The truth
they’re not
paying
you to say.

Let me put on my professional hat for a minute, because I want to do something I don’t get to do often enough.

I want to take the white supremacist — the MAGAT, the snow roach, the racist coworker, the racist cop, the racist judge, the racist neighbor with the Ring camera and the Nextdoor account — and I want to put him on the couch.

Not metaphorically. Clinically.

I want to walk you through what we are actually looking at when we look at these people. Because once you see it — once you really see it — you stop being scared of them. You start being embarrassed for them. And once you’re embarrassed for them, you have already won.

So pour something. This is going to take a minute.

First, the name.

I call them snow roaches and I want to be clear about why.

A roach is not strong. A roach is not dangerous one-on-one. A roach survives because of three things: it scatters when the lights come on, it multiplies in the dark, and it is very hard to kill in numbers because the structure of the building hides it.

That is white supremacy. A persistent, scattering, multiplying pest that only thrives because the building — the system, the architecture, the laws, the institutions — gives it places to hide.

Cut the lights on, and watch what happens.

That’s not poetry. That’s the behavioral pattern. We’re going to walk through it.

Diagnostic One: The Need for the System.

The first and most important thing to understand about a snow roach is that he is nothing without the system.

I mean nothing.

Strip the badge off the cop and you have a man who’s never been in a real fight in his life. Strip the robe off the judge and you have a man who couldn’t argue his way out of a parking ticket. Strip the Trump hat off the MAGAT and you have a man who is terrified you’re going to ask him a follow-up question.

The system is not an accessory. It’s a prosthetic.

He cannot function without it because there is nothing inside him to function with. No conviction. No inner authority. No earned competence. No spine that wasn’t installed by a structure built specifically to hold him up.

This is why their first move — every time — is to call somebody else. The cops. HR. The manager. The principal. The cousin with the badge. The Nextdoor app. The Karen pipeline.

He cannot resolve the situation himself because there is no himself. There’s a uniform with a man inside it, and the uniform is doing all the work.

This is the single most important thing I can teach you. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Every time one of them tries you and immediately runs to a system to handle it for him — that’s the diagnosis confirming itself in real time.

Diagnostic Two: The Cluster Behavior.

Snow roaches do not function alone.

They cluster.

Watch them. Really watch them. They do not protest individually. They do not rally individually. They do not even shop individually if they can help it. They need the truck convoy. They need the boat parade. They need the rally. They need the matching hats. They need the matching flags. They need the matching trucks with the matching stickers with the matching slogans.

This is not patriotism. This is not community. This is swarm behavior in a low-confidence species.

Healthy adult human beings do not require a uniform to feel like themselves. Healthy adult human beings do not require thirty other people in matching gear standing in a parking lot to feel brave enough to express an opinion. Healthy adult human beings do not require a flag the size of a billboard dragging behind their pickup truck to feel masculine.

You know who does require those things? A man who, alone, in a quiet room, has nothing.

Look at the photograph of any MAGA rally and tell me what you see. You do not see individuals. You see a texture. Red hats, white faces, the same five facial expressions repeating across thousands of bodies. They had to come together to become one person. And that one person is still a coward.

Now compare that to the Civil Rights Movement. Compare that to the 1963 March on Washington. Compare that to a Black church on a Sunday morning. Different people. Different faces. Different stories. Different occupations. Different ages. One mission.

That is the difference between a community and a swarm.

A community is many distinct people choosing the same purpose. A swarm is many indistinct people borrowing the same identity because none of them have one of their own.

Diagnostic Three: The Uniform.

I want to talk about the MAGAT uniform specifically because it is one of the most clinically interesting artifacts in modern American behavioral psychology.

The hat. The flag. The truck wrap. The bumper sticker. The lawn sign that stays up four years past the election.

Behavioral science has a name for this. We call it identity outsourcing.

It is what happens when a person has so little internal sense of who they are that they have to wear their identity on the outside, in advertising form, at all times, just to remember it.

Think about that.

A grown man cannot make it from his truck to the Twin Peaks without a hat declaring his political loyalty. A grown woman cannot leave the house without an American flag t-shirt and a cross necklace and a Punisher skull keychain and a Live Laugh Love tattoo and a Let’s Go Brandon phone case. A grown man cannot drive a truck unless the truck is covered in stickers announcing what he believes about a man he has never met.

This is not pride. This is psychological scaffolding.

The man has nothing inside him to remind him who he is. So he writes it on the outside. Constantly. Loudly. Repetitively. Because if he stops broadcasting it for one minute, he will look in the mirror and see nothing.

This is why they get so angry when you laugh at the hat. They are not angry because you insulted their politics. They are angry because you saw the hat doing the work their personality was supposed to do and you pointed at it.

And here’s the part that’s going to free some of you.

Every time you mock the uniform, you are not insulting their beliefs. You are exposing the absence underneath the beliefs.

That’s why the wound is so deep. That’s why they cannot let it go. That’s why a forty-five-year-old man on Twitter will spend three hours arguing with a stranger about a hat. The hat is not the hat. The hat is the only thing holding him together.

Diagnostic Four: The Obsession with Other Men.

I want y’all to sit with this one because it is wild once you see it.

These men are obsessed with other men.

Not in a spiritual mentorship way. Not in a I’m learning from this leader way. In a romantic way. In a parasocial way. In a way that, if you saw it directed at a woman, you would call it stalking.

They wear the man’s name on their chest. They paint the man’s face on the side of their truck. They put the man’s slogans on their lawn. They quote the man at the dinner table. They fight with their own family members about the man. They cry about the man. They write fan fiction about the man storming back into office. They dream about the man.

Now here’s the question I want you to ask yourself.

When was the last time you saw a Black man do that with another man?

You haven’t.

Because Black men, broadly speaking, were raised by people who taught them how to be a man — not how to worship one. We were taught to sit at the kitchen table with our grandfathers and learn. We were taught to find our own voice. We were taught that if you have to borrow another man’s whole personality to feel like a man, you are not a man yet.

Snow roaches were not raised that way.

They were raised by other snow roaches. In a culture that told them they were the default, the standard, the protagonist of human history — and then watched the world not behave that way and could not handle it. So they latched onto a strongman, any strongman, the loudest and meanest one available, and they made him their identity.

Trump is not their president. Trump is their daddy. Their boyfriend. Their pastor. Their therapist. Their personality. Their whole inner life.

And when you criticize him, you are not criticizing a politician. You are criticizing the only thing they have ever loved with their whole chest.

That’s why they will burn down their own marriages over him. That’s why they will disown their own children over him. Because without him, there is no them.

Diagnostic Five: The Retreat to Violence.

Now we get to the dangerous part. And I want you to understand it clearly because I do not want a single one of my readers being naive about this.

Snow roaches are weak.

Snow roaches are also dangerous.

These two things are not contradictions. They are the same fact stated twice.

A weak man with a gun is more dangerous than a strong man with a gun, because the strong man knows when not to use it. The weak man does not. The weak man uses the gun the first time he feels his weakness exposed, because he has no other tools. He cannot argue. He cannot reason. He cannot persuade. He cannot earn respect. So when his weakness is exposed in public, the only lever he has left is force.

This is why their entire political project, since the day this country was founded, has been about access to force.

Slavery was force. The lynching tree was force. The police as we know them today were force, designed specifically as slave patrols and never reformed away from it. The prison system is force. ICE is force. The Second Amendment, as currently interpreted by the people screaming about it the loudest, is force on standby.

They retreat to force not because they are strong but because they have never had anything else. Force is the only language their entire ancestral lineage in this country has ever spoken fluently. Strip force off the table and they have nothing to say.

This is why I tell you to match their energy carefully.

Match it in the parking lot. Match it in the boardroom. Match it on the playground when somebody talks sideways to your kid. Match it in the courtroom when a judge tries to talk down to your mother.

But understand who you are dealing with. A weak man with a system propping him up. A weak man with a gun on his hip. A weak man with a phone in his hand and 911 on speed dial. The system is the thing that makes the weak man dangerous. So you match his energy and you keep your wits and you keep witnesses and you keep cameras and you never, ever forget that the snow roach’s last move is always going to be calling something bigger than him to do the fighting for him.

That doesn’t mean don’t stand up. It means stand up with your eyes open.

Diagnostic Six: The Tell.

Every snow roach has a tell.

If you watch them long enough, you will start to see it. It’s the moment their script breaks. It’s the moment they realize you are not afraid of them. It’s the moment the system isn’t there to back them up and the cluster isn’t there to hide them.

The tell is a flicker.

The eyes go wide for half a second. The mouth opens and closes. The hands move without purpose. There’s a tiny, almost imperceptible recalibration happening in real time as the brain tries to figure out what to do without the prosthetic.

Watch the trooper’s hands when Pearson stepped up. Watch the MAGAT’s face in the Twin Peaks parking lot when I told him exactly what he was doing. Watch your racist coworker’s eyes the next time you don’t laugh at the slick comment. Watch the Karen at the school board meeting when a Black mother stands up and doesn’t lower her voice.

You will see it. The flicker. The recalibration. The half-second where the mask slips and you can see the scared little person inside.

That is the moment.

That is the moment when you realize that everything you were ever told about being afraid of these people was a lie their grandfathers told your grandfathers to keep the math from getting out.

The math is out now. We have been doing the math for four hundred years.

Closing the file.

So here’s the clinical summary, and then I’ll let y’all get back to your evening.

The American white supremacist is not a strong man. He is a weak man who learned, very young, that the building he was born into would do the lifting for him. He learned that he could outsource his identity to a flag, a hat, a leader, a swarm. He learned that his real opinions did not need to be defensible because nobody was going to make him defend them. He learned that force was always available to him on demand, through systems his ancestors built specifically so that he would never have to know how weak he actually is.

He is a man held up by scaffolding. He is a roach that depends on the building.

And the building is cracking, family. The building has been cracking since George Floyd. The building has been cracking since Tennessee tried to expel Justin Pearson and watched him come back stronger. The building cracks every time a Black state representative looks a white trooper in the face and calls him boy.

You cannot be afraid of a roach once you understand the roach. You cannot be afraid of a man once you see the scaffolding.

So I’m telling you. I’m a behavioral scientist and a cultural strategist and a member of the American Psychological Association and I’m telling you, on my professional license, that the men you have been afraid of your whole life are not what you were told they were.

They are scared. They have always been scared. They have been scared since the first enslaved African on the first plantation looked them dead in the face and they realized he had not stopped being a human being just because the law said he had.

They have been losing the war ever since. The only thing keeping the score close is the building. And the building is cracking.

So watch the flicker, family. Watch the hands. Watch the recalibration.

And the next time one of them tries you — at work, in court, in the parking lot, on the playground, anywhere — remember what I told you tonight on this porch.

You are not facing a strong man. You are facing a roach in a uniform.

Cut the lights on.

Hopefully by now many of you have read the Taraji piece I published earlier today on Medium. If not, go back and do that first — the link is already on the site. Get caught up. I’ll wait.

Because what we’re doing right here, right now, is the uncut version. The one I held back on Medium because Medium has rules and audiences and rate cards. This is the porch. There ain’t no rules out here.

Family — we gotta fucking talk.

This shit goes way deeper than the Bezos-bought Met Gala. The laundry list of these tap-dancing-ass niggas is as long as my arm, and we’re airing every last one of them out today.

Let’s go.

The thesis is simple. The Black billionaire class is not on our side and never has been.

Not Oprah. Not Jay. Not Bey. Not Tyler. And not the access-aspirants like Steve, who’d sell their own mama for a seat at that table.

These are not our heroes. These are not our champions. These are not the people we should be defending in comment sections and group chats while they sit at dinner with the architects of our oppression. They are characters in a system designed to keep us calm while the real ones run the country into the ground.

And the system has a founder.

Oprah Gail Winfrey.

Patient zero. The blueprint. The original tap dancer. The one who taught every single person on this list how to perform Blackness for a white audience while quietly serving white power.

Y’all wanna act like Oprah is sacred. She’s not. She’s the prototype.

Let me walk you through it. Slowly.

This is the woman who put Dr. Phil on television. The one who put Dr. Oz on television. The one who put Jenny McCarthy on a national platform to spread anti-vaxx propaganda that killed children. The one whose stamp of approval launched half the right-wing-pipeline grifters operating in this country today. She did that. With her platform. While we clapped.

This is the woman who defended Harvey Weinstein, took it back when it was no longer safe, and never apologized for the difference between when she knew and when she said something. The woman who interviewed Russell Brand with kid gloves while women were lining up with allegations. The woman who sat on stages with every billionaire bootlicker in the country and called it “leadership.”

This is the woman who — and we’re getting to this in detail — actively participated in the blackballing of Mo’Nique for the crime of asking to be paid fairly. Mo’Nique said it on Steve Harvey’s own show: “I said no to Oprah Winfrey. I said no to Tyler Perry. I said no to Lee Daniels.”

Three names. One of them is Oprah. Of course it is.

This is the woman who, when push came to absolute shove with this last election, did the minimum. Showed up at one Kamala event. Read off a teleprompter. Then went right back to her billionaire-friend ranch and stayed quiet while this country burned.

She is not your auntie. She has never been your auntie. She is a brand. And that brand has spent fifty years selling Black trust to the highest white bidder.

That’s the prototype. Now let’s talk about her descendants.

Tyler Perry. The franchise model.

Where Oprah sold trust, Tyler sells tropes. Mammy in a fat suit. Strong Black women whose entire arc is forgiveness of their abusers. Light-skinned saviors. Dark-skinned punchlines. Plot after plot built on the most reductive, most marketable, most digestible version of Blackness that a white-owned distribution chain could possibly want.

He calls it ministry. Y’all call it representation. I call it product.

And he learned it from Oprah. Literally. She platformed him. She gave him the OWN deal. She handed him the keys to a national audience and watched him build an empire on caricature. Then she sat back while he became the man who also enforced the blackball on Mo’Nique. Same Mo’Nique receipt. Same list. Tyler Perry.

His studio sits on a former Confederate Army base. He named soundstages after Black actors. Then he turned around and produced more boot-shining content per square foot than any other Black creator in America.

That’s not legacy. That’s a factory. And the factory floor is built on our dignity.

Shawn Carter. The modernization.

Where Oprah did it through media and Tyler did it through film, Jay did it through the language of struggle. Made the whole game look like he was still one of us. Still hood. Still the kid from Marcy. Still hustling.

While he sat on $2.5 billion and a Roc Nation deal that put him in business with the same NFL that blackballed Colin Kaepernick.

I told y’all this in the Taraji piece, but on the porch we’re saying it louder. Three years to the day after Kaep first knelt, Roger Goodell sat that man down at Roc Nation headquarters and handed him a $25 million entertainment deal — and the entire conversation about ownership, about why the league has zero Black majority owners, about why a seventy-percent-Black workforce is treated like cattle, died on contact.

Y’all called it Black excellence. I called it the bag.

Then we get to the Kushner table at the REFORM gala. Then we get to the Bezos Met Gala this week with Bey co-chairing. Then we get to a dozen more receipts I don’t even have time to list because we’d be here till Sunday.

Hov ain’t a culture hero. Hov is a case study. He took the language of Black liberation and turned it into a marketing campaign for white-owned everything. He sold the dream of escape while quietly cashing the checks of the people we were trying to escape from.

And his wife sat right next to him while he did it.

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles. The glamorization.

Listen — I know. I know what some of y’all are about to do. The keys are already getting warm. Stop.

I’m not coming for her catalog. I’m not coming for her vocals. I’m not coming for Lemonade or Renaissance or Cowboy Carter or any of the work. The work is the work. We can hold that.

But the politics are a goddamn disaster, and we have got to stop pretending they’re not.

Same Kushner table. Same Bezos Met Gala she co-chaired. Houston rally for Kamala where she gave a powerful speech and then went radio silent the second the camera turned off. No campaigning. No down-ballot push. No appearance in the actual swing states where her voice could’ve moved real numbers.

The Cowboy Carter rollout asked us to reckon with country music’s anti-Black history while she wore Tom Ford to dinner with Jared Kushner. Pick a lane.

She wraps herself in Black culture for the merchandise drop and gets photographed with the architects of our oppression for the personal brand. That’s the deal. Always has been.

Bey is not Mother. Bey is management. And the difference matters because management always picks the company over the worker. Always.

Steve Harvey. The bouncer.

Steve isn’t a billionaire. He’s billionaire-adjacent, and that adjacency is exactly what he’s been chasing his entire career. The whole tap dance — the suspenders, the Family Feud face, the church-folk-grandpa routine — that is all in service of getting one inch closer to the room where the real money lives.

And in 2017, the room called.

Steve walked his ass into Trump Tower during the transition. Sat down with Donald Trump. Came out talking about “inner cities” and partnerships with Ben Carson at HUD. The optics were catastrophic. He later admitted on his radio show he regretted it. Cool. Receipts don’t get unrun.

But the real Steve Harvey receipt isn’t even Trump Tower. It’s Mo’Nique.

This is the part I need every single one of you to sit with, because it locks the whole picture together.

In February 2019, Mo’Nique sat down across from Steve Harvey on his own show and said, on camera: “I said no to some very powerful people. I said no to Oprah Winfrey. I said no to Tyler Perry. I said no to Lee Daniels. And I gotta put my brother Steve on the list.”

Three of the five names in this piece are on her list. Said by name. On tape. By the woman they tried to bury.

And what did Steve say back? He told her “this is the money game” — that integrity has to bow to access, that she went about it wrong, that her demand for equal pay was “rich people problems.”

A Black woman, Oscar-winning, telling another Black entertainer she was blackballed for refusing to work for free — and his response was to lecture her on tap dancing.

That, family, is the bouncer’s job description. Stand at the door. Make sure the wrong people don’t get in. Make sure the wrong questions don’t get asked. Make sure anybody who breaks the rules — especially a Black woman — gets reminded who’s running things.

Steve isn’t even at the table. He’s the man at the velvet rope explaining to you why you can’t come in. And he’s been working that shift for thirty years.

Now here’s where the lineage closes the loop.

Mo’Nique’s list — Oprah, Tyler, Lee Daniels, Steve. My list — Oprah, Tyler, Jay, Bey, Steve.

Three names are on both lists. Oprah. Tyler. Steve.

That’s not a coincidence. That’s a system. The same three people who tried to bury one Black woman for asking to be paid fairly are the same people who’ve been quietly running the gatekeeping machine for decades. Mo’Nique just happened to say no loud enough that we got to see the machinery.

And the response from the community? Mo’Nique was difficult. Mo’Nique burned bridges. Mo’Nique should’ve played the game.

Sound familiar?

It’s the exact same response Taraji is about to get this week for asking “what the fuck are we doing.” Same script. Same enforcers. Same community-policing-itself-into-silence routine that I broke down in this morning’s piece.

The names change. The mechanism doesn’t.

So what do we do, family?

We stop. Treating. Them. Like. Family.

These are not your aunties and uncles. These are not your cousins. These are not the people who’d show up at your funeral. These are billionaires and billionaire-aspirants who, given the choice between you and a yacht invitation, will pick the yacht every time.

We stop confusing celebrity proximity with community wealth. Their billions don’t lift your block. Their Vogue covers don’t pay your rent. Their proximity to Bezos and Trump and Kushner is not your proximity. It is the opposite of your proximity. They are flying first class on planes funded by the people stepping on your neck.

We stop letting the shield work. The reason these names have been protected for thirty, forty, fifty years isn’t because they’re untouchable. It’s because the community made them untouchable. We did that. We built the shield. We staffed the security detail. We attacked every single person who ever tried to say what I’m saying right now.

That stops now. On this porch. Today.

We say their names. We list their receipts. We hold them to the same standard we’d hold any sellout. We let them know — out loud, in public, with our whole chest — that the era of free passes is over.

Mo’Nique tried to tell us in 2019. Y’all wasn’t ready.

Taraji is telling us in 2026. Y’all better be ready.

Because the next time a Black woman with a platform stands up and tells the truth about these people, the question isn’t whether she’s right. She’s right. The question is whether you’re going to do what we always do — protect the snakes and exile the sister — or whether this is the time we finally break the pattern.

I know which side I’m on.

I’ve always known.

Now show me you do too.

Drink the Kool-Aid. Or stay thirsty.

See people, this is why I’m so hard on coon’ing. This. Right here.

I published two pieces this week. One on Dana Bash. One on Sage Steele and Stephen A. Smith. Two articles. Two different topics. Two different industries. Two different segments of the same broken machine.

And as I sat with both of them — reading them back-to-back, stacking the receipts, listening to the echo — one thing became blindingly clear:

The same fucking entities are pulling the strings.

Same script. Same talking points. Same paychecks. Same cowardly choreography. The only thing that changes is the face on camera.

Let me walk you through it.

Dana Bash hops on national television and decides — with a straight face — that what Black America really needs to hear right now is a sermon on responsibility. Not the responsibility of the people building cages. Not the responsibility of the politicians stripping voting rights. Not the responsibility of the billionaires writing the checks. Our responsibility. The people getting stepped on. We need to pull ourselves up. We need to clean up our rhetoric. We need to be more polite to the people boot-stomping our necks.

Cool. Got it, Dana.

Now watch what happens next.

Stephen A. hops on his platform — same week, same energy, same coordinated frequency — and starts dragging Black women athletes for their “attitudes ruining their opportunities.” Translation: when Black women refuse to take the scraps they’re given, when they speak up, when they negotiate, when they advocate for themselves, when they use the platform their talent earned them — they’re a problem.

Sage Steele’s entire career was built on this same exact play. The pipeline is the pipeline. The script is the script.

Sound familiar?

It should. That’s the same “shut up and dribble” energy. Repackaged. Repurposed. Run through a Black mouth so it sounds like accountability instead of containment.

See how that shit works?

Racist white woman says some shit on air. Her Black pets trail behind her to repeat it, sell it, sanctify it. Run it back into the community with the credibility our complexion buys it. Get patted on the head by white ownership. Cash the check. Repeat next Sunday.

Diabolical.

Now let me put my behavioral scientist hat on for a second — because this is not random. This is not coincidence. This is not “everybody’s entitled to their opinion.” This is a system. A documented, replicable, measurable system. And it has names in the literature.

Psychologists call it system justification. The phenomenon where members of a marginalized group internalize the very ideology that marginalizes them — and then defend it. Defend it. Why? Because defending the system feels safer than confronting it. Confronting it costs you everything. Defending it pays.

It pays in checks. It pays in invitations. It pays in proximity. It pays in “you’re not like the others.” And for a certain kind of broken person? That last sentence is the entire prize.

Then there’s operant conditioning. Old-ass Skinner-box psychology. You reward a behavior, you get more of that behavior. White ownership rewards the Black mouthpiece who polices other Black folks. That mouthpiece gets booked. Gets paid. Gets platformed. Gets a contract extension. Their algorithm reach explodes. Their phone rings.

Meanwhile, the Black voice telling the truth? Shadow-banned. Demonetized. “Too divisive.” “Too angry.” “Not a good fit for our brand.”

The lesson is taught early. The lesson is taught often. And the coons? The coons learn the lesson.

Add to that moral disengagement — the cognitive trick that lets a person harm their own people without feeling guilty about it. They reframe it. They sanitize it. They tell themselves they’re “telling hard truths.” They’re “keeping it real.” They’re “not afraid to call out their own.”

No, baby. You’re afraid to call out the people writing your check. So you call out us instead. Because we don’t fire you. We don’t cancel your contract. We don’t pull your sponsorships. We just talk shit on the internet, which actually helps your engagement numbers, which actually raises your value to the very people you’re protecting.

The coon is the only employee in America whose performance reviews go up when his own community hates him.

Now here’s the part I really need y’all to sit with.

I bet a lot of those conversations — the ones in the studios, in the green rooms, in the boardrooms, in the church pews, in the company Slack channels — were started by the coons. Not the white folks. The coons.

That’s how they move. They don’t wait to be asked. They volunteer. They run to church to talk bad about niggas to their white owners just to make sure ownership knows they agree. They preempt. They anticipate. They sniff out the direction the wind is blowing and get there first so they can plant the flag.

That’s the part that should chill you to the bone.

It’s not that they’re asked to betray us. It’s that they’re eager to. The betrayal is the application. The betrayal is the resume. The betrayal is how they let ownership know they’re a safe hire.

And this is why I don’t trust them. Cannot trust them. Will not trust them.

Because once a person has shown you they will volunteer to harm their own community for proximity to whiteness — that’s not a phase. That’s not a moment. That’s not a misstep. That’s a worldview. That’s a wiring. That’s the entire operating system. And it does not get patched. It does not get updated. It does not turn back over to our side because the wind shifted.

Y’all keep waiting for these niggas to “come home.”

They’re not coming home. This is home for them. They picked it. They earned it. They campaigned for it. The only thing that’ll move them is when ownership decides they’re no longer useful — and then watch how fast they get dropped without a parachute. Watch them suddenly remember they’re Black when the checks stop. Watch them suddenly find the language for solidarity when they need a couch to sleep on.

We are not that couch.

So here’s the call to action, family. Plain as I can put it.

Stop feeding them. Stop watching their shows. Stop streaming their podcasts. Stop sharing their clips even to dunk on them — the algorithm doesn’t know the difference between hate-engagement and love-engagement. It just counts the watch time. Stop counting their watch time.

Stop arguing with them in comment sections. Stop quoting them, even ironically. Stop putting their names in your mouth on a daily basis. Every time you do, you’re running their PR for free.

Stop trusting them when they show up at the cookout. Stop letting them moderate the panel. Stop letting them speak for “the community” on networks that wouldn’t platform a single one of us who tells the truth.

And most of all — start trusting your own gut. When a Black person in public life is consistently rewarded by white ownership for the things they say about Black people? Run. When a Black person on a major platform reliably finds the microphone to scold us and reliably can’t find the microphone to scold the people building cages? Run. When a Black person would rather be white than stand with their own?

Run.

The coons aren’t safe for us. No matter how they present. No matter how charming. No matter how funny. No matter how light-skinned, well-spoken, church-going, well-dressed. Especially if they’re all of those things at once. The wrapping doesn’t change the contents.

Dana Bash had her coons ready before the segment aired.

Stephen A. had his coons ready before the press conference ended.

Sage Steele was the coon, fully assembled, batteries included.

And until we, as a community, agree to stop platforming, repeating, defending, debating, and tolerating these niggas? The pipeline doesn’t close. It just hires the next one.

The pipeline closes when we close it.

That’s our responsibility, Dana. Yours — you can keep.

Drink the Kool-Aid. Or stay thirsty.

Black men — what the fuck are we doing?

Please. For the love of God. One of you niggas answer that question for me. Just one. I’m not asking the whole roster. I’m asking one of you to look me in the eye and tell me what we are actually doing right now.

I’m online daily — daily — watching us lead the goddamn charge on distracting our community. Then turning right around and blaming our women, blaming our queer folks, blaming our youth, blaming our elders, blaming each other, blaming everybody but the fuckers who are actually doing this to us. Every single thing this community refuses to be accountable for, you niggas have found a way to pin on the people sitting next to you in the pew.

I really need you niggas to wake the fuck up.

And before one of you starts typing — yeah, “jesus.” Y’all run around claiming Jesus is the reason you’re walking around acting like a Klansman in a clergy collar. Y’all quote scripture to defend the same political project that’s building cages for your cousins. If that’s what your church is teaching you? Then I suggest leaving that damn church. Today. Right now. Don’t finish service. Don’t put nothing in the basket. Walk out.

Because what you’re calling church ain’t church.

That’s a Klan meeting with a praise team. That’s a white nationalist talking point in a Black face with a tambourine. That’s the same disease our grandmothers tried to keep us out of, dressed up in Sunday clothes and run by a pastor who flies private and drives a Bentley you funded.

Now let’s talk about Martin. Let’s talk about Malcolm.

If those two men could see what we’re doing? If they could see what became of the movement they bled for? The pain would kill them again. Not the white supremacy. They expected that. They prepared for that. They died confronting that. What would kill them is us.

Specifically — the Black men. The brothers. The descendants of the very people they laid down for. Standing in the pulpit of the algorithm, microphones in hand, podcasts running, follower counts climbing — and using every ounce of that platform to divide the very community they once swore to defend.

That’s the part Martin couldn’t have imagined. That’s the part Malcolm wouldn’t have tolerated for thirty seconds. Malcolm would’ve walked into one of these podcast studios and slapped a nigga across his whole jaw on principle.

Let’s name them. Because I am tired of pretending we don’t know who they are.

Jason Whitlock. The Confederate apologist with a microphone and a paycheck from Tucker’s old crowd. This nigga has built a career out of telling white people what they want to hear about Black folks — and they pay him handsome for it. He is not your brother. He is not your truth-teller. He is a paid actor in a minstrel show with a podcast budget.

Stephen A. Smith. Loud. Wrong. Confused. Now apparently running for something? This nigga went on national TV and tried to defend Donald Trump’s civility to white women like he wasn’t watching the same fascist takeover the rest of us are living through. Sit your ass down and stick to bricks.

Byron Donalds. The cosplay-Republican smile. The Confederate-flag-rationalizing, “Black families were better under Jim Crow” congressman who is, somehow, still allowed to call himself one of us in public without getting laughed off the porch. He is not us. He is them. He’s just wearing our face.

Clarence Thomas. I shouldn’t even have to put him on this list because everybody knows. But for the kids in the back — this nigga has spent forty years on the highest court in the land voting against every single right his ancestors marched for. He is the reason we’re here. Literally. He’s the deciding vote on half the bullshit destroying us right now.

Cam Newton. KevOnStage. The whole “funny uncle” podcast circuit performing acceptance of queer Black folks while never actually offering it. The economic incentive is performing tolerance for a check while the actual ideology stays in 1987. We’ve already covered this. Same con, different outfit.

Tyler Perry. Sitting on a billion dollars and using it to make movies that punish Black women for being tired. I said what I said. Don’t @ me.

Steve Harvey. Praying on Black women’s singleness for two decades while being on what — wife number three? Four? I lost count. Telling Black women how to act “like a lady” while you’re fumbling your own vows is some top-tier patriarchal con artistry.

Every name on that list got paid — paid — to point the camera at us instead of at the people building the cages. Every. Single. One. That’s the job. That’s the whole gig. They are not commentators. They are not analysts. They are not voices of the community. They are employees of the people destroying it.

And before some nigga in the comments tries to tell me I’m being divisive — shut the fuck up.

I am not the one being divisive. I am pointing at the men who’ve built entire careers on division. There’s a difference between calling out a fire and being the arsonist. I’m the smoke alarm. They’re the gasoline.

Let me ask you something else, brother.

When was the last time you posted about fascism? Project 2025? The Voting Rights Act getting gutted? The cages? The disappearances? Mahmoud Khalil? The HBCU students just disenfranchised in Louisiana? Cleo Fields? Troy Carter? Anything?

And I don’t mean a repost. I don’t mean a heart emoji on somebody else’s post. I mean your words. Your voice. Your platform. Your face on camera saying something that might cost you a follower.

If you can’t remember — we got a problem.

Because I can remember the last time you posted a take blaming Black women for the state of the community. I can remember the last time you weighed in on whether some sister was “wifey material.” I can remember the last time you were in a comment section arguing about a celebrity’s relationship like it was the goddamn Geneva Convention. I can remember when you told us all about how feminism ruined the Black family. I can remember every single one of those takes.

Funny how you find your voice for that. Funny how the microphone always works when it’s pointed at her.

Y’all keep talking about Black love. Black unity. The Black family. Building Black. Saving Black. Protecting Black. And then half of you can’t name a single Black woman elected official in your state. Half of you don’t know who Cleo Fields is. Half of you couldn’t tell me what just happened to Black voting power in Louisiana if I put a hundred-dollar bill on the table.

But you can quote a Whitlock take from last week verbatim.

You can recite a Cam Newton interview clip word for word.

You can break down what some podcaster said about why Black women are too independent.

That is not Black love. That is not Black unity. That is collaboration. That’s the technical word for it. You are collaborating with the people building the cages. You are amplifying the voices that pay you nothing and cost your community everything.

Martin marched for you to have a microphone — and you used it to mock the women in your own house. Malcolm took a bullet so you could speak freely — and you spend your free speech telling Black folks why they deserve less.

If those men could see this? They wouldn’t weep. They’d be furious. Martin would weep first — that man wept easy. Malcolm would’ve had his hand drawn back by the time the tear hit the ground.

So here’s where we land, brothers.

You don’t get to claim the legacy without doing the work.

You don’t get to wear a Malcolm shirt and parrot Whitlock takes.

You don’t get to quote MLK on Monday and call Black women “modern” on Tuesday like that’s a slur.

You don’t get to hide behind “jesus” while voting for the people building the cages your cousins are sitting in.

You don’t get to be silent for four years on fascism and then show up at the cookout claiming community.

That’s not how this works. That has never been how this works.

Pick a side. And if the side you pick is the one Whitlock’s on — just be honest about it. Take the kente cloth off. Stop quoting Maya Angelou in your bio. Stop using “our community” in your captions. Be a Klansman with a praise team out loud, so the rest of us know who we’re actually dealing with.

Because the women in this community — our women, Black women, the most informed and most organized voting bloc in this country — they already know who you are. They’ve been telling us. We just haven’t been listening.

Time to listen.

Time to wake up.

Time to be the men Martin and Malcolm bled for — instead of the men they’d be ashamed of.

Pick a side, brother. The clock’s ticking. And the women aren’t waiting on you anymore.

Drink the Kool-Aid. Or stay thirsty.