Black people can’t afford to wait for the government to improve our quality of life. We have to save ourselves.
Seventy-four percent of Black voters say President Trump’s policies are making them financially worse off, and the federal government keeps giving Black folks fresh reasons not to expect help.
Eighty-six percent disapprove of how he’s handling inflation and prices. For Black Houstonians under 40 already stretched by rising grocery bills, tariff-driven price hikes, and a student loan system in chaos, those numbers aren’t abstract. There’s a gap between rent and groceries this month.
The federal government has spent the past year and a half widening that gap. The “Black Lives Matter” mural near the White House was painted over this spring after a congressional bill threatened to cut D.C.’s federal funding if it remained. A March executive order accused the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture of pushing a “race-centered ideology,” triggering a review of its exhibits.
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The Department of Education spent months pressuring colleges to drop diversity programs or risk losing federal dollars, even as it redirected funding toward HBCUs with one hand while cutting hundreds of millions from other minority-serving institutions with the other. And as of July 1, more than 7 million student loan borrowers on the SAVE plan received a formal notice that their forbearance is ending, with payments resuming as early as this fall, often higher than before.
None of this is new to Black America. It’s the same arithmetic our ancestors did when they realized the people in power weren’t coming to save them.
Booker T. Washington built his entire philosophy around the concept of saving ourselves. He pushed vocational training and Black-owned enterprise not because he trusted the system to open its doors, but because he didn’t. Marcus Garvey took it further, arguing that Black communities needed their own institutions and an economy, separate and self-sustaining. And when even the integrationists grew impatient, a young John Lewis argued the same point from a different angle that justice delayed by courts and legislatures was justice that Black people couldn’t afford to wait for.
That history matters now because America is living a modern version of the same choice. Waiting for Washington to reverse course on everything they’ve fumbled is a dream at this point.
So what does community-level economic survival look like here? It starts with where dollars actually go. Houston has Black-owned credit unions and lending circles that keep money circulating in neighborhoods like Acres Homes, Sunnyside, and Fifth Ward, rather than leaving them. Local mutual aid networks have stepped up where SNAP and housing assistance have gotten more uncertain. Black-owned grocers and farmers, the same ones absorbing tariff-driven cost increases, deserve the dollars people already spend on food.
It also means building financial literacy block by block, the way certified public accountants and financial educators have been doing through free budgeting workshops around the SAVE plan’s end and income-driven repayment alternatives before the deadline hits.
And it means showing up at the ballot box in 2026. Midterm turnout among Black voters under 40 has historically lagged presidential-year numbers, even though midterms decide the school boards and county officials who control local funding.
Houston doesn’t need to wait for that history to repeat itself before it acts. The same instinct that built those institutions is what gets Black Houstonians through this moment. Take care of your own, because waiting has never been the strategy that worked.
