Op-Ed | “Run, Byron, Run!”

The president gave a Black man two words. This country has said those two words before.

Fourth and last in the four-part Florida governor series. Part one, “Twenty Years, One Chair,“ is how Florida got here. Part two, “The DeSantis Inheritance,“ is the record the next governor takes over. Part three, “The Field and the Data,“ is the candidates and the numbers. Part four, “Run, Byron, Run,“ is this reckoning on the Trump endorsement and what it means. A standalone companion, “First, and for Whom,“ keys in on Byron Donalds’s historic first and the full race breakdown. A note on language: this essay quotes song lyrics and spoken-word poetry by Black artists that use the n-word, rendered here as “n—-.“

“Light n—-, dark n—-, faux n—-, real n—-. Rich n—-, poor n—-, house n—-, field n—-. Still n—…. I’m not Black, I’m O.J. Okay.” Jay-Z, “The Story of O.J.,” 2017

On February 20, 2025, the president of the United States went on his social media platform and gave a Black man two words. “RUN, BYRON, RUN.” A complete and total endorsement, he said. Run, Byron, run.

I want to sit with those two words, because this country has said them before, and it did not mean what Trump means.

Run.

In the mouth of the master, that word was the starting gun of the hunt. Run, and the dogs are loosed. Run, and the patrol is behind you. My late friend, the poet Will “Da Real One,” built a whole spoken word around the command, and he called it what it was. Will “Da Real One” was my friend, and Miami knew him before the world did, a poet who could turn a room into a church and a wound into a witness. He is gone now, and I still hear him. Before I use his art to make a point about a politician, I want you to know he was a man first, my man, someone who loved this city and paid for that love the way our best ones so often do. So when I quote him, understand I am not borrowing a clever line. I am carrying a friend. In the piece, Will travels backward in time and keeps arriving at the crime scene. He is on the Underground Railroad beside Harriet Tubman, rubbing the clothes of a thousand slaves on his body to confuse the dogs’ scent, handing her a flashlight, and then he runs. He runs to Jackson, Mississippi, in June 1963, and he is in the bushes screaming at Medgar to look out. He runs to a Birmingham church basement in 1963 and cuts the wire to the box under the four little girls. He runs to the Audubon Ballroom in February 1965 to pull Malcolm from the guns, to the Lorraine Motel in April 1968 to catch the King, to a Las Vegas intersection in September 1996 for Tupac, to Atlanta for Biggie. And at every stop, the same voice comes from the dark. You’d better run. So he runs.

That is what “Run” has meant to us. It is the sound of Normandy, the way Killer Mike puts it, borrowing Dave Chappelle’s voice at the top of his song “RUN”: storming the beach, a man gets popped, another man goes, another man falls, and there is no rhyme or reason why it is not you on the ground, so you keep your feet under you and you keep moving. Run. It is the work song in “12 Years a Slave,” a rhythm to labor by and a warning in the same breath. For four hundred years, when America said run to a Black man, it was not an endorsement. It was a threat, a prophecy, and a leash.

And there is an older song underneath it all, the one the others are answering. “Run, N—-, Run” was not a metaphor. It was a real antebellum song, first documented before the Civil War, a slave-patrol chant about a Black body in flight and the white power that owned the chase, and in “12 Years a Slave,” it is sung not in rebellion but to taunt a captured Solomon Northup. Run, and the paddyrollers will catch you. That melody never fully left the American ear. So when the most powerful white man in the country looks at a Black man and posts RUN, BYRON, RUN in capital letters, I am not going to pretend I cannot hear what I hear. I am not saying he reached for that song on purpose. I am saying he did not have to. The country encoded it a long time ago, and the code still plays underneath the words, and a Black man is once again being told to run for the benefit and the amusement of the people who did the telling. The only thing new this time is that they are calling it an endorsement and asking him to say thank you.

So forgive me if I do not hear “RUN, BYRON, RUN” the way it was meant to be heard.

So sit in the collision with me. For four hundred years, when this country put the word run in front of a Black man, it was a threat and a starting gun. Run, and the dogs are loose. Run, and the beach is on fire. And now the most powerful white man in the country puts those same two words in front of a Black man’s name, and it is supposed to mean a blessing. Run, Byron, run. I do not say that to mock Byron Donalds. I say it because the word has a memory, and the memory does not clear just because the man saying it is smiling. When the master’s voice says run, a part of us still flinches, and it is worth asking why the person the word is aimed at does not.

Here is the seduction underneath it. Jay-Z named it in one line that has never stopped ringing. “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.” He is playing a man who believed the money and the fame and the acceptance had bought him out of his own skin, a man who ran so far and so fast into the house that he forgot he could still be sent back to the field. And Jay-Z gives the whole game away with the word he lets fall after it. “Okay.” Not a period. A puncture. The world says, “Okay, sure, you are not Black; you are O.J.,” right up until the day it decides to remind you, and then the reminder is total. There is a version of Byron Donalds that has run all the way into that house, that believes the endorsement is arrival, that the movement sees Byron, and no, as a Black man, it found useful. Okay.

Let me be fair to the man, because he deserves it and because the lazy version of this argument insults him. Byron Donald’s ambition is his own, earned, not handed to him. His conservatism may be entirely sincere. It is condescending, and I will not do it, to treat every Black Republican as a dupe who does not know his own mind. Grant all of that, at full strength. And then make the only turn that matters. Sincerity was never the question. The house does not need you to be a hypocrite. It only needs you to be useful. And, unlike belonging, usefulness comes with an expiration date you do not get to set.

They will tell you this is about a road bravely chosen. They will quote Frost: the road less traveled, the one that made all the difference. But read the poem again, and you find it is not the anthem people think it is. Frost’s traveler admits the two roads were worn “really about the same,” and that he will tell the story later “with a sigh,” dressing up an ordinary choice as destiny after the fact. That is the honest frame for the road Byron took. Not a brave path through the wilderness, but a well-worn road into a house that was always going to welcome a Black man who arrived useful, and a story he will one day have to tell himself about why.

And here is the cruelty the endorsement hides, the thing that turns this from a character study into a tragedy. The movement Byron is running for is the same movement that has spent a decade making his own people run. Run from the maps, redrawn to cut Black districts down to the last two. Run from the vote, thinned and challenged and diluted. Run from the state’s protection, as the offices that once caught us are being gutted one by one. Trump says run, Byron, run, and a Black man runs the race, for a movement whose Florida project has been to keep the rest of us running.

This is the miseducation Carter G. Woodson wrote about almost a hundred years ago, the training that teaches a man to seek the back door even when no one tells him to, that teaches him his own advancement runs through the service of the people who locked the front. Woodson said if you make a man believe he is inferior, you do not have to assign him to the back; he will find it on his own and build one if none exists. Byron Donalds found the door. He is running through it, and the country is cheering, and some of that cheer is real, and all of it is beside the point.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to, the whole heart of it. A movement can want everything you provide without wanting a single one of the people you come from. It can put your face on the podium and your policies on your neck at the same time. That does not belong. It is utility wearing belonging’s clothes, and the two feel identical right up until the day they do not. I have watched an institution love an individual exactly as long as the individual served the story the institution likes to tell about itself, and not one minute longer. The love was never for him. It was for what he let them believe about themselves. Byron should ask, while the cheering is loud, what exactly they are cheering for, because it is not him. It is what he lets them feel.

And you do not have to take my word for any of this, about utility and belonging and the house that does not want you, because his own party keeps proving it out loud. His most aggressive Republican rival in the primary he just won, the investor James Fishback, spent the race calling Byron Donalds a “slave” to his donors, mocking his name as “By’rone,” branding him a “DEI Republican,” and describing a Black vision for the state as “Section 8 ghetto.” He ran an ad whose entire premise was the sentence “Byron Donalds is Black.” Even David Jolly, the Democrat, called it plainly what it is: racist. And Fishback’s defense, that he is only judging Donalds by the content of his character, is the oldest trick there is, the smiling denial laid over the open wound.

Sit with that picture. A Black man runs for the highest office in Florida as the standard-bearer of a movement, and a white rival inside that same movement calls him a slave, mocks his name, and reduces his whole candidacy to the color of his skin. The movement mostly shrugs because it was never offended by the degradation. It was only ever using the man. This is not the opposition doing it to him. This is the house. The same house that posted RUN, BYRON, RUN is the house that also says By’rone, and enslaved person, and DEI, and it sees no contradiction, because to the house, those were never opposites. They are the same transaction. Run for us, and we will use you, and we will remind you what you are the moment you forget.

Because a governor is not a symbol, and this is where the two words finally land. A governor signs the budgets, draws the maps, and decides whether the state protects the vote or dismantles it. The test of a Black governor is not the color of the hand that signs the bill. It is what the bill does to Liberty City, Overtown, and Pahokee, and to the people who will feel the effects of his decisions long after the history-making photograph has yellowed. A first who governs against his own people is still governing against his own people. The pigment does not vote. The platform does.

So let me put my card on the table, as a man who has knocked on doors and loved this community my whole life. I am not telling anyone how to vote, and I am not calling Byron Donalds a sellout, because that word is too small and too cheap for what is actually happening here. I am asking him the oldest question in Black America, the one buried in Will’s whole poem, the one that runs under four hundred years of that command. When the master’s voice says run, run toward what, and run from whom? Byron is running as fast as any Black man in this country, and the country is calling it victory. I keep hearing my friend’s voice underneath it, and I want to know, before the history-making photograph yellows, whether the man in the frame has ever asked himself what he is running from. Run, Byron, run. We have heard those two words before. We know how the sentence usually ends. And Will, if you can hear this, I hope that where you are, nobody has to run anymore.

At the end of Will’s poem, after all the running, he finally reaches a place where he does not have to run anymore, and the relief in it is almost unbearable, because it only comes at the very end, after every hero is already gone. I keep thinking about that. Byron Donalds is running as fast as any Black man in America right now, and the country is calling it a victory. But you have to ask what he is running toward, and you have to ask what and who he is running away from. Run, Byron, run. We have heard those two words before. We know how the sentence usually ends.

Denzel D. Burnside III is a Miami-Dade native, a minister, and a former organizer and campaign manager. He is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Housing Table, a statewide housing coalition.

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