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.
It’s a question for my brothers: what do you think you’re protecting by staying out of the room?
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.
Notice what that history does to the word “identity.” There were no ready-made Black Americans who then decided to get involved. We arrived here from a hundred nations, speaking different tongues, scattered across plantations and ports, deliberately divided so we could never become anything together. What welded all of that into a people, a “we” with shared institutions, shared money, shared memory, and a shared name, was the participation itself. Participation is not something we do. It is how we were built.
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.
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.
Understanding is the whole game, because policy is everything. Where you can drive, where you can live, where you can open your business, where your child goes to school, and what she’s taught when she gets there, every inch of your day is governed by policy somebody showed up to vote.
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.
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
I finally understood that everything is a vote. Not a metaphor. A literal show of hands, at 2 PM, by people whose names most of my neighbors couldn’t tell you.
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.
Who do you become when you participate? You become a man who knows how his own life is governed, and that is the one inheritance nobody can repeal.
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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