George Washington Bought Human Teeth. Obama Calls Him Great. I Got Questions.

Y’all know I watch these interviews so you don’t have to. On June 28, 2026, Barack Obama sat down with Michele Norris on MS NOW for a special tied to the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, ten days after the ribbon got cut in John Lewis Plaza, six days before this country throws itself a 250th birthday party. Timing matters, kinfolks. The semiquincentennial machine is running at full steam, the National Mall got a state fair on it, the flags are pressed, and into that moment the first Black president of the United States decided to hand the founding fathers a permission slip.Here is what he said, word for word, so nobody can say I’m putting words in the man’s mouth:It is possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder. And that does not negate his greatness. It simply acknowledges that there is a profound, deep flaw in these founding fathers, who were also geniuses and gave us these tools... which is true of all of us, right? It’s true of every president. We’re this mixed bag. We’ve got contradictions and embody the country’s contradictions.Now on the surface that sounds like the reasonable grown up in the room talking. It sounds like nuance. It sounds like the thing they teach you to say at a dinner party in Hyde Park. Peep the two roles frame I been teaching y’all from my debate days though: there is what a statement SAYS, and there is what a statement STRUCTURALLY DOES. What it says is, history is complicated. What it does is launder human trafficking into a personality flaw, the same way you’d say your uncle is a great man who just talks too loud at the cookout. That laundering is not neutral. Claimed neutrality IS a position, the view from nowhere, and the view from nowhere always ends up being the view from Mount Vernon’s front porch.Research over MeSearch, so let’s run the receipts.Receipts from Mount Vernon: What Kind of Great Are We Talking About?George Washington was not a man with a flaw. George Washington was a human trafficker with a farm. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved human beings held at Mount Vernon, and across his lifetime the man bought, sold, rented, raffled, and mortgaged Black people like they was equipment, because under the law of Virginia, that is exactly what we were. Historian Henry Wiencek documented this in An Imperfect God, and the Mount Vernon estate’s own records confirm it. This ain’t hidden history. This is ledger history, written in the man’s own hand.Speaking of ledgers. In May of 1784, Washington’s account books record a payment of 6 pounds and 2 shillings for nine teeth pulled from the mouths of enslaved people, teeth that scholars believe went into the dentures of the so called father of the nation. Sit with that. The smile on the dollar bill in your pocket may have been built out of Black people’s teeth. When I said on camera that this man had other people’s teeth in his mouth, that was not a punchline, that was a citation.It gets more premeditated. While Washington was serving as president in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had a Gradual Abolition Act on the books saying any enslaved person who resided in the state for six continuous months became legally free. So what did the great man do? He set a rotation. Every time an enslaved person got close to six months, Washington cycled them back to Virginia and brought them back on a fresh clock, deliberately, repeatedly, in writing, specifically so the law could not free them. Then in 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, putting the full weight of the federal government behind hunting human beings who freed themselves. That is not a contradiction inside a genius. That is a man committing calculated evil with a calendar reminder.Then there is Ona Judge. In May of 1796, a young enslaved Black woman held by the Washingtons walked out of the president’s house in Philadelphia and freed herself, slipping onto a ship to New Hampshire. Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the whole story in Never Caught. Washington did not shrug and say we’re all a mixed bag. Washington used federal officers, customs officials, and family agents to hunt this woman for years, trying to trick her onto ships, pressuring her even after she married and had children, and under the law he signed, she died in 1848 still legally a fugitive. The greatest man in America spent the last years of his life trying to drag one Black woman back into bondage. Tell me again about greatness.Nobody Ever Calls the Mustache Man a Great OratorHere is the test I gave y’all in the video, and I need you to feel how it lands in your body. Nobody, in the entire history of polite society, has ever stood in front of a camera and said the mustache man was a great leader who galvanized his people and pulled Germany out of turmoil after the first world war, and sure, he put some folks in ovens, but that does not negate his greatness, he was a great orator. That sentence does not exist. The second you even try to build it, your stomach turns, your hands get clammy, every alarm in your moral hardware goes off. That reflex is the point.Now notice when the reflex goes missing. It goes missing, every single time, when the atrocity is antiblack. Wilderson calls this gratuitous violence: violence against Black people that does not require a transgression, a reason, or a cost benefit analysis, violence that is constitutive of the world rather than an exception to it. Hartman showed us in Scenes of Subjection how the terror of slavery got absorbed into the everyday, into the mundane, into the paperwork, until it stopped registering as terror at all. That is exactly what is happening when a slaveholder’s crimes get filed under flaws. The rationalization is so smooth, so automatic, so bipartisan, that it proves the diagnosis. Antiblack violence is the one atrocity this country has trained itself to metabolize without gagging. That is the reason the status quo look the way it look.Contradiction Is a Luxury ItemLet me bring this down from the marble columns to the block, because this is where it stopped being abstract for me. My daddy is a great daddy and a great man. The system does not see him as a great man. The system sees him as a man who once sold drugs, full stop, end of file. His greatness is not allowed to sit beside his record. There is no interviewer on a soundstage saying his conviction does not negate his greatness. Every guilty person sitting in a cell right now could tell you about the great things they’ve done, the kids they raised, the mamas they took care of, the crews they fed, and every one of them is still gonna be defined by the conviction. The Sentencing Project counts about 4 million Americans stripped of the vote behind felony convictions, disproportionately Black, in a country where a man who trafficked over three hundred human beings gets a monument, a state, a university, a bridge, and the number one spot on the dollar.Derrick Bell told us in Faces at the Bottom of the Well that racism is not a glitch America is working out, it is a permanent load bearing feature, and that Black people’s suffering gets acknowledged only when acknowledging it serves somebody else’s interest. Watch how that plays here. Washington’s slaveholding gets acknowledged, sure, but only in the exact form that protects him: as a flaw, a footnote, a shadow that makes the portrait more interesting. The acknowledgment is doing protection work. Meanwhile the same public that extends infinite moral credit to a dead slaveholder extends none to a living Black man with a record. Contradiction is a luxury item in this country, and everyday Black folks cannot afford it.The View from Hawaii Ain’t the View from the PlantationNow let me say the uncomfortable part with precision, because I said it on camera and I’ma stand on it in print. Barack Obama is the child of a white American mother and a Kenyan father. That is not a diss, that is a data point. His family line does not run through the auction block, through partus sequitur ventrem, through the hush harbors and the whipping post and the Great Migration. What he knows of the plantation, he learned the same place most Americans learned it, in school, filtered through the same curriculum that taught all of us that Washington could not tell a lie. Lineage is not a purity test, feel me, plenty of children of immigrants ride harder for descendants of the enslaved than some cousins I know. Socialization matters though. When the flagship Black American political figure carries no inherited memory of American slavery, and then publicly extends grace to the man who hunted Ona Judge, we are watching the difference between representation and rootedness play out on national television.This is where the intersectional lens is not optional. Crenshaw taught us to ask who sits at the intersection and gets hit from every direction, and the Combahee River Collective told us that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires tearing down every system of oppression at once. So run the Obama quote through Ona Judge. Run it through the enslaved women at Mount Vernon whose children were born into bondage because Virginia wrote in 1662 that the child follows the condition of the mother, turning Black wombs into factories of property. Spillers named that ungendering of Black flesh in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. Washington’s greatness was materially built on Black women’s bodies, their labor, their reproduction, their teeth. A framework of greatness that requires footnoting Black women is not a framework, it is a crime scene with good lighting.Exceptionalism Is a Hell of a DrugZoom out to the empire level, because Obama’s statement is not just about the past, it is a user’s manual for American exceptionalism in the present. This country will tell you it must invade, sanction, or bomb another nation because that nation engages in human trafficking, because those people over there are barbaric, uncivilized, in need of democracy and stability. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance in The Racial Contract: a structured, cultivated way of not knowing, where white supremacist states produce moral maps on which their own atrocities literally cannot appear. Every barbaric, inhumane, unethical thing that happens outside the West becomes proof those people need saving. When the identical thing happens here, it becomes a contradiction inside a great man. Same act. Different ontology. That is the racial contract doing its paperwork.The man delivering this lesson has his own ledger, which is exactly why the framing serves him. Over 540 drone strikes across his two terms, with his own administration admitting between 64 and 116 civilian deaths outside declared war zones and independent monitors counting far more. Over three million deportations, enough that Janet Murguía of La Raza named him the deporter in chief back in 2014. A 2011 intervention in Libya that collapsed the state and, by 2017, CNN cameras were filming open air slave markets in the wreckage. Every president makes bags off the machine and embodies the country’s contradictions, he said it himself. Peep the move though: they get to be heroes for their contradictions, and the rest of us get locked up for ours. Every accusation is a confession, and mixed bag is just what empire calls a body count it intends to keep.Material Impacts: This Ain’t Just DiscourseSomebody in the back is saying this is just words, just vibes, just an old man being diplomatic before a holiday. Nope. Frameworks fund things. Frameworks write curriculum. Frameworks decide what your babies are allowed to learn. Texas already passed its 1836 Project in 2021 to promote patriotic education, and dozens of states have passed laws restricting how teachers can discuss race, slavery, and structural racism, laws that get enforced through book pulls, teacher firings, and district lawsuits. The 250th anniversary is a federal content machine right now, pumping out a version of the founding scrubbed for family viewing. When the first Black president cosigns the flawed genius framework on national television days before July 4, he is not making an observation, he is handing every school board, every textbook publisher, and every state legislature a bipartisan permission structure: see, even Obama says the slaveholding does not negate the greatness.Trouillot broke down in Silencing the Past how power operates at every stage of historymaking: what gets recorded, what gets archived, what gets narrated, what gets commemorated. Greatness is not discovered, kinfolks, greatness is manufactured, and the factory has a silence at every station. The material outcome lands on real people: the descendant community of Mount Vernon fighting for their ancestors to be named, the Black studies programs getting defunded while founder worship gets a federal budget line, the teachers in former slave states choosing between honest history and their mortgage, the millions of disenfranchised who learned that redemption arcs are whites only. That is the impact calculus, straight out the debate round: the link is the framework, the internal link is the curriculum and the law, and the impact is a generation raised inside a lie with a gift shop.What This Means for the ClassroomFor my fellow educators, here is the andragogy of it all. Knowles taught us that adult learners bring their lived experience into the room and learn best when new knowledge connects to that experience, and Freire taught us that education is never neutral, it either functions as an instrument of conformity or an instrument of liberation. The flawed genius framework is conformity pedagogy: it hands students a settled verdict and asks them to admire it. Liberation pedagogy hands students the primary sources, the 1784 ledger, the Pennsylvania rotation letters, the Fugitive Slave Act, the runaway advertisement for Ona Judge, and asks them to render the verdict themselves. In practice that means teaching students to separate what a claim says from what it structurally does, to ask who is allowed contradictions and who gets defined by convictions, to read commemoration itself as a primary source, and to notice whose grandmother’s testimony counts as history and whose counts as bias. A classroom that can run that analysis on George Washington can run it on any power structure it meets for the rest of its life. That is the whole point of education, and that is exactly why they keep passing laws against it.Five Key Takeaways for the Folks in the Back1. The flawed genius framework is a laundering device. Calling slaveholding a flaw converts a crime against humanity into a character quirk, and that conversion is the political work the statement performs, regardless of intent.2. The rationalization test never fails. No other atrocity in modern memory gets the his crimes do not negate his greatness treatment. The grace flows only when the victims are Black, which is Wilderson’s gratuitous violence thesis playing out on a press junket.3. Contradiction is distributed by race and class. Presidents get to be mixed bags. My daddy gets to be a record. About 4 million disenfranchised Americans get to be their convictions forever. Who is allowed complexity is itself a power map.4. Center the women or you are lying. Mount Vernon’s greatness was built on Black women’s labor, wombs, and literal teeth. Ona Judge’s hunted freedom is a truer founding document than anything signed in Philadelphia.5. Frameworks become curriculum, and curriculum becomes law. The 250th, the 1836 Project, and the classroom censorship wave all run on the same permission structure Obama just cosigned. This is material, not rhetorical.Become a Paid Subscriber: Keep the Receipts ComingIf this breakdown gave you the primary sources, the frameworks, and the language that the flawed genius curriculum was built to keep from you, then you already understand exactly what is at stake when honest history depends on one independent Black educator instead of a funded institution. Becoming a paid subscriber today is how this work survives the same machinery that manufactured Washington’s greatness in the first place.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. 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. 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