Why Black Americans Need to Be Their Brother's Keeper Our people say, when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion. And so we return to the beginning, to unravel the truth. For as they say, what is possible must first be imagined. But what if we don't have to imagine, what if all it takes to come alive is to observe, an unlikely small specimen of creeping creatures… the soldier ants. “Soldier ants come out during the worst periods—the rainy seasons…” This is when the colony is most vulnerable—when the earth trembles under the weight of torrential rains, when muddy floods threaten to swallow homes, when enemies both small and large exploit the chaos to strike. It is in these darkest hours that the soldier ants emerge. Not to flee. Not to hide. But to fight. Each soldier ant has a purpose. Not for itself, but for the colony. It does not ask why. It does not wait to be told. The survival of the whole is the survival of the one. The mission is simple: protect the queen, guard the young, hold the line. If death comes, then death comes. Another will take its place. Because the colony must live. Compare this to the plight of Black Americans—scattered in a society that too often rains down injustice, floods neighborhoods with poverty, and scorches opportunity under a blinding, unrelenting sun of systemic inequality. The dangers are real: mass incarceration, police brutality, economic marginalization, educational neglect, internal division. Like soldier ants, Black Americans face extermination from many directions. The system: like careless feet crushing an anthill, systems of oppression break homes, erase futures, and rewrite histories. Runoff water: just like how flash floods can drown an entire colony, so too do drugs, crime, and economic instability drown communities already standing on brittle ground. Predators: the ants fight off insects many times their size—like how Black communities must confront racism and state violence embedded in institutions with far more power. But here lies the difference: soldier ants do not turn on each other. In the face of annihilation, they close ranks. The strong form barricades for the weak. They lift each other when one falters. No ant abandons its duty. No soldier ant feeds off the downfall of another. It is this unity that is their greatest shield—not size, not strength—but collective will. Black Americans have survived the middle passage, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and mass incarceration. But the next evolution must come from within. Until we stop tearing one another down at the first mistake… Until we stop seeing success as competition instead of confirmation… Until we are willing to lay down ego to lift up the broken… Until we become our brother’s keeper, our sister’s defender, our children’s wall and weapon— We will remain vulnerable. Because just like the soldier ant, the only true protection in a hostile world is unity. An African proverb says: So too must Black Americans bind themselves to one another—thread by thread, life by life—until they become unbreakable. The future of the colony depends on it.