What Have We Done With the Gift of Life?

When God made Eve, He did not make a second Adam. He formed her from Adam's side, and Adam knew her immediately as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, but she was not a copy of him. She came into the world with a different body, a different temperament, a different way of moving through creation, and one capacity Adam would never have: the ability to carry a human life inside her own and bring it forth.

We argue endlessly in this culture about what womanhood means, and I understand why the argument exhausts people. But whatever else we say about it, we cannot talk our way around the design. God created humanity male and female, and He did not distribute the work of continuing the human race evenly or interchangeably between them. The man contributes; the woman carries. One body makes a life possible, and the other makes that life a home for the better part of a year. Neither function is insignificant, and neither one is an accident.

Not every woman becomes a mother. Some cannot conceive and grieve it privately for decades. Some never marry. Some make a deliberate decision not to have children and live full, faithful, consequential lives. None of that makes them less than women, and I want to be plain about that before I go any further, because this is precisely the point where people stop reading. But the fact that a design is not fulfilled in every individual case has never, in any other area of life, been treated as proof that the design means nothing. If anything, it makes the design more remarkable — that it holds at all, generation after generation, in a world this broken.

Genesis tells us that God blessed humanity and told them to be fruitful and multiply. And after the Fall, in the middle of the wreckage, Adam turns to his wife and gives her a name: Eve, because she would be the mother of all living. At the exact moment death enters the story, the woman is named for life. Humanity continues because life is brought forth, and it is brought forth through her. That is not merely biology. That is the thread tying one generation to the next, and God placed it inside a woman's body.

The Burden of Life

That is what I have been sitting with all week, and if I am honest, my heart is heavy about it. Somewhere along the way we became confused about the value of the very thing that makes the continuation of human life possible. First we separated motherhood from womanhood. Then we separated childbirth from its meaning. And finally we separated the child from the moral weight we once attached to any human life at all.

I finished John Steinbeck's East of Eden this week and have not been able to put it down mentally since. Cathy Ames is one of the most disturbing characters I have ever encountered in fiction, and what disturbs me is not that she is cruel — literature is full of cruelty — but that she is a mother. She has the biological capacity to give life and she treats everything surrounding that capacity as a weapon. She tries to end the pregnancy before the twins are born, and days after their birth she shoots their father and walks out of that house without looking back. Motherhood, it turns out, does not automatically produce tenderness. The womb does not sanctify the woman who carries it.

The Names They Did Not Have

There is a detail in that novel I cannot get past. After Cathy leaves, Adam falls into such a stupor that the twins go nearly a year without names. They are simply “the twins.” It takes Samuel Hamilton — an old Irish neighbor with dirt under his fingernails and Scripture in his mouth — to come back to that ranch, strike Adam across the face, and force him to sit down and name his sons. Lee is there too: the Chinese cook every white man in that valley underestimates, the one who has actually been feeding and raising those boys while their father grieves. The three of them open Genesis, argue their way through Cain and Abel, and finally give the children names. Caleb and Aron.

I keep returning to that scene because naming is not decoration. A name says: I see you. You are not an extension of me. You are somebody — distinct, present, real. Before the naming, the boys are a burden Adam cannot bear to look at. After the naming, they are Cal and Aron, two boys with two natures, two destinies, and by the end of the book two very different ends. You cannot look away from a person who has a name.

Which is exactly why I pay attention to the words we choose. When a child becomes a pregnancy, when a baby becomes a fetus, when a human being becomes a clump of cells or a piece of tissue or a product of conception, something has happened that is not merely clinical. Language either makes a person visible or makes a person easy to overlook, and an abstraction is far easier to end than a somebody. We have gotten very good at the vocabulary of disappearance.

The Children We Stop Seeing

That thought followed me straight into the news, because as I write this on a Sunday morning, a jury in Plymouth, Massachusetts has gone home for the weekend without a verdict.

Lindsay Clancy, thirty-six years old and a former labor and delivery nurse, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in the January 2023 deaths of her children — Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months old — at their home in Duxbury. Her attorney does not dispute that she killed them. He argues she was in the grip of postpartum psychosis and therefore cannot be held criminally responsible for it. She attempted to take her own life the same night and has been paralyzed since. The jurors — nine women and three men — may return first-degree murder, second-degree murder, manslaughter, not guilty, or not guilty by lack of criminal responsibility. They resume Monday morning.

Massachusetts does not say the word insanity in a courtroom. The doctrine is called lack of criminal responsibility, and it comes from a 1967 case, Commonwealth v. McHoul, which asks whether a mental disease or defect left the defendant without substantial capacity either to appreciate the wrongfulness of her conduct or to conform her conduct to the requirements of the law. Notice that there are two doors there and not one, and the second one is wide. Notice something else, too: unlike most states, Massachusetts puts the burden on the government. Once the defense raises the question, the Commonwealth must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she was criminally responsible. The state has to prove sanity. That is the wall prosecutors spent five weeks and more than seventy witnesses trying to climb.

I am not interested in pretending mental illness is not real, or that postpartum psychosis is not a genuine and devastating medical emergency, or that a human mind cannot come apart. But here is what has stayed with me about the testimony. Not one physician who actually treated Lindsay Clancy told that jury she was psychotic. Dr. Jennifer Tufts, her psychiatrist across months of appointments, testified she never observed psychosis and saw no serious sign that Clancy's safety or anyone else's was at risk. Dr. Alia Goodheart, who treated her during her inpatient stay at McLean Hospital, testified that she saw no signs of psychosis either. The prosecution's expert found severe depression and anxiety, found no evidence of postpartum psychosis, and noted that during a psychiatric hospitalization two weeks before the children died she never once mentioned hallucinations. The psychosis opinion at the center of this defense came from an expert retained by the defense, who reviewed her records but never met her.

I want to state the other side fairly.  Postpartum psychosis can rise and recede quickly, and a person can be organized, deliberate, even calm and still be operating inside a delusion — which is precisely why the law asks about capacity rather than composure. Her husband testified that on the last full day of his children's lives, his wife was having one of her best days, and that the two of them spent it trading photographs of the children making snowmen. That fact can be read in two directions, and honest people in Plymouth are reading it both ways this weekend.

But whichever way the jury reads it, there is a question sitting underneath the verdict that the verdict will not settle: at what point does explaining a person's behavior become excusing it, and at what point do the people who died disappear from a conversation that is supposedly about what happened to them?

Read the coverage and count the paragraphs. We talk about her medications, her psychiatrists, her hospitalization, her discharge, the failures of a mental health system that may well deserve every accusation leveled at it. All of that may matter, and some of it may be a genuine indictment of how this country treats women after childbirth. But somewhere in the middle of that necessary conversation, three children became the setting instead of the subject. Cora was five. Dawson was three. Callan had been alive for less than a year. They had names, faces, futures, and a father who is still walking around this world without them. Whatever the jury decides about their mother's mind, we should not let the explanation of an act swallow the people it was done to.

Guilty of the Act

I want to put two more names into this, because Clancy's is not the only case of its kind, and I do not want to be the sort of writer who only becomes exercised when the defendant happens to fit her argument.

In October of 2024, in Marion, Iowa, a father named Matthew Schleier strangled his five-year-old son Jack. This past April a judge found him not guilty by reason of insanity, and the sentence the judge used to explain that finding is the most precise statement of my entire concern I have ever read: Schleier was guilty of the act, but was legally insane at the time and therefore not criminally responsible. He was committed to a state mental health institute rather than sent to a prison. In July a hospital physician testified that he had made progress but remained mentally ill or dangerous, and this month a judge ordered him to stay. The county attorney's statement afterward was short, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down. For us, he said, it has always been about Jack.

And last August, in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, an Amish mother named Ruth Miller drowned her four-year-old son Vincen at Atwood Lake and then attempted to drive her three teenage children into the same water. Her husband was found dead at a dock nearby. She waived her right to a jury. In March a judge found her not guilty by reason of insanity, explaining that all three psychiatric evaluations had reached the same conclusion — that she suffered from a mental disease that prevented her from knowing the wrongfulness of her conduct — and committed her to a secured behavioral health hospital.

I am not saying those judges were wrong. I was not in either courtroom, and in Miller's case three independent evaluations agreed, which is not nothing. What I am saying is that our legal system already contains a mechanism for the exact distinction I have been chasing all week. It can say, in a single breath, that a man did the thing and that he cannot be held to account for it. Guilty of the act. Not criminally responsible. The law itself knows those are two different questions.

And if the law can hold both halves of that sentence at once, then so can we. But holding both means holding both. It means we do not get to let the second half quietly erase the first. A child died, and that fact does not become smaller because the person who caused it was ill. Jack was five. Vincen was four. Cora was five, Dawson was three, and Callan was eight months old. Whatever we decide about the adults, those five sentences remain true, and they are the only sentences in this essay that nobody is arguing about.

Explanation Is Not Absolution

This brings me back to the Garden, because Genesis got to this question first.

When God confronts Eve, He asks her what she has done, and she does not simply say, I did it. She says the serpent deceived her — and she is not lying. He did. Adam does the same thing and does it worse, pointing first at his wife and then, unmistakably, at God: the woman whom You gave to be with me. Both answers are, as far as they go, factually true. Neither answer works. God does not respond by saying that since an influence existed, no one is responsible. The serpent deceived Eve, and Eve still ate. Eve handed the fruit to Adam, and Adam still ate.

That is the whole ballgame. We have become deeply uncomfortable with responsibility, and I understand the impulse, because I would also rather be understood than judged. Understanding matters — God Himself asks the question before He pronounces the consequence. But understanding was never designed to function as absolution. You can trace every influence acting on a human being, from biology to chemistry to trauma to the people who failed them, and still arrive at a person who chose.

And there is something in Eve's consequence I had never properly sat with. The very capacity tied to the continuation of life is the place where her pain would be multiplied. The gift and the suffering are located in the same body. Scripture never once presents the ability to bring forth life as effortless. Carrying a life can hurt, delivering a life can hurt, raising a child hurts, and loving one hurts most of all, because anything that matters that much will eventually cost you something. And yet even there, in the middle of the judgment, God speaks of the woman's seed and the crushing of the serpent's head. Judgment and promise arrive in the same breath. Motherhood in Scripture is never sentimental and never merely biological. It is a responsibility carrying enormous beauty and enormous cost at the same time.

Take Up Your Cross

Which is where this gets uncomfortable for all of us, and not only for the woman on trial in Plymouth. There is something in human nature that wants out from under whatever God has given us to carry.

Jesus did not accommodate that instinct. Take up your cross and follow Me, He said — not destroy whatever is making the cross heavy. Carry it. He never promised a life without suffering; He promised His presence inside of it. But we live in a culture that increasingly defines freedom as freedom from consequence, freedom from obligation, freedom from pain, and finally freedom from other people's needs. What if freedom was never meant to mean any of that? What if responsibility is precisely the thing that makes a choice worth something?

Steinbeck understood this, which is why the book has outlived him. Lee spends years chasing one Hebrew word, timshel, and comes back with thou mayest. Not thou shalt. Not thou must. Cal is not told he is good, and he is not told he is his mother's son and therefore doomed. He is told he may choose. That is the most hopeful sentence in the novel and also the most demanding one, because a person who may choose is a person who can be held to it. Strip agency out of a human being and you have not liberated him, you have erased him. If everything is caused, then nothing is chosen — and if nothing is chosen, guilt becomes meaningless, but so does love, so does faithfulness, and so does every act of courage anyone has ever performed. Genesis will not let us have that, and neither will Steinbeck.

The Distortion of Sacrifice

So let me say carefully what I think is at stake in that Plymouth courtroom, knowing I am not the jury and the jury has the harder job. If the account her defense has given of her thinking is accurate, then in the collapse of her own mind she came to believe her children were better off dead than left behind in the wake of her death. Set aside for a moment whether she can be held responsible for arriving at that conclusion. Look at the conclusion itself, because a tidier version of it circulates freely among people whose minds are perfectly intact. It says that when a life is going to contain unbearable suffering, the merciful thing is to end the life.

But she was making a decision about their suffering that was never hers to make. She decided that death was preferable to a future she believed would be too heavy for them to carry, and she decided it on their behalf, permanently, at ages five and three and eight months.

This is the thing I have been circling all week. A parent does not own a child. A mother does not own her children. A child is entrusted to us, and entrusted is not the same as owned. If a life has been placed in my hands, then my responsibility when the burden becomes heavy is not to eliminate the life. It is to carry the weight alongside it for as long as I am able, and to hand it to someone stronger when I am not.

There is a difference between sacrifice and destruction. Sacrifice means I take the weight onto myself; destruction means I remove the person who made the weight necessary. Love does not confer ownership over another human being simply because we are convinced we know what is best for them. And this is where our age has lost the thread in a way that reaches far past one courtroom. We have confused compassion with the elimination of suffering, freedom with the absence of responsibility, and explanation with absolution. Sometimes, in the name of sparing someone pain, we make a decision that removes their capacity to choose anything ever again — and then we call it mercy.

What We Have Done With Womanhood

I keep coming back to Eve, and to the beauty of what a woman is. Not physical beauty; men and women both have that, and it fades for both. I mean something deeper and stranger — that God chose to knit the continuation of the human race into a woman's body, that the womb exists at all, that a woman's body will feed a child before it feeds her.

We are told now that our bodies do not really tell us anything about who we are, that flesh is a kind of packaging around a self existing independently of it. I believe close to the opposite. The body is not the whole of the person — we are more than dust, and dust is where the body is going — but the body is God's own handiwork, and God does not do decorative work. He created male and female on purpose. A woman who cannot conceive is entirely a woman. A woman who never bears a child is entirely a woman. But the message this culture sends young women about their own bodies is that the very things distinguishing female biology are obstacles: fertility is a condition to be managed, pregnancy is an interruption to be prevented, and motherhood is a cost to be minimized. We have taught a generation to regard the most creative capacity a human body possesses as an inconvenience.

Keep the Child Visible

What troubles me most is how skilled we have become at making children vanish from our own sentences. The unborn child becomes a pregnancy. The child becomes a fetus. The child becomes a choice. And the child who was already born, already loved, already buried becomes a footnote beneath a long conversation about the adult who killed him.

So let me say the thing I have been circling instead of stating. We do not have a consistent language for the worth of a child's life. We can make an unborn child disappear behind the word choice, and we can make a murdered child disappear behind the words mental illness. I am not claiming those are the same act. I am not claiming the law should treat them identically, and I am not interested in the argument that collapses them. I am claiming that the same instinct is at work in both — the instinct to keep our attention fixed on the person we can still do something for, and to let it slide off the person we cannot.

I do not want to participate in that disappearance, so I am going to do the one thing that reverses it and say the names out loud. Cal. Aron. Jack. Vincen. Cora. Dawson. Callan. Two of them belong to a novel and five of them belong to courtrooms in Iowa, Ohio, and Massachusetts, and all seven of them are the reason I have not been able to think about much else this week.

This morning I am going to church with a heavy heart, thinking about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a mother, and what it means to be handed a life that is not your own. I do not have every answer, and I distrust anyone who claims they do. But I keep arriving at the same question: what have we done with the gift of life? God gave woman the capacity to bring it forth. That is not the whole of what a woman is, but it is a profound part of what a woman can do, and I am no longer certain we remember how sacred that is. We have forgotten that the gift arrives attached to a burden, that love requires sacrifice, that freedom requires responsibility. And most of all, we have forgotten to keep the child in view.

Because before the child is a political argument, a medical procedure, a statistic, a diagnosis, or a tragedy in the evening news, the child is a human being. And the child has a name.

The Pool in Our Hands

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. Jeremiah 17:7 (KJV)

A sermon on literacy, a book about mirrors, and the question underneath both

I made it to church today, and they were giving out scholarships. During the service the pastor spoke about literacy among Black and Brown children and said that literacy rates were at some of the lowest levels we have ever seen.

The statement caught my attention, though perhaps not for the reason he intended.

I began wondering whether what we were really looking at was race, or whether poverty, school quality, family circumstance, and access to educational resources were all being gathered together and filed beneath the convenient description of Black and Brown children. Those are not the same thing. One of them is a description of who a child is. The other is a description of what has been done around that child.

So I Came Home and Looked

The picture is troubling. It is also more complicated than saying our children simply cannot read.

The most recent Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, found that reading scores fell again for both fourth and eighth graders, two points below 2022 and five points below where students stood in 2019. Forty percent of fourth graders and a third of eighth graders now read below the NAEP Basic level. For eighth graders, that is the largest share in the history of the assessment. Twelfth graders posted the lowest average reading score the test has ever recorded. And the officials who administer it were careful to say something that rarely survives the headlines: this slide did not begin with the pandemic. It began roughly a decade before it.

Now look at where the damage concentrated. The children at the bottom of the distribution, the tenth and twenty-fifth percentiles, are reading at levels not seen in more than thirty years, while the highest performers have largely held their ground. In fourth grade reading, more than a hundred points now separate the top from the bottom on a five-hundred-point scale. Children classified as economically disadvantaged make up the majority of the bottom quarter of scorers, and roughly half of the children eligible for free or reduced-price lunch are reading below basic, a share that has been climbing steadily since 2015.

And here is the detail that stopped me. Among the groups whose reading scores declined both overall and among their lower performers were White students, students in rural schools, students in the South, and children who were not identified as economically disadvantaged at all.

So this is not a story about Black and Brown children being unable to read. It is a story about American children being pulled apart, with the ones already struggling falling the furthest and the fastest, and with poverty running through nearly every line of it.

There is something dangerous about repeatedly teaching a child that his skin explains his condition, when the conditions surrounding him are the things that can actually be changed.

Skin color cannot be legislated, funded, tutored, or reformed. School quality can. Housing can. Curriculum can. Teacher retention can. Whether a child has a book in the house can. If we hand our children an explanation they can do nothing about, we have handed them a ceiling and called it the truth.

And Then My Mind Went Somewhere Else

Somewhere in the middle of thinking about children, literacy, and what we are preparing this generation to become, my thoughts turned toward artificial intelligence.

I have been making a deliberate effort to put more nonfiction into my reading lineup, which meant temporarily stepping away from The Three Musketeers and East of Eden to squeeze in a second nonfiction book for August. The book was The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking by Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh.

I picked it up because my questions about AI have become less practical and more philosophical. Not simply whether it will take our jobs, write our books, or teach our children. What exactly are we creating, and what happens to us as we become dependent upon it?

Vallor introduced an idea that immediately changed how I was thinking. She argues that AI is not a copy of human intelligence in the way we casually imagine. It is better understood as a mirror.

To explain the distinction she reaches all the way back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the story of Narcissus. He encounters his own reflection in a pool of water without at first understanding that the beautiful image staring back at him is himself. He becomes consumed by it. He cannot pull himself away, and eventually the fascination destroys him.

The important thing about the reflection is that it was never another person. It was Narcissus.

That is what makes the metaphor so unsettling when we apply it to artificial intelligence. When we sit down with these systems, it is easy to imagine we are speaking with an independent intelligence, a machine that knows things, understands things, and perhaps increasingly knows more than we do. But nearly everything reflected back at us originated with us. Human language. Human history. Human mathematics. Human discovery. Human prejudice. Human creativity. Human error. Human knowledge accumulated across generations and poured into enormously powerful computational systems. The machine can reorganize it, analyze it, predict from it, and generate something new out of the patterns it finds inside it. But the pool it is staring into was filled by humanity.

And a mirror does not only reflect the person standing in front of it. It catches whatever is standing behind. So when the machine hands us an answer, we are not simply looking at a machine. We are looking at everything humanity has left standing in the background.

A Strange Moment to Be Living Through

Consider where we are.

On one hand, we are worried that children are not reading well enough, comprehending deeply enough, or developing the mathematical skill they will need for the world ahead of them. On the other hand, we are pouring billions of dollars and extraordinary amounts of human ingenuity into building machines capable of reading for them, writing for them, calculating for them, reasoning for them, and perhaps eventually discovering things that human beings can no longer discover without the machine’s assistance.

I recently came across the suggestion that artificial intelligence may eventually replace mathematicians, or at minimum perform portions of mathematical work that once required some of the most highly trained minds in the world.

That stopped me.

Writing I can understand. AI can examine language, recognize patterns, rearrange sentences, correct grammar, suggest vocabulary, and imitate style. I use artificial intelligence myself, so none of this is an argument against the technology. But mathematics feels different to me. Mathematics sits near the foundation of how we understand order itself. One plus one equals two regardless of who is speaking, what language we speak, what political party we belong to, or what country we live in.

So what happens when we surrender even that kind of reasoning to a machine?

The question is not whether AI can solve an equation faster than a mathematician. A calculator has outrun most of us for decades. The deeper question is what happens when the machine stops merely assisting the human mind and begins replacing the intellectual work that develops the human mind. If AI finds the answer, proves the theorem, writes the explanation, checks its own work, and then a second artificial intelligence verifies the first artificial intelligence, at what point does the human being disappear from the process?

And if the human being disappears, who is left who knows enough to recognize when the machine is wrong?

The Question Underneath the Question

That troubles me. But there is something underneath it that troubles me more.

Human beings built artificial intelligence. Human hands assembled the machines. Human minds developed the mathematics. Human beings wrote the software, trained the models, gathered the data, and constructed every system through which these things operate. Yet we appear increasingly willing to place greater trust in the thing we created than in the intellectual capacity through which we created it.

There is something almost biblical about that. The psalmist knew this pattern long before anyone assembled a machine. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have they, but they see not …They that make them are like unto them; so is every one that trusteth in them. Psalm 115:4-5, 8 (KJV) .

The psalmist was describing idols that could not speak. Ours can. That should not comfort us. What has not changed is the eighth verse, which is not really about the idol at all. It is about what happens to the person who trusts it. We come to resemble whatever we bow down to.

Jeremiah says it more bluntly. Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm,and whose heart departeth from the LORD. Jeremiah 17:5 (KJV)

And then, two verses later, the counterweight.

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. Jeremiah 17:7 (KJV)

Neither passage is about computers. Both are about a very old human habit: we build something, and then we bow to it. And notice that Jeremiah does not condemn the man for using his arm. He condemns him for making flesh his arm, for relocating his confidence into it.

We have always built things. Houses, cities, ships, airplanes, telescopes, microscopes, machines that carry us past the atmosphere. There is nothing wrong with creating. Creation is one of the extraordinary characteristics of humanity, and I believe we possess reason, imagination, and the ability to build precisely because we ourselves were created. But there is a difference between making a tool and making something to which we eventually surrender our own responsibility to think, understand, discern, and decide.

What I appreciated about Vallor is that she does not simply catalogue the dangers and leave the reader frightened of technology. At the close of her chapters she turns back toward the human being and asks what we need to cultivate so that these systems do not diminish us. Her answer, as I understood it, is not that we must abandon AI. It is that we must become far more intentional about remaining human while we use it. If we follow that lead, perhaps we will not hand over the whole weight of our trust to a system.

And it is worth remembering that these systems are not self-sustaining gods. Human beings design them, train them, maintain the infrastructure beneath them, correct their failures, and intervene when they break. AI remains dependent on human-designed systems, human maintenance, and human judgment. The machine does not eliminate the necessity of human ingenuity. The machine is the evidence of it.

Where the Sermon and the Book Collided

Perhaps this is where my pastor’s comments about literacy finally met my questions about artificial intelligence.

We are standing inside churches handing children scholarships because we understand that education matters. We want them to read. We want them to calculate. We want them to comprehend and discover. We want them to become doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists, writers, mathematicians, and thinkers.

And at the very same moment, we are building a world that increasingly tells them they may not need to do any of those things for themselves.

The machine will do it.

I am not suggesting our children should be left behind or kept away from the technology. They need to understand it and be prepared for the world they are walking into. But preparation cannot mean substituting the machine for the very capacities a child needs in order to use the machine wisely. A child who can read deeply, reason through a problem, recognize a weak argument, handle numbers, and question what appears on a screen can use AI as a tool. A child who has never developed those abilities will simply believe whatever the screen says. Literacy has not become less important in this era. It has become the whole ballgame.

Which is why I loved what I saw today. Scholarships were handed out. There was talk of building a library, a real one, with books on shelves, so that a child could walk in and pick something up and read it.

Beside artificial intelligence that sounds almost old-fashioned. Maybe that is exactly why it matters. Reading a book requires patience, concentration, imagination, memory, and the willingness to stay inside another person’s thought for longer than a few seconds. Those are human capacities, and they are the first ones we lose when we stop using them. There is something beautifully defiant about a congregation saying, in this particular moment, while the world races toward the machine, that a child needs a book.

The Danger of the Mirror

So perhaps all of us should consider taking a small step back even while we move forward on this train.

Narcissus’s problem was never that a reflection existed. His problem was that he could not pull himself away from it. And this time the pool is not in a forest. It is in our hands, on our desks, in our classrooms, and eventually inside nearly every decision we make.

The danger is not simply that artificial intelligence might one day become extraordinarily powerful. The danger may be that we become so mesmerized by what humanity has managed to create that we forget to ask where the intelligence, the imagination, the reason, and the ability to create came from in the first place.

Because perhaps the greatest danger of artificial intelligence is not that the machine eventually learns how to think like a human being.

Perhaps it is that human beings eventually decide they no longer have to think at all.

The Undercard

“It is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.” — Ecclesiastes 7:5, KJV

On what fifteen thousand people paid to see, and what they walked past to get to it

Sometimes I worry severely about my community.

Not my neighborhood. Not my village. Not even my family. I worry about American descendants of slaves, and about the unfortunate habit we have of living up to a perception that was never ours to begin with. This past weekend gave me a great deal to worry about, because it was a weekend that showed me exactly how reality gets traded in for perception, and how cheaply we let it go.

Let me tell you about Saturday night.

      *

I should tell you something before I go further, because I do not want to be dishonest about my own eyes. I do not like women's boxing. Something in me recoils at watching women take punches, and I am not going to dress that up as a considered position. It is not considered. It is a reaction, and I have had it my whole life.

Claressa Shields cut thirty-eight pounds in fourteen weeks and took back a championship on Saturday night, and my discomfort has nothing whatsoever to do with whether that is excellent. It is excellent. Those are two separate questions, and holding them apart is the exact thing I am about to ask you to do for the rest of this essay.

On Saturday the fifteenth of August, at State Farm Arena in Atlanta, about fifteen thousand people filled a building to watch a fight.

The main event was Claressa Shields.

If that name does not mean anything to you, sit still for a minute, because it should. Shields is from Flint, Michigan. Flint, where the water was poisoned and the country moved on. She won Olympic gold at seventeen in London and won it again in Rio, the first American boxer of any sex to take gold in consecutive Games. She has held world titles at four separate weights and at heavyweight besides. She calls herself the greatest woman of all time and has the ledger to make the claim an argument rather than a boast.

Saturday she came back down to middleweight to take on Kaye Scott, who held the WBA and WBC belts. Coming down meant cutting from one hundred ninety-eight pounds to one hundred sixty in fourteen weeks. Thirty-eight pounds. If you have ever tried to lose ten and keep your strength, you know what that sentence costs a body.

She stopped Scott at one minute thirty-eight seconds of the sixth round. Three left hooks in succession, a knockdown, a count, one more flurry, and towels coming into the ring from the other corner. Shields moved to nineteen wins and no losses. Scott had never been stopped before.

A Black woman from Flint reclaimed a championship in the fifth weight class of her career, in front of fifteen thousand people, on a Saturday night in Atlanta.

I saw this in my timeline, but not before I saw short after short of the prefight.

      *

Here is what I saw first.

On the undercard, before the title fight, Ray J fought Orlando Brown. A promised three rounds. Ray J won by unanimous decision. Every outlet that covered it used some version of the same word: comedy. Neither man appeared to be trying to box. They grappled to the floor in the second round and threw punches that reporters described as arriving in slow motion. The clips were circulating online before the third round was over.

Floyd Mayweather was in that building. Terence Crawford was in that building. Two of the finest craftsmen the sport has produced in fifty years sat at ringside and watched that, and so did the rest of us, and the difference is they had also come to see the champion.

Now let's turn to the two clowns that were in the ring.

Ray J was in there three months after being knocked unconscious and hospitalized in a fight in May. He said afterward that the fight had been fixed. Three months later he is back under the lights, on a card built to go viral. Orlando Brown was a child actor on a Disney program that half our children grew up watching, and what has happened to him in the years since has been documented in public, over and over, by people who were entertained by it.

I am not going to inventory that man's suffering for you. I am not going to do to him on this page what a network did to him in that arena. What I will say is that both of those men were the product being sold, and I want you to sit with what the product actually was. Paid jesters who were willing to make a mockery of boxing for a payout.

People paid money to watch two hurting Black men fail to box each other, and it was funnier because they were bad at it, and it was funnier still because one of them we have watched come apart for years.

      *

Now let me say the part that I think is fair, because I am not interested in standing over my own people with a switch.

We are tired of watching clowns.

There is a reason foolishness sells to us and it is not that we are frivolous. We have been carrying weight for four hundred years and laughter is one of the few things nobody has ever been able to tax or seize or legislate away from us. We made a whole tradition out of it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to laugh, and I am not going to pretend that I have never watched something ridiculous at the end of a long week.

So my argument is not that we should behave ourselves in front of company. I have no interest in respectability. I am not asking anybody to perform dignity for an audience that was never going to be satisfied.

My argument is about attention.

Attention is the one currency a people cannot borrow. You can raise money. You can organize labor. You can build an institution out of nothing, and we have, more than once. What you cannot do is get back the hours a community spent looking at the wrong thing. Attention is finite, and every hour of it is spent whether you decide where it goes or somebody else decides for you.

Here is the part I cannot talk myself out of. The promoter got it right. Salita Promotions put the championship in the main event and the spectacle on the undercard, exactly where each belonged. The building knew what it had come for. Fifteen thousand people sat there and watched a woman from Flint take a title back.

The inversion happened afterward, and it happened in our hands. The clips that traveled were the clown fight. The shares were ours. The group chats were ours. Nobody at that arena decided that excellence would become the undercard of the evening. We decided it, one thumb at a time, in the hours after the towels came in.

That is worse, and I want it to be worse, because it is the only version of this that we can do anything about.

     *

Then there was Friday.

On Friday the fourteenth, Candace Owens sat down for three and a half hours opposite a man named Andrew Wilson, with Patrick Bet-David moderating, to debate whether a man named Tyler Robinson killed the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, or whether Tyler was the patsy set up to take the blame for it. Robinson is twenty-three, charged with aggravated murder and six other counts. He has entered no pleas. Prosecutors have said they intend to seek the death penalty. Nothing about that case has been tried.

I have no verdict to offer you and neither does anybody else yet. That is the entire point of a trial.

What I am able to tell you is what Owens said. She said that she believes France and Israel were involved in the assassination, and she said she was putting it out there with full confidence.

Full confidence.

There is no room for suspicion in that phrase. Not a question she wanted answered. Not a thing she was troubled by and wanted somebody to explain. Two nations named as accomplices to a political murder, offered to millions of people with full confidence.

Then Wilson asked her whether she had any positive evidence whatsoever that Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

She conceded that she could not say Israel was on the ground and shot him. She said she had been working to establish a motive.

Sit with the distance between those two moments, because the whole of what I am trying to tell you lives in it. The confident version went out to millions of people over the better part of a year. The concession came the first time somebody put money on the table and made her defend it out loud, and it took one direct question to get there. One.

The debate drew millions of views on the PBD Podcast channel within a day.

      *

I wrote about Cambridge University this week and I did not expect the two pieces to shake hands, but they do.

At Cambridge, a room full of credentialed people looked directly at a document and could not see what was in it. Here we have the same faculty failing in the other direction. Owens looks at a case file and sees things she cannot show anybody, and states them with the certainty of a woman reading a thermometer, right up until the moment somebody asks her to produce them.

Those look like opposite errors. They are the same error wearing different clothes. Both are the failure to keep the distance between what you have evidence for and what you have decided. The professor who will not check because checking is inconvenient and the commentator who will not doubt because doubt does not sell are doing the identical thing. They have both stopped letting reality have a vote.

Do not miss what is similar between Ray J and Brown and Candace Owens. Money sits right in the middle of both of these stories. Greed is the culprit. Wilson went on Joe Rogan in early August and said he had offered Owens three hundred thousand dollars to defend her claims. She countered toward half a million with conditions attached. On the day of the debate, Wilson said from his chair that it had cost him three hundred thousand dollars to get her to sit down. Whatever else that was, it was a transaction. Certainty is a product now. It has a price, a distribution deal, and a view count, and the market rewards the person who never says the three words that ought to be the beginning of every serious argument.

I do not know.

The purse paid to Ray J and Brown has not been disclosed, and it has been speculated that both men are in serious need of resources. Whatever the figure was, it was evidently no small sum.

      *

So here is the weekend, laid end to end.

On Friday, millions of us watched a woman name two foreign governments as accomplices to an American murder and then concede, when pressed, that she could not show it. On Saturday, an unknown number of us watched two damaged men stumble through three rounds while, in the same building, on the same night, one of the greatest fighters this country has ever produced took a championship back.

Now consider what did not get millions of views.

Nobody put up three hundred thousand dollars to debate why our children are leaving school unable to read the documents that govern their lives. There was no viral clip about the men in our neighborhoods burying each other before thirty. There was no pay-per-view about the pills and the powder that emptied a generation out of our households, though we did pay to watch what addiction has done to Black men and called it entertainment. Nobody cut a promo about the fathers who are not in the houses, or the grandmothers raising the third set of children they did not plan on raising.

Those things are real. They are not perception. They are the actual condition of the actual people I am worried about, and they went another weekend without our attention because our attention was already spoken for.

      *

Scripture has a story about this and it is shorter than anything I have written here.

Esau came in from the field and he was hungry. His brother had a pot of stew. And Esau, who held the birthright, the inheritance, the thing that could not be earned and could only be received, looked at that pot and asked what profit the birthright would do him, seeing he was about to die. He was not about to die. He was hungry. He traded an inheritance for one meal because the meal was in front of him and the inheritance was not.

That is the whole mechanism. Nobody ever takes an inheritance from a people by force alone. They wait until the people are tired and hungry and the pot is warm and close, and then they let the trade happen, and everybody involved can say afterward that it was freely done.

We are the descendants of people who built this country's wealth and were not paid for it. Whatever else is owed to us, the one thing that has never been in dispute is that we are owed our own attention. It belongs to us. It is the last unmortgaged thing we have, and every week we hand it across the counter for a bowl of something warm.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. Read that the other way around, which is how I think it was meant. If you want to know what a people actually treasure, do not ask them. Watch where their hearts went this weekend.

      *

I am not asking anybody to stop laughing. I am asking a harder thing.

Claressa Shields cut thirty-eight pounds in fourteen weeks and won a championship on Saturday night, and most of us could not tell you her name this morning while we could quote the undercard. That is not her failure. She did the work. She has done the work for fifteen years and she keeps doing it whether or not we look.

It is ours. The excellence was in the building. We were watching the parking lot.

So here is my question. If a people can be reliably counted on to look at the clown and walk past the champion, what exactly is the value of the freedom to look wherever we want, and who benefits from the way we keep spending it?

This week, do one thing. Find the person in your own community who is doing the unglamorous excellent work. The teacher. The coach. The woman running the food pantry out of a church basement. The young man who got the certification nobody threw him a party for. Give them the attention you were going to give to the next clip. Say their name out loud to somebody else.

That is not sentiment. That is where our treasure goes, and our hearts are going to follow it either way. I would rather we chose the direction.

The Apostrophe in the Title

“Not very bright, not well educated, but a great sense of wisdom and heart.” Jean Stapleton

On Edith Bunker, Cambridge University, and the difference between knowing things and knowing people

When I was carrying my first son, I went out on maternity leave about six weeks before he came. Six weeks is a long time to sit in a house waiting on a baby. I filled it with reruns. Mork and Mindy in the afternoons. All in the Family whenever I could find it.

I loved that show. I loved Archie, who was a bigot and a hard worker and, underneath all of it, a man with a warm heart he was too proud to show anybody. I loved that Norman Lear set it in Queens in the early seventies, at 704 Hauser Street in Astoria, in a neighborhood that was changing block by block and a man who could not stop it from changing. That is a real American story and the show told it without flinching.

What I loved most was Edith.

The household had a hierarchy and everybody in it knew where they stood. Archie sat in the chair and told you what was what. Mike Stivic, the son-in-law, had the education, or was working on it. He was a graduate student living rent free in Archie's house, and he never let a conversation pass without letting you know he had read something you had not. Gloria was somewhere in the middle, half her father and half her husband. And Edith was the dingbat. That was the word. Archie said it to her face for nine seasons and the audience laughed every time.

Edith was also, in nearly every episode, the only person in that house who understood what was actually happening.

Books were not her friends and classes weren't a pastime. She took care of her family and her neighbors. She paid attention to what people did rather than what they announced, and she held onto a moral sense of right and wrong that she never once had to look up. The educated man in the room would argue himself into a corner and Edith would say one plain sentence and the corner would disappear. Everyone came around to her eventually. Nobody ever admitted that was what had happened.

      *

I have been thinking about Edith Bunker all week because of a man who died in London on Friday afternoon.

Jason Arday was born in 1985, just four years before my son crossed over into life. His parents were Ghanaian and he lived on a council estate in Clapham. He earned a doctorate from Liverpool John Moores University. In March 2023, at thirty-seven, he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College. The university announced that he was the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship in its eight-hundred-year history. Cambridge's pro-vice-chancellor for education called him "an exceptional scholar of race, inequality and education."

Let me say plainly what I think about that appointment before I say anything else. A Black man from a council estate reaching a professorial chair at Cambridge is a good thing. It should happen more. The institutions that kept people like him out for centuries owe a debt they have barely begun to pay, and I have no interest in joining the chorus of people who are delighted this week because they never wanted him there in the first place.

Here is what happened to Jason.

In July, allegations of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis became public. The Telegraph commissioned an analysis and reported more than a hundred passages identical or nearly identical to a 2009 thesis by Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, a doctoral student at Brunel University, on a closely related subject. Dave Harris, an emeritus professor at Plymouth Marjon University, went on the record saying that important sections of the thesis and of subsequent published articles appear to show serious plagiarism, and that he had alerted both Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores about it in 2023. Two years before any of this reached a newspaper, somebody told them.

On the first of August, the Guardian published an investigation by Lanre Bakare into the biography itself. Arday had said he ran six hundred miles in six days. He had said he raised more than five million pounds running thirty marathons in thirty-five days. He had said a masked man came to his workplace and threatened him, and the Guardian found nothing on the CCTV and no colleague who saw it. He had said a pig's head was sent to his parents' home and that the police traced the butcher, and the Metropolitan Police said no such inquiry took place. When Bakare pressed him on the missing evidence, Arday answered: "I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"

He resigned on the fourth of August. He denied the plagiarism to the end, while acknowledging that he had made some mistakes during his doctorate. He was found unresponsive at an address in Battersea on Friday the fourteenth and pronounced dead at forty-one. The police have said the death is unexpected and not believed to be suspicious. A file has gone to the coroner. His family says a campaign of abuse and misinformation killed him.

It was tragic to hear of Arday's death indeed, and I am aware his family are grieving. It is true nothing I have to say is worth adding weight to that. So I am not going to attempt to write about what was in his heart. I am going to write about what was on the front of his dissertation.

      *

The thesis is four hundred and one pages long. This is its title:

An exploration of peer-monitoring among student teachers' to inform reflective practice within the context of action research

Read it again. Student teachers' to inform. There is a possessive apostrophe sitting there with nothing to possess. That is no subtle error. It is also not a matter of British usage versus American usage. It is the kind of thing that stops your eye on the first pass, and when the Telegraph prints that title it now marks the spot with a bracketed sic so nobody thinks the newspaper made the mistake.

That title was on the front of a document that a supervisor guided. It went to examiners who read it and questioned him on it and passed it. It sat in a university repository. It went onto a curriculum vitae. It traveled through appointment committees at Durham, at Glasgow, and finally at Cambridge, where people whose entire professional standing rests on their ability to evaluate scholarship looked at his record and called him exceptional. Somewhere in that chain are dozens of highly credentialed men and women, and not one of them fixed an apostrophe on a title page.

I am not a grammarian. Grammar mistakes had been my middle name and I still will overlook many a grammatical mistake. I have fought with my own commas my whole writing life. And I saw Jason's mistake in about four seconds.

So what would have to be true for that title to survive every stage of that process?

I can think of only a few answers and none of them are comfortable. Either nobody read it, or people read it and did not notice, or people noticed and did not think it was their place to say. I will let you decide which is worse. What I will say is that any of the three tells you the same thing about the machinery: at no point did it do the thing it exists to do.

      *

Now let me slow down right here, because there is a question underneath the surface that matters more than the scandal.

What exactly did Cambridge evaluate?

Clearly it neglected to evaluate the prose. We have established that. Did the professors of such a fine and intellectual institution evaluate the scholarship? The plagiarism claim was in their hands in 2023 and yet the appointment stood. Did they evaluate the credentials? His doctorate was real, the teaching posts at Durham and Glasgow were real, the publications existed. Something was doing the work of persuasion, and it was not the pages.

I think it was the story. I think the biography had become part of the intellectual product.

Consider what the institution got. An eight-hundred-year-old university with a documented history of exclusion could point at a man and say: look what is possible here now. The narrative did something for Cambridge that no monograph could have done. And once a person becomes useful as a symbol, examining him carefully starts to feel like an attack on the thing he symbolizes. That there was the trap, and it is worth naming who built it.

      *

Now I want to say the hard thing, because my first pass at this essay was too gentle and I knew it while I was writing it.

These are the intellectuals.

Not people who admire intellect from a distance. Not people who wish they had gone to university. These are the credentialed men and women of one of the oldest and most respected institutions in the Western world, the people who set the standard, who examine the doctorates, who decide what counts as knowledge and who is fit to produce it. Their entire professional existence rests on one claim: that they can look at a body of work and tell you whether it is any good.

A four hundred and one page document with a broken title passed through their hands and they could not see it.

I have turned this over for days and I keep arriving at the same fork. Either they looked and could not see, or they saw and said nothing. I no longer think it matters much which. What matters is that neither possibility can be explained by ignorance, because ignorance is the one thing these people cannot claim. They are the experts. That is the entire premise.

So what moves an expert to ignore what is in front of him?

Guilt will do it. An institution that spent centuries keeping people out develops a powerful appetite for evidence that it has changed, and a man who embodies that evidence becomes precious in a way that has nothing to do with his footnotes. Guilt makes you want the story to be true. Wanting a story to be true is the beginning of not checking it.

Greed will do it. Not only money, though there is always money. Reputational capital. Press coverage. The prestige of being the university that did this. A man who generates that kind of return becomes an asset, and nobody audits an asset that is performing.

Fear will do it, and I suspect fear did most of the work here. Consider the position of a junior academic who reads that title and notices the apostrophe. What does raising his hand cost him? He knows exactly what it costs, because he watched what happened when somebody did. Dave Harris raised it in 2023 and was ignored for two years. When it finally surfaced, Cambridge did not investigate.

Understand what that means. The institution whose job is scrutiny responded to scrutiny by calling it bigotry.

It went further than a press statement. Arday sent a letter from the libel firm Carter-Ruck to a Times Higher Education reporter, Jack Grove, who had assembled a report and asked him for comment. The story had never been published. Arday also complained about Grove to the Metropolitan Police, who investigated the journalist for four months. The Commissioner has since acknowledged the force dropped the ball and should have screened the complaint out. A reporter asking a man for his side of a story was investigated by police for a third of a year.

Every institution in that sentence failed. The university, the press, the police. Not one of them was equipped to look at a plain question and decide whether it was a fair one.

      *

Which brings me to something I want to say carefully, because it cuts against the way this story is being told.

Jason Arday was not the stupid one in this story.

Set aside the dissertation. Whatever he lacked in the scholarly apparatus, he possessed something the professors did not. He read the institution correctly. He understood what Cambridge wanted before Cambridge could have told you what it wanted. He understood which stories would be irresistible, which credentials would go unchecked, which questions could not be asked out loud, and precisely how to make the asking of them expensive. That is not nothing. He told tall tales and made up things that could not have possibly been true, knowing his audience would buy every line and lie as if they were golden eggs laid by a golden goose. That is a real and formidable capacity, and every credentialed person in the building was entranced by the golden eggs.

I will not call Jason's seemingly manipulative capabilities discernment, because discernment is the thing I am arguing they lacked, and the two are not the same. What he had was shrewdness. Scripture keeps these separate and knows the difference well. The serpent was subtle, more subtle than any beast of the field. That is not a compliment and it is not a denial of his capability either. Jesus said it plainly in Luke 16, commending an unjust steward for acting wisely, and then giving the reason: the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.

Shrewdness reads people in order to use them. Discernment reads people in order to know the truth. They look identical from the outside, and only one of them can be corrupted into a weapon.

So the professors were not beaten by a superior scholar. They were beaten by a man who understood them better than they understood themselves, which is an ancient story and always ends the same way. Where there is no discernment, shrewdness wins every time. It does not have to be brilliant. It only has to be awake in a room full of people who are not.

      *

Now let me say the part my own people need to hear, because I am not writing this for Cambridge.

The man who made the plagiarism allegations public is a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas, who calls himself a race realist and who was fired by Cambridge's Emmanuel College in 2024. I want you to hold two things at once, and I know how hard that is.

The first is that the textual analysis does not become false because of who ran it. The Telegraph commissioned its own. An emeritus professor with no stake in any culture war raised it in 2023 and was ignored. Evidence is evidence no matter whose hand carries it in.

The second is that a great many people are celebrating this week for reasons that have nothing to do with a dissertation, and they will take this story and use it as proof of exactly what they always said about us. That is coming. Some of it is already here.

Which is why I am not willing to let either side of that argument do my thinking for me.

We rejected long ago the lie that American Black people are intellectually inferior. We were right to reject it and we should never stop. And we have to be equally suspicious of the opposite reflex: the assumption that a Black man who reaches an elite institution must be brilliant because he reached it. That is the same lie standing on its head. It still lets the institution do our thinking. It still makes the credential the proof.

Neither racism nor racial pride is a substitute for carrying out your own responsibility and reading the work.

      *

Now come home, because I did not write all of this about an English university.

The same failure is running here and it has been running a long time.

Let me be exact about what I am claiming, because these cases are not interchangeable and I will not blur them. Only one of the people I am about to name faced the accusation Arday faced. The offenses differ. What does not differ is the pattern around them: an institution elevated a person before it examined the person, and then defended the elevation when the examination finally arrived. The failure I am describing is never the individual's. It belongs to the room.

Start with Harvard, because Harvard is the mirror.

Claudine Gay became the thirtieth president of Harvard University in July of 2023, the first Black woman to hold the office. Ironically she was appointed the same year as Arday. In October, the New York Post approached the university with a list of possible instances of plagiarism in her scholarship. Harvard's response was to threaten the newspaper with a defamation suit and to call the allegations demonstrably false.

Then Harvard reviewed the work itself.

The review found duplicative language without appropriate attribution in her 1997 doctoral dissertation, and more of it in published articles. She submitted corrections to the dissertation and requested corrections from journals. Roughly fifty allegations eventually accumulated across a third of her published work. The independent reviewers called the conduct regrettable and said it violated the university's citation policies. Then they concluded it did not amount to research misconduct, because misconduct under the applicable policy requires intent or recklessness.

Sit with that for a moment, because it is the whole disease in one sentence. Harvard looked directly at the thing. Harvard saw it. Harvard wrote it down. And Harvard had a rule ready that made what it saw not count.

The policy that produced that conclusion governs faculty. The rulebook that governs students is stricter, and colleagues said out loud at the time that an undergraduate who did the same thing could have been suspended for it. Two rulebooks in one institution, and the gentler one belongs to the people who grade the others. When the New York Times went looking for faculty who thought the allegations were serious, it found that almost none of them would say so with their name attached.

She resigned the presidency on the second of January, 2024, six months into the job, after a congressional hearing that had nothing to do with citations. She kept the endowed chair. She is a professor of government and of African and African-American studies at Harvard today, and this fall she is teaching a tutorial for sixteen students titled What is a University.

Again I must be fair about the other half of this, because I am not interested in a version of the truth that only cuts one way. The allegations against her were assembled and driven by conservative activists who wanted her gone for reasons that had nothing to do with footnotes, and she said in her resignation letter that she was subjected to attacks fueled by racial animus. I believe that she was. Both things sit in the record together. Her enemies were operating in bad faith and the duplicated language was still there, and an institution that could not hold those two facts at the same time chose to hold only the first one, and then only until the political cost of holding it got too high.

Look at the sequence one more time, because Cambridge ran it two years later almost step for step. Question arrives. Institution threatens the newspaper. Institution reviews, finds the thing, and explains why the thing is not the thing. Faculty go silent. Then the ground shifts underneath, and the institution that was threatening lawsuits is suddenly investigating itself.

Joy Reid rose to a nightly hour on MSNBC. In 2017 and 2018, homophobic posts surfaced from her old blog. She apologized for the first batch. When more appeared, she said an unknown party had accessed the blog and fabricated them, and her lawyer announced the FBI had opened an investigation. The Daily Beast examined the evidence and reported that it fell apart. The Wayback Machine had the posts archived at the time they were written. She eventually said she could not prove a hack, apologized again, and stayed on the air for years afterward.

Look at the shape of that. A woman is asked a question and the answer is a lawyer, a cybersecurity consultant, and a federal law enforcement agency. Arday had Carter-Ruck and the Metropolitan Police. Harvard had its counsel and a threatened defamation suit. There were three people, three separate institutions and one instinct: when the question arrives, do not answer it. Make it expensive to have asked.

Ibram Kendi arrived at Boston University in 2020, in the months after George Floyd, and was given a center of his own. It raised somewhere north of fifty million dollars. In September of 2023 it laid off more than half its staff, and former employees went to the press describing disorganization, turnover, and an output of research that did not match the money. BU audited the finances and found no wrongdoing, and I will say that plainly because it is true. The question that never got a satisfying answer was a different one: how does a center take in that much and produce that little? The center closed in June of 2025 and Kendi went to Howard.

Nobody at Boston University asked what he had actually built before they built it around him. They asked what he represented. In 2020 that question answered itself, and no one wanted to be the person in the room raising a second one.

Three American cases, three different underlying facts, one identical reflex. In each of them the institution had every resource required to examine the person in front of it. Money, expertise, lawyers, archives, time. What it did not have was anyone willing to look first and be told what it meant afterward.

      *

Here is the part of this that I cannot get out of my mind.

The same people who lifted that man up are the ones who let him fall.

In July, Cambridge said he was the victim of a vile campaign. By August the university was announcing an investigation into the circumstances of its own appointment of him. Senior academics signed a letter demanding an independent inquiry into how he was hired in the first place, suggesting he had been a quick fix for the institution's diversity problem. Notice what that letter concedes. They are not saying they had been deceived by a fraud. They are saying this is what happens when an institution embraces a man because of what he looked like on a page of statistics, and they are saying it now, after the fall, having said nothing before it.

He resigned on the fourth of August. He was found dead on the fourteenth. His publisher was still scheduled to release his memoir on the twenty-seventh.

Every one of those parties had an interest in him while he was rising. Not one of them examined him then. When the examination finally came it came all at once and from everywhere, and the institution that had celebrated him loudest was investigating him within days of the crowd turning. They pretend this is accountability. It is not. Accountability is what you do before, and what it costs you to do it. What happened here is that a set of institutions used a man for what he represented, declined to check him because checking him was inconvenient to what he represented, and then abandoned him the moment he stopped being useful and became a liability.

      *

Which brings me back to Edith.

The thing about Edith Bunker is that she had none of the equipment. No degree, no vocabulary, no standing, no chair at the head of the table. What she had was attention. She looked at people and saw them. She could tell when a thing did not sit right, and she said so in a plain sentence, and she was almost always correct, and she was called a dingbat for nine seasons by a man who was almost always wrong.

Our institutions have built themselves an elaborate apparatus for measuring the accumulation of knowledge. Degrees, examinations, citations, publications, the correct vocabulary, the accepted framework. Those things matter. I hold two degrees and I would not give either one back. A child in Camden or Clapham who cannot read is not free, and nobody should tell that child that reading is optional because there are other kinds of intelligence. There are other kinds. That child needs both.

What the apparatus does not measure is the older thing. Can you tell when somebody is not telling you the truth? Can you see what a person wants from you? Can you tell the difference between an argument and a performance of an argument? Can you look at a page and know that something is wrong with it?

That capacity has a name in scripture and the name is discernment, and it is spoken of as a gift, which is to say it is not the same as learning. Solomon did not ask for information. He asked for an understanding heart. He asked for wisdom that he might discern between good and bad. He already had the throne and the library. He asked for the other thing.

Understand what is at stake in its absence. Intellect built every institution we have. It wrote the charters and drafted the amendments and argued the cases that made a people free. Intellect is the instrument by which history moves. What steers it is discernment, and when discernment fails, that same instrument does not go idle. It keeps working. It builds the thing anyway. It just builds it toward foolishness, and then past foolishness into wickedness, and every hand on it the entire way is a credentialed hand. That is the part that should frighten us. The people who took us here were not fools. They were the smartest people in the room, and there was no one left in the room who could tell them what they were looking at.

A man is dead and I take no pleasure in any of this. I do not know what was true about his childhood and I am not going to guess. What I know is that a great many educated people were handed a document with a broken title, and they passed it along, and they promoted it, and when a quiet man said wait, look at this, they told him he was a bigot for asking.

Not one of them lacked intelligence. Every one of them lacked sight.

So here is my question, and I do not think it is only Cambridge's question. What happens to a people when the ones we appointed to recognize the truth have lost the ability to recognize it?

Go find something this week that everybody around you has already agreed is excellent. A politician, a preacher, a program, a policy, an identity, a book everyone says they have read. Read it yourself. Look at it with your own eyes the way Edith looked at that house. Then tell me what you see.

The Rod and the Hand

On Providence, Slavery, and Why Being Used by God Has Never Been the Same Thing as Being Forgiven by Him

❦

I believe God used slavery to bring my ancestors out of idolatry and into the knowledge of Jesus Christ. I believe He knew what the ships were before they were built, that He permitted what He did not author, and that I am sitting here in possession of a faith that reached me by the worst road any people has ever traveled.

I know how that sounds. I have heard it called an insult to the dead. I am going to make the argument anyway, because I believe it, and because the version of it that gets condemned is not the version I hold.

Before I go further I have to deal with one of the witnesses I intend to call, because I have not been fair to him, and not in the direction anyone would expect. I have been too generous with Booker T. Washington. I have written admiringly about what he built and about what he concealed, and I have not once made him answer for what has been charged against him, some of it charged by men whose judgment I respect and some of it true. If I am going to put him on the stand, he has to be cross-examined first.

I AM NOT THE FIRST TO SAY THIS

Phillis Wheatley wrote it in 1773, while still enslaved in Boston, in a poem that opens by calling it mercy that brought her from her pagan land. She was roughly twenty years old and she had crossed on a ship named for a prophet.

Booker T. Washington wrote a version of it in Up from Slavery. Having catalogued the cruelty in plain terms, he argued that American Black people had nonetheless emerged in a stronger condition, materially and spiritually, than any comparable population anywhere on the globe, and he read the hand of Providence in that outcome.

Neither of them was excusing anything. Wheatley spent her life petitioning for the freedom of her people and died in poverty. Washington was secretly financing lawsuits against Alabama's disenfranchisement while he wrote those words. These were not people making peace with slavery. They were people insisting that God had not lost control of the ship.

CROSS-EXAMINING THE WITNESS

W. E. B. Du Bois brought the central charge in The Souls of Black Folk, and it deserves to be stated in his own terms rather than softened. Washington's program, Du Bois wrote, asked American Black people to surrender three things: political power, the insistence upon civil rights, and higher education for our young. And in the years that followed we received the disenfranchisement of the Black man, the creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority, and the steady withdrawal of aid from institutions of higher training. Du Bois did not claim Washington caused those outcomes. He observed that Washington had asked for the concessions and that the concessions had been taken.

The second charge is worse, and it comes from the same files that revealed the secret lawsuits. Washington ran what historians call the Tuskegee Machine. He placed informants inside the Niagara Movement to report on Black men organizing against his leadership. He secretly subsidized Black newspapers so that they would attack his critics in print. He used his control over white philanthropy to starve rival institutions of money and to keep Black men who crossed him out of positions. What happened to William Monroe Trotter in Boston in 1903 does not read well for him.

Set the two records side by side and they are difficult to hold. The same man was quietly paying attorneys to sue Alabama on behalf of the race while quietly wrecking the careers of other Black men who disagreed with him about how the race should be led. Both hands were his.

The third charge is silence. Washington was the most listened-to Black man in America during the worst years of lynching in this country's history, and he largely did not use that platform to say so.

I do not have a rebuttal to any of that, and I am not going to manufacture one. What I have is a scale, and two things to put on it.

The first is that a man's public performance and his actual record are two different objects, and we have already established that in his case they pointed in opposite directions. That cuts against him here as much as for him. If the accommodating speech concealed a litigator, the benevolent educator concealed an operator who fought dirty. Both concealments are in the same files. Honesty requires taking both.

The second is what is still standing in Macon County, Alabama. Tuskegee University is the only college campus in the United States designated a National Historic Site by act of Congress. It is the only historically Black college with a fully accredited veterinary college granting the doctorate, and it has produced more than three quarters of the Black veterinarians in the world. It originated the Tuskegee Airmen. It has produced more Black general officers than any institution in the country, including the service academies. Ralph Ellison studied there. George Washington Carver worked there for forty-seven years and is buried on the grounds.

And most of the buildings still holding that school up were built by its own students. The bricks came out of the kiln that failed three times before it held.

I will name the other thing myself rather than let someone else name it for me. The United States Public Health Service ran its syphilis study in Macon County from 1932 to 1972, and the institute was involved in it. That is seventeen years after Washington was in his grave and it is not his act. It belongs in any honest accounting of what that name has carried, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to protect a point I am trying to make.

So here is where I land on the witness. Washington was not a saint and I have no interest in canonizing him. He was a strategist operating in Alabama at the precise moment when a Black man could be killed for less than a sentence, and he made hard choices, some of which I would not defend, and some of which were plainly self-serving. What he also did was build a thing that has outlasted every one of his critics and every one of his defenders, and which is educating American Black children this morning.

That is the man whose testimony about Providence I am about to rely on. I would rather you know exactly who he was.

WHAT I AM NOT SAYING

There is a doctrine that must be separated from mine before I go one sentence further, because for three centuries it was preached from American pulpits and it is the reason this argument makes people flinch.

Slaveholders taught that the ninth chapter of Genesis, where Noah curses Canaan, marked Africans as a race divinely appointed to servitude. That reading is exegetically false, since the curse falls on Canaan and not on Ham, and Canaan's descendants settled in the land that bears his name rather than in Africa. It was also morally monstrous, because its entire function was to justify the act itself. If God has appointed a people to be slaves, then the man who enslaves them is doing God's work and has nothing to answer for.

That is not my argument. That is the opposite of my argument.

The Ham doctrine justifies the deed. What I am saying is that the deed was wicked, that the men who did it were wicked in doing it, and that God brought something out of it which they did not intend and would not have permitted had they known. Those two positions are not neighbors. They are enemies.

THE ARCHITECTURE

Three passages carry the weight.

The first is Genesis 15, where God tells Abraham, before Isaac is born, before Jacob, before Joseph, that his descendants will be strangers in a land that is not theirs and will be afflicted there four hundred years. God does not merely permit the bondage in Egypt. He announces it centuries in advance to the man whose family will endure it. Foreknowledge is settled by that text and cannot be argued away.

The second is Genesis 50, where Joseph stands in front of the brothers who sold him and says that they meant it for evil but God meant it for good. Read that sentence slowly, because everything depends on the two verbs having two different subjects. The brothers intended one thing. God intended another. The same act carried both intentions, and Joseph does not collapse them. He does not tell his brothers that what they did was secretly fine. He tells them what they meant, and he uses the word evil to say it.

The third is in Acts, where Peter tells a crowd in Jerusalem that Jesus was delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and that they took Him and by wicked hands crucified and slew Him. One sentence. Divine appointment and human guilt, joined by the word and rather than separated by the word but. If the crucifixion itself can be both ordained and murder, then the objection that ordination excuses the ordained instrument has already been answered in the text at the center of the faith.

THE ROD AND THE HAND

The chapter that settles it is Isaiah 10.

God calls Assyria the rod of His anger and sends that empire against a nation He intends to chastise. Assyria goes and does exactly what God sent it to do. And then, in the same chapter, God says He will punish the king of Assyria for the pride of his heart, because Assyria did not mean it that way. Assyria meant conquest. God meant correction. The empire executed the divine purpose without intending it and is judged for the intention it actually had.

Then comes the image the whole doctrine hangs on. Shall the axe boast itself against the one who chops with it? Shall the saw magnify itself against the one who moves it? The rod does not get credit for the blow. It also does not get acquittal.

Habakkuk contains the same movement. The prophet complains about the violence in Judah, God answers that He is raising up the Chaldeans, the prophet is appalled that God would use a people more wicked than the one being punished, and God's reply is a series of woes pronounced against the Chaldeans. Used, then judged. The pattern does not vary anywhere in Scripture.

THE OBJECTION, STATED FULLY

James Cone argued that any theology reading providence into Black suffering makes God complicit in it, and that a God who would ordain the Middle Passage to accomplish some further purpose is not a God worth worshipping. Delores Williams pressed further, questioning the Exodus framework itself on the ground that our story did not end the way Israel's did. Israel walked out. We were emancipated into sharecropping, into peonage, into the terror that followed Reconstruction. Where is the Red Sea in our account?

These are not frivolous objections and they are not made by unbelievers. Cone was a churchman. Williams was a churchwoman. They watched the providential argument used by the men holding the whip and concluded that the argument itself was contaminated.

I take the contamination seriously. I do not accept the conclusion.

A GOD WHO CANNOT ORDAIN SUFFERING CANNOT JUDGE

Here is where the objection fails.

To say that God cannot ordain suffering without being implicated in evil is to say that God cannot judge, because judgment is ordained suffering. It is the flood. It is the plagues. It is the destroyer passing through Egypt at midnight in Exodus 12. It is the armies of Assyria and Babylon dispatched against Israel and Judah. It is, at the end of the book, the seals and the trumpets and the bowls poured out at the command of the throne.

Strip God of the authority to ordain affliction and you have not protected His goodness. You have removed His office. What is left is a God who sympathizes and cannot act, who weeps with the oppressed and can do nothing to the oppressor, which is not the God of Scripture but a comfort object with no power to settle a single account.

I want a God who can judge. A God who can judge is necessarily a God who can ordain suffering. And a God who can ordain suffering can ordain the crossing.

THEN EGYPT WAS JUDGED

Now the part that costs something, and I am not going to leave it out to keep the argument comfortable.

If Egypt held Israel by divine appointment, Egypt was still judged. Ten plagues fell on it. Its firstborn died in a single night. Its army drowned in the sea it had chased them into. Being the instrument bought Egypt nothing.

If Assyria was the rod of God's anger, Assyria was still judged for the pride of its heart. If Babylon carried out the exile, Babylon still received its woes. If the crucifixion was ordained before the foundation of the world, the men who carried it out are still described as wicked hands.

The pattern is unbroken, and it does not stop at the edge of my own comfort. If I am going to say that God used the American slave trade to bring the gospel to my ancestors, then I am obligated by my own reasoning to say what follows. America occupies Egypt's position in this account. Used, and accountable. Every man who bought a person, every man who sold one, every man who wrote the statute and every man who preached the Ham curse to keep a congregation docile stood in exactly the place Pharaoh stood.

I have said before that I do not condemn Americans for slavery, and I need to correct myself, because my own theology does not permit that sentence. Joseph forgave his brothers. Joseph did not pretend they were innocent. He told them to their faces what they had meant, and then he fed them. Forgiveness and acquittal are two different transactions, and only one of them is mine to give.

So I will say it accurately. I do not carry hatred toward the descendants of the men who did this, because the sons do not inherit the guilt of the fathers. I do not believe the wickedness is settled, because God settles it and He has not asked my opinion about the timing. And I will not stand in front of that ledger and pronounce it closed on His behalf.

JOSEPH WEPT

There is one more thing in the Joseph account that the people who quote it usually leave out.

He wept. Repeatedly. He turned away from his brothers and wept when he first recognized them. He wept in another room and washed his face and came back out pretending. When he finally told them who he was, he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard him and the news carried into Pharaoh's house. This is a governor of Egypt, the second most powerful man in the ancient world, sobbing hard enough that the palace staff heard it through the walls.

Providence did not cancel the grief. Knowing that God meant it for good did not mean the pit had not been cold, or that the years in Potiphar's house and the prison had not been stolen from him, or that his father had not spent decades believing him dead. Joseph held the theology and the wound at the same time, and the theology did not close the wound. It gave him somewhere to stand while it bled.

That is the posture I am after. Roughly twelve and a half million people were loaded onto those ships. Nearly two million never reached the other side. There is no reading of Providence that makes that arithmetic acceptable, and I am not attempting one. What I am saying is that God was not absent from the water, that He was not defeated by it, and that He brought something out of it that the men who filled those holds never intended and would have prevented if they could.

They meant it for evil. He meant it for good. Both clauses are true, both have subjects, and neither one cancels the other.

And I intend to say so with my whole heart, while weeping like Joseph, because the man who could say that sentence best was the one who had the most cause to weep when he said it.

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A Warning From Detroit

“Discussion of public issues and debate on the qualifications of candidates are integral to the operation of the system of government established by our Constitution.” — Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1, 14 (1976)

What Michigan's Primary Revealed About American Black Voters, the Progressive Movement, and the Difference Between a Promise and a Record

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Last week, the Michigan Democratic Senate primary revealed something uniquely important about the political direction of the American Black community. For months, Americans have watched one primary election after another with caution, trying to understand not only whom voters are choosing, but what those choices say about the changing identity of the Democratic Party. Michigan gave us an answer that deserves considerably more attention than it has received.

American Black voters are not nearly as progressive as political strategists, activists and media commentators often assume. That may be because more of us are beginning to distinguish between promises made, promises repeated and promises actually kept. We have heard the language of transformation for decades, yet many of our neighborhoods remain burdened by struggling schools, disappearing businesses, unsafe streets and political leaders who appear only when they need our votes.

The Michigan results reflected that growing skepticism. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate embraced by Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other leaders of the DSA-aligned movement, won the Democratic nomination by less than one percentage point. Yet he lost Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, the center of metropolitan Detroit, and substantially underperformed in traditional American Black strongholds. Haley Stevens received more than 60 percent of the vote in Detroit, America's largest Black-majority city. El-Sayed became the first Democrat to win a statewide race in Michigan without carrying any of those three counties since Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. He built his victory elsewhere, particularly in university communities and progressive strongholds such as Ann Arbor and Grand Rapids.

The presence of Mallory McMorrow's name on the ballot also mattered. Although McMorrow suspended her campaign before the election, she still received approximately 4 percent of the statewide vote, while El-Sayed defeated Stevens by only about one percentage point. We cannot declare with certainty that every McMorrow voter would have supported Stevens. McMorrow herself endorsed El-Sayed the morning after the primary, which should caution anyone tempted to assume her supporters belonged to the moderate lane by default. We can say, however, that a divided field may have helped El-Sayed capture a nomination that nearly half of Democratic primary voters rejected.

This election therefore should not be presented as an overwhelming progressive mandate. It was a narrow victory produced by enormous margins in selected progressive and university communities, combined with a potentially consequential division among voters seeking a less ideological candidate. Meanwhile, Detroit's American Black electorate moved decisively in a different direction.

That divide is significant because it suggests that American Blacks may have more in common with centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans than either political party wants to acknowledge. This does not mean American Black voters are suddenly becoming Republicans, nor does it mean they have abandoned every progressive policy. It means their political judgment cannot be reduced to ideological labels. American Black voters often evaluate candidates through experience, relationships and evidence of tangible service. Our loyalty is not always ideological. It is frequently reciprocal. We remember who appeared when our communities were in danger, who protected our livelihoods and who treated our concerns as something more than campaign-season material.

That brings us to Haley Stevens.

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Stevens was born in Rochester Hills and raised in Oakland County. She earned bachelor's and master's degrees from American University and worked in Democratic politics before joining the Obama administration's response to the collapse of the American automobile industry. During the Great Recession, General Motors and Chrysler were approaching disaster. Their collapse would not have stopped at corporate boardrooms. It would have spread through assembly plants, parts suppliers, dealerships and working-class communities across Michigan. Detroit's American Black families were among those with the most to lose.

Stevens worked on the federal Auto Task Force and was described by its leadership as its chief of staff. She also helped establish the Office of Recovery for Automotive Communities and Workers, which was created to address the consequences of the industry's restructuring. Her campaign has claimed that this work helped save approximately 200,000 Michigan jobs. That number should not be credited to Stevens alone. The rescue was a massive federal undertaking involving two presidential administrations, Congress, Treasury officials, automakers, unions and many other participants. Nevertheless, Stevens was part of the team doing the work, and the economic outcome was real.

Economic studies estimated that allowing General Motors and Chrysler to collapse through uncontrolled liquidation could have cost Michigan more than 200,000 jobs. The precise counterfactual can never be proved, but the catastrophic job losses predicted by analysts did not occur. Stevens cannot personally claim salvation of the automobile industry, but neither should her participation be dismissed as an empty campaign slogan.

That distinction may help explain her strength in Detroit. For many American Black voters, the automobile industry is not an abstract economic sector. It represents generations of work, union wages, homeownership, family stability and entry into the middle class. When the industry was threatened, the livelihood of Detroit was threatened with it. Stevens could point to her presence during that crisis, while El-Sayed offered a much newer collection of promises about what an expanded federal government might accomplish in the future.

American Black voters understand the difference between a promise and a record. Our communities may recognize even a limited contribution when it is attached to work that helped preserve families and livelihoods. Loyalty does not require exaggerating Stevens's role. It requires acknowledging that she participated in an effort whose consequences were felt in Detroit homes.

This is what the progressive movement repeatedly misunderstands about American Black voters. It assumes that the language of revolution, universal programs and expanded government automatically speaks for us. Michigan demonstrated otherwise. When given a choice, Detroit's Democratic voters favored the candidate connected to an imperfect but tangible record over the candidate offering a sweeping ideological vision.

El-Sayed may have won the nomination, but Haley Stevens won the argument in Detroit.

“The right of citizens to inquire, to hear, to speak, and to use information to reach consensus is a precondition to enlightened self-government and a necessary means to protect it.
”

— Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310, 339 (2010)

THE SAME BALLOT, TWO DIFFERENT ANSWERS

There is a second result from that Tuesday that deserves as much attention as the Senate primary, and it complicates any simple reading of what Detroit did.

In Michigan's Thirteenth Congressional District, which covers much of Detroit, voters removed Representative Shri Thanedar and nominated Donavan McKinney, a state legislator, former union organizer and self-described democratic socialist endorsed by Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley. McKinney campaigned on a Green New Deal, removing corporate money from politics and ending military aid and arms transfers to Israel. Unofficial Wayne County results show he defeated Thanedar by approximately 4,200 votes out of 112,000 cast, a margin near four percentage points.

McKinney and El-Sayed were not rivals. They campaigned together. McKinney appeared at an El-Sayed rally in Detroit on July 18, roughly three weeks before the election, and the two walked the streets of Detroit together on the Sunday before the vote. They shared endorsements, a movement and a platform.

Detroit sent one of them to Congress and gave the other's opponent a decisive victory on the same ballot.

The ticket splitting becomes stranger the closer it is examined. Thanedar was supported by AIPAC-aligned spending and endorsed by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Stevens was supported by AIPAC-aligned spending as well. Detroit voters rejected the AIPAC-backed candidate in the House race and selected the AIPAC-backed candidate in the Senate race, in the same election, on the same day.

Whatever that is, it is not an electorate following instructions. It is also not the behavior of people who can be purchased with advertising, since the advertising pointed in opposite directions and Detroit went its own way in both contests.

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Thanedar's presence in that seat requires explanation, and the explanation is arithmetic.

In 2022, when the district was newly drawn, nine candidates competed in the Democratic primary. Eight of them were Black. Thanedar, an Indian immigrant and millionaire businessman, was not. He committed more than five million dollars of his own money to the race and won the nomination with 28 percent of the vote, against Adam Hollier at 24 percent, Portia Roberson at 17 percent, John Conyers III at roughly 9 percent and Sherry Gay-Dagnogo at roughly 8 percent. Seven Black candidates divided nearly seventy percent of the vote among themselves.

Within the City of Detroit itself, Thanedar defeated Hollier by 78 votes, 10,248 to 10,170. Seventy-eight votes. That is how a district represented by an American Black member of Congress continuously since the 1950s lost that representation. Not through persuasion, and not through a shift in the community's judgment, but through a divided field and a self-funded advertising budget.

Two years later the pattern held for a different reason. Hollier attempted to challenge Thanedar again in 2024 and was disqualified from the ballot for failing to file enough valid petition signatures. Thanedar faced Detroit City Council member Mary Waters instead and retained the seat.

Thanedar therefore served four years in Congress without once facing a single credible American Black Detroiter in a head-to-head contest. The first time he did, in 2026, he lost.

That history matters because it removes the lazy explanation. Detroit did not suddenly discover racial solidarity in 2026. Detroit finally received a clean choice.

The McKinney result also disposes of a reading that would otherwise be tempting, that Detroit's rejection of El-Sayed amounted to a rejection of progressive politics. It did not. On the same ballot, in the same city, Detroit nominated a democratic socialist who wants to end American arms transfers to Israel. What Detroit declined to accept was not a program. It was a stranger.

THE MOVEMENT BEHIND THE CANDIDATE

The Michigan primary also directs our attention toward something much larger than a single election. A political movement is rising within the Democratic Party that Americans should examine with care. Candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed may deny belonging to the Democratic Socialists of America, but they increasingly travel within the same political orbit, embrace many of the same policies and accept the support of figures whose hostility toward American institutions and America's alliance with Israel is unmistakable.

El-Sayed is not formally a member of the DSA. He describes himself as a capitalist, and I have found no evidence that he has personally endorsed the organization's proposal to abolish the Senate or replace the independently elected presidency and present Supreme Court with institutions subordinate to Congress. We should not attribute another organization's entire platform to him without evidence. Nevertheless, Americans have every right to examine the movement surrounding his candidacy and demand that he state plainly which portions of its agenda he accepts and which he rejects.

What the DSA is proposing is not simply a larger collection of government programs. Its latest national platform reaches into the fundamental structure of American government. It calls for abolishing the Senate, replacing the existing presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress, abolishing ICE and ultimately dismantling the police and prison systems. These are not ordinary proposals for reform. They would reconstruct the constitutional division of power that prevents any temporary political majority from controlling the entire federal government, while dismantling the institutions through which the nation enforces its laws, administers immigration and maintains public order. The DSA seeks to dissolve the constitutional structure that has held America together since 1789. El-Sayed may say that he is not a socialist, but he has benefited from the energy, endorsements and organizing power of a movement seeking changes he has not adequately confronted.

His relationship with Hasan Piker raises similar concerns. Piker is not a candidate, nor should every statement he has ever made automatically be assigned to El-Sayed. Yet El-Sayed has repeatedly chosen to campaign alongside him. Piker previously declared that America deserved the September 11 attacks, although he later described the remark as inappropriate and attempted to explain it as criticism of American foreign policy. He has also been condemned for statements concerning Israel, Hamas and the reported sexual violence committed during the October 7 attack. El-Sayed has rejected some of Piker's statements, but he has refused to sever the political relationship. In fact, he appeared with Piker again immediately before the Michigan primary.

A recently circulated video provides a disturbing glimpse into the attitude surrounding this movement. In the clip, an unidentified El-Sayed supporter speaks directly to El-Sayed and Hasan Piker and says, “The encouraging thing is that people are stupid.” El-Sayed did not make the statement, but he was present, heard it and did not disagree. He did not correct the speaker, defend the intelligence of the voters whose support he was seeking or reject the suggestion that political success could be built upon their ignorance.

A candidate cannot accept the energy of a political movement while avoiding responsibility for what is said openly in his presence. El-Sayed has demonstrated that he is perfectly capable of objecting when his opponents criticize him, when AIPAC spends money against him or when American policy supports Israel. Yet when one of his own supporters described voters as stupid, no comparable objection followed. His silence permitted the insult to remain within the conversation as though it were an acceptable political calculation.

The exchange then moved into the movement's familiar slogans: take money out of politics, put money into people's pockets and pass Medicare for All. That sequence matters because it reveals how complex policies are reduced to promises that sound free, immediate and effortless. The message does not explain the taxes required, the authority transferred to the federal government, the disruption of private insurance or the consequences for patients and medical providers. It offers the benefit while concealing the bill.

El-Sayed may argue that he did not personally call Americans stupid, and technically he did not. Leadership, however, is also demonstrated by what a candidate is willing to correct when the words are spoken directly in front of him. In that moment, El-Sayed was given an opportunity to reject contempt for the electorate. He chose not to use it.

El-Sayed promises health coverage from cradle to grave without premiums, copayments, deductibles or out-of-pocket costs. That does not make medical care free. Doctors, nurses, hospitals, pharmaceutical manufacturers, equipment suppliers and administrative workers must still be paid. Medicare for All changes the collection mechanism and transfers enormous authority to the federal government. It does not eliminate the cost of health care. Calling the program free conceals the very question voters deserve to have answered: who pays, how much do they pay and what happens to the present system during the transition?

The same instrument was used on his own biography. El-Sayed has campaigned as a physician, and the word has been central to his political identity. He holds a Doctor of Medicine degree, which is real. What public records do not show is a license. Politico reviewed state licensing records in Michigan and New York and found no record that El-Sayed has ever held a license to practice medicine in either state. His primary rival Mallory McMorrow's campaign went further, stating that he never completed a residency, never passed his boards and never practiced medicine independently.

By his own account, his direct patient care consisted of a four-week sub-internship at a Manhattan hospital near the end of medical school. On a 2022 podcast he described that experience as cosplaying a doctor and called himself the worst doctor on the team. Those are his words, offered before he had a Senate campaign to defend. When the journalist Mehdi Hasan, hardly a hostile interviewer, asked him directly whether he had told voters the truth, El-Sayed did not answer the question.

A medical degree certifies that a person completed medical school. A license is a state's active grant of authority to treat patients, issued after residency and board examination, and revocable by a board that can hold the holder accountable. Voters who hear physician do not hear graduate of a medical school. They hear someone who has sat with the sick. That is the whole reason the word carries weight in a debate about health care, and it is the reason its use deserves precision.

This is where language becomes a political instrument. Medicare for All sounds familiar because Americans already know Medicare. Yet the proposal El-Sayed describes is not simply the current Medicare program extended to everyone. Traditional Medicare contains premiums, deductibles and cost sharing. El-Sayed is proposing a different and substantially broader federal guarantee while borrowing the trusted Medicare name to make that transformation sound smaller and safer than it is.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CAMPAIGN MONEY AND OUTSIDE ADVERTISING

Abdul El-Sayed repeatedly tells voters that AIPAC spent tens of millions of dollars to purchase the Michigan election for Haley Stevens. That description obscures an essential distinction. Most of the money attributed to AIPAC was not donated to Stevens, placed in her campaign account or controlled by her campaign. It was spent independently by outside organizations, principally on advertisements and political communications supporting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed. In other words, American citizens contributed to a political committee that independently spent its funds on political messaging protected by the First Amendment.

That does not make the spending insignificant, and the scale of it should be stated plainly rather than minimized. The best-supported figure is approximately $30.6 million spent by AIPAC's affiliated Super PAC, United Democracy Project, on independent communications supporting Stevens and opposing El-Sayed. When expenditures by other outside organizations are included, roughly $54 million in outside spending benefited Stevens or opposed El-Sayed, while approximately $5 million benefited El-Sayed. That produced an outside-spending advantage of nearly eleven to one.

The imbalance was enormous, and the existence of that spending also tells us something El-Sayed's narrative leaves out. It demonstrates that a well-financed constituency of Americans considered his candidacy, his opposition to Israel and his proposed changes in American foreign policy important enough to organize, contribute and purchase political messaging. United Democracy Project is an American political committee operating within the American campaign-finance system. Its lawful expenditures represent political participation and constitutionally protected political speech, not money secretly deposited into Stevens's campaign account.

The amount spent does not prove that most Americans agreed with AIPAC or opposed El-Sayed. Dollars are not voters, and a comparatively small number of wealthy contributors can finance an enormous advertising campaign. Nevertheless, El-Sayed cannot fairly dismiss every American who financed that messaging as part of a corrupt foreign-interest operation. Many Americans support Israel, value the American-Israeli alliance and considered El-Sayed's call to end military assistance dangerous. They were entitled to organize around those convictions just as El-Sayed's supporters were entitled to organize around Medicare for All, opposition to Israel and his progressive agenda.

El-Sayed has sometimes described the broader opposition as a $70 million campaign against him, but that figure should not be attributed to AIPAC alone. AIPAC's affiliated Super PAC spent approximately $30.6 million. The larger figures combine the activities of multiple outside organizations and, depending upon the source, may also include campaign spending or advertising reservations. The accurate criticism is that Stevens benefited from a historically large outside-marketing advantage. The inaccurate implication is that AIPAC placed $60 million or $70 million into her campaign account and purchased control over her candidacy.

Tens of millions of dollars in advertising can dominate television screens, mailboxes and digital platforms. It can influence which subjects voters discuss and determine how frequently they encounter a candidate's name. Americans have every right to debate whether Super PACs possess too much power. Nevertheless, money spent talking about a candidate is legally and financially different from money given directly to that candidate.

Federal law permits an independent-expenditure-only committee to raise and spend large amounts advocating for or against candidates, but it prohibits the organization from coordinating those expenditures with the candidate's campaign. Stevens therefore benefited from AIPAC-affiliated marketing, but she was not legally entitled to direct it, spend it on campaign staff, move it into field operations or decide what advertisements the organization produced.

The direct fundraising comparison tells a different story. According to Federal Election Commission reports covering the period through June 30, 2026, and as reported by the Detroit Free Press, Stevens had raised just under $11 million for her Senate campaign, approximately $8.3 million of it from individual contributions. The remainder came from political action committees and other sources, including a joint fundraising committee she shares with the state Democratic Party. El-Sayed had raised approximately $12.2 million over the same period, nearly all of it from individual donations. El-Sayed therefore raised roughly $3.9 million more from individual contributors than Stevens did.

That difference matters because El-Sayed's campaign controlled the money it raised. It could decide how much to spend on employees, travel, organizing, voter outreach, data, events and advertising. Stevens could not exercise that authority over the millions spent independently on her behalf. Campaign-controlled money and independent marketing expenditures may both influence an election, but they are neither financially nor legally interchangeable.

El-Sayed's claim that he defeated $60 million can be rhetorically effective while remaining incomplete. He defeated a candidate who benefited from an extraordinary amount of outside advertising, but whose campaign raised substantially less than his campaign raised from individual contributors. The race was not simply one wealthy campaign against one penniless grassroots movement. It was a well-financed El-Sayed campaign facing a less directly funded Stevens campaign that benefited from a much larger independent advertising operation.

The source of El-Sayed's financial support deserves the same examination he demands of his opponents. His individual contributions arrived through a combination of itemized donations and smaller unitemized receipts. Those totals do not reveal that most of his donors were Arab American, nor do they tell us how long those donors' families have lived in the United States. The Federal Election Commission does not classify contributors by ethnicity or immigration generation. They do, however, demonstrate that El-Sayed entered the election with a powerful and successful fundraising network of his own.

The voting results show where one especially important part of his political strength was concentrated. According to census estimates reported in 2023, approximately 54.5 percent of Dearborn residents identify as having Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. The city has since questioned those estimates following a reported loss of more than 6,700 residents, but the general composition of the population is not in dispute. El-Sayed received 77.59 percent of the Democratic Senate primary vote cast in Dearborn.

The turnout figures are what make that share consequential. Dearborn cast nearly 25,000 ballots on August 4, the most in any primary in the city's recorded history, and 17,253 of them were Democratic, more than five times the 3,129 Republican ballots and the widest partisan gap there in a decade. El-Sayed's margin over Stevens within the city approached ten thousand votes. His entire statewide margin was fewer than 15,000. One city therefore supplied close to two thirds of the margin that carried him across the finish line.

That is not an objection to who those voters are. It is an observation about how little of Michigan was required to settle the question. Dearborn organized and produced record participation while the rest of the state performed ordinarily, and a compact, highly motivated bloc determined a nomination the entire state will live with in November. Michigan compounds this by holding an open primary with no party registration, which means a Democratic nomination here is not decided by Democrats in any formal sense. It is decided by whoever chooses that ballot.

There is a further irony in the arithmetic. Medicare for All has been the signature demand of the progressive movement for more than a decade, and it has never come close to passage, because the insurance industry it would eliminate remains among the most effective lobbying forces in Washington. A single Senate seat does not change that. Voters who cast ballots for that promise are unlikely to receive the program. What they receive instead is position, visibility and a voice in the party's direction, which are real goods but are not the good that was advertised. The distance between the two is the space in which political disappointment is manufactured, election after election.

This does not mean every El-Sayed voter in Dearborn was Arab or Muslim. It does mean that a city with a Middle Eastern and North African majority provided a concentrated political margin that was almost decisive, while Black-majority Detroit rejected him and gave Stevens more than 60 percent of its vote. His victory was not simply a broad uprising of ordinary Michigan voters against money in politics. It was produced by a coalition that combined extraordinary support in Dearborn with younger progressive voters and large margins in university communities.

El-Sayed can fairly say that AIPAC-affiliated organizations tried to defeat him. He is not entitled to imply that only his opponents were supported by organized political interests. He had his own donors, influential endorsers, outside organizations, online media personalities and geographically concentrated constituencies. The amount of money was unequal, but the system is designed so that individuals may exercise political freedom, and every American has a constitutional right to support the candidate of their choosing. That right guarantees that money will sometimes be distributed unevenly. Both sides used the American political system to influence an American election. The difference is that El-Sayed asks voters to treat one side's participation as corruption and the other's as democracy.

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El-Sayed did accept approximately $71,845 in contributions from other political committees, although he says he rejects corporate PAC money specifically. He also benefited from independent spending by Fighting for Michigan, a Super PAC substantially financed by his father-in-law, who contributed approximately $300,000. That outside spending was far smaller than the advertising operation supporting Stevens, but it was Super PAC spending nonetheless. There is something disingenuous about arguing that PAC money should be removed from politics while accepting contributions from political committees and benefiting from a Super PAC funded by a relative.

El-Sayed's claim that he has never accepted a corporate PAC check appears to be technically accurate. It is also considerably narrower than the political message he sells to voters. None of those transactions appears illegal, and individual contributions to a Super PAC are not corporate PAC contributions. Nevertheless, they complicate his declaration that he represents money out of politics. His objection is evidently not to every PAC, every Super PAC or every six-figure contribution. His objection is primarily to money spent by interests that oppose him. He has separated himself from the DSA by name while accepting the support of its movement, and he has declined to say which portions of its platform he rejects. That silence is a choice, and voters are entitled to read it as one.

ISRAEL, GAZA AND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AN ALLEGATION AND A JUDGMENT

El-Sayed's campaign also collapses the legal and moral debate over Gaza into the declaration that Israel is committing genocide. That remains an allegation, not a final judicial judgment. South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the United Nations. The court issued provisional measures but did not rule that Israel had committed genocide. The case remains pending, and Israel filed its response in March 2026.

That distinction is critical. The humanitarian devastation in Gaza may be acknowledged without announcing that the most serious allegation in international law has already been proved. Civilian deaths, disrupted humanitarian assistance and the destruction caused by war require serious examination. They do not relieve those using the word genocide of the responsibility to prove genocidal intent.

The International Criminal Court is a separate institution. Its arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does not establish that Israel committed genocide. The United States and Israel are not parties to the Rome Statute, and the United States is not obligated to execute the warrant. Nevertheless, calling the warrant void goes too far. ICC member states face their own legal obligations if Netanyahu enters their territory, although questions involving jurisdiction and head-of-state immunity remain contested.

El-Sayed also presents American assistance to Israel as though it were simply money taken from Michigan classrooms and hospitals. That is misleading. Much of the assistance is congressionally authorized for defense and is used to purchase equipment from American defense manufacturers. Congress can debate whether that assistance should continue, be reduced or carry additional conditions. It cannot honestly be described as a pile of interchangeable money that a senator could immediately redirect into Detroit schools.

Israel is a longstanding American ally, and the relationship is not exclusively charitable. Israel provides intelligence cooperation, technological development, missile-defense research and strategic capacity in a volatile region. That relationship does not place every Israeli government decision beyond criticism. It does mean that ending military assistance, including defensive support, would represent a significant strategic change requiring more explanation than accusations against AIPAC and repeated invocations of genocide.

The strongest criticism of El-Sayed is not that his Muslim faith secretly controls him. It is that his documented political choices deserve scrutiny. He has made opposition to American support for Israel central to his campaign. He has repeatedly appeared with Hasan Piker despite Piker's history of inflammatory statements about America, Israel and October 7. He attacks the influence of his opponents' donors while accepting direct contributions and outside support from a politically organized network of his own. Those are matters of public conduct and political judgment. They are also more than sufficient grounds upon which Americans can evaluate him.

A WARNING FROM DETROIT

I had no personal stake in Michigan's Democratic primary, but I believe Haley Stevens would have been the more difficult candidate for Mike Rogers to defeat. Whether progressives like it or not, Stevens demonstrated considerable strength across metropolitan Detroit and within Michigan's traditional Democratic coalition. She carried Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties, and she received more than 60 percent of the vote in Black-majority Detroit. Those results suggest that many working-class and American Black Democratic voters regarded her as a credible candidate with a record they recognized.

I liked Stevens, and I wanted her to win even though her nomination might have made it more difficult for Republicans to capture the seat. That is because elections should not be reduced to wishing for the weakest possible opponent. The country benefits when both parties offer candidates with experience, credibility and an identifiable relationship with the communities they hope to represent. Stevens's involvement in the federal auto rescue gave her a connection to Michigan workers that could not be manufactured during the final weeks of a campaign. Liking her does not require pretending she stood above the system. Her House campaign committee accepted corporate PAC contributions from DTE Energy and Consumers Energy in March 2025, and that money moved into her Senate account when she launched the following month. PolitiFact examined her debate statement that she had not taken utility money for her Senate campaign and found the transfer. It was legal. It was also narrower than what voters heard. Neither candidate in this race ran clean of the system, and Detroit was entitled to examine both.

El-Sayed defeated her, but his victory should not be mistaken for a statewide progressive transformation. He won by less than one percentage point after losing all three counties in metropolitan Detroit. He was carried across the finish line by enormous margins in Dearborn, university communities and progressive strongholds, while Mallory McMorrow's name remained on the ballot and drew more votes than El-Sayed's margin of victory. That is a victory, but it is not an ideological mandate.

Mike Rogers now enters the general election as a strong and experienced Republican candidate. He is not easily reduced to the most theatrical version of far-right politics, and he came within approximately 19,000 votes of winning Michigan's 2024 Senate election. Donald Trump carried the state that same year, while Rogers received nearly 123,000 fewer votes than Trump. If Rogers can recover even a portion of those Republican-leaning voters, compete for independents and persuade moderate Democrats who supported Stevens, he has a credible path to defeating El-Sayed.

Rogers should not assume, however, that opposition to El-Sayed will be enough. He must offer Michigan voters an affirmative economic program and speak directly to Detroit's American Black community about employment, education, public safety, homeownership, health care and the preservation of the automobile industry. American Black voters should not be expected to move from one party to another merely because Republicans identify the weaknesses in a progressive candidate. Their votes must be earned through policies, presence and reciprocal loyalty.

That may be the most important lesson of the Michigan primary. American Blacks are not a political monolith, but neither are we politically asleep. Detroit voters examined the candidates and moved differently from Dearborn, Ann Arbor and the progressive movement that delivered El-Sayed's nomination. They favored the candidate whose record was connected, however imperfectly, to the preservation of an industry that sustained generations of Black working families.

There was a wolf lingering at the edge of the garden, wrapped in the language of free government programs, political revolution and moral certainty. Detroit recognized that something did not belong.

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Perhaps the most important response to the supporter who described voters as stupid came not from El-Sayed or Hasan Piker, but from the ballots cast in Detroit. American Black voters did not accept El-Sayed's promises merely because they were wrapped in the language of free health care, money in their pockets and government working for everyone. They examined the candidates and overwhelmingly selected someone else.

That does not mean American Blacks think alike or will always reject progressive candidates. Detroit answered that question on the same ballot by nominating Donavan McKinney. New York's recent primaries make a similar point.

Michigan presented a different test. El-Sayed sought a statewide nomination in a politically divided state, and Black-majority Detroit gave more than 60 percent of its vote to Haley Stevens. Detroit voters were not seduced by the assumption that adding the word all to a government program makes it free. They did not confuse expansive promises with demonstrated results, and they did not accept the proposition that questioning a progressive program means voting against their own interests.

The two Detroit results are not a contradiction. They reflect an electorate that understands what each office does. A member of the House of Representatives is sent to speak for one district and to answer for its schools, its water, its housing and its jobs. McKinney was raised in that district, legislated for it and organized within it, and Detroit judged him on that ground. A United States senator represents an entire state and votes on treaties, arms sales, confirmations and the use of American force. That office invites a broader and more demanding examination, and El-Sayed had built his candidacy on precisely the questions a senator would decide.

Applying a district standard to a district office and a national standard to a national office is not inconsistency. It is discernment. It is what voters do when they are paying attention, and it is the opposite of what the man in that video believed about them.

American Black voters know better than most that every government benefit carries a cost, every political promise deserves examination and every candidate must eventually account for what has actually been delivered. We have lived through generations of politicians arriving with programs, slogans and assurances that government expansion would finally rescue our communities. We are entitled to compare those promises with the condition in which those same communities remain.

At the end of the day, this election is not merely about politics. It is about policy and whether a candidate's ideas align with the material needs of the communities that candidate wants to represent. American Black voters are not obligated to support a candidate because he calls himself progressive, promises universal programs or invokes our history to strengthen his movement. We are entitled to examine whether his policies will produce safer neighborhoods, stronger schools, greater homeownership, stable employment, affordable health care and opportunities for our children.

That is what El-Sayed will have to sell to a skeptical group of voters who did not follow him during the primary. He will have to explain what his policies will deliver beyond slogans, who will pay for his promises and why Detroit should trust a candidate it overwhelmingly rejected when given another choice. Mike Rogers will face the same standard. Opposition to El-Sayed will not be sufficient. Rogers must demonstrate that his policies can materially improve the lives of the working-class and American Black voters whose support could determine the election.

The people surrounding El-Sayed may find it encouraging to believe that voters are stupid. Detroit's American Black voters answered that contempt with discernment. They examined the promises, considered the records and cast their votes accordingly, twice, in two different races, by two different standards, on the same day.

Michigan's American Black voters did not prevent El-Sayed from winning the Democratic nomination, but they exposed the weakness concealed beneath his victory. They demonstrated that the progressive movement surrounding him does not speak automatically for us. Now both candidates must move beyond political branding and prove that their policies deserve our vote. If the rest of Michigan is listening, the warning from Detroit could determine what happens next.

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Give Us A King

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

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

I.  The Waking

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

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

The sermon was about trust.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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II.  Give Us a King

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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III.  If You Want to Win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sit with that last sentence, though.

If you want to win.

Who is the you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read that as a believer and not as a strategist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IV.  The Best of Your Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were they fighting about?

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

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

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

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

What I notice is the shape of it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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V.  The Silence

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

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

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

Then the show went back to work.

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

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

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

Here is what is happening to her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is real and I thank God for it.

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

We were revived. We were not delivered.

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

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

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VI.  The Name

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is one more thing about that date.

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

They located the sickness in the wrong man.

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VII.  The Cry in That Day

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

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

It would not, and here is the distinction.

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

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

We have been taught to ask for the fish.

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

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

Go out before us and fight our battles.

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

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

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

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

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

The question is who we are waiting on.

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SOURCE NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy Sharecropping

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

What Zohran Mamdani Sold on Roland Martin’s Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That presents the DSA with a serious problem.

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

So what does Mamdani do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What He Reached For

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

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

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

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

That is the transaction. Everything after it is terms.

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The Sales Presentation

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

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

Everything framed as something the government could give.

Childcare

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

The word carrying that sentence is path.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing

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

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

Ask what affordable means in that sentence.

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

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

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

Those numbers should have driven the entire interview.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Groceries

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

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

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

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A Chancellor Without an Accounting

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

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

A very good job is not a measurement.

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

Five percent of what, and for whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Interviewer Becomes Part of the Presentation

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

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

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

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

There is also a question about the platform itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Harvest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DAHTRUTH

The Power We're Told We Don't Have

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

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

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

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

The Story They Tell About Us

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

Look around the world and the story falls apart.

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

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

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

The Dollar Has Teeth

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

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

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

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

Party With a Purpose

Which brings me to Essence.

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

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

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

What Comes Back

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

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

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

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

The Debate We Started Having

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

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

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

What We Are Left With

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

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

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

The Microphone Is Not the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

That was a different era of journalism.

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

Today, that world has largely disappeared.

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

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

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

Or at least it used to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is precisely why his assassination immediately became national news.

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

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

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

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

Her influence accelerated dramatically after the death of George Floyd.

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

From there, however, our paths began to diverge.

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

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

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

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Half the Truth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The danger does not end with Charlie Kirk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Trojan Horse

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

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

One of the greatest examples is Gone with the Wind.

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

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

Storytelling was the advertisement.

Today, I wonder whether that has changed.

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

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

Instead, I heard about the casting.

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

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

Controversy sells tickets.

Every article becomes free advertising.

Every podcast becomes another commercial.

Every reaction video becomes another trailer.

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

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

Attention has become the product.

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

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

The Little Mermaid provides an example I know firsthand.

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

Then I watched the movie.

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

The Odyssey is a different matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The controversy became far larger than the performances themselves.

That does not mean historical authenticity is irrelevant.

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

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

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

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I also considered another comparison that many people raised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I cannot ignore one simple fact.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pot of Gold at the End of Your Rainbow

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

The builders, the beneficiaries, and the American Black inheritance

The America That Builds

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

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

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

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

The Conversation That Brought the Question Back to Me

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

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

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

DEI: The Symbol and the Beneficiary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Same Blindness in the Immigration Discussion

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

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

A Case in Point: The Roof Over My Head

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pot of Gold and the Missing Taxpayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Bridge, Not a Destination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Political Opportunity Republicans Keep Missing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Story Beneath the Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Right to Have Rights

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

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

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

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

The Amendment Was Ours First

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

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

The Colorblind Contradiction

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

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

The Insult in the Universal

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

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

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

What the Founders Could Not See

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

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

Whose Fourth, Whose Amendment

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

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

The Anthem Was Already Ours

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

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

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

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

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

A Speech at Washington's Desk

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

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

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

An Old Creed in Borrowed Clothes

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

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

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

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

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

Who Gets to Define the Fourth

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

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

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

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

What the Anthem Answers

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

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

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

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

The Sweep That Wasn’t

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

What the New York Primaries Actually Tell Us

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

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

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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.