BLACK PUPPETS

Byron Donalds and the Price of Conditional Acceptance

THE MATTER OF THE MATTER — Janice Off the Mic

I am not prepared to pay the price of celebrating, for the first time in Florida’s history, a Black person occupying the Governor’s Mansion if that achievement comes at the expense of Black political power, dignity, and the interests of the very people whose struggle made that possibility real.

We have paid that price far too many times. We have celebrated the first Black person to enter institutions that once excluded us, only to discover that the institution remained unchanged, its power undisturbed, and its obligations to Black people no greater than before. We have mistaken access for influence, visibility for representation, and individual achievement for collective progress.

There was a time when every first represented a breach in the walls of American racial exclusion. Those victories mattered. They were hard-won, and we should never diminish the struggle that made them possible. But we have learned something in the generations since. The presence of a Black person in a position of authority does not necessarily mean that Black people have gained any authority at all.

A first has no value as Black progress unless it opens the way for those who follow, expands the possibilities of those who remain excluded, and advances the collective power of the people whose history made that first possible.

Otherwise, we are being asked to celebrate the color of the person operating the machinery while ignoring what the machinery is doing to us.

And I, for one, am no longer willing to make that bargain.

There is another dimension to the prospect of Byron Donalds becoming Florida’s first Black governor that deserves examination: the response of those entrusted with the leadership of our historically Black colleges and universities. I wonder how many administrators will hesitate to challenge his candidacy or his policies, persuaded that the historic symbolism of a Black governor, or the practical need to maintain access to his administration, outweighs their obligation to examine what his leadership might mean for their institutions.

The dilemma is particularly consequential for Florida’s public HBCU, Florida A&M University, whose relationship with state government involves funding, oversight, appointments, and institutional priorities. Administrators must maintain working relationships with elected officials, regardless of party. But maintaining those relationships is not the same as endorsing their political agendas. Nor should institutional survival require silence when policies threaten academic freedom, educational opportunity, or the teaching of Black history.

There is a dangerous illusion in believing that the presence of a Black man in the Governor’s Mansion necessarily translates into greater security for Black institutions. It does not. The measure of that administration would be found in its budgets, appointments, educational policies, and willingness to protect the independence and historical mission of those institutions. A Black governor could strengthen those commitments, weaken them, or leave them unchanged. His racial identity alone tells us nothing about which course he would choose.

And this is where the seduction of the historic first becomes especially troubling. Our institutions cannot afford to confuse proximity with protection or ceremonial recognition with substantive support. The history of Black higher education is a history of institutions built and sustained against extraordinary political and economic resistance. Their leaders inherit an obligation greater than securing an invitation to the Governor’s Mansion.

The question is not whether a Black governor will welcome Black university presidents into his office. It is whether those presidents will retain the independence to challenge him when the interests of their institutions and students demand it.

Black representation does not automatically mean Black political power. Too often, it becomes the machinery through which power is exercised against Black people.

There is a particular kind of political betrayal that deserves more than the customary language of disappointment. It is not simply the abandonment of Black interests. It is the deliberate decision to become an instrument of political forces working against those interests, to use one’s Blackness as a credential of legitimacy while participating in the dismantling of the protections, institutions, and opportunities that generations of Black struggle made possible.

Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice

My grandmother would have called such people race traitors. She would not have wasted much time explaining herself. She understood that there were always people willing to exchange the collective interests of their people for the privileges of proximity to those who controlled the money, the property, the law, and the machinery of government.

But I have another name for the contemporary political actors who perform this function.

Slave catchers.

Not because the historical institution of slavery and contemporary political life are interchangeable. They are not. But because the historical slave catcher was more than a man pursuing someone who had escaped bondage. He was an agent of a system determined to deny Black people the right to determine the conditions of their own existence. He helped enforce a political and economic order in which Black freedom was regarded as a threat to someone else’s wealth and power.

Today, the machinery is different. There are elections, legislative chambers, cabinet departments, executive orders, government contracts, political appointments, and television cameras. The chains are not the same. Neither are the laws. But the question of who is recruited to enforce the boundaries of Black freedom remains worth asking.

And that brings me to Byron Donalds.

Byron Donalds: The Price of Being Useful

Why Byron Donalds?

Why would a political movement that wraps itself in law and order, personal responsibility, merit, and moral superiority so enthusiastically embrace a Black man whose own encounters with the criminal justice system required precisely the discretion and second chances that its political rhetoric so often condemns?

Donalds, now seeking the governorship of Florida, has a criminal history that includes a misdemeanor marijuana case and a separate felony bribery charge resolved through a diversion program and ultimately dismissed. He does not have a felony conviction arising from that case. The distinction matters, but so does the larger history.

He was given an opportunity to move beyond those encounters with the law, complete his education, build a career, enter public life, and pursue one of the most powerful offices in Florida. I do not begrudge him those opportunities. I believe in second chances. I believe that the circumstances of one’s youth should not necessarily determine the possibilities of one’s future. But I wonder how much of that understanding Byron Donalds extends to the Black and poor young men who find themselves entangled in the same criminal justice system that allowed him to move forward.

There is something particularly revealing about a man who benefits from institutional discretion and then aligns himself with a political movement that so frequently substitutes punishment for opportunity, personal condemnation for structural understanding, and political theater for justice. It is not Donald’s criminal history that disqualifies him from political leadership. It is the contradiction between the opportunities he received and the policies he is willing to support that deserves examination.

The Moral Contradiction: Donald Trump

And then there is Donald Trump.

For Black people of good faith and goodwill, those who still listen to the whispers of their history, Donald Trump represents something profoundly indecent. I regard him as a rabid racist, a man whose public conduct has repeatedly demonstrated contempt for truth, decency, moral responsibility, and the dignity of others. Vile in his rhetoric, immoral in his conduct, and seemingly amoral in his exercise of power, he embodies much of what generations of Black struggle have sought to confront and overcome.

And so I find myself asking a question that goes well beyond political affiliation. Why would a Black man who has himself benefited from forgiveness, who claims the possibility of redemption and a transformed life, so enthusiastically embrace a man whose public life so frequently demonstrates the very absence of those virtues?

What does Byron Donalds see in Donald Trump that makes such an embrace not merely acceptable but worthy of his public devotion? Is it the promise of political advancement? The seduction of proximity to power? The prospect of wealth, influence, and acceptance among men whose political movement so often treats the history of Black struggle as an inconvenience to be dismissed?

I cannot know what resides in Donald’s heart. But I can judge the company he has chosen, the conduct he is willing to excuse, and the policies he has helped advance. And I can ask what happens to a man’s moral judgment when political ambition requires him to defend what he might otherwise recognize as indefensible.

There is a difference between receiving redemption and understanding its moral obligations. Redemption ought to deepen one’s appreciation for mercy, justice, human dignity, and the possibility of transformation. It ought not become merely a personal exemption from standards one is willing to impose upon everybody else.

What good is the redemption of one Black man if, having received it, he lends his political power to a movement that would make redemption harder for others to obtain?

And perhaps that is the most disturbing question of all. Has Byron Donalds mistaken the opportunity to rise within this political machinery for evidence that the machinery itself is righteous?

Trump’s embrace of Donalds is instructive. Here is a political leader whose movement regularly demands harsh judgment of people who violate the law, yet finds room for redemption when the individual in question serves its political purposes. Apparently, the standards are not nearly as inflexible as the rhetoric suggests.

Donalds has made himself one of Trump’s most recognizable Black political defenders. He has embraced the president’s agenda, supported his legislative priorities, and sought to translate that loyalty into political advancement. Trump, in turn, endorsed Donalds’ gubernatorial ambitions.

What an arrangement. One man receives a highly visible Black advocate for his political agenda. The other receives the endorsement, access, and political support of a powerful president. But what do Black Floridians receive?

That is the question that interests me. Not whether Donalds is sufficiently grateful to Trump. Not whether Trump likes him. Not whether Donalds is welcomed into rooms where other Black people may never be invited. The question is whether any of that proximity produces independent political power for the people whose history and struggle helped make Donalds’s career possible. And there is an important distinction here.

Representation answers the question of who is present. Agency answers the question of who determines what happens.

A Black face can be placed at the head of an institution while the institution’s commitment to racial equity is being weakened. A Black elected official can defend an agenda that diminishes the power of communities that have historically been excluded. And a Black political spokesman can be elevated precisely because his presence makes that agenda more difficult to challenge as racially consequential.

The system does not have to exclude every Black person to maintain racial inequality. It can reward selected Black people for helping preserve it.

The Record Behind the Representation

Donalds’s political record gives us considerably more to examine than his personal relationship with Trump.

He supported the administration’s sweeping 2025 tax-and-spending legislation, which combined tax provisions with major changes to Medicaid, SNAP, and other federal programs. Those changes have consequences for economically vulnerable households, including Black families already confronting disproportionate barriers to wealth, health care, and economic security.

He supported legislation imposing new documentary proof-of-citizenship requirements for voter registration, despite concerns that such requirements could create additional obstacles for eligible citizens who lack ready access to the required documents.

These are not merely abstract ideological preferences. They are legislative choices affecting the conditions under which people obtain assistance, exercise political rights, and participate in American democracy.

Donalds and his allies argue that these policies encourage responsibility, protect election integrity, reduce government dependency, and restore fiscal discipline. But the rhetoric of responsibility cannot substitute for an examination of consequences. When eligibility requirements become more burdensome, when public protections are reduced, and when the exercise of citizenship becomes more administratively difficult, the question is who bears the cost.

We know enough about the racial and economic history of this country to understand that formally race-neutral policies do not necessarily produce racially neutral outcomes.

And this is where Donalds’s political ambitions become particularly consequential. He is not simply defending these policies from a seat in Congress. He is seeking to become governor of Florida, a state whose history of racial exclusion, voter suppression, unequal schooling, and resistance to Black political power is neither distant nor irrelevant.

What does it mean for Florida to elect its first Black governor if that governor embraces policies that weaken the collective political and economic agency of Black Floridians?

It would be a historic first. But historic firsts are not necessarily historic progress.

Black people have struggled too long and sacrificed too much to confuse the individual advancement of a Black politician with the advancement of Black political power.

The Price of Conditional Acceptance

There is something else about Byron Donalds that I find astonishing. He appears to believe that the machinery he serves will make a permanent exception for him.

That is either an extraordinary misreading of American racial history or an extraordinary act of political self-deception.

The machinery of white supremacy has never required that every Black person be excluded from its operations. It has always found uses for selected Black people willing to defend its arrangements, validate its authority, or help discipline those who challenge it. Their inclusion does not necessarily signal the abandonment of racial hierarchy. Sometimes it is one of the methods through which that hierarchy is maintained.

And here is the part that Donalds ought to understand:

Being useful to power is not the same as possessing power.

He may enjoy the invitations, the photographs, the endorsements, the campaign support, and the applause. He may believe that his loyalty has purchased a place beyond the reach of the racial prejudices that his political allies so often dismiss or deny. But history offers little reason to assume that acceptance purchased through political usefulness is unconditional.

What happens when his usefulness expires? When his ambitions interfere with someone else’s? When his presence no longer serves the narrative? When the political movement that celebrates him today finds it more advantageous to discard him tomorrow?

He may discover that the privileges of proximity are not the protections of equality.

And that is what makes participation in the contemporary politics of Black erasure so profoundly troubling. The issue is not merely standing aside while the history of Black struggle is diminished. It is helping legitimize an agenda that weakens the institutions, protections, and public understanding through which Black Americans have sought to secure equal citizenship.

The great irony is that the Black history Donalds appears willing to subordinate to his political ambitions is the very history that explains why he can occupy the positions he holds.

He did not create those opportunities alone. He inherited the fruits of struggles waged by people who refused to accept the boundaries imposed upon them.

The right to vote, the ability to compete for public office, the expectation of equal treatment under law, and the dismantling of legal segregation were not gifts from a benevolent political establishment. They were wrested from that establishment through generations of Black resistance, organizing, litigation, sacrifice, and political confrontation.

There is a special indecency in climbing through doors opened by collective Black sacrifice and then participating in efforts that make those doors harder for others to enter.

Donalds seems to have mistaken admission for acceptance, access for authority, and personal advancement for collective liberation.

And if he has placed himself so completely within Trump’s political embrace, what does that make him?

Not necessarily a partner in power. Perhaps an especially valuable instrument of someone else’s power.

The machinery does not promise loyalty to those who operate it. It demands loyalty from them.

And when they are no longer useful, there is no reason to assume it will protect them from the same forces they helped empower.

And Donalds Is Hardly Alone

Oh, and then there are Scott Turner and Tim Scott.

Turner, the Black Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, presides over the federal department charged with advancing fair housing. Yet under his leadership, HUD has withdrawn important regulatory requirements intended to compel communities receiving federal housing assistance to examine and address barriers to fair housing.

Think about that.

Scott Turner, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

The federal government’s affirmative fair-housing responsibilities emerged from a history in which government itself helped construct and sustain residential segregation. The struggle was not simply to prohibit an individual landlord from refusing to rent to a Black family. It was to confront the structural arrangements through which entire communities had been denied equal access to housing, schools, transportation, public investment, and the accumulation of wealth.

And now a Black cabinet secretary is helping reverse important elements of the federal framework designed to address those arrangements.

Turner describes his actions as restoring local control and reducing regulatory burdens. But local control has a long and complicated history in Black America. It was frequently the language through which racial exclusion was defended, and federal intervention resisted.

The question is not whether every local government will discriminate. It is why a federal official charged with advancing fair housing would reduce mechanisms designed to hold those governments accountable for addressing persistent barriers.

Tim Scott, U.S. Senator and Senate Banking Committee chairman

And Senator Tim Scott? Don’t get me started. Well, I do have to fall out laughing because this cretin thinks he is really regal !! LMFAO

As chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Scott has used his institutional authority to advance financial deregulation, including the congressional effort to overturn a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rule intended to limit certain overdraft fees at large financial institutions.

Scott argues that such regulations restrict consumer choice and access to financial services. But overdraft charges fall heavily on financially vulnerable households. The competing interests are not difficult to identify.

Scott has also promoted Opportunity Zones and other market-based approaches to economic development. Some may produce meaningful benefits. But the existence of individual investment opportunities does not answer the larger question of whether Black communities gain durable economic power, ownership, and control.

Here again, we encounter the distinction between economic inclusion and economic empowerment.

Economic inclusion may allow selected Black individuals to acquire wealth, appointments, influence, and access to capital. Economic empowerment requires something more: the ability of Black communities to shape the economic conditions under which they live, work, build institutions, accumulate assets, and determine their futures.

The two are not interchangeable.

Donalds, Turner, and Scott occupy different positions. Their authority differs. Their individual records are not identical. But each has helped advance elements of a political agenda that reduces federal intervention in areas where federal intervention has historically been essential to confronting racial and economic inequality.

And each offers something politically valuable to that agenda: a prominent Black voice defending its legitimacy.

That is not proof of their private motives. I cannot know what bargains they have made with themselves or what they believe they will ultimately receive. But I can examine the public consequences of the policies they defend.

And I can ask why men who have benefited so substantially from the expansion of Black opportunity are willing to participate in a political project that threatens to narrow it.

The Matter of the Matter

I am not interested in the familiar defense that Black people are entitled to be conservatives. Of course they are. Black political independence includes the right to choose one’s ideology, party, and political associations. Nor am I interested in measuring anyone’s Blackness by whether they agree with me.

I am interested in something far more consequential: what happens when Black political figures lend their authority, credibility, and institutional power to political forces whose policies diminish the collective agency of Black Americans?

There is an old American practice of making room for selected Black individuals without making room for Black collective power. It permits access without surrendering control. It celebrates individual success while treating demands for structural change as unnecessary, excessive, or illegitimate.

What makes that arrangement particularly dangerous is that its beneficiaries can become its most persuasive defenders. Their own advancement becomes the exhibit offered to prove that the barriers confronting everyone else no longer matter.

And that is where Black representation becomes political camouflage.

The existence of a Black cabinet secretary does not prove that housing policy serves Black families. The election of a Black senator does not establish that financial policy protects Black consumers. And the prospect of a Black governor does not guarantee that the political rights and economic interests of Black Floridians will be advanced.

Their presence can instead become an answer to an accusation that their policies have never adequately answered.

My grandmother understood something about the people who sought privilege through accommodation to systems of racial domination. She understood that the question was never simply who was permitted inside the master’s house. It was what they were prepared to do once they entered, and whether they would help maintain the boundaries that kept everyone else outside.

She called them race traitors. I call their political function something harsher. Slave catching. Black cleansing.

Not because contemporary political office is equivalent to the enforcement of chattel slavery, but because I recognize the danger when people who have benefited from Black struggle lend their authority to political efforts that restrict Black freedom and agency.

And perhaps the cruelest irony is that they may discover, when their political usefulness has ended, that the system they helped sustain never regarded their inclusion as a commitment to their equality.

It merely found them useful. The presence of Black hands on the machinery does not change what the machinery is designed to do. And Black representation without independent Black political power may be little more than the decoration of our own subjugation.

     “I’ll Be Listening For You !”

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