Black Leaders Are Holding the Line. Our Absence Is Holding It Too.
Let me tell you what is not happening.
Black people are not checked out. Black people are not defeated. Black people are not sitting quietly at home because we have given up on the fight.
We are watching. We are regrouping. And while some of us are taking a beat — a necessary, intentional, fully conscious beat — others among us never stopped working. They kept their heads down and their feet moving and their voices loud on our behalf, even when the noise from every other direction got almost too heavy to bear.
This piece is about those people. And it is about us. And why our absence from certain spaces is not surrender. It is strategy.
The Monopoly Board Is Rigged. Kimberly Jones Said It First.
If you have not watched Kimberly Jones’ Monopoly metaphor, stop what you are doing and find it.
Jones broke it down with the clarity of someone who has been carrying the math in her head for a long time and finally had a microphone big enough to say it out loud. The game of Monopoly, she explained, has been going on for four hundred years. Black people were not allowed to play for most of it. We could not own property. We could not pass Go. We could not collect anything. And every time we managed to build something anyway — Tulsa, Rosewood, Harlem — somebody burned it down.
And now, after four centuries of being locked out of the game, after having the board flipped on us every time we started winning, we are being asked why we are not doing better. We are being told the game is fair now. We are being expected to compete on a board where the other players started with hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place and we are still trying to buy Baltic Avenue.
That is not an accident. That is architecture. And Kimberly Jones named it in a way that traveled around the world because it was true in a way that needed no decoration. Check out her book, “How We Can Win.” Inspirational.
Her words give us language. And language is the first tool of power.
Brandon Johnson Is Building Something Real In Chicago
Mayor Brandon Johnson is not interested in optics. He is interested in outcomes.
His public safety vision leans on stability, not force — investing in youth jobs, mental health care, affordable housing, food security, and services for unhoused residents to tackle the root causes of violence. The Root His 2025 budget allocated $52 million for youth jobs, putting 30,000 young people to work with real career pathways. A $40 million investment launched the One System Initiative to more than double the city’s shelter network, and a $30 million commitment targeted rapid rehousing to move families out of unsheltered situations into stable housing. City of Chicago
In September, Johnson announced an approximate 32% reduction in homicides for the first half of 2025 year-to-date, along with sharp declines in shootings. The Root
He is doing this while standing up to a federal administration that has actively threatened to cut funding to cities like Chicago. He signed executive orders against ICE overreach. He pushed back publicly and without apology. He called out the challenge directly: a structural deficit and a hostile federal administration threatening to cut off billions in funding — and he kept building anyway. City of Chicago
That is what Black leadership looks like when it has real power and uses it without flinching.
Stacey Abrams Is Still In The Room
Stacey Abrams lost two governor’s races in Georgia. The kind of losses that would have broken most people — close, contested, steeped in documented voter suppression, playing out in front of the entire country.
She did not break. She built.
After the 2018 election, Abrams founded Fair Fight Action, an organization credited with boosting voter turnout in Georgia and contributing to Democratic victories in the 2020 presidential election, when Joe Biden narrowly won the state, and in Georgia’s Senate elections, which gave Democrats control of the Senate. Wikipedia
She is not currently running for office. She is doing something more important right now. She has said her job is to ensure that we are doing everything in our power to save not just democracy, but our lives Cap Times — and she is spending every resource she has making sure 2026 elections are free and fair before the machinery of suppression can finish what it started.
She has pointed out that voter suppression in the 21st century is administrative. NPR Illinois No guns and dogs and hoses. Just paperwork. Deadlines. Closed polling places. ID requirements designed to exclude. Gerrymandered maps. Date changes that seem benign until you realize nothing about them is benign.
Stacey Abrams sees all of it. And she keeps naming it, loudly, in rooms that would prefer she sit down.
She has not sat down.
On Our Strategic Absence
Now let us talk about the rest of us.
A lot of Black people are staying home right now. Stepping back from social media. Disengaging from news cycles that seem designed to exhaust us. Not showing up to certain tables. Not lending our energy to systems that have historically taken it without giving anything back.
Some people call this apathy. It is a recalibration.
It is us deciding that our presence is valuable enough that we get to choose where we spend it. It is us recognizing that performing engagement for the comfort of people who want to see us react is not the same as building power.
And our absence is, in fact, a message. When Black voters stay home, elections shift. When Black consumers stop spending, markets feel it. When Black voices go quiet in rooms that depend on our labor and our culture and our purchasing power to function, those rooms notice. Our absence is a clarion call. It says: we are watching you figure out how to do this without us. We want to see what you’ve got.
That is not passivity. That is leverage.
The Bottom Line
Black leadership is alive. It is loud. It is working — in city halls, in courtrooms, in community centers, on podcast microphones, in budget hearings, in voting rights organizations that have never stopped fighting even when the fight got uglier than anyone predicted.
We are not a monolith and we are not a movement that runs on one track. Some of us are inside the rooms changing the rules. Some of us are outside the rooms making clear that the rules need to change. Some of us are home, resting, reclaiming our energy for the next round.
All of it counts. All of it is power.
Know who is fighting for you. Support them where you can. Stay informed even when the information is painful. And when you are ready to step back in — and you will be ready — step in with everything you have.
The opposition has not counted us out. They just keep hoping we will do it ourselves.
We are not done. Not even close.
