May 10, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - In politics, fear has a color.

For most of American history, that color has been Black.

No ad has taught that lesson more brutally than the Willie Horton ad of 1988. It showed the face of a Black man convicted of murder. It blamed Michael Dukakis for a furlough program. It told voters mercy was dangerous.

After that, clemency withered. Democrats especially learned to treat grace as a trap. To this day, too many Democratic politicians fear using their clemency powers. Even when their cowardice means people receive punishment they do not deserve.

Republican governors and presidents have often been more sweeping. Our nation’s current president has used the pardon power boldly and repeatedly. He has never seemed afraid of the power itself. Too many Democrats still are.

This spring marks 10 years since the Bernie Sanders campaign made a very different kind of ad. Nearly three decades after Willie Horton, I asked the campaign to do the opposite. Put a Black man convicted of murder in a presidential ad. Not to destroy the campaign. To strengthen it.

His name was Chris Wilson.

Chris grew up in Baltimore. He saw violence young. At 17, he took a man’s life. He went to prison.

There is no hiding from that truth. There should not be.

But Chris did what we say we want people to do. He took responsibility. He educated himself. He built a master plan for his life. He came home determined to work, mentor, and help others escape the traps that nearly swallowed him.

At the time, Chris was painting my house. When the campaign came to film the ad, Chris helped find the location.

To me, his story was not a liability. It was the point. Real public safety requires redemption. Prevention. Education. Jobs. Second chances.

The idea carried risk. Given the legacy of Willie Horton, some had concerns. That was understandable. This was not a safe testimonial. It was a direct challenge to a powerful racial taboo.

But in a nation with the highest incarceration rate on Earth, Willie Horton politics had trained campaigns to distrust voters. My experience told me voters were better than that.

Years earlier, I had been part of polling for a big-box retailer that wanted to know what would happen if customers learned it provided second-chance employment for formerly incarcerated people. Customers said they would be more likely to shop there. The company stood to gain market share, not lose it.

People were ready to believe in second chances. Politics just had to catch up.

Everyone signed off on taking the risk. The campaign made the ad. The name said it all: “Be Bold, Change the System.”

There was Chris, looking into the camera, telling the truth. No hiding. No sugarcoating. No mug shot. No monster. Just a man. A Black man. A Baltimore man. A man who had caused harm, paid a terrible price, and fought to become a force for good.

It was the anti-Willie Horton ad.

The Willie Horton ad said Black men are the reason to fear mercy. The Chris Wilson ad said Black men are among the reasons to believe in redemption.

And it worked. The ad drew roughly a million clicks in the first 24 hours. It sent Bernie’s support up fast in Illinois. It was used powerfully in Michigan and Missouri. It moved people because it trusted them.

Chris later received a book contract. The Master Plan told how he refused to let prison be the end of his life. That work became the basis for an education program that has trained more than 100,000 incarcerated people.

Today, Chris is a celebrated artist whose paintings sell for tens of thousands of dollars.

That is what Willie Horton politics never wants America to see. It wants to freeze a Black man forever at the worst moment of his life. Chris Wilson proves something else. Redemption does not erase accountability. It fulfills it.

Ten years later, the lesson is urgent. Willie Horton politics is still with us. It has changed targets. Today, the scary Black man in the old ad has too often become the scary brown immigrant in the new one. Campaigns still take one terrible crime, attach it to a whole people, and tell voters mercy, due process, and fairness will get them killed.

The faces change. The formula does not.

The Chris Wilson ad, and the life he has led since, prove the best way to combat racist, authoritarian propaganda is with the bold and transformative truth.

Bold enough to believe accountability and redemption can live in the same sentence. Bold enough to trust voters with the full humanity of a Black man who changed his life. Bold enough to bury the politics Willie Horton made famous — and build a politics worthy of the people of every color we too often leave behind.

In America, the color of trust is the color of the blood in all our hearts — red and blue, flowing together as one.

Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP.

To Be Equal 
May 9, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - "The consequences are likely to be far-reaching and grave. Today’s decision renders Section 2 all but a dead letter. In the States where that law continues to matter—the States still marked by residential segregation and racially polarized voting—minority voters can now be cracked out of the electoral process."  Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan

Instead of taking an objective look at the state of voting rights in this country that is rooted in its history to exploit rather than provide equality, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board came together to draft a piece titled Democrats Have a Jim Crow Fantasy.”

The piece suggests that the Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais likely will have no meaningful impact on voting rights, basing its argument on the fact that Black voter turnout in midterms increased after Shelby v. Holder in 2013.

After cherry-picking statistics about midterm turnout in 2018 and 2022, the board had the audacity to state that “Many states in the South—including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia—have no-excuse absentee voting” while completely ignoring the fact that the administration is aggressively trying to limit absentee voting ahead of this year’s midterms.

It also failed to mention that since 2020, an election with record voter turnout because of mail-in ballots, states responded by passing a record number of voter suppression laws with tactics that include: enforcing strict voter ID laws, shown to disproportionately impact lower income voters, purging voter rolls, and in many majority Black communities, literally removing ballot boxes.

Regarding Shelby v. Holder, the piece also ignored how the decision reduced Black political participation.

Using nearly one billion individual voter‑file records, researchers at the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the average county formerly subject to Section 5 preclearance, the relative participation of nonwhite voters worsened after federal oversight ended.

Critically, the study estimates that absent Shelby County, the white–Black turnout gap would have grown by only about 4–5 percentage points by 2022. Instead, it grew by roughly 9 points, nearly double what national trends alone would predict. That divergence reflects a causal effect of ending preclearance, not mere coincidence.

It doesn’t take a study to see how Louisiana v. Callais will impact Black voter representation in Congress; we can look at the arms race to redistrict the South that took place within days of the decision.

The editorial closed out by saying that “The Court’s Callais ruling may result in less racial polarization to the extent that both parties will have to compete more vigorously for minority voters rather than packing them into majority-minority districts for partisan gain.”

As we see with states immediately rushing to eliminate any competition in their newly drawn maps, its clear that the real fantasy is both parties competing for minority voters.

Louisiana went as far as to cancel its primary elections to redraw a map that could potentially eliminate all of its Black districts and Tennessee created a map that establishes a one-party system that eliminates the only sitting Black member of Congress the state has.

No one claims that today resembles 1965 Selma in form. But the data show that federal oversight mattered, and its removal disproportionately burdened minority voters.

Callais was yet another nail in the coffin of the Voting Rights Act. It co-signs the dilution of the votes of Black communities which may result in the reduction of Black congressional representation in numbers worse than after Reconstruction.

Calling this reality a “fantasy” is not analysis; it is evasion and only underscores the urgency of restoring the protections that once enforced them.

April 14, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - People keep talking about the future of work as if it is something waiting just around the corner—robots taking jobs, artificial intelligence transforming industries, entire occupations disappearing overnight. I’m speaking soon at a conference on this very topic, and the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that we are asking the wrong question. The future of work is not something waiting decades in the distance. For millions of Americans, it has already arrived—and it looks a lot like insecurity.

The latest employment report shows the economy adding 178,000 jobs in March, with unemployment holding at about 4.3 percent. Economists look at those numbers and pronounce the labor market strong. But statistics do not pay rent or buy groceries. Economists love numbers. Workers live with consequences. Talk to workers and you hear something different: a growing sense that the rules of work are changing, and not necessarily for the better.  And the surface numbes don’t tell the whole story.  With severl measures of labor underutilization, the unemployment rate looks more like 8 percent, and as high as 13 percent for African Americans.

For decades Americans believed that education, hard work, and loyalty to an employer would lead to stability. A job was supposed to provide more than wages. It was supposed to offer a path—a way to build a life, raise a family, and eventually retire with dignity.

That bargain is quietly disappearing.

Many of the fastest-growing occupations in the American economy are in what economists politely call the care sector: home health aides, childcare workers, nursing assistants, and elder care providers. These workers do the labor that allows the rest of the economy to function. They care for children, support people with disabilities, and help aging Americans live with dignity.

Yet the economy rewards that labor with wages that barely sustain the people doing it. The median pay for home health and personal care aides is about $16 an hour, roughly $32,000 a year for full-time work. Try paying rent, transportation, and groceries on that in most American cities. An economy that pays caregivers poverty wages is telling you exactly what it values.

More than four million Americans now work in these jobs, making caregiving one of the largest occupations in the country. Demand will only grow as the population ages. Within the next decade, Americans over the age of 65 will outnumber children for the first time in our history.

That demographic reality reveals something uncomfortable about the American economy. The work that sustains human life—caring for children, tending to the sick, supporting the elderly—is treated as low-value labor. Meanwhile, sectors far removed from those everyday needs capture extraordinary wealth.

At the same time, the middle-class professional job that once symbolized stability is showing signs of fragility. Workers in media, technology, universities, and nonprofits increasingly face layoffs with little warning. Contract work replaces permanent employment. People who once relied on one job now patch together two or three to stay afloat. Roughly five percent of American workers now hold multiple jobs, often because one paycheck no longer stretches far enough.

Artificial intelligence may accelerate these trends, but technology alone is not the story. The deeper issue is how our economy values work. In the emerging labor market, the jobs that generate the greatest social value often generate the least financial reward.

Black women understand this reality better than most. For generations they have participated in the labor force at high rates, sustaining families and communities while navigating an economy that rarely rewarded their labor with equal pay or equal opportunity. What many Americans are discovering today about instability and undervalued labor is something Black women have been managing for decades.

The future of work is not being shaped by technology alone. It is being shaped by power.

So when we talk about the future of work, we should be clear about what is really at stake. The question is not whether machines will replace humans. The question is whether work in America will continue to drift toward instability while the most essential labor remains the least rewarded.

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is a DC based economist and author.  Juliannemalveaux.com.  Subscribe to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

April 13, 2026

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - With the chaos and confusion surrounding the United States’ self-inflicted war with Iran, our NATO allies are experiencing America’s leadership void firsthand. The direct U.S. and Israeli military operation against Iran has severely strained the relationships with our closest European allies, leading to a major decline in confidence in American leadership.

The erosion of trust comes from the lack of diplomatic consultation resulting from our nation’s “America First” policy, which consistently ignores input from our allies. Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has severely disrupted global energy supplies and is economically impacting European and Asian allies with higher energy prices. It shows that Americans here at home are not alone in suffering from the results of the Trump administration’s recklessness and arrogance. Our allies, who express concerns about the stability of U.S. leadership, would not be wrong to question how a presidential candidate with a long list of documented moral, ethical, and legal failings managed to maintain political support from millions of voters.

It didn’t matter to voters that each of the failings was a red flag representing clear evidence that he is unfit to become the most powerful person in the world. When it comes to shielding the nation and world from Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policy volatility, the Republican-led Congress, the Republican-led Supreme Court, and the MAGA movement have let the nation and world down. On the world stage, our allies can no longer trust the actions and motives coming from this White House. At one time, the Republican Party was the party of foreign affairs and fiscal responsibility.

Steve Schmidt is best known as a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. It was founded in 2019 in opposition to Donald Trump and his leadership of the Republican Party and has earned him the wrath of MAGA. He was an establishment Republican who worked on political campaigns for President George Bush and Sen. John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign. He is now a Never Trump Republican who has broken with the Republican Party. Thanks to Republicans, Schmidt said the nation no longer has the system of checks and balances envisioned by the country’s founders.

“A system with checks and balances and a separation of powers and a separation between church and state in the country…is foundational to who we are, to what we are,” said Schmidt. There are not enough Republicans like Schmidt who understand the times we are living in, both domestically and globally. I do not agree with Schmidt politically on many things, but I do appreciate his willingness to speak out to confront fascism and the billionaire class. This is important because every Senate and Congressional election directly and indirectly impacts the nation and world. Every Republican lawmaker knows the threat that Trump poses.

What Schmidt has been able to do is highlight the contrast between Republicans who are true Americans, with courage, and Republicans who have placed the goals of their party over the needs of the nation by refusing to restrain President Trump’s aggressive power grabs, even when they are done without Congressional approval. “It’s an age of epic cowardice of selfishness of greed,” Schmidt told Left Hook podcaster Wajahat Ali in reference to members of his former party. “These are despicable, villainous people, and I think the High Court of History is going to judge them very, very harshly.

The world is watching, and the High Court of History will judge Democrats as well, because there are many forms of checks and balances.

There is a critical U.S. Senate race in Texas, and the Black vote can ultimately determine the outcome. A May runoff between U.S. Sen. John Cornyn and Attorney General Ken Paxton will determine the Republican candidate. The winner is favored to win in November. The Democratic nominee is James Talarico, the Texas state representative who defeated U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett. While a coalition of white, college-educated Democrats and Latino voters helped propel Talarico over Crockett, Talarico will need the support of Black voters if there is any chance of winning in November.

That may not be easy. Some of Crockett’s supporters took offense to the notion that a white state representative was more electable than a Black congresswoman, as rooted in racism and sexism. Dallas Jones, a Texas Democratic strategist, believes Talarico doesn’t need an “overwhelming surge” of support from Black voters, but he does need to make sure they don’t stay home. There is a balance to be maintained to keep the powerful Black vote energized, because voting and politics are based on relationships. On one side, the Black vote in Texas must be earned, regardless of the candidate. It should never be taken for granted; therefore, Talarico should sincerely work to earn the trust and support of the Black community.

On the other hand, the Black vote must be consistent, grounded in justice and compassion. Black voters in Texas are in a position to serve as the moral checks and balances the nation and the world need. When Steve Schmidt refers to cowardice, despicable, villainous people, those people have names. Their names are John Cornyn and Ken Paxton.

 David W. Marshall is the founder of the faith-based organization TRB: The Reconciled Body and the author of God Bless Our Divided America.

April 4, 2026

To Be Equal 

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” - The 14th Amendment

They hoped we weren’t paying attention.

While the country was watching fighter jets and debating troop deployments, while the administration’s shock-and-awe news cycle churned through one manufactured crisis after another, a quieter and far more dangerous move was playing out in plain sight.

On the first day of his second term, President Trump signed an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship in the United States. Not through Congress. Not through the constitutional amendment process the framers required. Through a stroke of a pen.

This is one of the most brazen assaults on American democracy this administration has attempted. And it was designed to slide through the noise.

It must and will not.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, includes a citizenship clause that confers citizenship on anyone “born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The amendment simply constitutionalized centuries of precedent based on English common law.

And let us remind America, that this was a direct repudiation of the Dred Scott decision, which denied Black people the protections of U.S. citizenship. The amendment was the nation’s promise to itself that never again would the government get to decide that a person born on this soil was something less than American.

That promise is now under attack.

Trump has argued that the amendment “was meant for the slaves, for the children of slaves.” Let that land for a moment. The administration’s own framing acknowledges the 14th Amendment was written to protect Black people, and then argues that its protections should be narrower than the text plainly states. 

This is not a legal argument. It is a political ideology, rooted in White Supremacy, seeking to legally discriminate who really counts based arbitrarily by a select few.

The assault on birthright citizenship is anti-Black not only in its history but in its logic. When you establish the principle that citizenship can be conditioned on the legal status of your parents, you create the infrastructure for a permanent underclass. You open the door to generations of people born in America, raised in America, who are American in every lived sense, but who can be told they do not belong. 

If Trump’s order were allowed to stand, an estimated 2.7 million additional people would be unauthorized by 2045, and 5.4 million more by 2075.  These are not abstractions. These are children. And disproportionately, they are children of color.

Advocates have warned this risks creating a “permanent underclass” for some immigrant groups,  transforming the cultural and civic fabric of the country. Communities of color, already navigating the cumulative weight of structural inequality, would face an additional burden; proving their belonging in the only country they have ever known. 

That is not America at its founding promise. That is America at its worst.

Every federal court that has considered a challenge to the executive order has struck it down. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara this week, and a majority of the justices appeared skeptical of the administration’s position.  Even Chief Justice Roberts noted that we may live in a new world, but we have the same Constitution. We agree. A Supreme Court ruling is expected by the end of June or early July. 

The National Urban League has stood against every attempt to diminish the citizenship, dignity, and rights of Black and brown Americans since 1910. We know what it looks like when government uses the machinery of law to shrink the circle of who belongs. We have seen this before, and we have fought it before, and we are fighting it now.

To the communities living under the shadow of this executive order, we see you. To the children whose citizenship should never have been in question, you are American, and we will defend that truth.

And to those in power who believe the noise of the moment will drown out accountability, it will not. 

We are watching the courts. We are watching the Congress. We are watching the ballot box. American democracy has survived every attempt to hollow it out from within, because the people it was built to exclude refused to stop demanding what was theirs.

This generation will be no different.