Hicks is the founder and president of the AfricaLogical Institute and alumnus of Bridge Alliance's Master Mind Cohort.
The AfricaLogical Institute is a group of researchers and scholar-activists who provide thought partnership opportunites to individuals and organizations seeking positive change. We are social scientists – ethnographers by training – who perform the function of educated and experienced “people watchers.” One project our firm is currently leading is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-commissioned Health Equity Study. This action-oriented, community-based research initiative exists to ameliorate racial health disparities.
As a part of Team Indiana, we are working in urban areas throughout five cities in the Hoosier State. Our action-oriented research seeks to learn from and alert for better health awareness and create an advocacy network to provide appropriate diverse perspectives to the Indiana General Assembly and the state Family and Social Services Administration to develop and/or change laws. In a study published in 2019, we made 11 recommendations to them and others for improving a leading provider of Indiana Medicaid, HIP - The Healthy Indiana Plan.
We believe the recommendations deriving from our 2019 “HIP Study” were impactful, as they were foundational for the more prodigious Health Equity Study we are conducting now. Accordingly, the current Robert Wood Johnson Foundation study includes conducting semi-structured interviews with community members and creating a network across Indiana that united on the need to change laws, policies and procedures to improve community quality of life and health outcomes.
In developing the application for the foundation, I began promoting the term "community valued research." This approach to research does not simply seek to siphon input and data out of the community. It seeks to prevail as a primary methodological aim and study goal, placing resources, funded programming and investment dollars in the community.
Here, the community serves as the expert, and the Community Leadership Board is a diverse group of “co-conspirators” who work to make data-driven demands in the 2024 legislative session for specific changes to improve community health. Our Community Leadership Board has walked in step with us in developing and implementing this study that seeks to identify and make recommendations for eliminating racial and structural barriers that hinder proportionate quality of life in Indiana.
Precisely defined, a community-valued approach:
- Is signified by honoring community members as the experts. Our recommendations were based on community input and intentionally challenging the Flint, Mich., community to work on “clarion goals” that address their expressed community needs. We also clearly challenging elected and natural community leadership to lead.
- Insists that natural resources investments, funding for programming and other clearly defined avenues for money to get to the community are imaginable and clear and articulable study goals. Scholar activism, the backbone of AfricaLogical Institute Research, as defined internally, is only as valuable as it is actionable, feasible, and easily usable in our community for progress.
One of the best ways to account for change is by observing and measuring the impact as policy, law, procedures, rules and regulations are created or revised. In other words, it’s real when it’s written. Our macro-recommendation for the Flint community was to be intentional and unified in their pursuit of public policy change. We were careful, however, to insist that not even changing laws “sticks” in the politics of our day. We must ensure that laws are passed and that budget dollars are attached to revised regulations.
Gwendolyn Kelley, senior vice president for research design and development at the AfricaLogical Institute, shares: “There are too many laws that are good ideas that would help those who need help most, if only there were dollars attached to these potentially impactful laws that are passed with good intent.”
Finally, briefly, a third tenet of community valued research, as we observe it in its embryonic stage, should insist on evaluating existing and producing reformative, imaginative, intentional, and honest budgets. Community research in general, and certainly community valued research, should have a grand justification if budgets are not proportionate. We suggest starting at 50/50 and working the numbers from there. Community researchers working with institutions should insist that negotiated budgets reflect the community's contribution to the data outcomes needed and anticipated – especially in a community-oriented research project.
Another overwhelming tenet of community valued research could be the clear imperative that through methodological intent and resolve, research is designed and conducted to, in some empirical way, disrupt dysfunction.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.