AT&T Promised Us $10 Million — Then Sold Us Out for a Billion

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Yesterday I was standing in front of AT&T headquarters in Dallas, 10,000 signatures in my hand, asking one company to reinstate the very initiatives that once gave my community inclusivity, resources, access, and opportunity. I need y’all to sit with the geography of that for a second, because this is the same building, the same brand, the same gold-and-blue letterhead that less than five years ago looked Black America dead in the eye during the summer of 2020 and said we see you, we hear you, we’re committing $10 million to you. Then it folded. The receipt is public: on July 30, 2020, AT&T announced an additional $10 million to create economic opportunity in Black and underserved communities, stacked on top of a claimed $215 million over the prior five years, and the press releases were warm, the language was tender, the photo ops were plentiful. Crazy how the same company that wanted all that political capital in 2020 is now writing letters to the federal government bragging that it does not and will not have a single role focused on DEI. Two things can be true: the 2020 statement was real ink on real paper, and it was always temporary, always performative, always a lease the community was never going to be allowed to renew.The Receipts: $10 Million Then, a Letter to Carr NowHere’s the part the press release won’t tell you. In November 2024 AT&T agreed to buy roughly a billion dollars in wireless spectrum licenses from U.S. Cellular — a $1.02 billion deal that cannot close without the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission — and the FCC under this administration has made the terms of that blessing crystal clear: end your DEI, in substance and not just in name, and we’ll talk about your spectrum. So in December 2025 AT&T’s general counsel sent a letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr memorializing exactly that, no roles focused on DEI, no diversity training, merit and merit alone. For the folks in the back: that is not a change of heart, that is a transaction. AT&T did not discover a new moral principle; it discovered a billion-dollar incentive.Let me correct the record before somebody clips this and runs with it — AT&T was not even the first telecom to fold. Verizon ended its DEI program in May 2025 to clear a $20 billion fiber deal; T-Mobile folded in July 2025 to clear its own mergers; AT&T came in December, last in line, which somehow makes it worse, because AT&T watched the price of admission, counted the cost, and paid it anyway.Now AT&T says the new standard is “merit-based,” and I want us to name what that word is doing, because claimed neutrality is never neutral; it is a position wearing a lab coat. Apply Charles Mills here: Mills taught us that the social contract was always a racial contract, that the supposedly neutral, colorblind rules were authored by and for a specific group while presenting themselves as the view from nowhere. When a company that built its diversity numbers through decades of deliberate effort suddenly announces that merit will now sort everything fairly, it is not removing a thumb from the scale; it is pretending the scale was never tilted, that the field was always level, that history started this morning. Two roles: what AT&T says is “we treat everyone the same.” What the position structurally does is freeze in place every advantage the old, openly discriminatory system already distributed. This means the merit story is wrong on its own terms, because there is no merit measured outside of history.Who Decides Your Internet?So who is holding the dial? His name is Brendan Carr — not Brandon, Brendan, get it right for the citation — and he is not a neutral referee who wandered into this job. Carr wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for this presidency, and then he was handed the chairmanship of the exact agency he wrote the chapter about. As a former English teacher I have to give the author credit for his work: you wrote the assignment, you got the grade, you got the desk. Carr’s FCC has opened investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, and NPR, has threatened broadcast licenses, and oversees the telecom giants — AT&T among them — that route your call, your data, your access. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, was written precisely to stop this kind of concentrated control over the arteries of American commerce and communication, and somewhere John Sherman is rolling over in his grave, because the agency built to keep the wire fair is now being used to decide whose speech the wire will carry.And here is the tell. You don’t have to take my word, or some outside critic’s word, that the FCC is being weaponized — the warning came from inside the agency itself. In May 2026, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, sent a letter to Disney’s CEO describing what the company was facing not as a string of coincidences but as a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.” Like that judge told my cousin at sentencing — we have to acknowledge the accessory. The call came from inside the house, y’all. Here’s the quick timing for the receipts: after the White House made its displeasure with Jimmy Kimmel loud, Carr’s FCC moved on ABC’s licenses within a day, and the Brookings Institution, no radical outfit, called this not deregulation but heavy-handed regulation, an agency expanding its reach to punish content it dislikes.Then watch what he did with Disney’s DEI. Carr opened a probe in March 2025 even though Disney had already walked back its diversity programs the month before — ended “Reimagine Tomorrow,” renamed the metrics, shortened the content advisories — and Carr admitted in writing that he’d seen the rollback and pressed anyway. That is the boot coming down on a neck that had already gone limp. Every accusation is a confession: an administration that screams “censorship” is running the most documented censorship campaign against the American press in modern memory.Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room while we’re here. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being played on American soil right now, and it is nothing but diversity, equity, and inclusion in motion — every continent, every language, every shade of human being on one field — and these same institutions will profit off that spectacle of difference all summer while telling the rest of us that diversity is discrimination the moment it shows up as a hiring goal or a community grant. They’ll sell you the jersey; they just won’t share the table. This is where I run the Gil Scott-Heron move, because in “Whitey on the Moon” he set the nation’s lavish spending right next to Black material neglect to expose the lie of priorities, and the same arithmetic applies here: a billion dollars is available for spectrum, and no DEI for you; a quarter-billion was available for warm 2020 statements, and a boot for you in 2025; there is always money for the merger and never money for the people the merger displaces.From Ma Bell to the Boardroom: Who Has Always Owned the WireTo understand this moment you have to understand that the question “who decides your internet” is just the newest version of a very old American question: who owns the means of speaking to each other? AT&T is not a young company stumbling into politics; it is the direct descendant of the Bell System, the telephone monopoly so total that the federal government broke it up in 1984, splitting Ma Bell into the regional Baby Bells precisely because one company controlling the nation’s communication was understood as a danger to democracy itself. The Communications Act of 1934 created the FCC and, crucially, established the idea of common carriage — the principle that the company carrying your speech cannot discriminate in what it carries — and for decades the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present controversial issues with some balance, until it was repealed in 1987 and the road opened for exactly the kind of one-sided, weaponized media environment we’re litigating today.Apply Cedric Robinson here, because in Black Marxism Robinson showed that capitalism did not emerge as a colorblind system that later picked up racism as a bad habit; it was racial from the jump — racial capitalism — meaning the extraction of value has always run on racial hierarchy. The wire was never neutral. The same infrastructure that connected white suburban America was redlined out of Black neighborhoods, the same logic that made Black labor cheap made Black communication optional, and the “digital divide” is not a glitch in the system but the system doing exactly what it was built to do. Saidiya Hartman calls this the afterlife of slavery — the way the racial calculus of bondage keeps reproducing itself in new institutional forms — and the broadband map of America is one of its most precise portraits.Here is where I hold two frameworks at once, the way I always tell y’all to. From a Black Marxist lens, the 2020 pledges and the 2025 reversals are both rational moves by capital — invest in Black goodwill when it’s profitable, divest when it’s costly — but Frank Wilderson and the Afropessimists push us further, and we have to sit in the discomfort of it: the Black position is structurally fungible, available to be acquired, leveraged, and discarded according to a logic that was never about Black thriving in the first place. The $10 million was never a relationship; it was a line item. Hortense Spillers teaches the distinction between the body and the flesh — the flesh being that which can be marked, moved, and monetized without consent — and a community reduced to a quarterly diversity statistic is being treated as flesh, as a number on a ledger that can be added in a good PR year and erased the moment a billion-dollar deal needs clearing. Afropessimism is descriptive, not a prescription for despair; it is a flashlight, and what it illuminates here is that any promise extended to Black people by an institution structured on antiblackness was always conditional, always revocable, always written in pencil.The Hidden Curriculum of the Dial ToneNow let’s bring it to the classroom, because the people who control the wire are quietly writing a lesson plan for every child in this country. During the pandemic AT&T itself announced a separate $10 million commitment to close the “homework gap,” acknowledging in its own press release that the lack of home internet disproportionately hit Black students, students with disabilities, and students in under-resourced neighborhoods — one in three students of color on the wrong side of the divide. Hold that admission next to the retreat. When a telecom giant ends its equity commitments to clear a merger, the bill does not land in the boardroom; it lands in a kid’s bedroom where the wifi doesn’t reach, on a grandmother’s kitchen table where the hotspot ran out, in the gap between the student who can join the class and the student who can only watch it buffer.Paulo Freire warned us that education is never neutral — it either functions as the practice of freedom or as an instrument of domination — and infrastructure is the most invisible curriculum of all, because it teaches before a single teacher speaks: it teaches some children that the network was built for them and others that they are guests on it, lucky to be let in, easy to be cut off. bell hooks called the classroom the most radical space of possibility, but you cannot enter the radical classroom if you cannot reach it, and access is not a footnote to learning — access is the precondition. The hidden curriculum of the dial tone is a lesson in who counts, and when AT&T folds its equity work, that lesson gets taught in every household on the margins, no syllabus required.The Ledger Where Black Women LiveLastly, and this is non-negotiable for me on every single piece I make: who actually pays when DEI dies? Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us intersectionality precisely so we’d stop analyzing race and gender as separate lanes and start seeing the intersection where Black women stand, getting hit from both directions by traffic that single-axis analysis can’t even see. Apply it here. When AT&T dissolves its diversity hiring, its employee resource groups, and its supplier diversity commitments, the person at the sharpest point of that loss is disproportionately a Black woman — the Black woman manager whose pipeline just got quietly capped, the Black-woman-owned vendor whose contract just lost its rationale, the Black woman head of household for whom the digital divide is not abstract because she is the one budgeting whether the data plan or the light bill gets paid this month.The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everyone would be free, because our freedom would require the destruction of all the systems of oppression at once — and the inverse is the warning: when Black women’s material conditions are the first sacrificed, it signals the whole structure is sliding. Moya Bailey named misogynoir to describe the specific contempt aimed at Black women, and you see its quiet form in a “merit” standard that treats the very people who had to be twice as qualified to get in the door as the suspicious beneficiaries of unfair advantage. Angela Davis reminds us these are not separate fights — labor, race, gender, and the carceral state are one knot — and the supplier-diversity contract canceled in a Dallas boardroom is tied to the homework gap in a child’s bedroom is tied to the spectrum deal in a federal filing. Having the luxury to treat “the end of DEI” as an abstract policy debate is itself a sign of how far you stand from the intersection where the bill actually comes due.Closing the LoopSo let me close the loop back to where I started, in front of that building in Dallas with 10,000 signatures. The Color of Change petition I helped deliver is not just a petition; it is direct action aimed at telecom policy and at a corporate accountability that is evaporating in real time, that some of us would argue was never really there in the first place. AT&T wants to profit from the history of this country while quietly shaping the rules of your connection, and the question on the table is the one Anna Gomez asked from inside the house and the one I’m asking from outside it: who decides your internet, and who decided you didn’t get a say? The answer they’re betting on is nobody, that we’ll be lost in the sauce, that we’ll accept the $10 million memory and the boot that replaced it. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: we are going to keep the receipts, keep the names spelled right, keep showing up at the headquarters, and keep teaching the history they’re paying to erase. Because liberalism is a hell of a drug, and the cure is an organized, educated, unbought community. Research over MeSearch.5 Key Takeaways* The promise was always revocable. AT&T’s 2020 $10M Black-community pledge and its 2025 letter ending DEI aren’t a contradiction — they’re the same logic of racial capitalism: invest when Black goodwill is profitable, divest when it’s costly. We were a line item, not a relationship.* It was a transaction, not a conversion. AT&T’s reversal is tied to FCC approval of a $1.02B U.S. Cellular spectrum deal; the agency made ending DEI the price of admission. And AT&T was last — after Verizon (May 2025) and T-Mobile (July 2025) — not first.* The author is grading his own assignment. Brendan Carr wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025 and now chairs the FCC. His own Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, called the pattern a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.” Every accusation is a confession.* “Merit-based” is not neutral. Following Charles Mills, claimed colorblindness is a position that freezes existing advantage in place — the view from nowhere doing the work the old, openly discriminatory system used to do out loud.* The bill lands at the intersection. Per Crenshaw and Combahee, the first and sharpest costs of ending DEI fall on Black women — in hiring pipelines, supplier contracts, and the digital divide — and the homework gap in a child’s bedroom is tied to the spectrum deal in a federal filing.Become a Paid SubscriberFrom the broken-up Bell System to the broadband age, the people who control the wire have always decided whose voice carries and whose gets static — and right now a Project 2025 author is holding the dial. When AT&T can quietly trade a $10 million Black-community pledge for a billion-dollar spectrum deal, the only counterweight left is an independent press that answers to the community and not to the FCC.I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Related Readings / Annotated BibliographyTheory & the Black Radical Tradition* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The foundational text on racial capitalism — capitalism as racial from its origins, not by accident.* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Afropessimism (2020). The Black position as structurally fungible and available for gratuitous violence; descriptive, not prescriptive.* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2007). The “afterlife of slavery” — how the racial calculus of bondage reproduces in new institutional forms.* Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (1987). The body/flesh distinction; the captive reduced to that which can be marked and monetized.* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The “neutral” social contract as a racial contract; the view from nowhere as a position.Intersectionality, Black Feminism & Education* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The origin and elaboration of intersectionality.* The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). “If Black women were free, everyone would be free.”* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). The specific anti-Black-woman contempt and its digital life.* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class (1981). Labor, race, gender, and the carceral state as a single knot.* hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). The classroom as a radical space — if you can reach it.* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Education is never neutral: freedom or domination.Media, Telecom & the Digital Divide* Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). The supposedly neutral wire encoding old hierarchies.* Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010). The recurring cycle of communication monopoly — the Bell System as case study.* Pickard, Victor. Democracy Without Journalism? (2019). Why an independent, accountable press is structurally necessary, and what its retreat costs.Primary Documents (verify before citing)* AT&T press release, “AT&T Committing $10 Million to Economic Opportunity in Black and Underserved Communities” (PRNewswire, July 30, 2020).* AT&T letter to the FCC committing to end DEI-related policies (Dec. 2, 2025); reporting by Reuters / CNN / Fox Business.* FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, letter to Disney CEO re: DEI investigation (March 27, 2025).* FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro (May 11, 2026).* The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025), FCC chapter authored by Brendan Carr.* Brookings Institution, “Not ‘deregulation’ but heavy-handed regulation at the Trump FCC” (Feb. 25, 2025). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe