The National Urban League’s 2025 State of Black America report is polished, passionate, and packed with urgency. It warns of voting rights rollbacks, the dismantling of DEI, cutbacks to civil rights enforcement, and worsening housing inequality. These are real issues that deserve attention. But the problem is not what the report identifies — it’s what it prescribes. The solutions it offers keep us dependent on the same political and corporate structures that have failed us for generations.
This is the central argument of my book Emotional Politics, Logical Failure: too often, we mistake access for power, representation for ownership, and inclusion for independence. We spend our energy trying to preserve what was granted to us instead of building what we control.
Even in the report’s discussions of business, technology, and entrepreneurship, the framework is one of permission and inclusion, not sovereignty. Access to capital is envisioned through corporate loan programs and government grants. Opportunities in technology are about being hired into someone else’s company or admitted into their STEM pipeline. Business procurement is dependent on whether major corporations decide to diversify their supplier lists. That is not independence; it is conditional access. And conditional access means the same hand that gives can just as easily take away.
One telling example is the report’s casual use of the term “woke” in framing political and cultural battles. This word was born in the Black community as a warning to stay conscious of systemic injustice. It was ours — a part of our cultural lexicon. But over time, white liberals mainstreamed it, corporate America commodified it, and political opponents weaponized it. For a legacy Black organization like the Urban League to use “woke” without reclaiming its original meaning signals something deeper: we’ve surrendered control of our own language. It shows how easily our cultural tools can be repurposed to fit the priorities of a liberal donor class, adopting their framing rather than defending ours. When you lose the language, you lose the power to define the struggle.
The report also frames the political struggle almost entirely as a battle against Republicans. That framing may stir emotions, but it deliberately ignores the failures of Democratic leadership in blue states, which have overseen decades of housing segregation, school failure, and economic disinvestment in Black communities. By refusing to hold both sides accountable, the Urban League reinforces a cycle of loyalty without results.
Strip away the rhetoric, and what’s left is a blueprint for managed dependence: jobs instead of ownership, access instead of control, and federal oversight instead of community self-governance. If all our “progress” rests on court rulings, election results, or corporate goodwill, then it is not progress at all — it is permission. And permission can be revoked the moment the political winds change.
The scoreboard tells the truth. By every serious measure — wealth, homeownership, educational outcomes, and business ownership — Black America is not closing the gap. Representation without economic power is cosmetic. Access without control is unstable. The Urban League’s vision is about defending our place within a system we do not own, while true power lies in building systems that are ours outright.
The Urban League’s legacy is significant, and its defense of civil rights matters. But defending is not the same as building. Their report offers a path to greater comfort in captivity, not a roadmap to freedom. We must stop confusing survival with power. Until we own the tables we sit at, control the industries we work in, and write the policies we live under, the “state” of Black America will always be decided by someone else’s mercy.
That is not liberation. That is management. And it’s long past time we stopped settling for it.
