Considering the parlous, incendiary time we are living in, Black America should not belong exclusively to the loudest voices standing inside it.

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” - Mark Twain.

You may not dig this… but dig this: I wouldn’t dare be divisive and contribute to MAGA’s age-old divide-and-conquer plans, but at this fork in the road, Black America must elevate all voices to the forefront of the movement, not just the popular ones.

Volume is not wisdom. Visibility is not authority. A million followers, three platinum records, two felony convictions, and a podcast microphone do not automatically qualify anybody to serve as ambassador for forty-some million Black people.

Sometimes, occasionally, and at times, the loudest person in the room… is not the leader. Sometimes he, or she is simply the individual who grabbed the microphone while everybody else was busy takin’ care of business.

TCB baby.

Black America needs a cultural reformation. Not a White-approved makeover. Not some respectability minstrel show in which everybody straightens a tie, lowers a voice, and auditions for acceptance at the country club. I mean full-grown Black adults standing up, speaking honestly, and exercising the cultural power they have surrendered through silence.

Because Black America has a branding problem. Black America needs a Leadership Table, not a Celebrity Throne.

White America has spent centuries branding us from a stone-cold and Red-Lined comfortable distance: we, as a people, black people are primitive, dangerous, lazy, criminal, hypersexual, intellectually inferior, and permanently suspicious. It, i.e., the court of white popular opinion, has repeatedly declared Black people Public Enemy Number One, then acted astonished when police officers, employers, banks, judges, and frightened suburban homeowners behaved accordingly.

But here is the “uncomfortable” portion of the sermon: while White America manufactures the stereotype, too many Black people package it, promote it, put a beat behind it, and sell it worldwide.

See Robert Townsend’s classic - Hollywood Shuffle flick for clarity.

We cannot keep allowing Corporate America to select the most reckless, dysfunctional, cartoonish fragments of Black life and market them as authentic Blackness. That is like studying a trailer-park fistfight and then loudly announcing you have finally understood White civilization.

The Black America I know is wider, deeper, stranger, smarter, and far more complicated than the handful of images repeatedly shoved through America’s television screen.

There is Du Bois’s Talented Tenth. There is Booker T. Washington’s professional class of credentialed craftsmen and women. There are teachers, welders, nurses, soldiers, contractors, mechanics, scientists, barbers, business owners, farmers, librarians, engineers, truck drivers, and grandmothers who can stretch eighty dollars far enough to feed twelve people and still leave change for Sunday offering.

There are also millions of Black people insulted as “house Negroes” simply because they want to succeed in America rather than burn it down. They call themselves African American. They believe this country owes them a blood-, sweat-, and tear-drenched portion of the American apple pie, and they are hell-bent on collecting it - with interest.

Wanting integration is not surrender. Wanting education is not Whiteness. Speaking standard English when the occasion requires it is not betrayal. Owning property, raising children responsibly, deeply respecting intellectual curiosity and scholarship, and refusing to romanticize criminality do not make a Black person less Black.

But we must also have an honest, adult conversation about the reshaping of the Black family during the past fifty years. Racism, disappearing jobs, mass incarceration, bad public policy, and economic abandonment have done tremendous damage - but personal irresponsibility has collected a paycheck from the same wrecking company. Generations of babies having babies who then have babies have produced too many homes in which nobody is old enough, stable enough, financially secure enough, or emotionally prepared enough to raise anybody. When no respectable, dependable Black father or husband is present - and an exhausted mother is forced to play every position on the field - the vacuum gets filled by the street, social media, and whichever neighborhood fool has the loudest engine.

That absence has consequences. It can show up as academic underachievement, poor discipline, emotional chaos, and children who have never encountered consistent boundaries. Sometimes it honestly appears that nobody can tell a large portion of young Black America what to do - not the parent, teacher, principal, coach, professor, police officer, or judge. That is not because Black children are inherently uncontrollable. It is because authority, responsibility, and accountability have been weakened in too many homes, then mocked by a marketplace that makes money selling rebellion back to children.

The ghettoization, thugarazation, and tragically Niggerazation of our illustrious Black American culture and way of life.

That reality is part of why Tuskegee University had to tiptoe through a field of cultural landmines merely to address bonnets and do-rags. The institution was trying to establish standards appropriate for a historic college campus, yet it risked being accused of attacking Blackness itself. But every habit “practiced” by Black people is not automatically a “sacred” piece of Black culture. You are on a college campus, not at the backyard barbecue.

Every room has standards. Preparation is not oppression.

Nor can we remain silent when a segment of Black America becomes so lost, wounded, or willfully ignorant that it self-brands as gangsters, hookers, pimps, and drug dealers - as if degradation were a heritage, criminality a profession to admire, and self-destruction our ancestral calling. Those people should not be thrown away. They must be helped, educated, challenged, treated, and loved firmly enough to be told the truth. You cannot pull somebody from a ditch while complimenting the mud.

Yet Black America has spent decades focusing enormous, I say enormous, attention, sympathy, money, and cultural oxygen upon its headaches and knuckleheads while neglecting its academic overachievers. We organize emergency meetings for the boy who brought a weapon to school, then barely shake the hand of the girl who brought home a scholarship. The troublemaker receives counselors, conferences, committees, and second chances. The honor student receives a crooked certificate from the office printer and directions to close the door on the way out.

Not every Black person believes do-rags and bonnets are intrinsically Black. Not every Black family considers prison a normal rite of passage. “Who you know ain’t been locked up?” is not a charming proverb. Five children by five absentee fathers is not Black culture. It is family dysfunction wearing Black skin. Illiteracy is not authentic. Public vulgarity is not liberation. Ignorance does not become revolutionary merely because it is delivered with rhythm.

Many, many moons ago, The Huxtables and Different World lost the battle for the hearts and minds of Black America to BeBe’s Kids; it’s no deeper than that, Bruh.

And you know I am telling the T-r-u-t-h truth.

Comedian/actor Chris Rock has a much-cited and debated monologue in which he describes the internal conflict within Black America: “I love Black people. but I hate Ni**ers!” This debate rages on, formally and informally, throughout black America; it’s had at family gatherings, bowling alleys, barbershops, salons, gyms, and sports bars all the time.

Poverty deserves compassion. The oppressed deserve justice. The abandoned deserve investment. But suffering does not confer exclusive cultural authority. One more time: suffering does not confer exclusive cultural authority. A person can be victimized by society and still make destructive choices. Both truths can sit at the same table without throwing plates.

Malcolm X made the piercing observation that Black people were among the few whose singers, entertainers, athletes, and celebrities were routinely treated as spokesmen for an entire population. There is nothing wrong with a boxer, rapper, actor, or football player having an opinion. Citizenship does not require a doctorate.

But call me crazy: I would also like to hear from Black historians, economists, physicians, teachers, military officers, entrepreneurs, scientists, farmers, and scholars. I want to hear from Black people in Harlem, Detroit, Atlanta, and South-Central Los Angeles - but also from Black families in deep suburbia, rural Alabama, the mountains of Colorado, and farms in the middle of Nowhere, USA.

I understand what Malcolm meant when he said he had no compassion for a society that crushes people and then punishes them for failing to stand beneath the weight. America built the trap, greased the floor, dimmed the lights, and blamed Black people for stumbling.

But understanding the trap does not require glorifying everything caught inside it.

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton were assassinated because powerful forces feared disciplined movements, organized people, political enlightenment, and systemic change. Biggie and Tupac were murdered. Their deaths were tragic, but political assassination and street murder are not interchangeable simply because all the bodies were Black.

Black America does not need fewer voices. It needs more representative ones.

Let the poor speak. Let the formerly incarcerated speak. Let artists and athletes speak. But move the microphone down the table. Make room for the professor, plumber, colonel, farmer, mother, businesswoman, suburban family, honor student, and working fool paying taxes while trying to keep the lights on.

Black America is not a costume, a criminal record, a musical genre, or a collection of White America’s favorite nightmares.

We are a people - and it is long past time the adults in the room stood up and said so.