Every March, Women’s History Month brings a familiar rhythm of celebration—panels, proclamations, and tributes to pioneers who shattered glass ceilings. Those stories matter. But if we are honest, the story of women in America cannot be told without confronting another truth: this nation has been built, quite literally, on the backs of Black women. From the earliest days of the republic, Black women’s labor has been both indispensable and invisible. Enslaved women worked fiel

America has rituals for the dead. We lower flags. We dim lights. We ask for moments of silence. In rare cases — former presidents, Rosa Parks — we place bodies beneath the Capitol dome and call it honor. So when congressional leaders declined to extend that honor to Rev. Jesse Louis Jackson, they cited precedent. Precedent is tidy. Procedural. It is also how exclusion dresses itself in neutrality. But here is the truth: the Capitol Rotunda is too small for Rev. Jesse Jackson.

Frederick Douglass did not know the day he was born. Like many enslaved people, he was denied even the dignity of documentation. Birth dates were approximations. Family lines were severed. Identity existed in property ledgers, not in public record. His mother, Harriet Bailey, called him her “little Valentine,” and Douglass later chose February 14 as his birthday — an act of self-definition in a country that refused to define him as fully human. That act matters. Douglass unde

Labor economists like me mark our calendars for the first Friday of each month, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases The Employment Situation. In February, that report did not arrive on schedule. According to BLS, a partial government shutdown temporarily suspended data processing and dissemination, delaying the January jobs report. Many economists have built careers around these numbers, and we are right to rely on them. But moments like this also remind us that labo

Don Lemon knew he was going to be arrested. On January 18, he flew from Minneapolis to Chicago to emcee the MLK Breakfast for PUSH Excel the next morning. He was expert and gracious, as always—but he also dropped a couple of quiet bombs. Lemon all but said he was under siege. He didn’t list every case or name every colleague. He didn’t have to. The message was clear: his arrest was coming. Lemon understands power. He understands pretext. And he understands that when Black jou

Black America is often told that foreign policy is distant—something for diplomats, generals, and elites in places most of us will never see. We are told to focus on schools, housing, policing, wages. As if global power has nothing to do with any of that. That separation is a lie. Decisions made in elite global spaces—whether at World Economic Forum in Davos, in NATO councils, or in negotiations over strategic territories like Greenland—shape budgets, priorities, and power at

The United States insists it cannot afford housing, jobs, or care. Yet it can always afford cages. Immigration enforcement is not a response to crisis; it is a budgetary preference. Billions are reliably available to detain, transport, and deport people, even as Black communities are told to be patient, resilient, and fiscally realistic. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—embodies that choice. Its budget has ballooned over two decades, underwriting detention centers, sur

We are living in a time of deep and dangerous instability. Wars are threatened or underway, democratic norms are eroding, and economic inequality is no longer episodic—it is structural. Historian Margaret MacMillan calls moments like this ones of radical uncertainty: periods when old assumptions no longer hold, power is shifting, and leaders respond less with wisdom than with force. As we mark the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., it is worth remembering that King did not a

The United States Postal Service is under attack again—and this time, the damage threatens both Black livelihoods and Black votes. The Postal Service is not just how we send letters. It is democratic infrastructure. It is also one of the largest employers of Black workers in the nation. Roughly 29 percent of postal workers are Black, more than double Black representation in the overall labor force. For generations shut out of private-sector opportunity, the post office offere

We are repeatedly told that inflation is down, the economy is improving, and that relief is on the way. By the numbers, that is partly true. Inflation has cooled from its recent peak. Wages have risen modestly. The unemployment rate remains historically low, though the Black unemployment rate is twice the white rate.  The man who lives in the House that Enslaved People Built treated us to yet another rant about how great he is.  But his hysterical televised rant on December 1

Congress is has headed home again, leaving behind a familiar mess. Health care costs are rising, insurance premiums are climbing, millions of people are struggling to stay covered—and lawmakers have once more failed to act. This is not a surprise. The Congressional coward love to run and hide, leaving, always, unfinished business, and their cowardice has consequences. Health care consumes roughly 17 to 18 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, far more than any other wealth

It has been a hard year. A loud year. A year marked by cruelty dressed up as policy and indifference framed as realism. Which is precisely why, this Christmas, I am urging something quiet, intentional, and sustaining: give a book. A book is not just a gift. It is an act of faith. It says to the recipient: I believe you can think. I believe you can sit with complexity. I believe your inner life matters. In a culture of scroll, speed, and disposability, a book resists the churn

Every December, we celebrate the story of a child born in a manger. We adorn nativity scenes with soft light and warm sentiment, but we rarely linger on the truth of the story: Jesus was born housing insecure. There was no room at the inn. His family was displaced, turned away, and forced to improvise shelter in the most vulnerable of circumstances. Two thousand years later, the story resonates more than we admit. Millions of Americans are, in their own way, “born in a manger

It’s the end of the year, which means you are being barraged by requests to give. Whether it is your alma mater, your church, a charity you gave to once upon a time, even a long, long time ago, you are getting repeated requests to give. Giving Tuesday, this December is December 2, and the encouragement to give is not a bad thing. The Giving Tuesday concept began in 2012, when the United Nations Foundation and New York’s 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural and community center

Every year, corporations expect us to line up, log on, and lose our minds for Black Friday. They expect us to stretch our budgets, drain our accounts, and pretend that “doorbuster deals” are some kind of patriotic ritual. But this year, a coalition led by Black Voters Matter, Indivisible, and Until Freedom is calling on us to do something radically simple—and profoundly powerful: A spending freeze from November 28 through December 1. No Black Friday splurges. No retail rush.

Now that Zohran Mamdani is the mayor-elect of New York City, expect the slings and arrows at him to intensify. He has been called everything but a child of God, and he gleefully claims himself as a democratic socialist, a Muslim, a progressive social justice advocate and a leader who recognizes the shoulders on which he stands, shouting out some of the workers responsible for his victory. He is not a communist, whatever that means in a contemporary context. But it serves ra

Dick Cheney, who died this week at age 83, was one of the most powerful and controversial figures in modern American politics. The former Vice President leaves behind a complicated legacy—marked by the Iraq War, expanded executive power, and decades of polarizing policy. Yet in his twilight years, Cheney performed an act of rare political courage: he stood against Donald Trump and, in a move that shocked Washington, endorsed Kamala Harris for president. That single act—rooted

For millions of Americans, the federal government isn’t an abstraction. It’s a paycheck, a housing voucher, a student loan payment, a disaster relief check. When the government shuts down, those lives shut down too. Yet here we are again — watching a small band of ideologues in Congress hold the nation hostage, threatening to turn off the lights on the very institution they’re sworn to serve. Government shutdowns have become almost routine — not the rare constitutional crisis

We don’t hate America. We built America. Brick by brick, cotton bale by cotton bale, invention by invention, we shaped this nation while it denied our humanity. Our ancestors sowed its fields, cleaned its houses, fought its wars, and fueled its economy. If we hated America, we would have left long ago—or let it collapse under the weight of its own hypocrisy. But love and hate are not opposites here. The opposite of hate is trust, and trust is something America has never truly

The federal government shut down on October 1, and the impasse between Congressional Democrats and Republicans suggest that this may be a...