for themselves what was right and what was wrong without needing any higher authority to tell them.

Something shifted in me as I kept reading. I realized Nietzsche is not arguing against God. He is arguing as if there is no God and then asking what follows. That is the experiment. That is the world he is describing. A world where man is the measure. A world where the strongest will writes the rules. A world where good and evil are inventions of the weak. The more I read him, the more clearly I could see something he could not. He was not describing a future he hoped for. He was describing the world we are already living in. And that world is exactly what is killing us.

That is the bridge from those murders to that book. Every act of violence we just discussed is a small Nietzschean act. The will of the self, exercised over the life of another, with no higher authority to answer to. The father in Shreveport decided whose children lived. The husband in Annandale decided whose wife lived. The trapper on TikTok decides his neighbor is prey. The girl on the live decides her body is currency. Strip away God, and this is what is left. Strip away the moral order, and the strong consume the weak. Reading a man who wrote without God has done the opposite of what he intended in me. It has driven me deeper into God. Because I have seen, in real time, what the world looks like when his ideas are left to run.

I know what some will say. Plenty of professed Christians have abused their wives. Plenty of pastors have preyed on the children in their pews. Plenty of so-called believers have done exactly the kind of violence I am condemning. That is true. I am not naive about it. The argument is not that Christians do not sin. They do. The argument is about what holds when the moral foundation itself is removed. A Christian who sins still answers to a standard outside himself. A man who has made himself the standard answers to no one. The first is a hypocrite. The second is the architect of his own permission.

Nietzsche thought he was freeing humanity. Look at us. According to CDC data, the abortion rate among Black women is nearly three times that of white women, and we account for roughly thirty-eight percent of abortions in this country while being only about thirteen percent of the population. Look at the children being told they can transform into something they are not. Look at the institutions, even our historically Black colleges, drifting into moral confusion they once would have stood firmly against. This is what self-made morality builds. Not freedom. Not flourishing. Graveyards.

When you remove God from the center, something else always takes His place. Money. Sex. Pride. Violence. Status. Self-worship. Survival at any cost. None of those things can save us. None of those things have ever saved anyone.

What Returning To Christ Actually Looks Like

There is healing that needs to happen in our community. Real healing. Not the performative kind that shows up at vigils and disappears by the next news cycle. Not the political kind that turns every dead child into a talking point. Returning to Christ is not a slogan and it is not a feeling. It is a thousand specific decisions made by a thousand specific people on a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.

It looks like a father coming home and staying home. It looks like a husband loving his wife enough to walk away from the argument instead of reaching for the gun. It looks like a mother turning off the live and opening the Bible at the kitchen table with her babies before bed. It looks like the church mothers in the neighborhood being free to correct somebody else's child again without fear of being cursed out on the porch. It looks like a teenage boy being walked into manhood by men who actually know his name. It looks like a teenage girl being told by her father that her body is not currency and her worth is not measured in followers. It looks like a marriage covenant that means something even when it gets hard, especially when it gets hard.

It looks like the deacon who finally tells the truth about what he saw the pastor doing. It looks like the sister who calls her brother out instead of covering for him one more time. It looks like the artist who decides he is not going to glorify the trap anymore even if it costs him the deal. It looks like the influencer who deletes the page because she finally counted the cost of who she was teaching her cousins to become.

It looks like policy too. We need illegal guns off our streets. We need real investment in our young people. We need real schools, real mental health resources, real intervention in homes where children are being raised in danger. We need to stop pretending that the absence of fathers is acceptable. We need to stop pretending that aborting our future is liberation. We need to stop pretending that what we glorify on a screen is not training the next shooter, the next abuser, the next mother weeping over a coffin too small for any mother to ever carry.

Most of all, we need to come back to Christ. Not as a sentiment. As a structure. As a daily, governing, household, neighborhood, community-shaping reality. Because a community without God will eventually become a community without restraint, without purpose, and without truth. We are watching that play out in real time.

The Word We Have Been Avoiding

A week of funerals. A week of headlines. A week of explanations that do not explain anything.

The word we have been avoiding is repentance. Not for what was done to us. For what we have allowed to happen among us. Repentance for the music we let raise our children. Repentance for the lifestyles we glorified. Repentance for the abortions we framed as freedom. Repentance for the husbands we never held to account. Repentance for the wives we did not protect. Repentance for the institutions we let drift. Repentance for the silence in our pulpits and the noise in our feeds.

Nietzsche bet his life that man could become his own god. We are the proof of what that bet costs. The way back is not forward into more self. The way back is down. To our knees. To the only One who has ever been able to heal a people.

And that One is not us.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Pawns On The Board

“A pawn that never questions the board will always be sacrificed for the game.” — Jacqueline Session Ausby

On Black Leadership, Borrowed Houses, And The Wages Of Loyalty

I came across a LinkedIn post this week from Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland. The post opened the way they always open these days. It pointed at gas prices. It pointed at tariffs. It pointed at wars overseas. It pointed at Donald Trump. Once that throat-clearing was done, the post pivoted home and listed the wins. Lower electricity bills. New laws preventing grocery stores from gouging customers. More housing being built. Investments designed to help businesses build wealth. Protections around the right to be vaccinated.

It read like progress. It read like leadership. It read like a man who is doing the work.

Then I sat with it for a minute. I asked myself the only question that actually matters when a politician posts a list. Whose life looks different because of any of this? In Maryland, where the Governor is American Black, where the Mayor of Baltimore is American Black, where Black leadership is finally seated at the table the ancestors begged for, what has actually changed for the people those names are supposed to represent?

The honest answer is the answer nobody on a podium wants to give. Not nearly enough.

Here is what I have come to believe. We are not being led. We are being managed. The policies change packaging every four years. The faces delivering them get darker while those benefiting from them get lighter. The conditions in our neighborhoods stay the same. We are pawns on a board, moved two squares forward, two squares back, and sometimes pushed to the front line to be taken. Until we name that out loud, no vote and no victory speech is going to save us.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.”

— Hosea 4:6

The House You Do Not Own

Start with housing, because housing is where wealth either takes root or never grows. In a state celebrated for its first American Black Governor, in cities run by American Black mayors, homeownership for our people is still out of reach for far too many families. Lending is harder. Credit thresholds are higher. Down payments are heavier. The doors that other communities walked through fifty years ago are still being negotiated for ours.

Meanwhile, the policy emphasis remains on rental support. Section 8 expands. Voucher programs are praised. Politicians cut ribbons in front of new apartment complexes and call it progress.

Section 8 is not stability. It is the appearance of stability. A family living in a house they do not own, on a voucher they did not earn equity from, one missed payment away from eviction, is not secure. They are housed. There is a difference. Stability is what you can fall back on when life turns. Equity is what you draw from when the job ends, when the diagnosis comes, when the child needs college, when the parent needs care. Renters do not have that. They have a roof and a deadline. The wealth that should be building underneath their feet is building somewhere else, in the bank account of the landlord, in the portfolio of the management company, in the property tax base of a city that does not return the favor.

Programs that keep our people renting forever are not neutral. They are extractive. Every month that voucher hits, somebody who is not American Black gets a little richer off our presence in a property we will never own. That is not a conspiracy. That is just how rent works. The question is why the most visible housing solution offered to our community is the one that builds wealth for everyone except us.

If American Black leadership in Maryland was going to do something historic, it would have been a pathway to ownership. Not a voucher. A door key. A deed. A stake in the ground that says my people are not passing through. My people are staying. That is not the legislation being passed. The voucher is the legislation being passed.

Cities Run By Us, Failing Us

Look at Baltimore. Look at Chicago. Look at Memphis. Look at Detroit. Look at every urban city in this country that has been under unbroken Democratic leadership for forty, fifty, sixty years. Look at the school systems. Look at the homicide rates. Look at the percentage of children reading on grade level by fourth grade. Look at the number of fatherless homes. Look at how long the bus takes to get to the grocery store that finally opened ten miles away.

The Mayors are American Black. The City Council members are American Black. The Police Commissioners, the school superintendents, the housing directors, the prosecutors are American Black. Representation has been achieved. Representation has been celebrated. Representation has not changed the outcomes.

In Baltimore, the school system continues to rank near the bottom nationally year after year. In Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson stands at podiums talking about a city moving in the right direction while teenagers run circles around the police department and shoot each other in numbers most of America has chosen not to think about. In every one of these cities, the script is the same. Crime is down according to the press release. Crime feels different according to the grandmother who has not let her grandbabies play on the porch in three years.

If leadership, policy, and representation have all been pointed in the same direction for half a century, the outcomes are not an accident. They are a result. They are what the system was actually built to produce. We have to be honest about that, even if it costs us our comfort.

The Loyalty Industry

The next layer is the messaging machine that keeps us locked into the same vote no matter what the vote produces. Black political media has become an industry, and like every industry, it has shareholders to satisfy.

Roland Martin tells us how to vote. Joy Reid told us how to vote until her show ended and now she tells us from a podcast. Don Lemon, in his second act, tells us how to vote. Angela Rye tells us how to vote. Eddie Glaude Jr. tells us how to vote in the seminar voice that pretends it is just analysis. Jemele Hill tells us how to vote between sports takes. The Native Land Pod tells us how to vote in the cadence of friends who already know the answer before the question is asked.

None of these voices are wrong simply for having a position. The problem is that the position is non-negotiable. Disagreement is treated as defection. Independent thought is treated as betrayal. If you raise a question about a policy that has not delivered for our community in three generations, you are accused of carrying water for the other side. The conversation collapses before it begins.

Then there is the other flank. Briahna Joy Gray, Marc Lamont Hill, Sabrina Salvador, voices that present themselves as the more authentic alternative because they reject mainstream Democratic policy. Look at what they actually offer in its place. A more aggressive form of the same dependency. A socialism that requires even larger government. A pan-African or foundational frame that rejects American identity altogether and offers no functioning replacement, only grievance dressed in academic language. They are not a way out. They are the same trap with different paint.

All of these voices are paid. All of them have podcasts, speaking fees, brand deals, book contracts, university appointments. They are not suffering from the policies they recommend. They are profiting from the loyalty those policies require. Their bank accounts grow whether the boy on the corner of West Baltimore lives or dies. We carry the cost of the alignment they sell. They carry the receipts.

Why Is Israel Suddenly The Threat?

Now turn on any panel show, scroll any timeline, listen to any rally aimed at our community, and tell me what the loudest topic has been for the past two years. Israel. Gaza. Foreign policy. The map of a country most of us have never visited has somehow become the moral center of conversations about American Black freedom.

Foreign policy matters. Innocent life matters everywhere. None of that is in dispute. The question is why the energy spent on a war ten thousand miles away is not being spent on the war happening on our own blocks. Black boys are killing each other in our streets. Black girls are being trafficked through our cities. Black mothers are burying their children at rates that would shut down any other community in America. Black families are being priced out of neighborhoods their grandparents built. Black schools are graduating students who cannot read the diploma they are being handed.

None of those crises are trending on the panels. None of those crises are organizing the marches. None of those crises are setting the agenda for the next election.

It is easier to point outward than to look inward. It is easier to indict a foreign government than to indict the city council you voted for in eight straight elections. It is easier to grieve the children on a different continent than to grieve the children on the corner because the children on the corner require us to ask what we have allowed.

The outward gaze is not righteousness. It is avoidance. And the leaders directing our attention away from our own house know exactly what they are doing.

When The Pulpit Joins The Machine

Even the church has gotten in line. I listened to a sermon recently from Jamal Bryant. The text was Habakkuk 2:3, the vision tarrying but coming in its appointed time. The application was something else entirely. Write down what you want God to do for you. A new job. A house. Tuition paid. Healing. A breakthrough. Then plant a seed, by which he meant a financial offering, and watch every word on your list come to pass in God's perfect timing.

I am not naming Bryant because he is the only one. I am naming him because he is the latest example of a problem that has spread through American Black pulpits like rot through a beam. The problem is not faith. The problem is what faith has been reduced to. A vending machine. Insert seed. Receive desire. The vision is no longer about the kingdom of God advancing in a generation. The vision is about the individual believer's wish list.

Habakkuk was not writing a personal prosperity plan. Habakkuk was crying out about the violence and corruption of an entire nation, and God answered him with a vision about justice and the destruction of the proud. That is not the sermon being preached. The sermon being preached turns the prophet into a life coach and the offering plate into a coin slot.

Where is the pulpit calling our community to repentance for the children we have aborted, the marriages we have abandoned, the boys we have left to the streets, the girls we have surrendered to the screens? Where is the pulpit naming the conditions instead of monetizing the longing? Where is the pulpit telling us that the seed God actually requires is obedience, not currency, and that the harvest He promises is righteousness, not real estate?

When the church starts selling individual breakthrough while the community burns, the church has stopped being the church. It has become another podcast with stained glass.

There is one more thing about that sermon I cannot let pass. Bryant is a Baptist preacher. He preached the entire message and never once spoke the name of Jesus Christ. Not in the opening. Not in the application. Not in the close. He had time to walk the congregation through how to write a vision, how to plant a seed, and how to wait for the harvest. He had time, at the very end, to tell the congregation to get out and vote. He reminded that that early voting was beginning the very next day.  He did not have time for the name of the Savior whose blood the church he stands in was built on. A Baptist pulpit that finds room for the ballot but not for the name of Christ has chosen its kingdom. It is not the one in scripture.

The Wounds Nobody Will Touch

Underneath all of this is a layer of pain leadership has refused to address for decades. Mental health in our community is a quiet catastrophe. Our boys are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are picking up guns and using them on each other before they can legally drink. Our girls are growing up traumatized and untreated, which is one of the reasons they are turning their bodies into commodities by sixteen and calling it confidence. Our mothers are exhausted and untreated. Our fathers, when they are present, are stretched and untreated. Our elders are grieving and untreated.

National incarceration numbers may be dropping, but the boys our system sweeps up are still disproportionately ours, and the boys it spits back out are still being released into the same neighborhoods that broke them in the first place, with no policy of restoration, no real reentry, no pipeline back to school or work or family or faith. They went in damaged and untreated. They come home damaged and untreated and now also marked. We act surprised when the cycle continues.

Gang violence is treated as a news cycle, not a policy priority. A child dies, the Mayor holds a press conference, the candle vigil is filmed, the headlines move on by Tuesday, and the next Friday another child dies on the same block. Where is the legislation? Where is the long-term mental health investment? Where is the trauma-informed schooling? Where is the federal task force? Where is the national conversation that lasts longer than a hashtag?

There is none. Because the leaders who are supposed to address it know that the conversation, if held seriously, would lead to questions they cannot afford to answer. So the silence holds. And the children keep dying.

Pawns On The Board

This is what it feels like to be American Black in this country in 2026. We are voted on, voted with, voted at, and rarely voted for. We are placed on the board to make a play look balanced. We are sacrificed when a sacrifice is needed. We are paraded forward when a victory needs a face. We are pushed to the front line when the casualty count needs to come from somewhere that will not cost the party anything important.

Our pain is currency. Our stories are evidence. Our faces are the defense when the institution gets investigated. Our votes are guaranteed. Our outcomes are optional.

That is not leadership. That is not representation. That is not progress. That is positioning. And every American Black man and woman with a microphone who is paid to keep us in formation is part of how the positioning holds.

The way out is not another election. The way out is not another speech. The way out is not another sermon promising you a job if you sow a seed. The way out is the truth, told plainly, told repeatedly, told regardless of who it offends.

Our leaders are not delivering. Our media is not protecting us. Our pulpits are not preaching repentance. Our policies are not building wealth for our people. Our cities are not safer for our children. Our schools are not teaching our babies to read. Our boys are not coming home. Our girls are not being protected. And every four years we are asked to vote again as if any of that has changed.

It has not changed because it was not designed to change. It was designed to keep us exactly where we are, useful enough to stay, broken enough to need them, loyal enough not to ask.

I am asking.

—

Jacqueline Session Ausby

DahTruth.com

Whitewashed Tombs: A Three-Part Series on Christ, Nation, and Mendacity

✝️ “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness.” Matthew 23:27

Part One

When Christ Becomes a Tool

Resurrection Sunday and the Political Use of Jesus

April is the season when Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is the time when believers reflect on the truth that Christ was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day. Because of this, Jesus Christ is recognized as King, and for over two thousand years the world has paused to remember His life, His sacrifice, and His victory over death.

When you consider it fully, it is remarkable that one man could have such transformative power across nations, cultures, and generations. That alone is awe-inspiring, and this season draws people together in recognition of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, something else is unfolding, and it must be named plainly.

Over the past month, there has been an increasing trend of individuals using Jesus Christ not as Savior, but as a tool to support ideological and political positions. This is happening across the political spectrum, from the far left to the far right, and it has become especially visible in conservative and nationalist circles.

Just this past week, imagery circulated of Donald Trump portrayed in a Christ-like manner. He stood over a man as though healing him, with light surrounding the scene, as if he were the savior of America. The image was astonishing and, quite frankly, blasphemous. It was criticized on both the left and the right and was eventually removed, which was the right decision. The fact that it was created at all points to something deeper.

What we are witnessing extends beyond political division and reaches into spiritual confusion. Everyone claims Christ. That claim now appears across political, cultural, and religious lines, each asserting moral authority while pointing to the same source. They cannot all be right.

Within that confusion, there is a strain of thought, increasingly visible in right-leaning circles, that aligns American identity with whiteness and presents that alignment as both natural and necessary. What is being advanced is not simply a political position, but a redefinition of belonging.

That redefinition carries consequences. It places American Blacks and Native Americans outside the very identity they helped form. It overlooks the presence of Native people who existed on this land before it was named America, and it dismisses the generational labor, sacrifice, and blood of Black Americans who helped build the nation that now claims to define itself without them.

It is presented as order and argued as preservation, defined as truth, when in reality it narrows the definition of belonging to fit a particular image and then uses that image as the standard by which others are measured and excluded.

When Christ is drawn into that framework, the distortion deepens. He is no longer presented as Savior over all, but as a figure used to affirm boundaries that were never His to establish.

“Mendacity: the act of presenting falsehood as truth, not only through direct lies, but through distortion, omission, and the manipulation of reality in a way that persuades others to accept what is untrue as though it were true.”

— Definition of Mendacity

Mendacity and the Claim to Possess God

What we are witnessing is mendacity. It is not limited to false statements. It takes shape in identity, in authority, and in claim, presenting what is false as truth and reinforcing it until it is accepted.

This pattern appears in both religious and political leadership.

The pope presents himself as a moral authority who claims proximity to divine truth while lacking the spiritual clarity such authority requires. He wears the garment and performs the role, yet what is revealed beneath that appearance reflects what Jesus warned about: a structure that looks righteous outwardly while concealing what is corrupted within.

The same danger appears in political leadership.

Donald Trump presents himself as a force for what is right in matters of war and conflict. I have more respect for Donald Trump than I do for Pope Leo, because Donald Trump recognizes that he is flawed. He knows he is capable of sin and capable of repentance. Pope Leo does not present himself that way. He does not recognize that he is a man. He is not God. He is not the holder of truth. No man is.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself.

Political leaders and religious leaders alike remain subject to that truth. The moment either begins to take on the imagery, authority, or symbolism of Christ, the line has already been crossed.

Jesus described such men as whitewashed tombs. Beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead men's bones.

Known by Their Fruit

Jesus said we will know them by their fruit. What a man professes and what a man protects will eventually reveal who he is. The concern here rests with the individual who believes he can define, contain, and speak for Christ as though God operates within the limits he has established.

Scripture has always addressed the question of who can claim proximity to God, and one of the clearest examples appears in the book of 2 Kings.

The account tells of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, a man of authority who suffered from leprosy. The path to his healing did not begin with his position, but with a young Israelite servant in his household, who pointed him toward the prophet Elisha.

Naaman approached the situation expecting a display that matched his rank. He anticipated a direct encounter, an invocation, an act that aligned with what he believed such authority required. Instead, the instruction came through a servant, directing him to wash in the Jordan. The simplicity of the command conflicted with his expectation, and he turned away from it. Only after setting aside that expectation and submitting to what had been spoken did the healing come.

His response afterward reveals something deeper. Naaman declared that he would worship no god but the God of Israel and asked for soil from the land to take with him. That act reflected allegiance. The God he encountered was not found within the structures he knew, nor in the power he carried, but in the authority of God's word.

Christ later pointed back to this moment, noting that while many in Israel suffered, it was Naaman the Syrian who was cleansed. The significance rests in where God chose to move. Proximity did not determine access. Identity did not determine outcome.

While certain voices speak with certainty about the side on which they believe God stands, they overlook the pattern Scripture reveals. God does not move according to expectation, status, or proximity. He moves according to His own authority.

When Christianity is fused with national identity and treated as something to be held and preserved within a particular image, the result is distortion. What begins as conviction shifts into possession, and what belongs to God is drawn into human structure and defined by human terms. That movement does not produce alignment with truth. It produces conflation.

Truth does not submit to identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

In Part Two, I will name what these men are actually arguing for, in their own words.

Part Two

The Argument They Are Making

On Joel Webbon, Dale Partridge, and Calvin Robinson

That same mendacity did not remain confined to political or traditional religious spaces. It surfaced this week on the far right in a conversation on NXR Studios, where Joel Webbon, joined by Dale Partridge and Calvin Robinson, framed Christianity and American identity in ways that tie faith to race, lineage, and national structure, raising serious questions about who belongs and who does not. All three men identify as Protestant. Two of them, Webbon and Partridge, are white. Calvin Robinson is of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. That detail matters, and I will return to it. What was presented carried the appearance of order and conviction, yet rested on a narrowing of truth that cannot sustain itself under Scripture.

Come with me as I walk through the major points being made, the arguments used to justify exclusion while denying its name, and the structure that allows it to stand.

Race, as it has functioned in America, is not a fixed biological reality but a social construct shaped by law, history, and power. It was used not only to organize and separate, but to assign belonging to whites and exclusion to Blacks in particular. That structure did not emerge by accident. It was built into the system itself, often enforced through measures as rigid as the one-drop rule, where the presence of any African ancestry placed a person outside of whiteness.

At the same time, the reality remains that all people share a common humanity that cannot be reduced to these categories. The tension between what is constructed and what is real has shaped the American experience from its beginning.

It is within that tension that this conversation must be understood. In their discussion, Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson take the language of race, nation, and identity and move it in a specific direction. They frame American identity and Christianity in ways that align with a particular vision of nationhood, one that narrows belonging and places American Blacks and Jews outside of it, while presenting that framework as consistent with Scripture.

That distinction requires clarity. The Jewish faith, as it is practiced today, does not affirm Jesus Christ as the Messiah or as divine. Christianity rests on the belief that Christ has already come, that He is the Son of God, and that salvation is found through Him alone. Judaism continues to await the Messiah and does not accept that claim.

This difference matters, and it should be stated plainly. Disagreement with Jewish theology does not translate into agreement with the arguments being made here, nor does it justify broad or disparaging claims directed toward Jewish people and American Blacks as a whole.

The same standard must apply across the board. Entire groups cannot be judged collectively while the historical record of others is minimized or ignored. The history of European expansion, conquest, chattel slavery, and the formation of this nation carries its own weight and cannot be set aside when defining who belongs.

Their position unfolds as a layered framework. A nation, in their view, is not simply a political structure but a combination of land, lineage, language, laws, loves, liturgy, and faith, with race and ethnicity treated as essential components rather than incidental features.

From that foundation, they move toward a vision of stability that depends on uniformity. A nation must remain unified in its composition in order to endure. That unity is not limited to culture alone, but extends toward a preference for a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural, and at times mono-religious society, where difference is treated as a source of disorder rather than strength.

From there, they move to a reading of American history that frames the nation as fundamentally European and Christian in origin. Immigration and demographic change are then positioned as threats to cultural continuity. That concern is not without historical context. The issue arises in how it is applied and who is included within the definition of the nation itself.

American identity is not reserved for European descendants. It is inseparable from American Blacks, descendants of those who built this nation through forced labor, and from Native Americans, whose presence on this land predates its naming.

Within their framework, stability requires sameness. Diversity becomes fragmentation, and change becomes decline. Immigration is then framed as a moral violation, at times described as theft, shifting the language from governance to judgment.

At the same time, Christianity is positioned as the force that should shape national identity, binding faith to governance, culture, and law. The church is called upon to develop a theology of nationhood that aligns belief with race and lineage.

The conclusion becomes clear. A nation defined in this way cannot remain multi-ethnic without losing what they believe it was meant to be. What is presented as preservation becomes a narrowing of identity.

The Slavery Problem They Will Not Solve

There is a tension at the center of this argument that remains unresolved. Immigration is described as theft, yet slavery is not addressed with the same clarity.

If crossing a border unlawfully is framed as taking what does not belong to you, then the forced removal of human beings, the stripping of identity, the separation of families, and the exploitation of generations must be understood for what it was.

It was theft in its most complete form. It was theft of body, of name, of language, of land, of lineage, of faith, and of future. The very elements they use to define a nation were taken from my ancestors.

That reality does not sit comfortably within their framework, and it is often avoided. The argument begins to resemble a desire to return to an earlier order while denying the full truth of how that order was established. The claim that the nation belongs to those who built it cannot stand without acknowledging who labored, who was forced, and who paid the cost.

An argument that treats immigration as a moral violation while softening the reality of slavery does not hold. It applies judgment selectively. It names one form of taking while minimizing another that was far more expansive and far more destructive.

That is not a theology of nationhood grounded in truth. It is a framework built on selective memory.

A Man Arguing Against His Own Existence

There is one more thing worth saying before moving to the answer. Calvin Robinson, sitting at that table, is himself of mixed English and Jamaican heritage. By the standard the three men are arguing for, he would not be considered fully English under their own framework. Race is biology, they said. Blood and lineage define a nation, they said. A man of partial Caribbean descent does not fit that picture cleanly. The fact that Robinson sits comfortably defending an argument that, taken to its logical end, would exclude him, is one of the strangest features of the whole conversation. It is also a reminder that ideology has a way of asking people to argue against their own existence.

In Part Three, I will answer them. Not with abstraction, but with my own lineage, and with the witness of Scripture itself.

Part Three

Land, Lineage, and the God Who Will Not Be Owned

An American Black Answer to Mendacity

There is a point where argument must give way to clarity.

The framework these men advanced attempts to define belonging through lineage, to anchor identity in ancestry, and to align nationhood with a particular vision of race and faith. It presents order as something that must be preserved through sameness and suggests that deviation from that sameness leads to decline.

That framework does not account for my existence.

I am an American Black woman. My lineage is not a matter of abstraction. It is tied to this land through generations of labor, displacement, survival, and faith. My ancestors did not arrive here by choice, yet their hands helped build what is now called America. Their presence is not incidental to this nation. It is foundational.

Land

My great-great-great grandfather married a Cherokee woman. That woman was not an immigrant. She was not a settler. She was born of the soil this nation now occupies. Her people walked this land before there was an America to call it America. That ancestry ties me to this place in a way no European descent can match. The Cherokee were here. They are part of who I am.

The men who argue that America belongs to them by lineage came here from somewhere else. England. Scotland. Ireland. Germany. The Netherlands. They came across an ocean to a land already inhabited, already named, already known by the people who had walked it for generations. By their own logic, the original claim belongs to those who were already here. By blood, I am also one of those people.

Lineage

My African ancestors did not come to this country. They were brought here. The first documented Africans arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1619. That is more than one hundred years before most European immigrant families set foot in America. Our roots and our ties were cut, just as the white man's roots and ties were cut when he left Europe. We became loyal to this land because this land became the only land we had. Africa was severed from us. America became us.

I can trace my legacy to a family that came out of slavery and built a community in Nacogdoches, Texas. That community exists today. I do not have to look at a photograph to prove it. I can go and stand on the ground where my people built. They did not migrate here. They were forced here, and then they built. That is American lineage. That is generational presence. That is the very thing these men say defines a nation, and I have it in two directions, by Native ancestry and by African ancestry, both rooted in this soil.

Labor

They want to talk about who built America. We should talk about it. The American Constitution was written by European men. The American economy was built on the backs of African slaves. Both things are true. Cotton became the largest export of the United States in the nineteenth century. That cotton was picked by the hands of slaves. The wealth that funded northern banks, southern plantations, and the broader American economy passed through the labor of people who received nothing for it. Parts of the United States Capitol and the White House were built using slave labor. That is a documented fact, not an opinion.

Black Americans have served in every major American war. The Revolutionary War. The War of 1812. The Civil War. The First World War. The Second World War. Korea. Vietnam. Iraq. Afghanistan. We have shed blood for a country that has not always been willing to shed its prejudice for us. That is loyalty by any measure these men claim to honor.

The God Who Will Not Be Owned

Christ does not belong to a nation. He does not belong to a race. He does not belong to a structure built by men. He is not preserved through lineage, nor is He confined to a people who claim proximity to Him.

He reveals Himself according to His own authority.

Scripture makes this plain. He spoke to those who were not expected to receive Him. He moved among those who were considered outside. He established a kingdom that did not follow the lines men had drawn.

Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well. Jews and Samaritans did not associate with one another. He crossed that boundary on purpose. He told her that God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth.

"God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth."

— John 4:24

Rahab was a prostitute, and she is in the lineage of Christ. Ruth was a Moabite, and she is in the lineage of Christ. The Roman centurion was an outsider, and Jesus said He had not found such great faith in all of Israel. The Ethiopian eunuch was the first recorded African convert in the book of Acts, baptized on a road in the desert by a Spirit-led evangelist. Naaman the Syrian was healed when the lepers of Israel were not. This is not a modern invention. This is the original pattern.

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

— Galatians 3:28

Paul wrote that in the first century. He was not a liberal theologian. He was a former Pharisee writing under inspiration to a young church trying to figure out whether Gentiles needed to become Jewish in order to be Christian. His answer was no. His answer remains no. Ethnicity does not determine standing before God. Status does not determine standing before God. National identity does not determine standing before God. Faith does.

"After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb."

— Revelation 7:9

That is the final vision. Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language. Not one race elevated above the others. Not one ethnic group designated as the true heirs. The throne room of God is the most diverse gathering in all of Scripture. Anyone who tells you that Christianity requires racial uniformity has not read the last chapter of the book they claim to follow.

The Retraction

The attempt to bind Christ to national identity reverses the pattern Scripture establishes. It takes what is not owned and presents it as possession. It takes what is given and reshapes it into something to be defended. It replaces revelation with structure and substitutes identity for truth.

That movement is not preservation. It is distortion.

What we are witnessing in this country is a retraction. There were ancestors, men and women, who thought they were better. They killed. They robbed. They raped. They stoned. They lied. For centuries, they pretended to be something they were not. Now that some of that has been corrected, even partially, there is a movement to go back. They want to relive a time when they were foul and called it good, because in their minds they hold an image that is a lie. It is a false image. It is mendacity.

Mendacity does not always appear as an obvious falsehood. It often presents itself as conviction, as order, as clarity. It speaks with confidence and appeals to history, to tradition, and to authority. Over time, it becomes familiar enough to be accepted.

But it does not stand when examined.

Truth does not depend on who claims it. It does not shift with identity, and it does not remain confined to the structures built around it. It stands on its own.

They claim Christ. They cannot have Him on those terms. Christ belongs to Himself, and through His own choosing, He gives Himself to all who come in spirit and in truth. The Samaritan woman knew it. Ruth knew it. Rahab knew it. The Ethiopian on the desert road knew it. My ancestors, who took a faith that was used against them and reshaped it into a faith that set them free, knew it.

I know it too.

No man is the representative of Jesus Christ except Jesus Christ Himself. No nation is the inheritor of Jesus Christ except every nation, together, before the throne. No race is the bearer of Jesus Christ except the human race, made in His image, redeemed by His blood.

The whitewashed tomb is beautiful on the outside. Inside, it is full of dead men's bones. We have seen the outside long enough. It is time to call what is inside by its name.

Mendacity.

Jacqueline Session Ausby

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