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(ThyBlackMan.com) Whenever cinephiles argue over the strongest bond between a filmmaker and his favorite leading man, the talk drifts fast toward Scorsese and De Niro, yet any honest reckoning has to save a chair at the table for two brothers who spent thirty five years sharpening each other into something rare. I caught Mo’ Better Blues in a nearly empty auditorium back in 1990, still in my twenties, with no […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Michael Jordan is arguably one of the best professional basketball players in NBA history. Among his many accomplishments during his illustrious career, Jordan was Rookie of the Year, five-time NBA MVP, six-time NBA champion, six-time NBA Finals MVP, and an NBA Hall of Fame inductee. Jordan’s final game as a player was on April 16, 2003, where he finished with 15 points in a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers. […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Turn on the debate shows long enough and you start to notice who gets handed the microphone when a Black athlete steps out of line. Not the loud one. Not the guy who might scare the room. Producers want somebody who looks the part, talks the culture, and still lets a nervous crowd exhale. Robert Griffin III has quietly become that guy. Understand me before you get heated. This […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Adrien Broner once carried the kind of promise the fight game rarely hands out. For a while, people talked about him like the next Floyd Mayweather. World titles across four weight classes, mouth running faster than his hands, a swagger that made you either love him or want to see him humbled. That was a while back now. The kid from Cincinnati is a grown man, and although he […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Summer of 2024, on a debate stage down in Atlanta, the man stood up and told the whole country that folks coming across the southern border were snatching up what he called “Black jobs.” A few weeks later he walked into a room full of Black journalists in Chicago and somebody asked him, plainly, what a Black job even is. His answer was that a Black job is anybody […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Somebody decided a while back that a serious Black man ought to look as if he is hauling a boulder up a hill. I never agreed to that. My pushback happens right here in the kitchen, volume up, nothing loud about it. Most of what gets published about brothers my age could pass for a case file. Statistics. Warnings. The weight of the world folded into a paragraph and […]

(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 […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) You couldn’t find a wackier candidate than Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialist vying to become the governor of Wisconsin. She wanted to defund police and abolish ICE, topping it all off with a call to end Thanksgiving. “Saturday Night Live” couldn’t have made her up. Hong lost the Democratic primary but left behind some sobering thoughts. She finished second by only a hair and against a sterling Democrat with […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Since March, America has been running an accidental experiment and glimpsing what the country might look like without one of its dumbest statutes. The results are in, and they embarrass a century’s worth of U.S. lawmakers and defenders. The statute is the Jones Act, passed in 1920 to rebuild and protect the U.S. merchant marine fleet after World War I disrupted American shipping capabilities. It requires that any vessel […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) “The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. … They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” — Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental […]