Black Men, Don’t Let Democrats or Republicans Decide Your Brotherhood.

Black Men, Don’t Let Democrats or Republicans Decide Your Brotherhood.

(ThyBlackMan.com) Political parties trade in loyalty, yet no Black man should hand a campaign the right to decide whom he respects, mentors, hires, or stands beside, especially not an outfit that will forget his name the morning after the votes are counted.

I have lived long enough to watch good men get sorted into piles by folks who never sat at their table. Some clerk in a campaign office, a strategist with a spreadsheet, decides that the fellow across the street belongs to the other tribe now, and just like that a friendship of thirty years is supposed to cool. I refuse it. You should too.

Let me tell you what nobody running for office will admit out loud. They need us divided. A united bloc of Black voters who talk to one another, who share resources across the aisle, who compare notes at the barbershop instead of shouting past each other on the internet, that is a nightmare for any campaign built on fear. Fear is the product. They sell it wholesale every October and hope we buy retail. Watch 2026 run that worn script one more time, the money landing early, the warnings turning shrill about how those people are coming for everything you hold dear.

Back when I was coming up, my father worked beside a man he disagreed with on nearly everything. Politics, church doctrine, how to raise a boy, they argued about all of it on the porch. But when my father’s car died in the middle of a January freeze, that same fellow drove twenty miles before sunrise to jump the battery. Nobody asked how he voted. That is what kinship looked like where I come from. The bond was never a poll. It was a promise.

Now watch how the game runs today. A young brother posts something you find foolish, and before you even finish reading it you have filed him under enemy. You have never met his mother. He might be pulling two jobs. On Saturdays he coaches a Pop Warner squad full of boys who are not even his, then drives home and reads his own girl to sleep. All you really have is a tag some stranger pinned on him, and you have worn it for him ever since, no questions asked.

Here is the hard part, and I say it with love. Both crews are guilty of the same trick. The blue side tells you that any Black man who leans right has lost his soul. Meanwhile the red side whispers that the ones who lean left are sheep who cannot think for themselves. Neither crowd wants you to notice that they are running the identical play from opposite sidelines. Keep him angry at his own reflection and he will never ask why his neighborhood still looks the way it does after 50 years of promises from both.

Some bonds outlast every argument, and you never know it until the day it counts. I learned that at a funeral, of all places. Two men who had not traded a word in ten years ended up in the same pew, close enough to touch, both of them wrecked, because the one in the box had loved the pair of them and never made either choose. Whatever they had been fighting about did not survive the room. Death does not check registration.

So let me be plain about what I am asking. When a fellow needs a job and you have the power to hire, hire him if he can do the work, and let the ballot he cast stay his own business. A boy on your block with no father steering him deserves a mentor, and you can be that even if his uncle wears a hat you cannot stand. Somebody stumbles in front of you, reach down and help him up. Argue with him later, once he is back on his feet, if there is any argument left worth having.

I am not telling you to abandon your convictions. Lord knows I have mine, and I will argue them until my last breath. Conviction is good. A man without a spine is no use to anybody. What I am warning against is letting a political machine monetize your idea of who deserves your loyalty. Campaigns, parties, and their allies will spend billions trying to convince you that your cousin is the threat. Meanwhile, plenty of the people writing those checks move in the same elite circles regardless of party. The division is for us. Not for them.

Think about the elders who built the road we walk. Did they screen the marchers by ideology before locking arms on that bridge? They came from churches, neighborhoods, activist groups, and every walk of life. They did not agree about everything, but they still marched together because the goal towered over any single opinion. We inherited that road. Now we hand a quick television ad the power to decide we cannot share a sidewalk.

There is a cost to all this sorting, and our sons are paying it. A boy watches his father cut off an old friend over a yard sign, and he learns that people are disposable. He learns that belonging is conditional, that love comes with a questionnaire. Then we wonder why the young ones feel so alone, why they trust nobody, why they build walls before they build anything worth keeping. We taught them that. And we can teach them something better.

I want you to try something this week. Call up somebody you have written off. Not to argue, not to win, just to check on him. Ask about his knees, his mama, his job. You will remember, somewhere in that conversation, that he is not a party. He is a person you once knew, made of the same clay, carrying the same weight in a country that never made any of it easy for either of you.

Finish story here; Black Men, Don’t Let Democrats or Republicans Decide Your Brotherhood.