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(ThyBlackMan.com) I have a very close family member who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. So, when famed actor, humanitarian, and political activist Danny Glover courageously announced that he was battling the disease I loudly applauded. I applauded for two good reasons. One, I know firsthand the monumental pain, suffering, and agony that my family member daily suffers. That pain deeply touches me as well as other family members. But it’s […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) There is an old wisdom I inherited from men who worked with their hands and thought with their whole lives, and it went something like this. A house is only as sound as the ground it sits on. I have carried that idea into my later years, and I offer it now because a generation of our Black men has been sold the opposite lesson. Raise the walls, hang […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) This week I am thinking about what it means to go back to school in a country that still rations opportunity. The stores are selling backpacks and dorm décor, but the deeper question is who gets access to education, who must borrow for it, and which institutions continue to carry the burden of Black possibility. The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) The United States nation faces threats that extend beyond the familiar divide between Democrats and Republicans. Increasingly, two ideological movements — one on the far left, one emerging on the populist right — share a willingness to undermine the principles that have long defined the American experiment. On one side stands the Democratic Socialists of America, whose influence within the Democratic Party has grown dramatically. This is no longer […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) There are moments when history reaches across the centuries with startling clarity. Standing in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, Italy, and looking at Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “Allegory of Good and Bad Government,” I had one of those moments. Nearly 700 years old, the series of fresco paintings includes a depiction of a bustling city that illustrates the effects of good government, as well as representations of the decay that results […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Sit in any barbershop long enough and you will hear a young man’s whole character decided over the hum of the clippers. Russell Wilson got decided in mine years back, and the ruling came down the same every time somebody said his name. Soft. Too polished, too churchy, grinning like the country had never once pressed its knee to his neck. My uncle would wave a hand at the […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) During a press conference following his July 7 meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan, U.S. President Donald Trump calmly raised a military technology issue that eight years ago triggered a major NATO alliance political quarrel. Trump told the press gaggle his administration just might sell NATO member and reliable U.S. ally Turkey the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter. This is not an arcane dispute. It wasn’t arcane in 2019 […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) I was wondering what boogeyman or boogeymen, what mysterious, fake non-existing evil the current occupant of the White House and Republicans were going to unleash on American voters running up to the consequential 2026 midterm elections. In 2024 Republicans and their ringmaster were utterly effective in having a significant number of Americans believe the fairy tale of open borders and the hordes of brown people invading, raping, robbing and […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Some deaths arrive with their circumstances already settled, and a community can mourn them cleanly. Others arrive with a hollow place at the center, where certainty ought to sit, and that hollow is where the trouble begins. The loss of an eighteen year old named Nolan Xavier Wells, of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, is the second kind. I will admit I have not been able to stop thinking about his […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Everything about President Donald Trump’s Independence Day-eve speech at Mt. Rushmore was a much-unneeded reminder that the personification of crude, self-glorifying narcissism occupies the White House as we celebrate our 250th birthday. He chose the venue to suggest, not subtly, that he deserves to be etched on a mountainside along with — God help us – former Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Lincoln, rather than, say, incarcerated. Trump […]