Who gets the priority? Black Americans gave the votes. The record shows who got the benefits.

Disclosure: This is an opinion column by Len Bagley, founder of Bagley Enterprises, which owns True News, and deputy chief minister of PAAN Ministry. True News has no political affiliation and endorses no party or candidate. The facts below are sourced; the conclusions are his.

In 1964, in "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X counted the seats. The Democrats held two-thirds of the House and two-thirds of the Senate, and Black voters had helped put them there. Then he asked the question that still has no good answer: "Why can't they pass something that will help you and me?"

Sixty-two years later, Black Americans are still the most loyal voters the Democratic Party has. Election after election, we deliver the large majority of our votes. Loyalty like that should be returned. The record says it has not been. We have been counted on, and too often taken for granted.

What they told us

In December 2009, when members of the Congressional Black Caucus said the administration was doing too little for Black Americans in the recession, President Barack Obama answered on American Urban Radio Networks that he could not pass laws that say "I'm just helping black folks," because he was president of the whole country. In August 2012 he told Black Enterprise: "I'm not the president of black America. I'm the president of the United States of America."

Those words drew a line: no laws aimed at the people who had just voted for him in record numbers. Keep that line in mind, because the record shows it was not drawn for everyone.

Who is targeted, and who gets protected

Year after year, the FBI's own hate-crime statistics show that Black Americans are the largest single target of race-based hate crimes. That is true even in years when the total falls.

In 2021, after a rise in attacks on Asian Americans during the pandemic, Congress passed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act with large bipartisan majorities. It was signed in May 2021, about two months after it was introduced in the Senate. Good. Every American deserves that protection.

But compare. Federal anti-lynching legislation was first introduced in 1900. Congress failed to pass it roughly 200 times. It took 122 years, until March 2022, for the Emmett Till Antilynching Act to become law. Two months for one group. A hundred and twenty-two years for us. That is not a matter of opinion. It is the record.

Who benefits from our exclusion

Here is the part that is rarely said out loud. Black Americans were excluded, by law and by practice, for generations: from land, from housing, from credit, from schools, from the protections other Americans took for granted. The civil-rights laws and the race-conscious remedies of the 1960s were won by our struggle and justified by that history. Then the door we pushed open was held for others to walk through first.

• At selective American colleges, where race-conscious admissions existed to repair the exclusion of Black Americans, a 2007 study by Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey and colleagues found that 27 percent of Black freshmen were immigrants or the children of immigrants, more than double their 13 percent share of Black young adults. At Columbia, Princeton, Penn and Yale, the share was 40.6 percent.

• New York City reported spending about $4.9 billion on the arriving migrants by mid-2024, nearly $2 billion of it on housing, with projections above $10 billion. The money was found in months, in the same cities where Black families wait years for housing help.

• California extended its state-funded Medi-Cal health coverage to undocumented adults; about 1.6 million were covered before the state froze new adult enrollment in January 2026 because the cost ran billions over projections.

• Arriving refugees receive federal cash and medical assistance when they arrive.

I do not blame any family for taking help that is offered. My point is about priority. Our exclusion created the debt and the remedies, and others have been first in line to collect on them, while the descendants of the people who were enslaved here are still fighting for the same housing, health care and education.

What the words were changed to

Start with what the Europeans who arrived here actually wrote. The Spanish and Portuguese records of the 1500s and 1600s describe the people they found on this land as black, dark, tawny and Moorish, and name them "negros de la tierra" and "negros da terra": the Negroes of the land. Not "Native American." Not "African American." Neither of those labels existed for them.

"Native American" has a history of its own. Before it became a government label, it was the name of a political party. The Native American Party, organized nationally in 1845 and the forerunner of the Know-Nothings, used "native American" to mean white, Protestant, native-born citizens, and fought to keep immigrants out of office. It was strong right here in Philadelphia, where nativist riots broke out in 1844. Only in the 1960s and 1970s did the federal government take up "Native American" as the name of a legal category, built around the tribes it chooses to recognize. That category is a creation of government. It is not the same thing as the aboriginal people the contact records describe. "African American" was popularized in the late 1980s.

Look at how the government decided who counted. Between 1898 and 1914, the Dawes Commission enrolled the Five Tribes of Indian Territory, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. The National Archives lists the categories on those final rolls: "Citizens by blood," "Freedmen," and "Intermarried White." White people who married in were enrolled as citizens. People recorded with "Negro blood" were put on the Freedmen rolls, with no Indian blood degree written down, even when their parents were Indian. In the words of the Oklahoma Historical Society: "Mixed-blood Black Indians were all enrolled as Freedmen with no Indian blood." Membership in those nations today is traced through the by-blood rolls. In 2007 the Cherokee Nation voted to remove the descendants of its Freedmen; a federal court restored their citizenship only in 2017.

Now follow the logic. The first records called the people of this land "Negroes": the Negroes of the land. So when the government went looking for "Negro blood" and removed it from the Indian rolls, it was not removing outsiders. It was removing the very people its own first records described. Those people, under the label "Negro," were the ones held in slavery, and their descendants were recorded as colored, then Black, then African American. The ones who remained on the government's lists became the federally recognized tribes.

And what was "Indian" by then? In 1854, in People v. Hall, the California Supreme Court threw out the testimony of Chinese witnesses against a white man under a law that barred "Black or Mulatto" persons and Indians from testifying. Its reasoning went back to Columbus, who thought he had reached Asia: ever since, the court wrote, "the American Indians and the Mongolian, or Asiatic, were regarded as the same type," so the name "Indian" covered "the whole of the Mongolian race." And in any case, the court said, "black" meant anyone who was not white. With that ruling, "Indian" stopped being the name of a people and became an open box, defined by theory instead of by the record of who was here.

That is why no one can answer a simple question: what is a full-blooded Native American? The people the first records named were written out by one label, and the category left behind was opened to anyone a court's theory placed inside it.

In May 2016, President Obama signed H.R. 4238, which struck "Negro" from two federal laws and replaced it with "African American," and replaced "American Indian" with "Native American." It was sold as modernizing the language. It did more than that. "Negro" was the word on the census, the court records and the civil-rights laws, and before them, in the contact-era records, it named people who belonged to this land. Replacing it with "African American" wrote a single foreign origin into federal law for a population whose origins, as my own research documents, have never been tested.

What my research documents

My research documents that a large, dark-skinned population was living on this land when the Europeans arrived, and that it was enslaved, reclassified on paper and replaced in the record by others. Its descendants were then made United States citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Nobody asked them. It was done to a people just coming out of bondage, under duress, with their prior status already erased. Citizenship was imposed, not chosen. Then, for generations, we were reclassified, miseducated, and taught to believe we are foreigners on our own land.

That is why this cannot stay a civil-rights question. Malcolm X said so in the same 1964 speech: "We need to expand the civil-rights struggle to a higher level--to the level of human rights. Whenever you are in a civil-rights struggle, whether you know it or not, you are confining yourself to the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam." A civil-rights claim asks the same government that did the reclassifying to judge its own case, and to decide whether to hear it at all. The law has an old principle against exactly that: no one may be a judge in his own case. When the accused holds the power to close the case without hearing it, only the accused benefits.

So the case belongs before international human-rights bodies, and that is where I have taken it: to the United Nations Permanent Forum on People of African Descent, where our written submission is now filed for its next session, and to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has not answered in a year. It also belongs before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the international body where people can petition against the United States itself.

From the plantation to the prison

The Thirteenth Amendment did not end slavery for everyone. It ended it "except as a punishment for crime." The South used that exception at once. The Black Codes made unemployment a crime, called "vagrancy," and states leased the people they convicted to plantations, railroads and mines, which paid the state and paid the prisoners nothing. In 1871 Virginia's highest court said it plainly: a convicted prisoner was "a slave of the State."

That door was never closed. Today Black adults are imprisoned at about five times the rate of white adults: 1,218 per 100,000 against 231, by the Justice Department's count for 2023. Black Americans are about one in eight Americans but 32 percent of the people serving prison sentences.

It is not because we commit more crime. The ACLU found that Black people were 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession, even though both use marijuana at about the same rate. From 1986, federal law punished crack cocaine, the form found in Black neighborhoods, 100 times more harshly than powder cocaine; Congress cut that to 18 to 1 in 2010, and it still stands. In my view, a prison system that was born from the slavery exception and is filled this way is filled by design.

Who has standing

The debt is specific. It is owed for slavery in the United States and for the century of legal discrimination that followed. That debt has a lineage, and it is ours.

Barack Obama is the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother from Kansas. That does not make him any less legitimate as a president. It does mean that the debt owed for American slavery is not his family's history, and it was never realistic to expect him to carry it the way a descendant would.

The same is true of everyone whose family arrived after that system was built, whether in 1900, after the 1965 immigration law, or last year. They are free to live, work and prosper here. But they did not pay this debt, and they should not be the ones deciding what we are owed, or arguing against it. The people whose ancestors paid the longest and heaviest price have the first and strongest claim to say what repair looks like.

Follow the money

The cleanest test of any party's priorities is who funds its politicians and what those politicians deliver. That is why True News publishes the Follow the Money series, which puts FEC filings and voting records side by side. Its next part, coming this week, lists from the FEC's own records every candidate funded this election by AIPAC and its super PAC, and by the other most powerful groups in American politics, from the realtors and the unions to the Senate and crypto super PACs. Look at who pays for the campaigns, then look at whose bills pass.

This is not a call to switch parties. It is a call to stop giving loyalty that is not returned. Malcolm X set the standard in 1964: count the seats, count the votes, count what was delivered. Then keep asking, of every party, until the record changes.

Originally published by True News: https://truenews.bagleyenterprises.net/stories/240