Being Black in America Is a Political Statement — Whether You Like It or Not

By Jeff Thomas | Publisher, Black Source Media | Owner, WBOK 1230 AM

I want to talk to you about something that should make you uncomfortable. Not in a way that ruins your weekend — in a way that sharpens your mind. Because somebody needs to say this plainly, and I have never been accused of being subtle.

Being Black in America is a political statement.

Let me tell you exactly what that means. Because I want this to land.

The color of your skin is an affront to some people. Your presence in a room changes the room. Your existence makes certain people uncomfortable — and that discomfort has never just stayed personal. It became policy. It became law. It became procedure. It became a system.

You are different. And in America, different — when it comes to Black skin — has always required management. Special rules. Special categories. Special responses. Not because you asked for them. Because they decided you needed to be handled, accounted for, contained, controlled, or at minimum explained.

That is what I mean when I say political. I do not mean Democrat or Republican. I mean that your very existence requires policies and procedures that govern how this society reacts to you. Rules about where you live, where you work, where you vote, what schools you attend, how police approach you, how courts sentence you, how banks lend to you, how hospitals treat you.

Consider this: you are not just a dark-skinned person moving through the world. Your life comes with a policy manual you never wrote and never approved. Since the first enslaved African set foot on this soil, that manual has been rewritten, expanded, restricted, and weaponized — generation after generation.

In America, You Are a Political Being First. Not a Human Being.

Here is the hardest truth in this entire piece. In America, you are not a human being first. You are a political being first. Your humanity was always questioned. Think about that for a second. How else did people load you into the bottom of boats, brand you like cattle, and sell you on an auction block — and then go home to their families and sleep at night? They could only do that by deciding, first, that you were not fully human. That your life was worth less. That your pain counted for less. That your children were property, not people. That decision did not die with slavery. It shape-shifted. It became Black Codes. It became Jim Crow. It became redlining and mass incarceration and stop-and-frisk and the school-to-prison pipeline. In every generation, some white Americans have looked at Black skin and seen something lesser — something that requires less consideration, less protection, less justice. Your Black skin has always diminished your worth in the eyes of some people. Not all people. But a whole lot of people. Enough people to write it into law. Enough people to enforce it with badges and ropes and courtrooms. Enough people to sit on a Supreme Court today and vote 6 to 3 to take your congressional district away. The names change. The mechanisms change. The conviction that Black life is worth less — that conviction has proven stubborn beyond any reasonable explanation except one: some people never stopped believing it.

Every generation of Black Americans has had to make the case — legally, politically, physically, morally — that we are fully human and deserve to be treated as such. That case should have been settled centuries ago. It was not. Right now, today, it is still being made. In courtrooms. In legislatures. In redistricting rooms. In the Supreme Court of the United States.

That is what being Black in America means. Not as metaphor. As documented, living, daily fact.

So no — we did not choose any of this. America chose it for us, three hundred years ago, when the men who wrote the most eloquent words about freedom and human dignity were simultaneously branding human beings and calling them property.

That contradiction is the foundation this country was built on. And here is what too many people get wrong — it is not getting worse. It is getting refined. Slicker. More sophisticated. New and improved. The violence of the old system was visible. Unashamed! In your face. You could see the fire hoses. You could photograph the lunch counter beatings. You could point to the “Whites Only” sign. That visibility made it possible to organize against it, to shame the country in front of the world, to force legislative change. The new version leaves no such marks. Today’s suppression comes in a Supreme Court opinion written in careful legal language. It comes in a redistricting map drawn by a computer algorithm. It comes in a budget cut that defunds the agency that was supposed to protect you. It comes in a nine-hundred-page policy document that most people will never read. No dogs. No fire hoses. No hoods. Just process. Just paperwork. Just procedure. And that is exactly what makes it more effective. You cannot march against a line of computer code. You cannot photograph an algorithm. You cannot make the world feel the violence of a Supreme Court majority opinion the way they felt Selma. So while we keep twerking and scrolling and telling ourselves that things are getting better — the machinery keeps running. Quiet. Efficient. Dressed in the language of law and order and constitutional principle. Ignorance is bliss. Until it is real. And by the time it gets real enough to feel, the work of dismantling your rights is already done.

They Wrote Beautiful Words While Owning Human Beings

Let’s start with the founding document. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Those words. You know them. You probably memorized them around the fourth grade.

Thomas Jefferson wrote them. Jefferson owned over six hundred enslaved people during his lifetime. Sally Hemings — an enslaved woman with no legal right to refuse him — bore his children. Still, Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal. He did not mean us. Every man who signed that document knew it too.

The Promise Was Never Meant for Us

I raise this not to relitigate history for the sake of it. Rather, I raise it because the gap between the promise of those words and the reality of Black life in America is not ancient history. In fact, it is the operating tension of this country right now, today, in 2026. Too many of us — particularly in younger generations — have decided that tension is somebody else’s problem while we pursue happiness in peace.

That is not how this works. It has never been how this works.

“You might not fool around with politics, but it sure does fool with you and your life.”

— Oliver Thomas, Former New Orleans City Councilman

That is not a talking point. Instead, it is a fact carved out of lived experience in this city, this state, and this country. And what is happening right now — right here in Louisiana — proves it beyond any reasonable argument.

Every Right We Have Was Taken, Not Given

Think about what it took to get here. Not abstractly. Concretely.

The right to vote required a constitutional amendment, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the blood of civil rights workers, federal legislation, and decades of legal battles that are still being fought today. The right to sit at a lunch counter required people to absorb beatings without fighting back — on purpose, as a strategy — because the alternative was worse. The right to attend integrated schools required a little girl named Ruby Bridges to walk through a screaming mob of adults while federal marshals flanked her, because those adults would rather terrorize a six-year-old than share a school building with her.

The Fair Housing Act. The Civil Rights Act. The Voting Rights Act. Each of these represented a moment where Black Americans — through organizing, sacrifice, litigation, political pressure, and in some cases death — forced a resistant country to move.

None of it was given. All of it was extracted. And here is what extraction means: it can be put back. We just watched it happen. In Louisiana. Last month.

Louisiana v. Callais: The Ruling That Just Changed Everything

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States issued its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Court struck down Louisiana’s congressional map — the one that had finally given Black voters in this state two majority-Black congressional districts — and in the process gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in all but name.

Let me make sure you understand what that means in plain language.

Louisiana is one-third Black. One-third. For decades, we had one majority-Black congressional district out of six. After years of organizing, legislating, and litigating — after the NAACP Legal Defense Fund fought this case all the way to the Supreme Court twice — we finally had two. The Court just took one back. And in doing so, it rewrote the rules of what states must prove to justify drawing districts that give Black voters a genuine voice in their own government.

The decision is not just about Louisiana. The ruling permits states to use partisan gerrymandering as a wholesale excuse to deny Black voters a voice in their government. That blueprint is now available to every Republican-controlled state legislature in America. And they are already using it.

Louisiana Republicans approved a new congressional map eliminating one of the state’s two majority-Black districts and drawing an additional Republican-leaning district in its place. They moved within days of the ruling. Specifically, the new map preserves a single majority-Black district anchored around New Orleans, largely protecting the seat held by Democratic Rep. Troy Carter — but it extends into Baton Rouge in a shape designed to minimize Black political cohesion rather than reflect it.

This is not redistricting as a technical exercise. This is the surgical removal of Black political power from the map. And it is happening while too many of us are not paying attention.

Why This Louisiana Ruling Is a National Blueprint

Understand something important. The Callais decision did not just affect Louisiana. The ruling gives every Republican-controlled state legislature in America Supreme Court cover to eliminate majority-Black districts. The argument is now simple: drawing a district to give Black voters power is itself an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Therefore, they don’t have to do it.

Tennessee eliminated their majority black district centered around Memphis. Louisiana moved next because Louisiana was the test case. Other states are watching. As a result, what just happened here is coming to Georgia, to North Carolina, to Texas — every state where Black political power was built district by district over fifty years of Voting Rights Act protection that the Court just stripped away.

Project 2025: The Checklist They Are Running Through

Some of you heard about Project 2025 during the 2024 campaign. You heard the nine-hundred-page document described as extreme. You may have assumed it was political rhetoric — the kind of thing candidates wave around before elections and then forget about.

It was not rhetoric. It was a checklist. And they are running through it.

As of February 2026, the Trump administration had initiated or completed 53 percent of Project 2025’s domestic administrative policy agenda — 283 of the 532 recommended actions — in the 12 months following the president’s inauguration.

Here is what that looks like in practice — the goals they set and the checks they have earned:

That is not a list of things that might happen. Every item on that list already happened — most of them in the last eighteen months. Furthermore, Black Americans sit on the receiving end of nearly all of them, whether or not we were paying attention at the time.

Project 2025 Is Done. Meet Project 2026 and Project 2029.

Here is what should stop you cold.

The Heritage Foundation has already shifted to Heritage 2.0, publishing its 2026 strategy — titled “The Golden Age is a choice.” Project 2025 drew massive public backlash, so they rebranded around four new cornerstones: The American Family, National Security, Free Enterprise, and American Heritage and Citizenship. The goals did not change. Only the packaging did.

Beyond that, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts went on national radio and announced Project 2029. His exact words: “We are not tired of winning.”

Read that again. They finished Project 2025 — halfway through a single presidential term — and already named the next plan. They are building infrastructure for the 2029 transition before this administration is even over. Meanwhile, too many of us are still trying to process what happened in 2025.

These are not casual political actors. This is a funded, staffed, multi-decade operation executing against a documented plan. They know what they want. They know how to get it. And they do not take days off.

What Comes Next If We Don’t Move

Let me project what the next phase looks like, based on what they have published and what they have already done.

First, redistricting will accelerate. The Callais decision is a national green light. Every Republican-controlled state legislature now has Supreme Court cover to eliminate majority-Black districts. The map that just passed Louisiana’s legislature will not be the last. It is the model.

Second, federal civil rights enforcement will continue to weaken. The DEI rollback was just the surface. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance — every agency tasked with enforcing the legal protections Black Americans depend on is being restructured, defunded, or redirected. When those agencies won’t act, the protections that exist on paper are no longer enforced.

Third, voting access will tighten at the state level. With Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act now gutted, states face less federal oversight of their election laws than at any point since the civil rights era. Voter ID requirements, reduced early voting, closed polling locations, purged voter rolls — none of these are hypotheticals. They are documented, they are happening, and the legal tools that once checked them are gone.

Could It Really Go All the Way Back?

The Heritage Foundation’s 250-year plan, released in January 2026, calls for restructuring American society around “the family home” and traditional values. Historically, that language has meant the erasure of Black cultural authority, Black family structures that don’t fit the prescribed model, and Black civic institutions that operate outside approved frameworks.

Could it go all the way back? I don’t know. In 2019, I would not have told you that Roe v. Wade would fall after fifty years. Moreover, I would not have told you that the Voting Rights Act — the law that the blood of Selma purchased — would be functionally neutered by a 6-3 court in a Louisiana case in the spring of 2026. Nevertheless, both of those things happened. In my lifetime. Probably in yours.

So can we really become second class citizens again? Will there be whites only signs in diners and bathrooms? Might we actually have to provide free labor again? I don’t know. And anybody who tells you they know for certain is lying to you. What I do know is that I would not have bet on half of what has already happened. That uncertainty is exactly why we cannot afford to be casual about any of this. I plan against the possibility with the same focus and attention that the Heritage Foundation plans for the future they want.

We should be doing the same.

The Pursuit of Happiness Requires a Foundation

I am not against joy. Let me be absolutely clear about that before somebody misreads this argument.

Black joy is not a distraction from the struggle. It is the point of the struggle. The second line, the cookout, the barbershop, the church, the block party — these represent survival, culture, and resistance all wrapped together. We should protect them fiercely.

However, joy built on a crumbling legal foundation is not sustainable.

You cannot twerk your way through a Supreme Court ruling that just eliminated your congressional district. Partying past a redistricting map that made your vote mathematically irrelevant before you cast it is not an option. And no filter on an Instagram post makes a 6-3 court decision go away.

Happiness Requires Ground to Stand On

The pursuit of happiness is not frivolous. It is the goal. But that goal requires a foundation. It requires legal standing. It requires that the rights protecting that pursuit stay intact. Above all, it requires that somebody is paying enough attention to stop the people dismantling those rights before they finish the job.

Right now, they are dismantling them. Moreover, they already have a plan for what comes after this one is done.

What Diligence Looks Like in 2026

Diligence does not mean living in fear. Instead, it means being informed enough to act.

Start with Callais. Know what that ruling means for Louisiana’s congressional delegation going into 2026. Follow what is happening in the state legislature with the same attention you give to a reality television franchise. Understand redistricting well enough to explain it to your neighbor. Beyond that, register to vote and show up in every election — not just the presidential ones, because the state legislature, the city council, the school board, and the district attorney are where the decisions shaping your daily life actually get made.

Support Black media. Not out of racial loyalty as an abstraction, but because Black media outlets are one of the few spaces where information affecting Black communities gets covered with the seriousness it deserves — rather than as a footnote in someone else’s story.

Have the civic conversation. With your children. With your young relatives. With the people in your circle who have decided that politics is not for them. Help them understand what Oliver Thomas already told us: you might not fool around with politics, but it sure does fool with you.

Politics is fooling with us right now. The map just changed. The Court just moved. The next plan is already written and funded.

The Verdict

Being Black in America is a political statement. Your existence here carries a history, a legal status, and a set of rights that were never freely given and are not permanently secured. Meanwhile, the people working to reduce that status are not resting. They are organized, funded, and executing a documented multi-decade plan — Project 2025 into Project 2026 into Project 2029 — while too many of us treat civic engagement like an optional elective.

It is not optional. It never was. To suggest otherwise is just dumb.

And we are not a dumb people. Ours is a people who survived the unsurvivable. We built institutions out of nothing. We created the cultural foundation the rest of the world has spent decades consuming. We forced a resistant nation to confront its own contradictions over and over again.

We did not come this far to sleepwalk through the most consequential political moment of this generation.

Wake up. Stay awake. And act like you know what is at stake — because you do.

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Jeff Thomas

Publisher — Black Source Media

Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist •  New Orleans

Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.

His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.

He is also the principal of EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.

Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas

Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu

Latest posts by Jeff Thomas (see all)

• How to Raise a Black Son When the Courts Won’t Protect Him - June 10, 2026
• Louisiana’s Insurance Crisis Is Destroying Black Wealth. - June 6, 2026
• Black Men’s Health 2026: Are You Strong Enough to Fight Back? - June 3, 2026

Jeff Thomas

Publisher — Black Source Media

Jeff Thomas
Publisher • Opinion Columnist •  New Orleans

Jeff Thomas is the publisher of Black Source Media and one of New Orleans’ most direct voices on civic affairs, economic justice, and Louisiana politics. He writes from the intersection of experience and accountability — as a licensed general contractor,a tech company founder and executive with over 30 years experience, and a businessman who has worked across the city’s civic, media, and construction ecosystems for decades.

His Sunday column covers Louisiana legislative politics, insurance discrimination, housing policy, and the forces shaping Black community life in New Orleans and across the state. Thomas writes in the tradition of Black journalists who hold power accountable without apology — building arguments from data, delivering verdicts from evidence, and speaking to Black New Orleans with the directness the moment demands.

He is also the principal of EA Inspection Services, LLC, a government inspection services company. Black Source Media is his platform for the civic conversation New Orleans has needed and too rarely had.

Selected Articles by Jeff Thomas

Black Neighborhoods Pay the Highest Insurance Rates in Louisiana. Here’s What They Don’t Want You to Know.
They Didn’t Yell the N-Word. They Went to Law School, Bided Their Time, and Rewrote the Constitution Instead.
Vappie vs. Morrell: Why Does Justice Look Different in New Orleans?
The State Has the Money. New Orleans East Just Needs Them to Use It.
The Failure of Mitch Landrieu