IMPACT-Magazine

On June 11, 2026, with inflation rising to 4.2 percent, the highest level in three years, Senator Tim Scott went on Fox Business and called it good news.

“We saw this last report is that inflation ticked up to 4.2 percent, highest in three years,” Scott said. “Last month it was 3.8, the month before that was 3.3. The trend is not going in the right direction.” Then he kept talking. “But one of the things it signals is resiliency in our economy, which is in fact good news. Because of Donald Trump, we have more Americans with more money in their pockets.”

He acknowledged the trend was bad. Then he called it good.

This is not a slip of the tongue. This is the job.

Tim Scott chairs the Senate Banking Committee. He now also chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, leading the party’s campaign strategy heading into the 2026 midterms. He has branded this year the “year of affordability,” promising Americans relief from rising costs.

Inflation rose for three straight months. Rent, groceries, and gas climbed alongside it. And the senator responsible for messaging his party’s economic record told voters that getting worse, slower, was reason for optimism.

Black families are not buffered from this. Higher costs hit households with less savings cushion hardest, and Black households carry less generational wealth to absorb the difference. When the price of groceries and rent rises, it is not abstract. It is the difference between a paid bill and a missed one.

Scott did not propose a policy to address the rising costs he confirmed were rising. He reframed them as a feature of a healthy economy.

This is what proximity to power does when accountability is optional. It does not require Tim Scott to fix the problem. It only requires him to describe it in a way that makes the problem easier to defend.

Black faces in high spaces are not coming to save you.

Tim Scott had the data in front of him. He chose the spin instead.

This is part of our Black Faces in High Spaces series, where we document Black people who have proximity to power but use it to uphold systems that harm Black communities. Follow for the next post in this series.

In January 2025, Target announced it was ending its DEI initiatives. Civil rights leaders in Minneapolis, Pastor Jamal Bryant, Tamika D. Mallory, and others called for a boycott. The math behind that call was simple. Black Americans spend an estimated $12 million a day at Target. The boycott worked; by the end of 2025, Target’s stock had dropped roughly 30 percent. Foot traffic declined. Sales fell. CEO Brian Cornell departed.

This is what economic power looks like when it is exercised, but Target did not respond by reversing course on DEI. It did not respond by sitting down with the organizers of the boycott. It did not respond by addressing the actual demand. It responded by buying proximity to Black culture instead.

In July 2025, Target was a major sponsor of Essence Festival, the largest Black cultural gathering in the country, taking place in the middle of an active boycott of the brand sponsoring it. The backlash was immediate. Festival goers and critics asked how an event built on Black empowerment could still be backed by a company actively under boycott by the community it claims to celebrate.

This year, Target has a new partner. And this time, there is no contract from before the boycott to point to. On June 26, 2026, Target will release an exclusive 30th anniversary edition of Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt, available only at Target.

Jay-Z is not bound by a multi-year sponsorship deal. This is a new partnership, announced this month, in the middle of a boycott that the organizers and the community say is still active because Target’s DEI commitments have not been meaningfully restored.

Here is the structural analysis underneath all of it. Target lost Black consumers because of a policy decision. The path back to those consumers is also a policy decision. Reverse the rollback, restore the commitments, and address what the boycott was actually about.

Essence said it was contractual. What is Jay-Z’s reason? This is not a question about any individual’s choices. It is a question about what it means when the path back into Black spending does not run through accountability. It runs through whomever with power is willing to take the deal.

Marcia Fudge became Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in 2021. She was the first Black woman to lead HUD since Patricia Roberts Harris in 1979. She inherited a department that, under Ben Carson, had spent four years operating on the belief that poverty was a state of mind and housing policy’s job was to stop “enabling” it.

Former Rep. Marcia L. Fudge had spent her career building the opposite belief. Before HUD, she served in Congress representing Ohio for over a decade, and chaired the Congressional Black Caucus. She understood, from the inside, what it meant to represent communities that federal housing policy had failed for generations.

At HUD, she restored the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule that Carson had weakened, putting back the requirement that communities receiving federal funds actively address segregation rather than simply not make it worse. She expanded eviction protections during the pandemic, when millions of families, disproportionately Black and Latino, faced losing their homes. She pushed to expand housing voucher programs and worked to address the racial gap in homeownership and home appraisals, a gap rooted in the exact redlining history that policies like Carson’s refused to acknowledge. She did not frame poverty as a mindset, but as the predictable outcome of policy choices made over generations, and she treated her position as an opportunity to make different choices.

Marcia Fudge left HUD in 2024. The work she started will take far longer than three years to undo decades of damage. Black homeownership rates remain lower today than they were in 1968, but the difference between Marcia Fudge and Ben Carson is not just policy preference. It is what each of them believed was true about why Black families don’t own homes at the same rates as white families. One believed it was a mindset, the other believed it was a system, and only one of them used their position at HUD to try to change the system.

This is part of our Unmuted Leadership series, profiling the builders and policymakers. Follow for a new profile every Thursday.



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What if segregation wasn’t an accident? What if the neighborhoods we live in, the wealth gaps we inherit, and the opportunities available to our children were designed by policy?

In The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein documents how the federal government created residential segregation through redlining, restrictive covenants, discriminatory lending practices, and racially segregated public housing.

This week, IMPACT profiled Ben Carson, who argued that poverty is, to a certain extent, a state of mind.

The Color of Law asks a different question:

What if poverty, wealth, and homeownership are not simply the result of individual choices, but the predictable outcomes of decades of government policy?

This book is the history that many conversations about personal responsibility leave out.

Who should read it?

Anyone wondering why Black homeownership rates remain lower today than they were in 1968.

Anyone seeking a documented explanation for the racial wealth gap.

Anyone ready to understand that what policy built, policy can change.

Richard Rothstein didn’t write this book to make readers comfortable. He wrote it to make the history impossible to ignore.

This is part of our Unmuted Reads series, featuring books that provide structural analysis of Black wealth, power, and legacy.
Follow for a new book recommendation every Wednesday.

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Ben Carson was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development from 2017 to 2021. He had no background in housing policy. He was a neurosurgeon. What he had instead was an ideology, and HUD gave him the power to turn that ideology into policy that affected millions of Black families.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Carson said poverty is “to a certain extent, a state of mind.” He repeated this framework throughout his time at HUD, then he went to work.

He proposed rule changes that would have nearly tripled rent for some of the lowest-income families receiving federal housing assistance. He weakened the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, a regulation designed to address decades of government-enforced segregation by requiring communities receiving federal funds to actively work toward fair housing. Carson rolled it back, removing the requirement that cities document and address segregation patterns. He proposed a rule that would have allowed homeless shelters to deny transgender people based on their gender identity.

During his confirmation process, he referred to enslaved Africans as “immigrants” who “came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less.” He later walked this back, but the framing revealed something: an unwillingness to see slavery, segregation, and housing discrimination as the deliberate systems they were.

Because if poverty is a state of mind, then housing policy doesn’t need to address history. It doesn’t need to address redlining. It doesn’t need to address generations of federal policy that locked Black families out of homeownership and the wealth it builds. If poverty is a state of mind, the government’s only job is to stop enabling it.

Black homeownership rates remain lower today than they were in 1968, the year the Fair Housing Act passed. Not because Black families don’t want homes. Because the policy infrastructure was never built to get them there, and people like Ben Carson made sure it stayed that way.

Black faces in high spaces are not coming to save you.
Ben Carson had the power to rebuild that infrastructure. He used it to dismantle what little existed.

We think. We be.

You have been available long enough. Available to everyone else’s vision, everyone else’s needs, and everyone else’s expectations. But what about your truth? The one you’ve carried for years, have felt but never fully named that keeps tapping you on the shoulder, asking for more.

On September 26, 2026, in Salt Lake City, we’re gathering for Unmuted: From Your Truth to Your Purpose. This is for the woman who is accomplished and still becoming. Purposeful and still processing. Successful by every external measure and still carrying a truth she has not yet built with. Together, we’ll name it, clear the weight around it, and we’ll build a framework to move with it.

This is not a motivational event, nor a networking brunch. This is a structured experience designed to move you from knowing your truth to building with it. The room will be intentionally small, with deep conversations, and the work will be real.

September 26, 2026. Salt Lake City.

Come build with your truth.

Registration link for tickets and vending is the bio.



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What do you do when the system tells you your daughter’s life did not matter? March 13, 2020, Louisville Metro Police officers broke down Breonna Taylor’s door in the middle of the night and shot her six times.

No one was charged with her murder. The system had reached its conclusion. Breonna Taylor’s mother, Tamika L. Palmer, reached her own. She refused to allow her daughter’s life to be reduced to a news cycle.

Tamika Palmer organized, advocated, and stood outside police headquarters demanding accountability. She pushed for Breonna’s Law, legislation banning no-knock warrants in Louisville. It passed unanimously and became one of the first laws in the country created in direct response to a police killing.

She filed a wrongful death lawsuit that resulted in a historic $12 million settlement, testified before Congress, met with lawmakers, and carried her daughter’s name into rooms that would have preferred to move on.

What makes Tamika Palmer’s story important is not that she became an activist, it’s that she became infrastructure. Too often, we confuse leadership with titles. We assume power belongs to the people holding office, writing policy, or standing behind podiums. Tamika Palmer reminds us that power also belongs to the people willing to build something after the system fails.

While elected officials debated justice, she organized for it. When the institutions protected themselves, she protected her daughter’s legacy. While others accepted the outcome, she challenged the structure that produced it. That is unmuted leadership. Not proximity to power, the willingness to build it.

Breonna Taylor would have been 33 years old this year. Her mother’s work ensures the country still remembers why her life mattered.

This is part of our Unmuted Leadership series, profiling the builders and thinkers every Thursday.

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What if the legal system isn’t broken? What if it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do?
That is the question at the center of Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.

Stevenson is a lawyer, professor, and founder of the Equal Justice Initiative. For decades, he has represented people the legal system decided were disposable: death row inmates convicted on false evidence, children sentenced to life in prison, and Black men and women trapped inside systems that confuse punishment with justice.

In Just Mercy, Stevenson tells the story of Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, and exposes the structures that make outcomes like his possible.

This is not a book about individual bad actors, it is a book about systems. Systems that determine whose innocence is presumed, whose fear is considered reasonable, and whose humanity is negotiable.

If you’ve been following our recent analysis on Karmelo Anthony, Breonna Taylor, and the question of who receives the benefit of the doubt, Just Mercy provides the historical and structural context. Bryan Stevenson doesn’t ask readers to be comfortable, he asks them to be honest.

Who should read this?

Anyone seeking to understand the relationship between race and the legal system.

Anyone questioning whether injustice is an anomaly or a feature.

Anyone ready to move beyond outrage and into structural understanding.

This is part of our Unmuted Reads series, where we feature books that deepen our understanding of Black wealth, power, justice, and legacy.

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On June 9th, Karmelo Anthony was found guilty of murder. Anthony was 17 years old when he attended a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. During a confrontation, Austin Metcalf pushed him after telling him to leave a tent he had entered to get out of the rain. Witnesses testified that the confrontation lasted several minutes.

Anthony’s defense team argued that he acted out of fear after being physically confronted. The jury rejected that argument and found him guilty of murder after approximately three hours of deliberation. That outcome raises a question, not simply about Karmelo Anthony, but about self-defense. Who gets to claim it, believed when they do, and what happens when a Black person says, “I was afraid”? Because we’ve seen other cases.

Trayvon Martin was walking home from a convenience store when George Zimmerman followed him, confronted him, and ultimately shot him. Zimmerman argued self-defense. A jury found him not guilty.

Breonna Taylor was asleep in her apartment when police officers executed a no-knock warrant and fired multiple rounds into her home. No officer was charged with homicide in her death.

Just days ago, Rick Chow was acquitted in the shooting death of Cyrus Carmack-Belton after claiming he believed a theft had occurred.

Different states, circumstances, and defendants. Each case raises the same underlying question, whose fear is considered reasonable? When others claim they acted because they felt threatened, endangered, or afraid, the legal system often spends considerable time examining those claims. What happens when the person claiming fear is Black? What happens when the person who survives the encounter is not the one the system instinctively identifies as the victim?

These questions are larger than one verdict. They force us to examine how race shapes our understanding of threat, innocence, fear, and protection; because self-defense is not just a legal argument, It’s a social one. It depends on who the public sees as dangerous, who the jury sees as credible, who the system believes has a right to be afraid.

Follow for structural analysis of the issues shaping Black communities.

We think. We be.

On June 9, 2026, Karmelo Anthony was found guilty of murder. Anthony was 17 years old when he attended a high school track meet in Frisco, Texas. During a confrontation, Austin Metcalf pushed him after telling him to leave a tent he had entered to get out of the rain. Witnesses testified that the confrontation lasted several minutes.

Anthony’s defense team argued that he acted out of fear after being physically confronted. The jury rejected that argument and found him guilty of murder after approximately three hours of deliberation.

That outcome raises a question. Not simply about Karmelo Anthony, but about self-defense. Who gets to claim it, believed when they do, and what happens when a Black person says, “I was afraid”? Because we’ve seen other cases.

Trayvon Martin was walking home from a convenience store when George Zimmerman followed him, confronted him, and ultimately shot him. Zimmerman argued self-defense. A jury found him not guilty.

Just days ago, Rick Chow was acquitted in the shooting death of Cyrus Carmack-Belton after claiming he believed a theft had occurred.

Different states, circumstances, and defendants. But each case raises the same underlying question, Whose fear is considered reasonable, and what happens when the person claiming fear is Black? What happens when the person saying, “I thought I was in danger,” is a Black teenager? What happens when the person who survives the encounter is not the one the system instinctively identifies as the victim? These questions are larger than one verdict.

They force us to examine how race shapes our understanding of threat, innocence, fear, and protection; because self-defense is not just a legal argument, It is a social one. It depends on who the public sees as dangerous, who the jury sees as credible, who the system believes has a right to be afraid.

The question isn’t whether every case is identical; it’s why some claims of fear are more readily accepted than others, and until we can answer that honestly, the debate surrounding self-defense in America will remain incomplete.

Follow for structural analysis of the issues shaping Black communities.

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