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(ThyBlackMan.com) There is a photograph in my head of Michael at his peak, tongue out, rising toward a rim that never seemed far enough away to stop him. Most of us carry some version of that image. It got burned into a whole generation. What fewer of us sit with is the quieter thing happening now, more than twenty three years after his final NBA game, where a person who […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) I have watched a lot of politicians stand at a podium and talk about the little man. Most of the time the little man they picture looks nothing like me, my nephews, or the fellas I came up with back home. So when Vice President JD Vance gets up and mourns forgotten workers, shuttered plants, and hard times in Ohio, I listen. But I listen the way an old […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) There are some things we never give a second thought because our nation has timeless traditions that are easily taken for granted. The 61st U.S. presidential inauguration will occur on Saturday, January 20, 2029, and tradition has it that the incoming and outgoing presidents meet at the White House before traveling together to the Capitol for the formal swearing-in ceremony. The customary practice was broken when Donald Trump, at the end […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Most of us learned early that a paycheck was the whole point. You show up, put in your hours, and Friday the direct deposit lands. That money keeps a roof up and food on the table. For a long stretch of my life, that felt like the entire arrangement. Nobody around my kitchen table ever separated getting paid from holding onto something once the work was done. Tyler Perry […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) The national debt has passed $40 trillion—that is $40,000,000,000,000, a number with more zeroes than most of us can comfortably count. The Congressional Budget Office projects a federal deficit of $1.9 trillion this year. We will spend more than $1 trillion simply paying interest on the debt—money that cannot be spent repairing bridges, educating children, housing families, or providing health care. The numbers are sobering. But whenever politicians start hyperventilating about […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) It drew some media and public attention. The “it” was the news item in August 2026 that California state officials were mandated to clean up a toxin chemical dump that had posed danger to residents for four decades in an area of South L.A.. The fact that it even made news had some significance for three worrisome reasons. The first: the dump has been there for decades. The feds, […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) I remember the version of manhood a lot of us were handed coming up. Your daddy provided, and if he stuck around at all you counted yourself lucky. Emotion stayed folded up somewhere behind the ribs. A boy learned early that a real man kept his answers ready and his softness hidden. That inheritance runs deep among Black men, and it does not turn loose easy. Which is exactly […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Democrat House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries encountered a government program he does not want to expand — at least not “currently.” Asked recently on NBC’s “Meet the Press” whether he supports Medicare for All, Jeffries replied it is “not legislation that I am currently cosponsoring or that I support.” In 2022, while seeking reelection, Jeffries wrote, “I have cosponsored the Medicare for All Act every Congress that I’ve been […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Sen. Darline Graham, Republican of South Carolina, was appointed to serve out her late brother’s term and was endorsed by President Donald Trump in the Republican primary for the full six-year term. Hers is a test in many respects: a test of President Trump’s reach, as well as a test of the value (or stigma) voters attach to experience versus a new face (Sen. Graham is running against Rep. […]

(ThyBlackMan.com) Darius Rucker turned 60, and something in him finally exhaled. The country singer sat down on The Dan Patrick Show recently and said out loud what plenty of us keep buried. Glancing back at his last calendar, he tallied the concerts. 110 of them. Then came a question that hit me square in the chest. What am I doing? That deserves a long pause. This is a brother who […]