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(ThyBlackMan.com) Few artists in modern R&B pose the moral puzzle as sharply as Chris Brown. The talent is immense, the history of harm is documented and long, and the culture has spent years dodging the plain question of how those two truths are meant to share the same room. I have been spinning his records since I was young enough to think a two step in the mirror made me […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) The song “Right Here, Right Now” by Jesus Jones opens with the line, “A woman on the radio talks about revolution, when it’s already passed her by.” There are some people who peaked in high school and never got over it – never changing their hair or general style from when they were at the pinnacle of popularity. It’s sad, really, not that the person seems frozen in the […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Following last week’s primary elections, in which the rise of Democratic-Socialist candidates alarmed many longtime Democrats, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) read a list of what he said those far-left candidates stand for. To conservatives and Independents, the list sounded like a grand jury indictment. Johnson said the Democratic-Socialist effort to take over the party and re-fashion it in their image is not limited to deep blue New York […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Tenants’ groups and leftwing activists are cheering New York City’s newly announced multiyear rent freeze. But Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rent scheme is headed for a judicial smackdown at the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2023 and twice in 2024, a hesitant Supreme Court declined to hear challenges by building owners to New York state’s rent regulations. Lower courts had ruled that the regulations diminished the value of rental properties, but […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) There is a particular arithmetic that greets a Black man before he has spoken a word, and I have spent the better part of my life on the wrong end of it. Many brothers who look like me know the moment I mean. A room adjusts. Folks measure height against tone, weigh how much space a body takes up, and somewhere in that quiet calculation a decision gets made […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Haiti is not an abstraction. Haiti is a nation whose pain has too often been treated as policy collateral, a people whose labor is welcomed when needed and whose lives are discounted when convenient. Now, with the Supreme Court clearing the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians, more than 350,000 Haitians who have lived and worked legally in the United States […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” reads the iconic welcome to the world’s oppressed inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus, the poet who penned those words, had herself helped Jewish refugees from the anti-Semitic pogroms of Eastern Europe who had fled to our shores in the late 19th century. As America’s 250th birthday approaches, it’s not untimely to consider her […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) There are records made for the party and others made for the hours after, once the house has emptied and there is no longer any reason to perform. Michael Jackson built his legend on the first kind. The moonwalk, the glove, the stadiums that shook on cue. Yet the longer you sit with the second kind, the more you notice something moving beneath the spectacle. Someone speaking quietly to […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) My grandmother kept receipts. Not only the paper kind, though a shoebox of those sat beneath her bed. The ones that counted she kept in memory, in the long private ledger a person compiles after a lifetime of learning whether the world means to deal fairly. The grocer who leaned a thumb onto the scale. The teller who waved her cousin from the loan desk while smiling the whole […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) “The majority claims to see no evidence that race played any role in the Haiti decision. But the evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat.”  The President’s allies on the Supreme Court have had to jump through some hoops to justify their decisions supporting his reckless and discriminatory policies. But Justice […]