Thursday, October 1st, was a rainy night in Chicago. Still, a room full of us came out for the opening night of the Grits & Eggs Coming Thru America Tour with my brother Deanté Kyle and Big “Ice Cup” Kat. You can catch the podcast anywhere, but the in person experience transcended the mic.

We had a time. Folks were laughing before the punchline even landed. The call and response came without anybody rehearsing it. A whole crowd heard the same words and caught the same meaning underneath them. Like the way family catches your mama’s look across a room full of company while everybody else misses it.

That telepathic communication, the understanding of what’s underneath, is the main thing we have right now. Black people have always known how to read what systems fail to understand. We’ve had to. And as artificial intelligence moves into every corner of how we work and live, that knowledge is about to matter more than it ever has.

In Frederick Douglass’ book 1845 Narrative, he wrote about the songs enslaved people sang in the fields of Maryland. White listeners heard noise, and some convinced themselves they were hearing contentment. Douglass said that while he was enslaved, he couldn’t fully grasp the songs’ meaning himself, because he was “within the circle.” Only later did he understand that every tone carried grief, prayer, and testimony against slavery. The songs said one thing to the people in power and something else entirely to the people who knew how to listen.

That’s what a cipher is.

The word means “zero” in Arabic and later came to mean “a secret code.” In our communities it took on a third meaning: the circle where we gather, build, and pass knowledge to each other. A people counted as zero, as nothing worth paying close attention to, learned to make language that carried more than one message at a time.

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W.E.B. Du Bois named the other side of that skill double consciousness, the experience of always seeing yourself through the eyes of a world that looks at you with contempt. He described it as a burden, and it is. But it also trained us to read two rooms at once. We learned to hear what a person says and what they actually mean, to check the official story against what we saw with our own eyes, and to know when a policy, a smile, or a promise doesn’t mean what it claims.

That training isn’t limited to one class of Black people. If you work a call center, drive a CDL, carry the mail, sling fries, or sling finance reports on the 40th floor, you know how to read a boss and a system that wasn’t built with you in mind. Different jobs, same language.

Now AI is arriving at all of those jobs. It’s scheduling workers, tracking them, rating them, and in some places doing the work itself. The office and front-desk work that brought so many of us into professional buildings is projected by the federal government to keep shrinking over the next decade, and Black workers hold about 15 percent of those jobs. So the question isn’t abstract.

Who’s going to make sure we still own something when the machine shows up at our job?

The machine has a problem reading us. That’s where our skill becomes essential.

In 2024, a team of researchers published a study in Nature testing popular AI language models. When they asked the models about Black people directly, the answers came back polite. Then they gave the models the same statements written two ways, one in standard English and one in African American English (AAVE), the English so many of us grew up speaking at home. The models attached the harshest stereotypes to the second speaker, matched them to lower-prestige jobs, and in hypothetical court cases were more likely to convict them and more likely to recommend the death penalty. Nobody typed the word Black.

The machine heard how we talk and decided who we were.

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The study also found that the training meant to make these systems sound less offensive did little to fix the prejudice underneath. It mostly made the surface more polite.

That should sound familiar. It’s the same gap our people have always had to read, between what an institution says out loud and what it actually decides. The machine can read our words, and it still reads us wrong. For anyone who has spent a lifetime noticing the distance between polished language and real outcomes, that gap isn’t a mystery. It’s home territory.

We are exactly the people who should be checking these systems, because we already know what it looks like when something sounds fair and isn’t.

This matters outside of just our jobs.

In 2019, the Senate Intelligence Committee reported that the Russian disinformation campaign around the 2016 election targeted Black Americans more than any other group, using fake pages and accounts built to look like they came from inside our community. AI makes that kind of operation faster and cheaper to run. And the oldest thing these systems sell us is fear. For generations it came dressed as respectability: shrink yourself, keep your voice down, don’t speak up for yourself or anybody else, or you’ll lose your job. Other folks get chance after chance after chance, while we get one and are expected to be grateful for the breadcrumbs.

Now the fear has a new costume. AI is new and unknown, so wait. Let someone else learn it first and come back to teach you. Underneath that advice is the same old belief that they’re smarter than us, and the lie detector determined that was a lie a long time ago.

It’s a machine, and you decide what it does. You keep your hands on the wheel. Ask it where it got its information. Ask the same question a different way and see if the story changes. Make it show its work, the same way you’d handle anybody you caught in a lie. We’ve been fact-checking confident people for four hundred years.

We also know what to do with knowledge once we have it. Historian Albert Raboteau documented how enslaved people slipped away to worship in secret, in woods and ravines they called hush harbors, where they could speak freely out of the overseer’s hearing.

That’s the cipher with a body: people in a circle, saying what couldn’t be said anywhere else and carrying it back out together. Deanté and Kat say it on Grits & Eggs all the time: the revolution is love. To love somebody means knowing when they’ve reached their limit and knowing how to show up for them next time.

So use AI the way our people have always used whatever tools they had. Let it find the Black-owned spot, plan the meetup, and get the word out. Then get off the screen and get in the room. Fill up our businesses and have the conversation out loud, among our own. Pool what you learn and teach it back. Teach the little girl on your block to question the machine before anybody teaches her to obey it.

We are the originators and the blueprint, the ones who know how to get it started and how to make this shit shake, and that’s exactly what they come harvesting every chance they get.

The world has always counted us as zero, nothing worth reading closely. That mistake is part of what kept us alive. They never learned to read us, and we learned to read everything. If you understood this, you’re already in the cipher. Now get in the room, like that rainy Thursday in Chicago, where everybody heard the same words and caught the same meaning underneath, together.

Ashley E. Jones is a Chicago-based strategist and writer, the founder of Sovereign Made LLC, and the author of Sovereign Cipher; find her on Substack at substack.com/@sovereigncipher and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ashleyerinjones

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As a millennial BET was a mainstay in my household.

Rushing home to watch the latest music videos on 106 & Park. Watching College Hill, the original reality show that brought the HBCU experience directly into our homes. Weekends watching HBCU football. BET News and its roster of writers and journalists documenting our communities. I wasn’t even old enough to vote yet, but I vividly remember the 2008 presidential election and watching the network use its platform to emphasize the importance of Black political participation during a historic moment.

Proof that BET not only entertained us, but informed us.

Those television shows, articles, interviews and news segments became a record of us.

In August, BET announced that its redesigned website would move away from the traditional standalone-publisher model and become a video-first experience connecting audiences to BET content across YouTube, social platforms, Paramount+ and BET’s other properties. The company described the new BET.com as a “distribution layer” for content living across those platforms.

BET’s decision to remove decades of written journalism from its website should concern us far beyond nostalgia for what BET used to be.

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Our stories aren’t disposable

BET deleting thousands of pages of articles is another reminder that our stories are not just content. They are history.

The Internet Archive says it has preserved almost 200,000 BET articles through the Wayback Machine. BET.com now directs visitors through an Archive link to articles preserved through the Wayback Machine.

But other reporting has documented that many contributors have lost their work. Behind every article was a writer. Someone who reported that story, invested time with that artist, activist, politician, athlete or community member and contextualized an event happening in our community. Someone wrote the first draft of what eventually became history.

For Black journalists in particular, losing that record carries additional weight because we are already underrepresented in the industry. Pew Research Center (Pew) found that Black journalists represented only 6% of reporting journalists in its 2022 survey. And while Black Americans don’t universally believe their news must come from Black journalists, 40% told Pew that it was extremely or very important for news about race and racial inequality to come from Black journalists.

When opportunities to tell our stories are already limited, we can’t treat the stories that were told as disposable.

What happens to the next generation of storytellers?

Just one day after announcing the redesigned BET.com, BET Digital announced its Community Reporting Initiative, a program intended to recruit local multimedia journalists to tell stories about the people, issues and cultural movements affecting their communities.

There is real opportunity in that idea. More Black storytellers must be equipped to work across video, writing, photography, audio, social media and whatever comes next. The evolution of journalism doesn’t have to mean abandoning what came before it.

But if you’re asking a new generation of journalists to trust you with their stories, there is also a responsibility to show them what will happen to their work when the platform inevitably changes again. Will today’s reporting remain accessible to tomorrow’s researchers, journalists and communities? And what responsibility exists to the people who already helped build BET’s journalistic legacy?

BET’s next generation of community reporters deserves to know their work will be respected and preserved. The journalists whose words helped build BET’s digital presence deserve acknowledgment and continued access to the work they created. And audiences deserve access to the record those journalists helped build.

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We are the griots now

But this conversation can’t stop at BET. We deserve for corporations and media institutions to do a better job preserving our history. Their decisions should also remind us how dangerous it is to entrust our entire cultural memory to platforms we don’t control.

Instagram is not our archive. YouTube is not our archive. TikTok is not our archive. Substack is not our archive. Even the websites belonging to Black media institutions are not guaranteed to exist in the same form forever.

In an ever-evolving digital world, we are the griots, telling stories for the generations coming after us while trying to preserve the stories, lessons and realities of those who came before us.

BET removing its archive brings to mind the idea of Black erasure, which doesn’t always mean something has ceased to exist entirely. Sometimes it means making it harder to find or harder for the next generation to know it was ever there. An article technically surviving somewhere in the Wayback Machine isn’t the same experience as a young person searching BET and finding decades of Black writers, interviews, criticism, reporting and cultural commentary waiting for them.

I remember teachers pushing us to learn fast math in school because we wouldn’t “always have a calculator in our pocket.” I guess all of our millennial math teachers were proven wrong. Our phones are calculators, calendars, cameras and even mobile banks.

We carry cameras in our pockets that previous generations couldn’t have imagined. We take thousands of photographs and videos, upload them to the cloud and sometimes never look at them again. We have more ways than ever to document our lives and publish them for others to see, but documenting and publishing aren’t necessarily the same as preserving.

An article can live on a website until the website changes. A photograph can sit in a cloud account until someone loses access to it. A story can live with one person until there is no one left who remembers it.

Preservation doesn’t have to begin with an institution. It can begin in our homes, with the people whose stories have shaped our families and the decision to document those stories while we still have the opportunity to hear them firsthand.

One project I intend to create is a video project with my last living grandparent.

I spent the first half of my life growing up in Baltimore with my mom and her side of the family, who immigrated to America from Jamaica. As the eldest grandchild born here, I’ve had the opportunity to grow up watching what my grandmother built with her own hands. She came to this country, worked both inside and outside the home to build a life for her family, became a homeowner, as a mother of 10, watching that family grow to more than 15 grandchildren and now great-grandchildren.

Her story is a piece of our family’s history that deserves to be preserved. I want my younger cousins to know it. I want my future children to know it. And I want the generations who may never have the opportunity to sit in a room with her to still be able to hear her tell it in her own words.

That history probably won’t appear in a textbook, but that doesn’t make it any less historically significant to us.

I want to sit down with my grandmother while I still can. I want to ask the questions, turn on the camera and let her tell her story in her own words. Not just for me, but for my younger cousins, my future children and the generations of our family who haven’t been born yet.

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For generations, Black people have found ways to preserve ourselves when institutions either couldn’t or wouldn’t do it for us. Today’s technology gives us tools previous generations never had, but those tools only matter if we use them with the intention of preserving what came before us.

BET’s disappearing archive reminded me that we can’t assume something will always be there simply because it exists today. That applies to a website holding decades of Black journalism, but it also applies to the people sitting across from us who carry decades of our own history.

Because our stories are not just content. They are history, and preserving them starts with making sure the people who come after us can still find them.

Ishmael McKinney is a Baltimore, Maryland native based in Dayton, Ohio where he works as a Digital Marketing Professional, Photographer, Creative, and Writer. Follow him across social media platforms @im_theish and on Substack Ishmael McKinney

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Our inheritance includes inquiry. It includes imagination. It includes the refusal to let someone else’s answer settle the matter.

That’s why systems try to beat it, scare it, manipulate it out of us.

As a Black person, I know that too many whys, hows, whos, and whens could get on an adult’s nerves so badly that we’d catch a hand to the mouth, a belt to the ass, or a switch to the hands. “Curiosity killed the cat” was less like a saying and more like a warning.

“Don’t ask again. Don’t question me. Because I said so.”

As a historian, I think about what it means to inherit those warnings. I see them against the backdrop of a country that enslaved our ancestors. A period which their desire to question and understand this new country was responded to with death.

I know our elders taught us about silence and compliance as a method of safety - a way to protect us from individuals who felt our questions meant we thought too highly of ourselves. Those who eventually wanted to bring us down a peg.

That’s why the bomb episode in A Different World stuck out to me so much. I was a college junior on Howard University’s campus 11 years ago when my intellect was treated as a threat worth extinguishing. There was a credible bomb threat on campus and I was almost paralyzed with the fear of dying, simply because others saw the Black brain as dangerous.

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But we are dangerous. At least when we’re critically thinking and dissecting everything around us. That’s what questions do, they force us to become active engagers in our own lives.

I became an educator to support a generation of Black children asking questions and seeking answers. To support more Black people who actively sought out truth and from it, created power.

My family nurtured my questions. Who, what, when, where, why, and how were part of my daily practice. The practice of whipping and beating children for questions wasn’t from my own lived experience. If somebody was picking me up, I needed to know: Who am I going with? Where are we going? How are we getting there? And my parents answered me.

Eventually, those questions grew with me. Who decides what’s right or wrong? When did the rules change? How do I become a player in the power game? And they answered me then.

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Now, whenever my patience starts thinning with my daughter, my elders chime in: “She’s just like you with all those questions.” I take a deep breath. Sometimes another one. Then I try to appreciate the curiosity I’m being trusted to nurture.

Because I’ve taught children who were already afraid to use theirs.

In my fourth-grade History and English classes, students were expected to make inferences: explain how a character might feel, why a historical event happened, or what a map or picture could tell us beyond what was immediately visible.

Eventually, I wanted us to conduct Socratic seminars—discussions in which students asked questions, developed arguments, and responded to one another using evidence. But I was asking them to practice something many had learned was unsafe.

I moved to eighth grade because I believed those students would’ve developed the skills necessary to support conversations. Honestly, I was tired of pulling teeth. But I realized that a child who’d been told to shut up and be quiet in fourth grade just grew into an eight grader with these same habits.

Worse even. It took me a year to recognize how much fear sat underneath their hesitation.

Some seemed more comfortable searching for the answer I wanted than exploring what they actually thought. They asked smaller easier questions just to appease my demand for them.

I had to consider whether the adults around them—including me—were making curiosity possible. Was I just asking questions to check it off the list, before barrelling towards my own answers?

Schools can reinforce that hierarchy. So can our homes.

By the time children reach grade school, many already know which behaviors adults will tolerate and which will draw negative attention. If questions consistently get them in trouble, silence becomes a sensible choice.

Then we turn around and ask them to think critically. We cannot spend years demanding that children accept “because I said so” and expect them to suddenly become confident thinkers when an assignment requires it.

We have to give them practice. We have to let their questions inconvenience us. We have to slow down enough to answer them. It doesn’t mean every boundary is negotiable or every question needs an immediate answer. Sometimes the answer is, “I don’t know.” Sometimes it’s, “We need to do this now, and I’ll explain afterward.”

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That matters far beyond the classroom. Questions can help us identify what power would prefer we accept. Who benefits from this rule? Why are we expected to endure these conditions? What would it take to change them?

It makes us ask questions and then search for the answers.

I not only want this for my daughter, but I desperately want this for the people I share the internet with, the Black women and men I am in meetings with, the brothers and sisters reading this article.

We have to ask more questions. Questions of our loved ones. Questions of our politicians. Questions of ourselves. As adults, to get comfortable asking questions again.

Let’s bring back the five Ws and an H. It’s a huge step to healing our inner child.

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^{Source: Kianna Naomi | Short Film}

With the midterms right around the corner, I asked a friend if he had registered to vote. He said “no” in that way that shuts down a discussion. It was the type of dismissiveness that made me embarrassed. He couldn’t believe that I thought by voting I was actually making a difference AND I couldn’t believe that he didn’t think it was worth a shot.

To him, registering to vote was just playing the puppet and allowing the master to pull our strings. To me, refusing to vote was a silent tap dance towards our people’s demise.

My friend was completely resigned from the democratic process and for a split second I believed he was onto something. This is the oppressor’s master plan at work: Don’t just make it hard for them to vote. Make it hard to imagine it being worth it and they’ll do the rest for us.

Voter suppression isn’t new; we aren’t new to being suppressed. And every day the powers at be find new ways to perfect their methods:

• They change ID requirements to make sure that we don’t have the right ones.

• They close voting locations.

• They intimidate us from showing up.

• It’s the faceless bots on social media feeding us misinformation.

• It’s the billionaire class trying to placate us with music, but it’s also us, a refusal to regain our power.

These aren’t accidental barriers. They’re part of a system that has spent generations convincing us that participation in the “Great American Experiment” is complicated, inaccessible, and pointless. It’s easy to blame voter suppression because voter suppression is real. But if we step back, we should realize that by not voting, we are playing into their game, a game that has always been more difficult for us to get ahead. And when we don’t vote, we don’t play, and so we DAMN SURE never win.

Anxiety of Civic Engagement

We feel the weight of the oppressor long before reaching the ballot. It’s a pressure that builds in the chest and ties bricks to our shoulders. It is a heaviness that settles deep in our bones each time the news mentions purged voter rolls, ICE presence at polling locations, or the fresh set of hoops we have to jump through to exercise our rights.

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We question the point of the weight we carry trying so hard to join a system that tries even harder to keep us out and before we know it we decide to put the weight down altogether. Carrying it around never got us anywhere. Right?

Eventually some of us stopped trying to change the world we live in and decided that surviving it was more than enough. Frustration, unchecked, calcifies into fatigue around the spirit. It feels like voting is just trying to decide which whip has the prettiest handle. And it’s not just about Republicans or Democrats, the right or the left. Because despite both sides pandering for our votes, making promises to decrease the bodies in jail and increase the jobs for our families, not much changes.

Both sides, let niggas down. Have thrown niggas to the side and out to dry.

When distrust in both parties is as widespread as it is, voting feels symbolic at best and delusional at its worst.

It’s easy to ask ourselves, “Why even bother?” So we don’t. Caring just costs too much. It’s too much to realize we’ve been lied to, our hopes thwarted again. That defeat is deafening.

With everything we go through we must focus on what’s right in front of us and call it a blessing. Do I have a job? Are my people good? Are they alive? Is my home safe? Shit do I even have a home? All of this is great, but what is survival without an attempt of change?

Black people are in a toxic relationship with America. And America is a partner that would kill us and say we made them do it. They didn’t want to hurt us. We just didn’t know any better. Didn’t do any better. Never asked for any better.

But since we aren’t leaving America, we have to BUILD the one we want. We’ve just been so busy getting it out the mud, like we’ve always done. We spend so much time refusing to be broken that we forget it’s also our duty to create.

But that’s their hope. That’s what they want us to do. To feel like the voting doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, Elon bribes other voters to the polls. You see that right?! They know voting matters. They just don’t want your vote. They have enough people agreeing with them. They just need Black people to stay quiet.

They want us to feel that it just isn’t worth it. Resignation to the “inevitable” isn’t a byproduct of voter suppression. It’s the goal.

They want Black people to believe change is too difficult, too impossible to even think about striving for it. But if it were the truth, then they wouldn’t be trying so hard to convince us of it. They wouldn’t need to spend billions and yes, I mean BILLIONS on fake narratives and misinformation.

We have to accept that not voting isn’t as powerful of a statement as we think it is. We have to admit that by giving in, we’ve given up our power. We’ve given up our lives to the fate of the world, to the whims of white powers who we KNOW would kill us. Continue killing us if they can.

Showing up is your refusal to disappear. Your refusal to allow anyone to silence you. We’ve come too far to stop caring. We have too much freedom now to stop here.

We have too much freedom now to stop here.

We are meant to do more than survive, my nigga. You and your children are meant for more, my nigga.

Vote because power is something we must demand. We must claim it and we must use it at every turn.

Go to the poll to show them “WE WILL NOT BE REMOVED”.

It’s our voice in collective fashion. It’s the direct line to those who hoped we’d given up on reaching them in the first place. I can’t guarantee what the outcome of participation will be, but I know what we get when we resign ourselves to the box they’d prefer to keep us in.

You get the silence that the system was engineered to deliver on our behalf.

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Dear Nolan,

Hey Buddy. I didn’t know you personally, but as you know, Black folks have a way of creating family beyond blood. A kind of fictive kinship connects us, and seeing you made me feel like you could’ve been one of my own nephews.

I have selfishly attempted the impossible task of avoiding the news surrounding your passing. Maybe it’s because the wounds are still fresh from the passing of my own nephew we lost a year ago. He was your age, and like you, he was beautiful and filled with life. Maybe I knew there was only so much grief I could hold.

I think, though, I finally understood what I had been avoiding when my wife shared the news that there would be no indictment. The feeling I had been trying to suppress wasn’t sadness or despair, although I’ve wavered between both since the news of your loss. It was something deeper. More terrifying. More difficult to heal. Rage.

James Baldwin knew something about that rage. Writing about his father’s death and his own struggle to live as a Black man in America, he observed, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” I understand that differently now, nephew. Seeing clearly is a burden. In loving a country while knowing what it is capable of doing to people who look like you. Like me. Like my children. Like my nephew.

We still don’t know the full truth surrounding your death. Various stories have implicated various people, and the details are murkier than the shores where you were found. Your so-called “friends” seemed more interested in absolving themselves of wrongdoing than helping your family understand what happened. A young woman you met on the lake that day came under scrutiny. She only knew you briefly, but I imagine she saw something in you that day too. That same light I see when I look at your pictures.

And then people blamed your parents. That part has stayed with me. “Why would they live in Mississippi?” It’s their home. “Did they give him the talk?” Of course they did. As parents of Black children, we know the talk. We know all the talks. Where you can go. What you should wear. How you should respond. What to do when someone follows you. What to do when the police stop you. When to speak. When to stay quiet. How to make yourself smaller when somebody else decides your presence is too large. As if there is some perfect combination of warnings that can keep a Black child safe. As if your parents could have loved you so carefully that the world would have been forced to love you too.

I know better. I have seven beautiful Black children myself, nephew. Two of them are your age. No matter how old they get, I still see their past selves. I see the babies I held. The little kids running through the house. The missing teeth. The scraped knees. The laughter. The questions. The innocence. Sweet. Beautiful. Full of life. Just like you. But I know the world can see something different. Dangerous. Threats. Promiscuous. Licentious. Disposable. That terrifies me.

My greatest challenge as a parent to Black children is figuring out how to raise them for a world that should be, while preparing them for the world that is. I don’t think I’m doing it right. Some days I want to tell them to be fearless. Other days I want fear to keep them alive. I want them to explore. I want them to travel. I want them to fall in love. I want them to make mistakes. I want them to be loud. To take up space. To go to the lake with their friends and come home late with stories they probably won’t tell me until they’re thirty. I want them to be free. And then I remember you. And suddenly freedom feels like something I am terrified to give them.

That is the impossible task your parents faced too: raising a FREE Black son in a country that has so often tried to extract every bit of our humanity. So I refuse to blame them. I offer them grace.

You were a son of the South, Mississippi to be exact, so I imagine you heard the story of another boy whose name became larger than the life he was allowed to finish living. Emmett. He was beautiful too. Full of life too. A boy who should have had the privilege of growing older. Instead, we remember him because the world would not let him simply be a boy.

I hate that I am writing your name anywhere near his. I hate that Black people have become so practiced at turning our dead into lessons. I hate that after someone like you is gone, we begin asking what your death can teach us. We search for meaning. We organize. We march. We write. We build something from the wreckage because that is what our people have always done. But nephew, sometimes I don’t want a lesson. Sometimes I just want you to still be here. I want your parents to have their son. I want the people who loved you to hear your laugh again. I want you to have been given the ordinary privilege of getting older.

What do we do when we don’t get that? Our people have been called resilient for generations. There is truth in that. We have made beauty in places designed to break us. We have built families, churches, schools, movements, neighborhoods, and whole worlds out of what we were given. But resilience has a cost. And I am tired of Black people having to pay it.

Right now, nephew, I have no prescriptions for hope, and I do not apologize for it. Right now, all I feel is rage. But I have been thinking about what I owe you if I am going to carry that rage. Because rage can consume a person. It can make me hard. It can convince me that loving anything in this world is foolish because everything we love can be taken from us. I cannot let it do that.

So maybe my responsibility is not to stop being angry. Maybe my responsibility is to decide what my anger will make of me. I can let it make me afraid for my children, or I can let it make me more intentional about loving them while they are here. I can hug them longer. Listen when they tell me the stories I’m too busy to hear. Remind them that they are worthy before the world gets another opportunity to tell them otherwise. I can teach them about this country without teaching them to hate themselves within it. I can prepare them for the world that is without convincing them that the world as it is must remain this way.

I can make sure they know that being Black is not simply something they must survive. It is something beautiful. Something sacred. Something free. I can love my wife. I can love my children. I can love my community. I can keep showing up for young people who aren’t mine by blood but become nieces and nephews anyway. I can fight for a world where their parents don’t have to rehearse every danger before allowing their children to live. And somehow, with all its faults, I can continue loving my country enough to demand more from it.

Loving you means refusing to let the circumstances of your death become the entirety of your life. It means remembering that before you became a headline, a case, a question, or another name people spoke while demanding answers, you were somebody’s baby. You were somebody’s friend. You were here. And you were loved.

So, dear nephew, I lay down these words in your memory, not to find closure. I don’t have closure to offer. I don’t have easy hope either. What I have is a vow. I will carry the rage. But I will not let it take my love.

I will love my children fiercely enough to prepare them for this world and stubbornly enough to believe they deserve another one. I will love my community enough to keep showing up. I will love our people enough to grieve every life without accepting that our grief is inevitable. And I will love you, nephew, I never knew, by refusing to let silence have the final word.

For you. For my nephew. For Emmett. For all our children.

Rest well, Nolan. Until we meet again.

With Love,

Uncle Tré

I knew it was coming. No matter how recently he’d seen me, once he caught sight of my chubby, pubescent cheeks or noticed that my five-foot-nine frame was already outgrowing my uniform khaki slacks, he’d crumple his kind, artfully wrinkled face and purse the lips beneath his soup-soaking mustache.

“Boy, how much you weigh now?”

My paternal grandfather, Granddaddy, asked this with melodic disbelief.

At fourteen, I was still trying to come to terms with my changing body. I’d shrug, avoid eye contact, and silently pray that no one else had heard him. Then came the jovial slaps on the shoulder, the playful pokes to my chest, and an inquiry into how many push-ups I could do. Sometimes he’d remove his burgundy suit jacket, unbutton his starched cream dress shirt, and demonstrate the exercise himself, announcing that he was sixty-four and used to be able to do a hundred at a time. My embarrassment would ease, and I’d begin to chuckle.

It took me years to understand the pride beneath the ribbing.

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Granddaddy had grown up during the Great Depression, with hunger shadowing his childhood. To him, a stout grandson was proof that things had improved. I was well-fed and growing. He wanted to know how strong I was getting.

My maternal grandfather stood five-foot-nothing and dragged a wooden cane everywhere he went. We called him Pépère, the Louisiana Creole name for grandfather used in our family. The folks in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward knew him as Kippy, or Kip if they knew him well.

“Kippy!” someone would yell as he rounded an aisle in the grocery store.

“Where ya at, nah?” he’d shoot back with a smile and a wink.

He rocked a half-done comb-over slicked across his dark, olive-hued bald head when it wasn’t covered by a rumpled fedora. He was the life of any room he limped into, a shot of earthy joy whose ability to charm seemed handed to him directly by God.

When I say he cried, I mean warm tears, moaning and cursing at the television before tossing his cane at the wall. Pépère cried all the time. Burned eggs. A preempted soap opera. A minor disagreement with our grandmother, whom we called Gammie. Here came the boo-hoos. Some of it was for comedic effect, but most of it was genuine.

I never thought this was strange. The most popular and beloved man I knew freely sobbed at the whisper of an opportunity. Later, I wondered whether he’d become this way with age. My mother told me he had always been like that.

Granddaddy was no less eccentric. He painted, sculpted, and drew subjects with gorgeous, ink-black skin and exaggerated features that accentuated the beauty of their African roots. On an unremarkable weekday, you might catch him in a retina-scorchingly bright suit, gleaming white loafers, and a yacht captain’s cap. At Southern University of New Orleans, where he taught art, his small, kitsch-filled office was always brimming with students doubled over in laughter.

For all that exuberance, I never saw him cry. Not even in the days after the death of his beloved wife, Grand Mommy. Whimsy, for sure. Bemusement, sometimes. Frustration, frequently. But sorrow was something he kept beyond my view.

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I recognized that reserve in my father, whose intelligent, tasteful demeanor I came to associate with elegant strength. Between him and Granddaddy, I learned to admire composure. Pépère made it impossible for me to believe that tears cost a man anyone’s respect. I had watched people love him through too many of them.

Of course, I knew both grandfathers as a child. Whatever they felt when I wasn’t in the room belonged to lives I couldn’t fully know. But I carried what I’d seen into my own.

For much of my adulthood, I’ve tried to examine my feelings before allowing them to dictate my behavior. Some days I manage that better than others.

I also cry easily. If this essay were a support group, I’d stand up, clear my throat, and confess, “Hi, my name is Chad, and I’m a crier.”

A gorgeous melody by Stevie Wonder or Cleo Sol can do it. So can Kendrick Lamar’s righteous anger on “Alright,” or a heart-wrenching passage in a novel. My displays are rarely as extravagant as Pépère’s, but they may be just as frequent.

Nothing, though, has made me blubber like a baby more than having one. I cried when I learned my son’s mother was pregnant, at his first sonogram, and in the hospital bathroom on the day of his birth.

My son is thirteen now. Neither of my grandfathers lived to meet him; both died more than a decade before he was born. Still, his honey-toned skin and facial structure remind me of Pépère. Watching him paint, draw, and sketch, I sometimes think Granddaddy must have passed the graphite pencil directly into his palms.

I can spot things he’s picked up from me, too. That gives me something to think about. Raising a Black boy means preparing him for peril I know exists while leaving him room for joy. I want him to be steady when he needs to be. I also want him to feel free to cry in front of his father.

At a recent church service, the choir sang the gospel standard “Excellent.” If you’ve heard it swell through a Black church, you know what I was up against. I made it through the first half emotionally intact. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw my son composing himself with a quick swipe across his eyes. I gently touched his shoulder. He turned toward me, his eyes still wet, and I draped an arm around his shoulders. We sat in silence.

I hadn’t planned that moment or rehearsed what kind of father I would be in it. I knew how to sit beside him. All those years of watching two very different men had given me that much.

“Boy, how much you weigh now?” Granddaddy used to ask.

All these years later, I finally know the answer: I carry the weight of both men.

Chad Jordan is a New Orleans native based in Houston, where he works as a legal professional, creative designer, and writer. Follow him on Instagram and Threads at @sacred_athletics and on Substack

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This week’s assignments span culture, politics, technology, world news, sports, and television.

Every assignment is an invitation to help shape the conversations our communities deserve to have.

Our goal is to build a community that archives and celebrates Black ideas and thought—a place where our perspectives are documented, questioned, challenged, and given the space they deserve.

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HOW IT WORKS

These writing prompts are available exclusively to E.N.D. paid subscribers. Choose the topic that speaks to you with the assignment you’d like to claim and a brief description of your angle.

You don’t need to be a professional journalist. You don’t need a journalism degree. You don’t need a massive following. You need something to say.

If you’ve been waiting for a reason to write, this is it.

ASSIGNMENTS BELOW

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Every Nigga Deserves and AAV are teaming up to connect civic participation to the lives Black people are already living.

Election Day is Tuesday, November 3. Between now and then, Black voters will hear plenty about what is at stake and why we need to show up.

^{Source: (Bettmann/Contributor via Getty Images)}

Those reminders matter. But if civic engagement is going to become a consistent part of our lives, the conversation has to make room for the rest of our lives too.

People are thinking about rent, groceries, childcare, work, safety, healthcare, and simply making it through the week. When you are focused on surviving, voting, attending a school board meeting, or keeping up with local decisions can easily become the last thing on your mind.

That is why AAV and Every Nigga Deserves are coming together.

IT TAKES US ALL

We are two Black led organizations with different approaches and one shared belief: Black people deserve a meaningful voice in the decisions shaping their lives.

AAV and E.N.D. are able to bring Black voters and civically engaged people together across age, class, gender and more.

How? Because we come from where y’all come from.

We’ve lived unique lives while sharing a collective cultural experience. We have grannies from small towns who never made it to high school but were the first in our bloodlines to vote. We have loved ones who’ve been impacted by the carceral system and war on poor people.

We know on a systemic and personal level what it means to be Black in this country, and we understand that we can’t wait.

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^{Source:Stephen Somerstein (American, b. 1941) Courtesy of the photographer}

AAV and E.N.D. want Black people to be well and live full lives. Compensated fairly, housed safely, stomachs full, and human rights intact.

We have a duty to each other and ourselves, and we firmly believe that we can only go far alongside our people. Building the world we want to leave behind takes courage, collaboration, and vision.

And there is no singular way, it sincerely takes us all.

SO, WHAT WILL YOU DO?

To kick things off, visit everyniggadeserves.com⁠ for a chance to win two tickets and travel to Camp Flog Gnaw.

Camp Flog Gnaw not your thing? Cool. You can still enter for a chance to win help with your groceries, gas, or rent. Did we mention you can check your voter registration while you’re there?

However you choose to participate, there is a part for you to play.

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^{Source: Associated Press}

WHERE CULTURE AND CIVIC LIFE MEET

AAV is a 501 c3, federally recognized, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that uses culture and conversation to help Black voters stay informed, stay ready, and feel supported, not just on Election Day, but all year long.

Behind AAV’s work is rigorous research. We conduct voter turnout experiments to understand what helps Black people move from being aware of an election to casting a ballot. That research shapes how we communicate, where we show up, and how we connect civic life to the things people care about every day.

That is why our work does not always look like traditional voter outreach. Through concerts, festivals, and rent, gas, and grocery giveaways, we meet people where civic life and real life intersect.

Every Nigga Deserves reaches people from another direction.

^{Source: Photograph by Matt Herron}

That perspective matters because information alone does not always move people.

Research can help us understand which messages reach people. Culture helps those messages travel with trust.

This partnership brings AAV’s civic engagement research together with E.N.D.’s creative voice and community.

Our immediate goal is to help more Black people, especially Black men, see themselves in the civic conversation, access useful information, and feel prepared to participate in this year’s election.

The city council where I live meets on Tuesdays at 2 PM.

Sit with that.

In a working-class Black and brown city, the public’s business is conducted in the middle of the workday. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 87 percent of full-time workers are on the job on any given weekday. So when the gavel comes down at 2 PM, nearly nine out of ten of us are exactly where we have to be: at work. The likelihood of us being in that chamber is slim to none, and slim clocked in at nine. And it wasn’t always this way — that same council used to meet at 7 PM, like most cities do, until it voted to move democracy to the afternoon.

An empty room looks like apathy. But it’s really architecture.

I know that room now. I didn’t always. For most of my adult life, I was exactly the man this essay is about, the one with the business plan, the degree, the drive, and no idea who signs off on any of it.

So when I sat with the question this issue is asking, who are we when we participate? I found I could answer it honestly only one way: by telling you who I was before I walked into City Hall and who I’ve been since.

Because there’s a version of that question with my name on it, and the numbers say I’m not the only one who needs to answer it. Black women vote at rates roughly ten points higher than Black men, and the gap is widening in exactly the places it matters most. In Georgia, only 71 percent of Black men under fifty who voted in 2020 came back in 2024, compared to 81 percent of white men the same age, and researchers noted the drop-off was specific to men. Among the youngest voters, it’s a chasm: in the 2022 midterms, 18 percent of young Black women cast a ballot against 12 percent of young Black men.

So this isn’t an abstract question about civic engagement.

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Participation Made Us

Start with the founding math. Every institution in early America was closed to us: the church pew, the bank, the ballot, the burial ground. So we built parallel ones, and in building them, we built ourselves.

In 1787, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones organized the Free African Society in Philadelphia, part mutual aid fund, part moral community, collecting dues to care for widows, orphans, and the sick. Out of it grew the independent Black church, which was never just a church: it was a legislature, a credit union, a school board, and a movement headquarters with a choir. Enslaved and free people pooled pennies into burial societies so that even in death, nobody went alone. After Emancipation, those societies became insurance companies and banks. During Reconstruction, Black men by the hundreds of thousands marched to the ballot and elected some two thousand Black officeholders, from sheriffs to United States senators.

Which means the question isn’t only what participation accomplishes. It’s what participation makes of the person who does it.

What It Costs, and What It Makes

Look at the record, and the same double truth shows up every time: participation transforms the man or woman who steps forward, and the transformation is precisely what draws the fire.

Fannie Lou Hamer walked into a Mississippi courthouse in 1962 to register to vote. She was fired that same day from the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years; the next summer, in a Winona jailhouse, she was beaten so badly she carried the damage for the rest of her life. But look at what the act produced. She went in as a laborer on somebody else’s land. She came out as a national moral authority, testifying before the credentials committee of a major party’s convention on live television, a woman with a sixth-grade education explaining democracy to the country that had denied it to her. The beating was the price. The becoming was the point.

Fred Hampton was twenty-one. Through organizing, community work, coalition-building, and a free breakfast program, he fed thousands of children before school. And became, a leader uniting Black, brown, and poor white organizations into the original Rainbow Coalition. In December 1969, he was shot to death in his bed during a pre-dawn police raid guided by an FBI informant’s floor plan. He had become exactly what a 1968 FBI directive, part of the COINTELPRO program later exposed by the Church Committee, had set out to prevent: a leader who could unify. Note what Hoover’s Bureau singled out about the Panthers. Not the guns. The breakfast program. Because feeding ten thousand children, organized by neighbors, was the most persuasive argument in America that we could govern ourselves.

George Jackson, writing from a prison cell in Blood in My Eye, named the logic: an effective Black organization isn’t processed by this system as citizenship. It’s processed as class war because people who pool their labor, their capital, and their votes stop being a market and start being a rival.

Which brings me to money, the substitute a lot of us have accepted for power. By most estimates, there are more Black millionaires in America than at any point in history. This is a wealth class led largely by our athletes and entertainers. Yet look at what we own. Our HBCUs, the institutions that built the Black professional class, sit chronically underfunded and physically deteriorating: students at Howard occupied a campus building in 2021 to protest mold in their dormitories, and in 2023 the federal government notified sixteen governors that their states had shorted their land-grant HBCUs by a combined $12.6 billion over thirty years and not lost in the market, withheld by statehouses. That’s a policy decision, reversible only by policy. Policy is made by votes.

This is why “buying power” is a trap. As Dr. Jared Ball argues in The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power, the trillion-dollar figure we hear every February is a marketing metric, not an economic one; it measures projected spending, not wealth, assets, or ownership. Dollars passing through our hands on the way to someone else’s balance sheet. Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran made the companion case in The Color of Money: money without political power cannot protect itself. Greenwood is the proof. Thirty-five square blocks of Black Tulsa burned in two days in 1921, insurance claims were denied under riot clauses, and no one was prosecuted. Greenwood had the wealth. It did not have the sheriff, the statehouse, or the Guard. Prosecution is a political act. So is protection.

The pattern to suppress leaders who unify evolved. Colin Kaepernick never played another down after 2016. And recently, Jaylen Brown, who committed years ago to building toward a Black Wall Street in Boston and actually followed through, said on a livestream that the people representing the league’s most influential players steer them away from investing in the communities they came from. That when he kept his plan, he was mocked for the crime of uplifting his own

I can corroborate the machinery from my own circle. Friends who went to the NFL two decades ago have told me what the guidance sounded like: nobody told those young men to go home and build. They were told to invest with the adviser’s network, the agent’s cousin who’s an accountant, and the partner who’s a business manager. This closed loop quietly routes a high percentage of every dollar back to the people managing it.

Honesty requires the counterweight, though, because participation has also won, and won big. Montgomery won. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were participation trophies. Black turnout reached near-parity with white turnout in 2008 and 2012. The pattern isn’t that we always lose. It’s that the response scales with effectiveness, the more our participation works, the more precisely it is answered, whether by a mob, a memo, or a meeting time. That’s not a reason to quit. It’s proof of leverage. Nobody builds a counterintelligence program against people who don’t matter.

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The Inheritance

So we come by our caution honestly, and the caution has receipts. Political scientists who coded thousands of local meeting minutes found that the people who show up and speak at public hearings skew dramatically older, whiter, wealthier, and more likely to own homes than their communities. Black turnout, having peaked in 2008 and 2012, has slid since, and the slide begins right where you’d expect. In 2013, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act’s preclearance requirement, and states with the deepest histories of suppression got to redesign their election rules unsupervised. Polling places closed. Rolls were purged. Meetings moved to 2 PM.

So let’s retire the word “apathy.” What gets diagnosed as Black disengagement is better described as institutional memory. Grandma is not apathetic. Grandma remembers.

But there’s a second inheritance with no such excuse: we are passing down ignorance and calling it culture. We grew up with platforms that treated Black civic life as appointment television. Teen Summit put teenagers on national TV every Saturday to argue the issues shaping their lives; Reading Rainbow made the library a destination.

Count today’s equivalents. The men our sons idolize aren’t merely silent on how power works; many couldn’t tell you what a city council does or who appoints the police chief, and their audiences inherit the shrug. The library has been replaced by feeds where “I heard” passes for evidence. I heard is hearsay. Show the data. And somewhere in there, we went from helping thy neighbor to selling to thy neighbor, the courses, the masterclasses, the blueprints to guaranteed success, $497 this week only. If the course worked, where are the students? We traded us, we, and ours for I, me, and my, and called the downgrade a hustle. Even the curriculum went missing: there was a time when the music itself was political instruction, Public Enemy, X Clan, Poor Righteous Teachers. Those artists still exist, and thousands of men and women are organizing, feeding, and tutoring in their neighborhoods right now. The algorithm doesn’t platform them, and we don’t either.

And be precise about where we stand: the race-conscious protections we did win are being dismantled in real time, preclearance gutted in 2013, race-conscious admissions struck down in 2023, federal equity and disparate-impact enforcement rolled back since, with nothing built to replace them. A group whose specific protections are being repealed cannot afford to have a generation that finds the drafting table boring.

The fear is inherited evidence. Ignorance is an inherited surrender. We can honor the first and refuse the second.

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What City Hall Made Me

Here’s where I have to talk about myself, because I was the shrug.

I have a doctorate in organizational leadership. I studied Black entrepreneurs for years. And when I bought my first brick-and-mortar, a restaurant and bar in Hawthorne, California, a few miles south of that 2 PM council chamber, I walked in with everything business school gave me and nothing the job required. Build it, and they will come. Move fast. Bet on yourself. That was the whole curriculum, and it was useless at the counter.

Because before I could serve one plate, I had to get through the permitting process. Building safety. Fire code. Health inspections. Water. Occupancy. Signage. And then Alcoholic Beverage Control, which is its own country with its own passport. Every one of those doors had a rule behind it, and every rule had been written by somebody, somewhere, at some meeting, on some Tuesday, and I hadn’t been in the room for a single one of them. My degree didn’t move a single inspection date.

So I took my first trip to City Hall. And I want to be honest about how I walked in: with ego. With bravado. With the posture of a man who intended to explain to the clerk how things ought to work. I lost that in about ten minutes. What replaced it was a question I hadn’t thought to ask in seventeen years of business: how does any of this actually work? and the humility to keep asking it out loud, in public, to people whose job titles I’d never learned.

That question took me to city council meetings. Then to planning commission meetings, which is where the real machinery is. And what I saw there rearranged me. I watched how corporations arrive in a city with counsel, consultants, and a relationship with everyone on the dais, while residents arrive alone with three minutes and no idea what an agenda item number means. I watched how a company that dominates a city’s tax base and its identity gets treated differently from the barbershop two blocks over. I watched budgets get moved, variances granted, and conditional use permits approved or denied, and

That is who participation made me. Not a politician, I’m not running for anything. It made me a man who reads agendas. Who knows the difference between what’s permitted and what’s prohibited on a parcel before he signs a lease? Who can tell a young entrepreneur which counter to visit and which question to ask? Who understands that his restaurant, his neighbors’ rents, and his students’ schools are all downstream of the same forty-minute meeting?

And it changed how I operate. I run participation like I run a business now, as a team. If I can’t make a meeting, I send someone with notes. We debrief on Zoom, on a text thread, over email; we split up agendas the way we’d split up shifts. I bring it to my family, my colleagues, my fraternity brothers, we’ve worked voter drives, and I keep pushing the same unglamorous message: go to a meeting, show your face, ask a question, bring somebody with you.

Because the information itself is fragmented on purpose, minutes buried in PDFs, zoning in one database, permits in another, none of it in plain English. I’ve spent the last two years building a tool to fix exactly that (a story we’ll save for another essay), so a person can type in an address and see what their city has already decided about it. I didn’t build it because I’m a technologist. I built it because I got tired of the answer being locked behind a counter I only found by accident.

So who am I now? I’m strategic. Let me be clear about what I don’t mean by that: I’m not denouncing anybody. My brothers and sisters who march, who post, who organize in the street, that work is needed, and if that’s what your heart tells you to do, do it. I don’t have the full answer, and I’m not here to rule on what’s right or wrong. Everything is needed.

But I move differently than I did, because I know where to go now. I know how to hold a person accountable. I know how to pull a record and find the document a mayor signed off on two elections ago, because what’s squeezing us today was almost always signed into action ten, fifteen, twenty years back, by somebody counting on us not to read it. So I find the evidence, I bring the question to the podium, and I hold that man’s feet to the fire, by name, on the record, in front of his colleagues. That’s not bravado. Bravado is what I walked in with the first time. This is a strategy, and I don’t run it just for my business anymore. I run it for the people who look like me, who work with me, who live where I live.

Pull Up Anyway, And Pull Up Local

So, brothers: what do you think you’re protecting by staying out of the room?

I understand the calculation. The room has cost us. Hamer’s job, Hampton’s life, Kaepernick’s career, our grandfathers’ peace of mind. Sitting out feels like the safe play, and it comes wrapped in a story we tell ourselves, that it’s rigged, that they don’t represent us, that our energy is better spent on our own bag. But look at what the whole record actually proves. They did not burn Greenwood because Black participation failed. They burned it because it worked. Hoover didn’t target a breakfast program because it was weak. The retaliation is the receipt.

And notice what staying out actually protects: nothing. Not your business, which lives or dies by a code enforcement decision. Not your children, whose curriculum is set by seven people you can’t name. Not your peace, which is policed under rules written at meetings you skipped. The bag you’re protecting is being taxed, zoned, licensed, and inspected by strangers. There is no version of manhood in which not participating counts as taking care of yours.

So: local first. We stare at the White House like it’s the only building with our name on it, while the decisions that shape our days, zoning, policing, curricula, contracts, and meeting times, get made in half-empty chambers on Tuesday afternoons. Even our national heroes have told us not to wait on them: President Obama said plainly he was not the president of Black America, and Vice President Harris asked for a Black agenda, offering plans for all Americans instead. I’m not here to bash either of them. I’m here to take them at their word. If no one nationally will represent us specifically, then we build representation where accountability is still possible, where the councilmember shops at your grocery store, where forty organized households swing an election, where you can look your representative in the eye and be home by dinner. Master the local, hold it accountable, make it deliver, then snowball it upward. We’ll worry about the president when we get there.

Start here. Find out when your council meets, and if it meets at 2 PM on a Tuesday, make the meeting time itself the first agenda item. Send one person from the block to speak for forty households; that’s not a compromise, that’s how the Free African Society did it. Read the agenda before you go. Learn your school board’s names before you learn another celebrity’s net worth. Understand the economy you live in well enough to define capitalism and socialism without flinching at either word. And vote locally, relentlessly, in the primaries and off-years where margins are small. Our numbers are decisive, not because a ballot is sufficient, but because a century of countermeasures against it is the strongest endorsement it has ever received.

Participation makes you informed. Being informed doesn’t guarantee a good decision; it improves the odds. And the man who never shows up isn’t avoiding decisions; he’s just letting other people make them for him. They called us class enemies precisely because participation made us a class: a people with shared interests who act on them together. Every year we retreat, that “we” thins out, and the man who retreats furthest ends up the most governed and the least consulted.

The meeting is on Tuesday at 2 PM. Pull up anyway.

And then, together, on the record, move the meeting.

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Cordaro M. Davis, EdD, is a Los Angeles-based entrepreneur, restaurateur, and adjunct professor of business. His doctoral research at Pepperdine University examined how Black entrepreneurs adapt and thrive despite systemic barriers. He is currently building Connexus, a civic intelligence platform that makes fragmented municipal data usable for entrepreneurs and residents.

Sources referenced: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey; Brennan Center for Justice analysis of Georgia turnout, 2016–2024; CIRCLE at Tufts University, youth turnout by race and gender (2022, 2024); Einstein, Palmer & Glick, “Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes” (Perspectives on Politics, 2019); U.S. Census Bureau Current Population Survey voting data; U.S. Senate Church Committee reports (1976) on COINTELPRO; 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission report (2001); George Jackson, Blood in My Eye (1972); Dr. Jared A. Ball, The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power (2020); Mehrsa Baradaran, The Color of Money (2017); U.S. Departments of Education and Agriculture letters on land-grant HBCU underfunding (2023); reporting on Howard University housing protests (2021); reporting on Jaylen Brown’s comments on athlete community investment.

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College is considered by many to be the best time of your life, and my time at Tuskegee University proved to be just that. I met great people from varying backgrounds, made progress in areas of my career, and created memories that I will cherish forever.

But it wasn’t always fun. In addition to the joy, there was also pain. For me, and many others, college is the most transformative experience to date. In 4 years, your self-concept and values are challenged and changed. The life lessons learned in college aren’t always from blissful joy, but painful regrets.

The Wonder Years

For half of my college career, I let fear control most aspects of my life, and it prevented me from having what I deem to be the “full” college experience: strong friendships, self-exploration, having fun, healthy relationships, etc. Ironically, these were the things I looked forward to when I first got to college, but the uncertainty that these situations wouldn’t go exactly according to plan and my need to therefore control such scenarios made me self-sabotage.

When I thought of college as an incoming freshman, I thought of it as a place where young women met and bonded through the mishaps of their youth to become lifelong friends. But when I heard of “The Great Falling Out” that happened to everyone’s freshman friend group, I was terrified. I’d always struggled with making friends, so the thought of losing any gave me a great deal of anxiety. This fear controlled my actions.

In an attempt to protect myself, I opted not to make any new friends, only remaining friends with the people I knew from high school at Tuskegee. This plan failed, of course. And when “The Great Falling Out” struck our friend group, it felt like my world had shattered.

My defenses were activated, and I began isolating myself from everyone. This counter dependency forced me to miss out on everyone and everything the university had to offer.

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The entire student body felt like one big family while there, but I had excluded myself from it.

I missed out on the privilege of creating bonds with my class. I didn’t participate in most campus events, attend any of the legendary parties or enjoy the celebrations that my other classmates recount every homecoming.The very experiences I had hoped for became what I ended up avoiding. Those experiences were no longer worth it in my eyes if they meant getting hurt or rejected. But getting hurt was unavoidable, and this fact was proven by the toxic relationships I fell into around this time.

I adored A Different World and wanted a Whitley and Dwayne love story of my own. My parents’ HBCU love story made me determined to get mine. But living in that fantasy, cost me too much in the end. When the dust settled from those catastrophes, I was at rock bottom.

This served as a turning point in my life. Something had to be done if I wanted to be happy. And I made the decision that I wanted, and deserved to be happy. So I made new choices.

I began my own HBCU (self) love story, journaling and exploring my self-concept. I began dating myself, discovering new hobbies and exploring interests (no matter how weird), and it led me to find new friends. It also forced me to participate, as that was the only way to explore those new interests and hobbies.

I realized that the right people didn’t care how weird or “off” I was and that those people were worth getting to know, regardless of a possible bad outcome. Slowly, college life began resembling what I had hoped it would look like, and all it took was releasing control of what I thought it should be and just being.

Reflections

Now that I’m 2 years post-grad, I can honestly say my biggest regret is trying to avoid the unavoidable. I wasted so much of my time and energy with the mental gymnastics I went through to keep myself “safe” from getting hurt. Had I just embraced change and accepted that mistakes would be made to begin with, my life would have been much more enjoyable.

I wanted to control how my experience went for fear of it going off track. I wanted to be the master of my own universe. But I had to realize that I wasn’t going to be the master; I was the participant. Life was telling me to jump on one foot, and all I had to do was choose the left or right one. I didn’t have control over the outcome nor did I give the instruction; I was simply the doer.

When I released my need to control the situations around me, life got easier and improved greatly. I was able to recover from those first few years, with the latter being all that I had hoped. The experience I had satisfied my personal requirements for what a college experience should be. The personal lessons learned from those early years have also proven to be useful today.

Because of college, now I embrace change and handle it with ease. I feel less anxious when I think of all of life’s uncertainties because I know the outcome will be what it is meant to be regardless. Four years in college taught me that.

But I wish I would have learned it sooner. My life today would be a lot fuller if I had. The close friendships that people built in college are the ones that I am now building in my adulthood, and I will admit that it is harder to do, but it is still possible. The adult fun, although a good time, also doesn’t compare to that young-and-dumb-fun had in college that I wish I would have experienced more of.

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Please make no mistake, I am thankful for how everything played out because I wouldn’t be the person I am today had it not been for those exact experiences. But when I reminisce on my time there, a large part of me dwells on the things I could’ve done differently. But we cannot change the past. We can only use what we learned to change what is happening now and in the future.

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We all got one uncle who’s been experiencing back pain for as long as you can remember. Instead of going to the doctor to help relieve his pain, he chooses to slap some Bengay on his back and call it a day.

You: “You need to get check out. Bengay isn’t a cure-all.”

Him: “What are they gon do for me besides take my money and tell me something I already know? I can do that for free.”

And this happens whenever you bring up a medical issue. To any of the men in your family. Whether they have money or not, the provide the same answer.

This is my Uncle Ben. When we have this argument, my first instinct might be to argue with him. Next thing you know, your whole fam knows you tried to get Uncle Ben to go see the doc. Now the whole line is calling to tell you it won’t work.

“We already tried. He didn’t listen.” Gridlock.

So let’s try a new approach.

Instead of arguing, ask Uncle Ben what’s keeping him from going. As you really listen to Uncle Ben, you’ll probably come to the realization that he doesn’t trust doctors anymore. He might tell you, “The last time I went to the doctor, they told me they couldn’t find the source of my pain. So there wasn’t anything they could do for me medically.”

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Uncle Ben Has a Point

My grandfather experienced a similar situation. His breathing troubles brought him to the emergency department on two separate occasions. Both times, the doctors told him nothing was wrong with him medically. Later, they discovered he had lung cancer, which explained the symptoms he had been experiencing for some time. None of the ER doctors ever suggested it.

That’s a root of the mistrust. They’ve gone before. They’ve complained before. And many times, nobody listened.

Medical mistrust isn’t limited to one family’s experience. Black men have higher levels of medical mistrust and are more likely to delay routine check-ups, blood-pressure screenings, and cholesterol screenings. Read more of the study here.

And to finally get some answers, Uncle Ben may need to have some control over how he gets there.

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Let Uncle Ben Have Some Control

Uncle Ben may be hesitant to schedule an appointment because of his pessimism. Before you go looking for a primary care provider, ask Uncle Ben what kind of doctor he would like to see.

Male or female? Older or younger? How far is he willing to travel? What time should the appointment be? If he’s not a morning person, please don’t schedule a 9 a.m. appointment. You know he’s not going.

By addressing these barriers practically, you’re creating better conditions for attendance.

Help Him Advocate for Himself

As we know, Uncle Ben has had his concerns dismissed in the past. Encourage him to speak up if the doctor tries to steer the conversation in a direction that doesn’t address his concerns.

If you can, go with him. Having someone else in the room can make it easier to remember what was said, explain what’s been happening, or speak up when Uncle Ben feels like he isn’t being heard. And younger generations, we don’t take no shit at the doctor. So if they’re messing with your elders, YOU can get them right.

Don’t Give Up After the First No

You will have to have the conversation more than once. More than twice. You will have to try a different approach. You may need to recruit your cousins and his siblings. And sometimes, you may have to let Uncle Ben come around on his own. The important thing is to keep the conversation open without turning every conversation into an argument.

At the End of the Day, It’s Still His Decision

At the end of the day, Uncle Ben is going to have to make the decision to take care of himself. You can’t make that decision for him. But you can make it easier for him to get there.

Acknowledge his concerns. Create a plan. Support along the way.

bio: Chyna Harmon is a writer from Ohio and the voice behind Regular Gurl, where she shares essays about everyday life. A two-time contributor to Homies Magazine, you can read more of her work and subscribe on Substack at Regular Gurl.

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Every assignment is an invitation to help shape the conversations our communities deserve to have.

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In a house full of women, “I Will Always Love You” was inescapable. It played on radios, televisions, in living rooms, and through car speakers. The adults around me understood the ache of it. At five, I only understood Whitney.

I was captivated by the video, by that red lip, and by that power suit. By the way, the softness in all of that eventually gave way to something enormous. Whitney didn’t need choreography or spectacle. She sat there and sang. Then the clarity and pristine intonation in her voice rose until a song about leaving someone somehow sounded like both devastation and triumph. I didn’t know enough about romantic love to understand why anyone would leave a person they still loved. I just knew something important was happening.

I also had no idea Dolly Parton wrote the song.

There are people who didn’t know“I Will Always Love You” first belonged to Dolly.

Dolly Parton, died on August 25 at 80, and leaves behind the kind of career that is incapable of summarizing. With nearly six decades of music, thousands of songs, Dollywood, movies, rhinestones, philanthropy, and a public persona so magnanimous, she will be missed forever.

As tributes roll in there is another part of her legacy that must be illuminated: her professional relationship with Black women.

Whitney Houston transformed “I Will Always Love You.” More than 30 years later, Beyoncé transformed “Jolene.”

One expanded the sonic possibilities of a Dolly Parton song, and the other rewrote its emotional politics. Both did so inside an American music industry that has spent more than a century pretending its genres developed along tidy racial lines, despite American popular music being fundamentally shaped by Black musical traditions.

Before the music industry figured out how to sell Southern sound, Black and white musicians were already playing traditions that overlapped far more than the categories we inherited suggest. In the 1920s, record companies were marketing music by Black performers as “race records” while rural white musicians were increasingly sold under the category of “hillbilly” music. Sounds that shared geography and influence became separated on store shelves and, eventually, in the American psyche.

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Genre did not simply describe American music. It helped teach us to hear it in racial terms.

Parton originally wrote the song as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, the country star whose television show helped introduce her to a national audience. She wanted to end their professional partnership, and when words failed her, she wrote the lyrics instead. Dolly’s recording of the song is conversational and delicate. It sounds like someone trying to have a conversation without waking a sleeping baby.

Whitney came through and sounded all the alarms. The arrangement builds around her until the song reaches the kind of vocal crescendo that made Whitney Houston, THE Whitney Houston. She transformed a modest country ballad into a gospel, soul, R&B, and pop performance in a monumental run where she spent 14 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won Record of the Year at the Grammys

And Dolly was enamored.

It would be easy to flatten this story into one about a benevolent white woman welcoming Black artists into her world. The white-savior trope is too simple, mostly because it erases the choices and genius of the Black women involved. Whitney Houston did not need Dolly’s generosity to make “I Will Always Love You” extraordinary.

But what kind of white woman watches a Black woman take one of the most important songs she has ever written and create a version so culturally enormous that entire generations barely know the song belonged to her first?

Dolly’s decision to allow Whitney to sing her classic record isn’t some form of sainthood. It’s her understanding the difference between ownership and possession.

Years before Whitney recorded “I Will Always Love You,” Elvis Presley wanted to. It was the kind of opportunity most young songwriters could only dream about until his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, informed Parton that Presley’s team expected 50% of the publishing. Dolly refused. She knew her songs were art, but she also understood they were assets. And the assets, Dolly determined, should be shared with a Black woman.

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Dolly spent the next three decades publicly celebrating what Nippy had found inside her song. Whitney’s success ultimately earned Dolly so much, Parton later said in a Nashville office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood. She affectionately called it “the house that Whitney built.”

In a 2022 interview, she then, remarkably, asked for it to happen again.

Parton publicly said she wanted Beyoncé to do something similar with “Jolene.” Dolly wanted another Black woman to take one of her “little songs,” and discover something bigger inside it.

Beyoncé did exactly that.

If Whitney expanded Dolly’s song, Beyoncé argued with one. Dolly’s “Jolene” is built around vulnerability. Its narrator studies another woman’s beauty almost obsessively and begs her not to take the man she loves. There is power in the recording is how Dolly sits lyrically in fear.

Bey’s version of the homewrecking anthem arrives on Cowboy Carter, an album the Houston native said was born from an experience in which she “did not feel welcomed” in the country space. It was a Black Southern woman examining why a musical heritage partially built by people who looked like her had been packaged as though they were outsiders.

On the original track, Dolly pleads. Beyoncé, however, warns. Parton later admitted she expected Beyoncé to sing the traditional version and was surprised by the rewrite. She loved it anyway. “As a songwriter,” she explained, “there was joy in hearing what somebody else could do with your work.”

There is something almost radical in that simplicity when placed against the racial history of American popular music. Black creativity has repeatedly been welcomed before Black creators were, and Black innovation has often become palatable, more profitable, or more “American” once separated from the Black people who made it.

Now Dolly has passed on, and the songs enter another life.

An afterlife that is more expansive than race. Many argue that music is the unifier. Dolly embodied that.

Perhaps that is the eerie negotiation of creating something capable of surviving you.

You can write and own a song. You can protect it fiercely enough to tell Elvis Presley, the alleged King of Rock’N’Roll, no. But once you release it into the world, you cannot possibly know every person who will eventually hear themselves inside it.

The late Backwoods Barbie simply seemed to understand that neither Whitney’s nor Beyoncé’s greatness required the erasure of hers.

And perhaps that’s the way they will keep living–even if, like me, my 8-year-old will discover at some point that two of the songs I blast during Saturday morning cleaning actually belonged to Dolly Parton first.

Christina Santi (she/her) is a multimedia communications specialist, cultural critic, and creative nonfiction writer whose work explores Black culture, race, gender, power, and the complex intersections between them. She received her MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism from The New School. Her writing has appeared in EBONY Magazine, TriQuarterly, and other publications. When she isn’t writing, editing, or teaching, she’s likely museum hopping with her son or obsessively explaining to someone why Frank Ocean’s music is masterful.

Instagram: Rawrsavvy

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On September 9th, 1995. I’m in suburban southern Connecticut. A precocious, lonesome young boy. Even though I’m not yet five, I already have too many flaws: too bookish, too effeminate.

Finally, it’s time.

In the X-Men: The Animated Series episode “One Man’s Worth”, members of the superhero activist team travel through time and land in the Jim Crow South. When confronted by locals angered by the appearance of interracial marriage, Alison Sealy-Smith says: “Skin color prejudice? That’s so pathetic, it’s almost quaint.” Her tone: haughty, indignant, defiant, elegant, and fearless, was everything! Everything I knew I’d need to become to survive, emotionally stranded in a world unprepared to accept my humanity.

She was Storm.

Every Saturday morning, images of Storm expanded my imagination and concept of self. In a way that felt taboo, she let me reimagine power, without the conventional Black masculinity I had already been violently disqualified from.

Growing up in the 1990s made being a Foundational Black American feel like a party. Our culture enjoyed an enormous amount of influence across movies, television, music, and fashion. This was the time of an expanding middle class and the first generation of Hollywood creatives culturally removed from systemic segregation. Blackness was portrayed as unapologetically cool, successful, desirable, and above all, marketable.

While the world was learning to see Black humanity more fully, I was learning that not all of us were included in the vision.

In the public consciousness, the Black American man was suave, handsome, athletic, talented, funny, and deceptively churchgoing. His image sold tickets, records, fragrances, or sneakers. Denzel Washington. Tupac Shakur. Michael Jordan. Masculine and tough. Not. Soft.

Heterosexuality and conventional masculinity were mandatory. The increasing popularity of gangsta rap made explicit expressions of misogyny and homophobia an inescapable daily reality. At school, I felt the constant sting of alienation, marked and excluded by peers who’d comfortably internalized the limits of socially-acceptable Black masculinity. Already, they’d begun to enforce its rules of engagement. But every Saturday morning, a Storm appeared, offering an escape from society’s restrictions. I had freedom.

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I didn’t yet understand that I’d been perpetuating another stereotype: borrowing emotional safety from a Black woman. I used her freedom to imagine a way out of my own constraints, without understanding how the Black women around me were often denied that same freedom; punished by forces outside their control.

In the early 1970s, Marvel Comics sought to revive the X-Men series, this time with a new, internationally diverse cast of characters. When she debuted in 1975’s Giant Size X-Men #1, Storm became the first Black female superhero in mainstream American comics, leading the X-Men and becoming a complex character study in femininity, authority, and self-determination.

Storm rejected pop culture’s sassy, subservient stereotypes of Black women. She was graceful, regal, otherworldly beautiful, completely in control of her emotions, and undiminished by the daily burdens of anti-Blackness. In other words, a power fantasy, like the ones white boys had already been afforded in characters like Batman and Spider-Man, white girls in Wonder Woman and Supergirl, and increasingly, Black boys, in Black Panther and Green Lantern John Stewart.

But I was not a Black girl. I was a Black boy, wrestling with the contradiction of my admiration.

I knew I related to Storm. I knew I wanted to be like her. Not because she was a woman, but because she represented a model of Black power that wasn’t contingent on being masculine in all the ways I already wasn’t. Relating to Storm didn’t make me less of a boy. It made the possibilities within my version of boyhood more expansive.

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When FOX Studios was casting 2000’s X-Men, the role of Storm was reportedly offered to Angela Bassett before going to Halle Berry. With the cultural specificity that made the character compelling stripped away, what remained was a light-skinned, Eurocentric vision of Black beauty representing a character that had formerly stood for fully realized Black womanhood.

The implication was that Storm was better seen than heard, better light than dark, better subordinate than leading, and that the racial politics of Marvel’s first Black female superhero were suddenly up for debate.

Where was the character whose protection had carried me through such a tumultuous early life? In many ways, I could no longer recognize her.

By the time Alexandra Shipp was cast as the younger version of Storm for 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse, the cultural conversation had changed, and social media backlash was swift. Consistent questions about colorism, proximity to whiteness, and the erasure of dark-skinned women from mainstream media followed the film’s release. Shipp herself responded to the criticism, telling Andscape: “I was thinking…all of these people are trying to tell me how Black I am…no one can tell you how Black you are…I’ve never been treated like a white girl.”

She would reprise the role in 2019’s Dark Phoenix, but like her predecessor did not feature prominently in either film.

For what it’s worth, neither Halle Berry nor Alexandra Shipp made Storm less Black, and neither should be made to answer for the decisions of studio executives. Both starred in films disinterested in developing the character into anything more closely resembling her comic book counterpart, seeding a cultural mistrust that mutated into a fiery combination of suspicion and protectiveness regarding adaptations of the character.

To cast Storm in 2026 is to face an incredible amount of public pressure, because she isn’t just a character. She’s also a symbol and a concept; the embodiment of a perfect society we’re still striving toward.

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To properly embody Ororo Munroe, aka Storm, an actress would need to be as beautiful as Naomi Campbell, as graceful as Misty Copeland, and as cool as Rihanna. Women like Cynthia Erivo and Chloe Bailey have publicly expressed interest in playing Storm in the MCU, only to receive intense backlash on social media. This one’s not pretty enough. That one’s not tall enough. This one’s too light. That one’s too dark. This one’s too American. That one’s too African.

At what point does protecting Storm’s legacy become just another way to police Black women into meeting impossible standards?

I understand the protectiveness and the fear. Storm isn’t just a character. She’s part of the emotional architecture of my inner self, a barrier that once stood between the world and me. I want the next generation of children, Black, queer, or otherwise, to see and feel what I did watching her scoff at skin color prejudice back in 1995. I want the perfect world she represents. I want my Storm.

In August 2026, Marvel broke the internet, announcing initial castings for its upcoming X-Men film. Among them was Maya Boyd, a 23-year-old Broadway actress from Ann Arbor, Michigan, as Storm. Immediately, social media began to buzz. She’s beautiful, but is she dark enough? Tall enough? Does her voice sound regal enough? Does she affirm my idealized image of Black womanhood?

Does it matter? Well, yes! But not in the way you might think. “It matters” is a lot different than “it has to be the way I want it,” and that’s a distinction that’s easy to miss.

Storm has survived over 50 years of publication history in part because she’s not just one thing, defined by one person. She belongs to the artists who design her, the writers who interpret her, the actors who portray her, the fans who idolize her, and the children who look to her for protection.

The 5-year-old me saw Storm as perfect. Perfection was the only way I could imagine navigating a world that hated and feared me as gracefully as she did.

30 years later, I know better.

Black women, fictional or otherwise, don’t exist to fulfill our fantasies. They don’t owe us perfection, even if they’ve helped us visualize it, against all odds. Storm doesn’t need to be perfect. She just needs to exist, unapologetically. And she does.

Maya Boyd doesn’t deserve to inherit the burden of becoming the Storm who saved me. She deserves the freedom to interpret her own Storm, her own way. Ask yourself what it means to release a woman from your expectations of her, and let’s find out together — on opening night.

Writer Biography: David Daniels IV is a writer, talent strategist, and cultural commentator exploring the intersections of identity, workplace politics, and popular culture. He is the founder of DD4 Consulting, a People Operations consultancy, and the creator of DD4 at Work, where he writes about how work really works. His writing examines the ways culture, power, and representation shape our understanding of ourselves and each other.

Substack: dd4atwork.substack.com

Instagram: dd4_consulting

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Even though more Black professionals are reaching high-salary roles today, the path to true financial security is still full of old roadblocks. I saw this firsthand with my father. He worked incredibly hard for decades to build a middle-class life, only to watch his entire retirement disappear when the housing market crashed in 2008. Because of that, he couldn’t give me the head start he wanted to, and I had to build my own foundation from scratch while he was busy rebuilding his. These moments taught me that we have to move past just “getting by” and start focusing on real wealth.

I believe the best way forward is a three-part plan: pushing for fair policy changes, treating our families like investment teams, and building strong local networks to turn those old obstacles into opportunities for us all.

Right now, we have a real chance to fix some of the systems that hold us back with a few smart policy shifts. A huge issue is how homes are valued. Even with a six-figure income, my family is finding it hard to buy a home because of how the market works, or doesn’t work, for us. It’s a broken system when even “success” doesn’t guarantee a seat at the table. We need things like tax credits or special funds to balance out areas hurt by unfair appraisals. We should also look at loan forgiveness for people entering essential fields like public health. By demanding fairness in housing and education, we can stop the drain on our community’s hard-earned money.

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Outside of government policy, we need to protect our own homes by setting up things like living trusts and estate plans while our elders are still with us. My father spent all his energy just keeping our heads above water. If we had treated our family finances more like a business back then, we would have been much more protected. Instead of just waiting for an inheritance, we should be building assets together right now. Think of it like a small investment firm where everyone in the family has a stake. By pooling our resources and looking for high-growth opportunities, we can create a safety net so that no one has to start over from zero like my father did.

We also need to get better at sharing connections to make sure everyone has a shot at the best jobs. When I started my career, I felt a bit lost because I didn’t have mentors who knew the ropes. We can fix that by sharing the names of the best, most honest professionals we know.

Whether it’s a great realtor or a smart wealth manager, these names should be common knowledge in our circles. Instead of waiting for big corporations to keep their promises, we can build our own ecosystem where we look out for one another and keep our community’s economy strong.

My father’s hard work and my own journey of starting from the ground level are what drive me to see this through. We don’t need to follow a script that wasn’t written for us; we need to write our own. This is about more than the old “American Dream”—it’s about protecting what we build and leaving a lasting legacy. With every smart move we make together, we’re securing our own future and our own independence.

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Thank you for helping us build something that belongs to us.

^{Photo Credit: Tobe Nwigwe “Chuke”}

As children head back to school, many parents take on one of the most challenging roles: the school-year support system. Navigating homework, volunteer expectations, field trips, and standardized testing, parents face endless demands in the school year. Parent involvement is a vital pillar of Black student success and is strongly linked to higher academic motivation, positive learning behaviors, and strong college aspirations, especially in all schools, but especially at white-dominated institutions.

I am the mother of two sons, an 11-year-old sixth-grader and a 6-year-old first-grader. My 11-year-old was diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), a common neurodevelopmental condition, and had an IEP. An IEP is an Individual Education Plan that assists in navigating the curriculum through modifications and accommodations, tracking his progress, receiving special education services, and setting goals. The plan ensures my son receives specialized instruction and related support services tailored to his unique learning needs. Contrary to the stigma, the diagnosis lifted a weight. My son was finally receiving the support he needed on both academic and social-emotional levels.

With this newfound plan, my role as his mother also expanded. As a part of his IEP, regular parent meetings with the student support team, surveys, and communication are integrated into the plan. Building a strong partnership with his IEP support team, in addition to his primary teacher, was essential to his success, and knowing how to build and maintain those relationships takes communication, respect, empathy, and shared goals and values. I also took those skills to support my other child as they matriculated through school.

Tips On Building Strong Parent Partnerships

After navigating that process with my own children, I’ve learned that a strong parent-school partnership begins on day one. Too often, parents and schools build their closest relationships only after something has gone wrong: a behavioral issue, a disappointing grade, a conflict with another student, or a concern that requires intervention. By then, everyone is entering the conversation with a problem to solve.

For Black parents, being intentional about building those relationships early can be especially important. We want teachers and administrators to know our children beyond a grade, a disciplinary incident, or an assumption made about their behavior. We want them to know their personalities, their strengths, what motivates them, where they struggle, and the families standing behind them.

When those relationships already exist, you aren’t introducing yourself for the first time during a crisis. You have context, established lines of communication, and people who already know both you and your child. And when something does require your attention, you are better positioned to recognize it, ask informed questions, and advocate effectively.

Here are a few ways to begin building that partnership from the start:

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1. Establish trust and communication as early as possible

As soon as you know the teacher’s name, set up a time to meet. Often, the first time parents meet teachers is either at back-to-school night, when multiple parents jockey for extremely limited time with the teacher, or during parent-teacher conferences, when tensions may be running high. Reaching out to the teacher to establish rapport and familiarity under neutral/positive circumstances gives you both an opportunity to connect, discuss your student’s goals, and identify potential opportunities or challenges before they arise in the classroom. The reality is sometimes Black children are some of the first Black people educators are exposed to and spend a significant amount of time with. Even with the best of intentions, biases exist and can filter how our children are perceived and received. Creating that fuller picture early can help establish a relationship in which your child is seen as an individual rather than simply through their academic performance or behavior.

For Black parents, establishing this relationship early can carry an additional benefit. You want your child’s teacher to know your student beyond moments of correction or conflict. Share what motivates them, what they’re proud of, where they struggle, what makes them laugh, and what you hope they accomplish that year.

2. Provide detailed information regarding your student’s needs

It may feel redundant to state “provide details” when communication has already been mentioned, but parents can forget details that are extremely relevant for classroom success. Are there additional details regarding your child’s personality or home life that would be helpful for the teacher to know? Issues such as a shifting home life (new marriage, divorce, new sibling, illness) are relevant information.

Black parents may also find themselves navigating the uncomfortable question of whether a concern raised about their child reflects an actual behavioral or academic issue, a misunderstanding, or bias. We don’t serve our children by automatically assuming every criticism is discriminatory, but we also don’t serve them by dismissing our instincts when something feels inconsistent. Knowing and sharing your child’s personality, patterns, strengths, triggers, and needs gives you a baseline for asking better questions.

Understandably, some family matters can be deeply personal and challenging to discuss; however, I would encourage an open and honest discussion balanced with truth and discretion. That said, it is not the teacher’s responsibility to make accommodations for each student’s home challenges and different personalities. BUT a good teacher will internalize this information, and it will support your child’s classroom experience.

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3. Know What—and How–Your Child Is Learning

Make sure you sit down with your student during the first week of school to review their curriculum, so you both understand the expectations for their in-class work, homework, study time, deadlines, and grading. Understanding how the class will be structured reduces potential conflict and confusion. Feel free to connect with the teacher, review the syllabus together, and address any questions you may have. For Black families particularly, as they move through history, literature, social studies, and other subjects, talk with them about whose experiences and perspectives are represented and whose may be missing. You don’t have to agree with every book, lesson, or classroom discussion, but knowing what your child is learning gives you an opportunity to provide context at home and encourage them to think critically about the material.

Then, stay vigilant. Pay attention not only to how your child is performing but also to what they are given access to. Are they being challenged academically? Are they being encouraged toward honors, advanced, or enrichment opportunities when appropriate? If they’re struggling, what interventions or additional resources are available? Knowing what the school offers and what is expected of your child allows you to ask more informed questions about their educational path.

4. Establish consistent communication channels between school and home

For Black parents, consistent communication can also provide important context. If the only time you hear from your child’s school is when they have missed an assignment, talked too much in class, or gotten into trouble, those negative interactions can begin to define how your child is understood. Make room for conversations about what is going well, too. Ask about your child’s strengths, improvements, friendships, participation, and contributions to the classroom, not only their challenges.

• Establish the communication channel. Early in the school year, find out how your child’s teacher prefers to communicate: email, school portal, scheduled check-ins, etc. Don’t wait until there is a problem to make contact.

• Build your own communication cadence. Decide how often you will check grades, review the school portal, talk with your child about what is happening in class, and check in with teachers. For Black parents, this also creates opportunities to hear about strengths, participation, friendships, and progress, not only disciplinary or academic concerns.

• Stay consistent and gradually bring your child into the process. Consistency gives you context when something changes. As your child gets older, encourage them to ask questions, seek clarification, communicate when they are struggling, and respectfully advocate for themselves.

5. Volunteering

Volunteering for classroom and school activities is another avenue for building a strong partnership with your child’s teacher and the school administration. Joining the Parent Teacher Association, volunteering as a room parent, and assisting with the planning of school-wide events and activities give parents and teachers opportunities to build rapport and relationships centered on a shared goal outside the traditional framing of parent and teacher for a specific student. Investing time to plan and fundraise for your child’s school can also have benefits when it comes to providing input and feedback on the strategic plans for the school and curriculum.

For Black parents, volunteering can be about more than lending the school an extra set of hands. It creates visibility. Being present gives teachers, administrators, staff, and other families the opportunity to know you and your child beyond moments of conflict or concern. It also gives you a window into the culture your child experiences every day: who is celebrated, who is disciplined, whose parents are in the room, and whose voices help shape the school community. Our children deserve to see Black parents represented in those spaces, particularly in schools where Black families are underrepresented.

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6. Checking in with your student

Engaging your child in conversations about how they feel about their teacher, their schoolwork, and their overall school identity can be daunting for some families; however, it is critical that you hear your child’s feedback about their school experience to be an effective advocate. Your child is the one experiencing their educational journey on the front lines every day, and their point of view should be held in high regard, even in moments of conflict. Black children need to feel comfortable sharing details about their day and engaging with their parents, even when they may face challenges. Because checking in with a Black child isn’t just “How was school?” it’s also sometimes “Do you feel like you’re being treated fairly?” “Does this happen only to you?” “Do you feel comfortable asking for help?” “Do you feel your teacher likes you?” Engaging in conversation about their day and how they are experiencing the teacher and curriculum is essential for determining how well they are being supported, identifying any challenges, and ensuring any additional needs are being met.

To note, this isn’t teaching your children to interpret every negative interaction as racial discrimination; you’re teaching them to pay attention to their experiences and give them a safe space to tell you when something doesn’t feel right.

Communicating During Conflict

Even under the best of circumstances, parents may encounter a situation in which they are in conflict with a teacher. I found myself in this situation when, at his previous school, my son’s ADHD IEP was not being adhered to, and it was impacting how he performed in the classroom. I felt the administration was allowing him to fail. There are always additional calculations for Black parents during conflict. Advocacy requires assertiveness, but Black parents may be conscious of how quickly justified frustration can be interpreted as hostility or aggression. That doesn’t mean making yourself smaller or remaining silent when your child needs you. It means being strategic. Document the issue. Bring emails, dates, assignments, IEP provisions, or other relevant information. Ask direct questions. Follow conversations with written communication. Know what resolution you’re seeking before entering the meeting. Your goal isn’t to win an argument with the school; it’s to create a record, identify a solution, and ensure your child receives what they need.

The Path Forward

Parents will spend the majority of their parenting careers supporting their children through their educational journey, and as parents, you are the primary support system for their educational foundation. You instill and reflect the priorities, provide access, and design the home life that can contribute to their success or failure.

Black-parent advocacy isn’t necessarily about entering school expecting discrimination. It’s about being engaged enough to recognize the difference between normal educational friction and something that requires intervention. While that feels heavy, so much of parenting is; it should also feel empowering. You do not have to know every policy, anticipate every problem, or fight every battle to be an effective advocate for your child. You simply have to remain present, curious, and willing to act when something doesn’t feel right. Build relationships with teachers and administrators before you need them. Ask questions. Read what comes home. Listen to your child. Document when necessary. And remember that advocacy can look just as much like collaboration as confrontation.

Our children deserve to enter their classrooms knowing someone is paying attention, someone will ask the questions, and someone will speak up when necessary. As their parents, we can make sure they never have to navigate those spaces alone.

Biography:

Courtney Welch is a writer, public affairs professional, and cultural and political commentator exploring the intersections of race, class, parenting, and politics. She serves on the Emeryville City Council and is the first Black woman to have served as Mayor of Emeryville, California.

Social Media:

Instagram | Threads/Tiktok/Gist: @_shortcourtney_

Substack: substack.com/@shortcourtney

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It’s Monday. A new week, and a new set of conversations worth having.

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WORLD

• Can You Be Black and European?

  • What does it mean to be Black and European at the same time? Explore nationality, migration, race, belonging, and how Black Europeans understand their own identities.

BUSINESS & MONEY

• Black Business Month

POP CULTURE

• Stephen A. Smith — A Coon?

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“Auntie, we should go see The Odyssey,” my niece said. “It’s amazing. It’s loud, but I think you’ll love it.”

We went to the late showing. 8:30 at night, three hours long. She’s young enough that staying up for it wasn’t a question. I’m not — these days I’m up by 5:30 whether I want to be or not, which is its own kind of surrender, since I spent most of my life being the person you didn’t speak to in the morning until she spoke to you first. I fully expected to fall asleep somewhere around hour two.

I didn’t. Not once. It was loud, and it was strange, and it was thought-provoking in a way I wasn’t braced for.

The week I first saw The Odyssey was the week ESPN let Ryan Clark go.

Clark is from Marrero, a working-class suburb in Jefferson Parish on the West Bank of the New Orleans area. It is only about five miles from the center of the city, but New Orleans is small enough that crossing the river can be treated like going on a journey. The West Bank is geography, but it is also an identity. It can mean Algiers inside the city limits or Harvey and Marrero beyond them. Clark is not from the city of New Orleans. He is, unmistakably, from the West Bank.

He played at Archbishop Shaw and LSU, went undrafted, then built a thirteen-year NFL career that took him through New York, Washington, and Pittsburgh, where he won a Super Bowl. After football came ESPN.

He had to leave home to become someone home would eventually celebrate.

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Odysseus — a soldier trying to get home to Ithaca after ten years fighting the Trojan War — spends another ten years just trying to complete the journey, and distance is not his only problem. Homer’s Odyssey is full of monsters and gods, temptation and loss — sirens, a witch who turns men into swine, a nymph who keeps him seven years on her island. By the time he reaches his own front door, most of the men who sailed with him are dead, and the wife waiting for him needs proof that the man standing there is actually her husband.

When he returns, he enters his own house in disguise. Even some of the people who love him need proof that the man who came back is the man who left.

Frankly, I had always wondered how Clark stayed at ESPN as long as he did. Not because he wasn’t good — he has one of the sharpest minds in sports analysis, full stop. But he was never willing to leave the politics out of it, the race out of it, the gender out of it. He’d debate the X’s and O’s and then, in the same breath, tell you plainly what a decision meant for the athlete underneath it. He is also a brilliant man with an impeccable sense of style, which, for a stylish person like me, is not incidental.

He wasn’t the first person like that ESPN has had. Jemele Hill spent twelve years there before she was suspended, pulled from SportsCenter, and eventually left through a contract buyout after a string of political controversies the network decided it no longer wanted attached to its name. She wasn’t fired, exactly. But by the time she went, both sides had more or less agreed the room had gotten too small for her to stay in it comfortably. I had been watching Clark for years and wondering, quietly, when his turn would come.

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The Tenuous Welcome

Clark said it plainly after his firing.

He felt he couldn’t be too Black to keep his seat at that table.

That’s the sentence I keep circling back to, because Clark said plainly what I had been watching for years. His voice got more expansive the longer he stayed — more willing to name what he saw, less interested in softening it for the room. And the room, from where I sat, seemed to get smaller around him at the same rate. Not all at once. A degree at a time, a segment at a time, a chyron here, a colleague’s discomfort there.

More than eleven years at ESPN is not proof that ESPN made room for the whole of Ryan Clark. It might be proof of exactly the opposite — of how skillfully a man can navigate a welcome that was never unconditional to begin with. ESPN could use what Clark brought without ever becoming large enough to hold all of him. Staying that long, in a room like that, means learning exactly how much of yourself the water will hold before it pulls you under.

Under Whose Command

Odysseus knows something about that kind of arrangement. After Troy falls, the Greek kings go their separate ways. Odysseus picks his own path, deliberately, after ten years fighting under Agamemnon’s command. He’s done letting someone else’s war dictate his direction.

It doesn’t make the journey easier. It becomes The Odyssey. But it’s his.

Except carving his own path doesn’t free him from the habits the command structure taught him. A prophet warns him plainly that only he will make it home. Odysseus refuses to accept it — insists he’ll bring his men back too. He doesn’t. The sea takes them anyway, one storm and one broken oath at a time, until he’s alone on Calypso’s island — a nymph who will hold him there seven years — with nothing but his own life. Leaving Agamemnon didn’t undo the instinct to carry everyone. He just started carrying them on his own terms, at his own cost.

I keep coming back to a different word than expansive. Clark’s voice didn’t just get bigger the longer he stayed. It got more expensive. Every time he tied a coaching decision to the history that shaped it, every time he wouldn’t let an athlete’s politics get flattened into a stat line, the cost of keeping him on the air went up. Not because the analysis got worse. Because it stopped fitting the narrow job ESPN had actually hired him to do.

I don’t think Clark stayed at ESPN purely to carry other people. That would flatten a decade of a real career into a single motive, and I don’t know his interior life well enough to claim that. What I can say is this: whatever else kept him there, he used the room he had to make more room for people the room routinely misunderstood. By his own account, he was still code-switching in his final year, censoring himself in places, to keep the seat that let him do it at all.

Code-switching isn’t a rare skill some of us reach for under pressure. It’s the thing Black people do every day, all day, just to move safely through rooms that were never built with us in mind.

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Trying to Bring Everybody Home

I know something about that particular exhaustion. For over a decade I helped build and run an organization called Brothers Empowered to Teach, working to get more Black men to consider education as a career. Most had already been told, by their own teachers, by people in their own families, that teaching was a terrible career for a man to choose — or told by their own peers that Black men can’t teach and don’t teach. Many hadn’t had a single Black teacher until high school, or college, or ever.

I remember sitting in a room with a well-known teacher recruitment platform, a room with a lot riding on it, and being told plainly that they just didn’t get it. Why would we pay Black men to consider education as a career? Why were we talking to young men whose GPAs were under 3.0?

We weren’t recruiting from the students with the polished résumés and the degrees from the schools whose names made funders comfortable. We were going after the ones who weren’t sure why they were in college in the first place, who nobody had ever told they might be good at this.

People said we were too Black. Too young. Too fly. They questioned the GPAs, the preparation, whether these young men belonged in a classroom at all.

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What that recruiter’s room never understood is that the mask-off space was the point. We built the work around hip-hop, around style, around showing up as ourselves on purpose — suits with sneakers, a tennis shoe game that was its own kind of statement — because we needed these young men to look at us and recognize someone they could actually talk to. We called it the Cipher — the place where the masks came off, where we could name what was really affecting the health and the livelihood of Black men without translating it first for a room that wasn’t in it. It was also where we did the harder work: challenging our own fellows to unlearn the deficit thinking, the gender bias, the socioeconomic assumptions that kept them from seeing clearly across difference, including differences among Black folks. Code-switching wasn’t a skill we were teaching. It was the thing we were trying to build a room sturdy enough not to require.

Even then, much of the early belief and investment we needed came from outside New Orleans. We had to take the work to other cities, build relationships elsewhere, and let people beyond home recognize its value before many institutions here treated it as something worth backing. Apparently, even work built specifically for New Orleans sometimes needs a letter of recommendation from somewhere else.

We proved the doubters wrong more than two hundred times over. Nearly seventy percent of the young people who came through our doors stayed in education or youth development for two years or more. Some of them are physicians now, building organizations of their own to get other Black students through medical school.

I stood in rooms for over a decade defending people’s promise before the room was willing to see it. Sometimes it cost me specific things I can name. I was the only woman in leadership for the first five years, which meant every room required proving I belonged twice — once as a leader, once as a woman leading men. I caught heat from both directions. Men who thought I didn’t understand them. Women who thought I defended men too much, made excuses for them I wouldn’t have tolerated anywhere else. Some of that critique was fair. Standing in that tension long enough to name what’s actually there, without pretending it isn’t, is its own kind of exhausting — the kind that doesn’t show up in a two-hundred number or a percentage.

I left Brothers Empowered to Teach in 2021. I’ve written before that I left knowing integrity and ego could not coexist. I still believe that. What I’ve had less practice saying out loud is how long I stayed inside that particular storm before I let myself see it as one. I told myself the work was too important to walk away from. I told myself the young men coming through our doors needed continuity more than they needed my comfort. Some of that was true. Some of it was the same story Odysseus tells himself with a boat full of men he cannot actually save — that leaving is a kind of failure, that a good captain finds a way to bring everyone home even when the water has already told him otherwise.

The organization closed for good last year. I wasn’t there when it did. I don’t say that with relief, and I don’t say it with innocence either. I say it because I think there’s a version of staying that we mistake for devotion, and it isn’t until much later — sometimes years later, sometimes only when you watch the thing finally come apart from a distance — that you can ask yourself honestly whether you were holding the work up, or whether the work had already stopped being able to hold you?

I don’t know if Clark ever asked himself that question. I’ve had to ask it of myself, more than once, and I don’t always like the answer. What does it cost to keep trying to bring everybody home, long after it’s become clear the storm isn’t going to let you?

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Give Yourself to the Sea

On Calypso’s island, Odysseus gets a different lesson than the one about carrying others — this one is about letting go of control entirely. She keeps him there seven years, feeding him the lotus flower so his grief can’t reach him while they build a life together. It isn’t peace, though it looks like it. It’s a hold pattern, and it breaks the moment Zeus’s storm reaches even her — the moment she starts asking Odysseus what he remembers. Memory has to come back before he can leave. She doesn’t release him by pushing him out. She releases him by making him remember why he came. Only then does she tell him: build the raft, and stop trying to command what happens next. Give yourself to the sea. You cannot control your way home. You can only trust it.

That’s the harder lesson, and I don’t think it’s really about Ryan Clark, or even about Odysseus. It’s about anyone who’s ever stayed inside a place, a role, a version of themselves, waiting for permission to leave that no institution was ever going to grant. We keep thinking the ceiling will move if we’re patient enough, skilled enough, careful enough. Sometimes it doesn’t move because it was never going to. Sometimes the only way home is admitting the room has already told you everything it’s going to tell you, and choosing to believe it.

Ryan Clark had already started building before anyone told him to. The Pivot — the podcast and independent platform he built on his own terms — didn’t get built after ESPN let him go. He built it while he was still on their air, still cashing their checks, still doing the calculus every week about how much of himself the room could bear. ESPN didn’t hand him a way home. They just stopped being the institution whose limits he had to negotiate while building something freer beside it.

That now is doing a lot of work.

Sometimes home does not recognize what it raised until somebody somewhere else names its value first. Odysseus returns to Ithaca disguised and must reveal himself inside his own house. Clark left the West Bank as an undrafted safety and returned, over and over, as a Super Bowl champion, an analyst, a national voice. The wider world did not make him worthy of home. It made his worth harder for home to overlook.

Brothers Empowered to Teach knew something about that too. So do many of us whose work becomes easier to explain locally after someone outside the city has already believed in it. There is a particular ache in being embraced by the place that made you only after you have proven yourself somewhere else. But there is also power in returning with something no institution can revoke: your voice, your people, and work built on terms expansive enough to hold you.

I won’t say The Pivot will outweigh what ESPN gave Clark. That’s not mine to promise, and it isn’t proven yet. What I’ll say instead: it gives him something ESPN’s scale never did. Room. The kind you don’t have to keep negotiating for.

Don’t look for gods in men. You’ll always be disappointed. Don’t look for them in institutions either. ESPN was never sacred. It was never entitled to set the outer edge of who Ryan Clark, or Jemele Hill, or any of us, get to become.

Giving yourself to the sea isn’t surrender. It’s refusing to let something smaller than you keep deciding where, or whether, you get to arrive.

K. Jones is a writer, cultural commentator, and community development consultant based in New Orleans. She writes Cribnotes, a newsletter that’s part field notes, part cultural commentary, part love letter to the places that raised her. Find her at Cribnotes and on Instagram @kjonze.

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^{Photo Credit: Belinda Cross}

There’s a conversation happening at kitchen tables across Black America right now, and it usually starts with an apology. “I hate to ask, but...” A daughter calling her mother about moving back in. A brother asking a brother about splitting rent. Two cousins wondering aloud whether they could qualify for a mortgage together that neither could get on their own.

But in my family, I never needed an apology.

Where I come from, moving in wasn’t a confession of failure. It was a move on the board.

Before we talk about housing, I want to ask the question this essay is about: Who taught us that independence is the highest form of achievement?

I’m a millennial, so I can tell you exactly where my generation heard it. We had an anthem. Webbie gave us “Independent” — a song so committed to the idea that it spells the word out letter by letter, just to make sure it sticks. And it stuck. The song is as popular today as it was then, still filling dance floors nearly two decades later, still preaching the same gospel: handle everything yourself, need nobody, and that’s when you’ve made it. The music didn’t invent the message — it amplified a definition of success America had been selling for decades. One person. One paycheck. One address. Maximum distance from your people.

Radical independence is not just outdated; it’s financially dangerous. The way out is actually a way back.

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Fourteen People, One Townhouse

In the 1990s in Washington, DC, fourteen people in my family, four families in all, lived together in a single townhouse. Inside the house, it was something else entirely: an economy. Meals were cooked for everyone, so nobody had to pay for four separate kitchens. Children were watched by whoever was an adult at home, so nobody lost income to childcare. Rides were shared, bills were pooled, and when one family hit a rough month, the other three absorbed the shock before it could become a crisis. Nobody was independent. Everybody was covered.

Within two to three years, each of those four families purchased and maintained a home of their own — all of them. The townhouse wasn’t a landing pad; it was the launchpad.

The launchpad turned into a system. When my mother and grandmother purchased our family home in the Maryland suburbs, they bought it the same way the townhouse had operated: as a collective. Shared purchase, shared responsibility, shared burden. If the water heater went out or a payment came up short, no single person carried it alone.

That home came with a standing policy, understood by everyone: If we had room, and you needed somewhere to lay your head, and — this part mattered — you had a plan of action, the door was open.

When my older brother graduated from high school, a younger cousin moved into his room. When I graduated and left for college, more family members moved in behind me: one out, one in. The house never sat idle, and nobody staying there was idle either. My family even extended the policy to my friends — young men who needed a place to stay, stayed, saved, and walked out of our house into their first homes.

And what worked for my family in the 1990s hasn’t gone out of date. Look at today’s conditions, and her model stops reading like history and starts reading like a forecast.

The Weather Report

Black homeownership fell to 43.9 percent in mid-2025, its lowest point in nearly four years and the steepest year-over-year drop this decade. The gap between white and Black homeownership now stands at nearly 30 percentage points. Among Black Gen Z adults, only about 14 percent own a home, and Black unemployment has climbed past 7 percent. For young Black workers with a high school education, it’s approaching one in five.

As for Washington, the same government has moved to shrink HUD, dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — the referee created because lenders have a documented history of cheating people who look like us — and imposed tariffs that add an estimated $17,500 to the cost of building a new home.

None of that is within your control. My family understood that in a DC townhouse thirty years ago.

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Unlearning the Shame

So why does the kitchen-table conversation still start with an apology? Because we’ve adopted a white and Eurocentric view.

Across most of the world, from Lagos to Mexico City to Mumbai to Seoul, multiple generations under one roof is not a crisis. It is the default architecture of family life. America’s ideal — one nuclear family, one detached house, one mortgage — is a historical anomaly, barely three generations old, built on cheap land, cheap credit, and government-backed loans that were explicitly denied to Black families through redlining and restrictive covenants. We were locked out of the subsidy, taught to measure ourselves against its results, then told our distance from it was a personal failing.

Our grandparents pooled — because they had to, and because they knew how. Our parents aspired — a good life came to mean getting the children up, out, and away. And by the time the idea reached us, independence was no longer a strategy or even an aspiration. It was an identity.

Success meant your own place, your own bills, your own struggles handled quietly and alone. We began measuring progress in distance — the farther you landed from home, the better your family must have done — until needing your people, the very thing that carried us through everything, became the thing we were most ashamed of.

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Reclaiming the village is about more than saving money.

It’s about reclaiming a philosophy of family — the understanding that a household is the first institution we ever built and the most reliable one we’ve ever had.

The extended household was never our failure. It was our technology. The village raised the children, pooled the wages, kept the elders housed, and financed the businesses when no bank would. Black families didn’t survive Jim Crow on individual credit scores. They survived on collective capacity.

My doctoral research on Black entrepreneurs revealed the same pattern again and again: those who endured systemic barriers didn’t wait for the system to change. They started with what they controlled — their skills, their relationships, their communities — and built from there. Scholars call it effectuation: begin with your means, not your wishes. It applies to a household exactly as it applies to a startup.

What We Control

Merged households need rules, the way businesses need standard operating procedures and contracts. Write your version down. Who pays what, who does what, what the money is for, and what the exit looks like. Treat the household like the enterprise it is — because it is one. The family is the first firm any of us ever belongs to. Mine happened to be a firm that produced homeowners.

While we do that, make sure to do the policy-level work: Vote. Mobilize. Organize. Demand a housing agenda that treats shelter as infrastructure rather than an asset class. But do not put your family’s survival on layaway while you wait for Washington to develop a conscience.

Webbie gave us the anthem for going it alone. My grandmother gave us a better one. She just never had to spell it out.

Cordaro M. Davis, EdD, is an entrepreneur, restaurateur, and adjunct professor of business in Los Angeles. His doctoral research at Pepperdine University examined the adaptive strategies of Black entrepreneurs navigating systemic barriers.

Instagram: @cordaro4u Substack: @cordarodavis

Sources referenced: Redfin/U.S. Census Bureau homeownership data (Q2 2025–Q4 2025); Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED); Economic Policy Institute, State Unemployment by Race and Ethnicity (Q1 2026); Bureau of Labor Statistics; Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, State of the Dream 2026; National Association of Realtors, 2025 Snapshot of Race and Home Buying in America.

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For just $5 a month, you’re directly investing in Black writers, Black ideas, and the future of independent Black media. Every subscription helps us commission original stories, platform new voices, and continue building E.N.D. into a living hub for revolutionary thought, culture, education, and community.

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