Education is Elevation

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The first person to ever call himself the Queen of Drag in the United States was not a reality TV star or an algorithm’s invention. His name was William Dorsey Swann, and he was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860, which means the man this country now wants to legislate out of existence predates Stonewall, predates the very vocabulary the state uses to criminalize him, and very nearly predates Emancipation itself. Let that marinate. The first person to ever call themselves a Drag Queen was not some new-age phenomenon that fell out the sky in 2014. Before America could agree that Swann was a person, Swann had already decided he was a queen.Freed after the Civil War, Swann made his way to Washington, D.C., and in the 1880s and ‘90s he hosted secret balls. Swann called them “drags”, where Black men, most of them formerly enslaved, the butlers and coachmen and cooks of the capital, gathered in silk and satin gowns half a mile from the White House. He crowned himself “the Queen.” Channing Gerard Joseph, the historian who pulled Swann out of a 19th-century newspaper database and back into the record, tells us Swann lifted that title from the “queens of liberty” he watched ride flower-covered floats at D.C.’s Emancipation Day parades. Black women who personified a freedom the nation had just been forced to concede. Apply Joseph here, because it flips the whole frame: the drag queen was not borrowing from white femininity. The drag queen was borrowing from Black emancipation. The crown was a freedom symbol before it was ever a costume.This wasn’t just parties, though. There was a defiance in it. In a world that refused to see Black and quare folk as fully human and I’m saying quare on purpose, the way E. Patrick Johnson taught us to say it, theory in the flesh, theory with a grandmother and a dialect and a body. Swann was moving like a swan. And the consistency you need to clock, the through-line that runs from his century to ours, is the raid. Pride Month itself starts off a police raid at Stonewall in 1969. Swann’s story is a police raid in 1888. Same script, eighty-one years apart. If you guessed raid, you guessed right.Before the Archive Tried to Forget HimHistorically speaking, before Swann ever threw a ball, enslaved people on the plantation had already drafted the blueprint, and they called it the cakewalk. They would put on their finest and parody the stiff, grandiose mannerisms of the people who owned them.. the promenade, the bow, the exaggerated elegance of the big house. Here is the part that takes the cake, literally: the enslavers thought they were being flattered. They watched Black people satirize them to their face, mistook the mockery for admiration, and awarded a cake to the best performers. That is the popular origin of the phrase “takes the cake,” and brother, that takes the cake. Brooke Baldwin’s scholarship lays out the double-edge of it. The cakewalk was stereotype and subversion in the same breath, a thing the white elite consumed as entertainment while the performers wielded it as a weapon. Two things can be true. The master saw a minstrel; the ancestor saw a mirror.Saidiya Hartman calls this the entanglement of pleasure and subjection, the way the enslaved were made to perform contentment, made to dance, made to simulate consent to their own captivity for an audience. Apply Hartman here, because the cakewalk is exactly that coerced scene flipped into something else. Our ancestors took the one territory they were ever granted, the space of the spectacle, and they smuggled critique inside the choreography. The cultural competency went clean over the enslaver’s head. That is the foundation of Black drag: reclaiming power through the body when the body is the only territory you have left.E. Patrick Johnson argues that Blackness itself is a performance that it is constantly scripted, surveilled, and policed. Apply Johnson here and the whole moral panic collapses on contact: drag is not a deviation from Blackness, it is a profound expression of it. It is the place where queerness and Blackness and a whole grammar of cultural aesthetics come together and refuse to be separated. Johnson’s work shows us that Black quare performance is not separate from Black history. It is Black history. The cakewalk, Swann’s drags, Harlem’s voguing, the ballroom houses that still walk tonight: these are not footnotes to the Black freedom struggle. They are chapters. Our culture embodies that, no pun intended.Ahh, but the state always understood this too, and the state responded the way the state responds with violence. Here I need you to hold two analytics at once, because that’s the only way the picture resolves. On one hand, Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism: the white elite looked at the cakewalk, looked at the ball, looked at voguing, and asked the only question capital ever asks — how do we commodify this? On the other hand, Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism: the gratuitous violence that rendered the Black body fungible under slavery, a thing to be moved and used and disciplined, never actually retired. It just changed uniforms. Two roles, one body… the Black quare body is simultaneously the source America strip-mines for its culture and the threat America insists on policing. Crazy how that works.Roderick Ferguson gives us the mechanism. In his queer of color critique, Ferguson shows how the state has always treated Black gender nonconformity as an aberration to be managed, a deviance to be manufactured and then punished. Apply Ferguson here: the criminalization is not an accident, not an overreach, not a few bad apples in a few red states. It is a feature. It is load-bearing. The pattern is consistent and it is old: any time the Black body moves freely, the state moves to put it back in captivity. From the slave codes to the drag bans, the choreography of control never changes, only the statute number does.The Implication for EducationThe Hidden Curriculum They Ban Before You Can Teach ItEvery society runs two curricula. There is the explicit one the standards, the textbooks, the things on the test and there is the hidden curriculum, the one Philip Jackson named back in 1968: the lessons a child absorbs about who belongs, whose body is normal, whose history is safe to know. When a state bans a drag story hour, it’s not protecting children from a threat the evidence don’t support. It’s teaching the hidden curriculum. It’s teaching every child in earshot that gender nonconformity is obscene, that the Black quare body is dangerous, and that some histories are contraband.Watch the projection, because every accusation is a confession. They tell you a man reading a picture book in a sequined gown is sexualizing your kid. If you can look at a drag queen reading Click, Clack, Moo and the first place your mind travels is sex, I believe the call is coming from inside the house. A drag show is not inherently sexually explicit. One has to inscribe sexuality onto their body and the inscription says more about the inscriber than about the performer. What is actually being criminalized is not sex. It is gender nonconformity, the same nonconformity Swann was jailed for when they charged him with “keeping a disorderly house” and sentenced him to ten months. The same alleged nonconformity that Trump is celebrated for by MAGA. They had no law for who William Dorsey Swann was, so they invented a charge. That is the move. That has always been the move.Here is the part that should keep every educator up at night. These bans do not travel alone. They ride in the same legislative convoy as the book bans, the anti-CRT bills, the gutting of DEI, and the dismantling of the very public-education infrastructure that might have taught a kid who William Dorsey Swann was in the first place. Whitey on the moon: we will spend the political capital to criminalize a library story hour, but we will not spend it to fund the library. We will pass a law about a performer’s prosthetics, but we will not pass a lunch. The state is not confused about its priorities. Racial and cultural literacy — the skill of reading a cakewalk and seeing the satire, of reading a ball and seeing the freedom — is precisely the competency being defunded, because a population that can read the satire is a population that is harder to govern. Apply Ferguson one more time: they are not banning a performance. They are banning a literacy.Let me get concrete, because theory that never touches the ground is just vibes, and we do research over MeSearch around here. When a state criminalizes drag, the bill does not get distributed evenly. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us intersectionality precisely so we would stop pretending it does. The penalty lands hardest at the intersections — and in this case the intersection has a name and a face: the Black and brown trans woman. The ACLU said it plainly in the Texas litigation, that SB 12’s steep criminal and civil penalties would harm Black and Latinx transgender Texans the most. That is not a side effect. Under racial capitalism, that is the design. The invoice is itemized by race and gender, and it always has been.Run the numbers like a load-bearing claim. A covered performance in Texas is now a Class A misdemeanor — up to a year in a cage and a fine — and the venue that hosts it eats a ten-thousand-dollar penalty. Now do the two-roles math. The same Black quare performer whose aesthetic gets strip-mined for the mainstream — the vogue in the pop video, the ballroom slang in the brand campaign, the “yas queen” the corporation tweets every June — is the one staring down the misdemeanor in that very same June. Hartman calls the Black body fungible: the culture is endlessly transferable, infinitely consumable, while the person who made it is endlessly disposable prosper. Misogynoir, the term Moya Bailey gave us, names the specific contempt aimed at Black women and, here, at Black trans women — the population GLAAD’s data shows absorbing the threats and the violence, more than 160 documented incidents against drag in a single year. That is the material residue of a “values” debate. Bodies.Economically, the chilling effect does the work the statute can’t always finish. You don’t have to convict a single performer to empty a stage. You just have to make the cost of being seen unpayable… the lost bookings, the canceled Pride, the venue that decides the liability isn’t worth it, the small Black-owned business that cannot absorb a ten-thousand-dollar gamble. This is racial capitalism running its oldest play: it took the cakewalk and sold the cake, it took voguing and sold the Madonna single, and now it takes the very existence of the Black quare body and turns it into a fine. The culture moves freely through the market. The body that births it does not. That contradiction celebrated and criminalized in the same breath, in the same month is not a paradox. It is the system telling on itself.The Raid Never Ended, It Just Got a Docket NumberPeople keep asking me where the law actually stands, so let me give you the receipts, because the picture moves fast and most of the coverage is a year stale. For a minute, the courts looked like they were holding the line. In September 2023 a federal judge in Texas a Reagan appointee, no less struck down SB 12 on five independent constitutional grounds, calling it an unconstitutional restriction on speech that would sweep up everything from The Nutcracker to a high-school Shakespeare play. Judges in Tennessee, Florida, Montana, and Utah said versions of the same thing. iMa bE honest with you: for a season it felt like the First Amendment was going to do its job.Then came the quieter, more dangerous move the one that never makes headlines because it never argues the merits. In July 2024, the Sixth Circuit did not defend the Tennessee Adult Entertainment Act on its constitutionality; it simply ruled that the LGBTQ theater troupe that sued lacked standing, that they couldn’t prove they’d be prosecuted, and threw the whole case out. The Supreme Court declined to touch it in 2025. So the first anti-drag law in the country is back in effect across most of Tennessee, having never once been called constitutional it just outlived its challengers on a technicality. Then in November 2025, the Fifth Circuit ran the same play on Texas, vacating the injunction and sending SB 12 back down; by February 2026 it had reaffirmed that ruling, and the law took effect. Today, a covered “sexually oriented” performance in Texas can cost a performer a Class A misdemeanor and a venue ten thousand dollars.This is the part I need you to understand structurally. The state learned it does not have to win the argument about whether your body is obscene. It just has to make you wait, make you spend, make you prove you are hurt before it has finished hurting you, and let the procedure do what the Constitution wouldn’t. Apply Ferguson a final time: criminalization adapts. Swann got charged with “keeping a disorderly house” because there was no statute for his existence. A century and a half later, they have upgraded from a euphemism to a misdemeanor, from a vice charge to a standing doctrine but the function is identical. The raid never ended. It just got a docket number.The Oldest American Freedom Story There IsSo when they tell you drag is some new corruption, some 2020s contagion, hand them the archive. Hand them a formerly enslaved man in 1888 who fought the police rather than run, who petitioned the President of the United States for a pardon decades before there was a movement to have his back. The first drag queen in America was a man who had been somebody’s property, who lived in a country that wanted him dead, and who decided to be fabulous anyway. That is not decadence. That is the oldest American freedom story there is.And here is the close, because this is what the whole panic accidentally reveals. When the state criminalizes the cakewalk, when it raids the ball, when it bans the story hour, when it turns a sequined gown into a misdemeanor. This is not exposing some danger in the Black quare body, its exposing itself. By performing this much fear of a man in a dress reading to children, it confesses what it was the whole time. Swann understood that in 1888. We are just citing it now.Roderick Ferguson’s Queer of Color Critique, he shows how the state regulation on Black gender nonconformity is very unique as aberrations to control, as always already being something they can perverse and they can make deviant . The pattern is consistent. Black performance of freedom meets state violence. Anytime we see the Black body moving freely, we have to make sure we control that and put it in captivity. From plantation laws to bans today, since 2023, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, Montana have all introduced or passed an anti drag legislation . Currently in Texas, a drag performance can get you up to a year in jail and fine. Today ain’t just glitter or whatever you think it is. It is a lineage of resistance from slavery, through cakewalk, to Swann, to every ballroom and stage I see today and want to attack and pathologize, just like Madison did.See, Johnson reminds us that performance remakes Blackness and Ferguson teaches us that criminalization is no accident that it is actually a key feature within this system that always already fears Black freedom . Think about it. The first drag queen was an enslaved man who dared to be fabulous in a world that wanted him dead. Education is elevation and happy pride.5 Key Takeaways1. Drag is not new — it’s foundational. William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Maryland in 1860, was the first American to call himself the “Queen of Drag,” hosting balls in 1880s–90s D.C. that predate Stonewall by roughly eighty years.2. Black performance was always a weapon. From the cakewalk’s satire of the enslaver to Swann’s drags to Harlem voguing, the Black body has been used as a tool of resistance — not a deviation from Black history, but, as E. Patrick Johnson argues, Black history itself.3. The criminalization is a feature, not a bug. Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color critique shows the state has always produced Black gender nonconformity as an “aberration” to be policed. The raid in 1888 and the drag ban in 2026 run the same program.4. The law is moving backward on a technicality. District courts struck down the Texas and Tennessee bans as unconstitutional — but the Fifth and Sixth Circuits revived them (2024–2026) on standing and procedural grounds, without ever ruling the laws constitutional.5. The bill is itemized by race and gender. Under racial capitalism, the penalties land hardest on Black and brown trans women — the same population whose culture is strip-mined for the mainstream and then criminalized in the same breath.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'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.Cited Sources & Related Reading Johnson, E. Patrick and Mae G. Henderson, editors. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Duke University Press, 2005.Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2000.Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press, 2005.Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.DeFrantz, Thomas F., editor. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.Currie, Netisha. “William Dorsey Swann, the Queen of Drag.” Rediscovering Black History, National Archives, 29 June 2020.Joseph, Channing Gerard. House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens and Changed the World. Crown, forthcoming.Cohen, Cathy J. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.Johnson, E. Patrick. “’Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001).Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2013.Baldwin, Brooke. “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality.” Journal of Social History 15, no. 2 (1981). 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Bacon, sausage, ham, and hot dogs — the World Health Organization, the most authoritative health body on the planet, classifies all of them in the same cancer group as cigarettes, and that ain’t no fringe study buried in a corner of the internet, that’s the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s own arm, telling y’all back in 2015 that processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen, sitting in the same evidence category as tobacco and asbestos. Now let me sprinkle context, because Research over MeSearch, and the science has to be clean: that Group 1 label is a statement about how SURE the evidence is that something causes cancer, not a claim that one hot dog hits your body exactly like a Marlboro. Two things can be true. The certainty is real, and the industry has spent decades making sure you never sit with that certainty long enough to change what’s in your cart.Then comes the part they REALLY ain’t trying to tell you, because the problem starts before the meat is ever processed. American pork producers use beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine to make pigs grow faster and leaner, and those drugs are banned in more than 160 countries — not restricted, banned — by the European Union, by China, by Russia, places that will not let American pork cross the border with that chemistry still in the animal. People in the back, sit with that. You got animals raised on drugs the rest of the world won’t even allow, getting processed into products the WHO says cause cancer, and that whole chain don’t end in some abstract “marketplace.” It runs straight through communities that look like mine.Before the Label, There Was the LagoonBefore any of this showed up as a sticker in your grocery store, it showed up as a lagoon behind somebody’s house. Let me take you to eastern North Carolina, the second-biggest hog state in the country behind Iowa, where roughly nine million hogs live in about twenty-three hundred industrial swine operations that generate something like ten billion gallons of liquid waste a year, most of it stored in around thirty-three hundred open-air pits the industry politely calls “lagoons,” where the feces and the urine sit and ferment until the company sprays it across the fields as fertilizer, and the mist drifts onto the porches, the clotheslines, the schoolyards, and the lungs of the people who live downwind. Crazy how the people downwind keep being the same people.That ain’t a feeling, that’s a finding. A 2014 study out of UNC by the epidemiologist Steve Wing and his colleague Jill Johnston mapped these operations and concluded that the proportion of people of color living within three miles of an industrial hog operation was more than one and a half times higher than the proportion of white folks, with Black communities and especially American Indian communities carrying more than twice the burden in some measures. Bullard told us this would happen. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert Bullard — a Houston man, a Texan like me — showed all the way back in 1990 that the question of where the waste goes is never random, it tracks the color line as faithfully as a deed restriction, and when the industry says siting is just about “cheap rural land,” that claim of neutrality IS the position. The view from nowhere is a position. Cheap land is just a polite map of who the country decided it could afford to poison.Gilmore gives us the sharpest word for what that does to a body. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, and once you have that frame, the health record around these operations stops reading like a coincidence and starts reading like a policy: researchers have documented elevated rates of anemia, kidney disease, infant deaths, and septicemia in the surrounding communities, and Wing himself documented the headaches, the coughing, the nausea, the respiratory distress among the neighbors before he died of cancer in 2016, before the trials even started. A lagoon of hog waste behind a Black grandmother’s house is not a smell. It’s a vulnerability, manufactured and maintained.And those neighbors fought. In 2014, an eighty-year-old Black woman named Joyce McKiver became the lead plaintiff in McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, one of more than two dozen federal nuisance suits brought by over five hundred plaintiffs, the majority of them Black, against Murphy-Brown, the hog-production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods — which is itself owned by the Chinese conglomerate WH Group. Across five trials in 2018 and 2019, juries awarded thirty-six plaintiffs almost $550 million. Then North Carolina’s punitive-damages cap shrank that to roughly $98 million. Read the choreography again: the people won in front of juries, and the LAW reached in to make the win smaller.They were warned, too. Folks built waste pits in a floodplain, and when Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999, the lagoons breached and turned whole rural communities into seas of dead hogs and toxic slurry. So the legislature did what legislatures do for the people who fund them: Right to Farm laws now exist in all fifty states, and North Carolina passed HB 467 — carried by a longtime farmer-legislator who took hog-industry money — to gut the very nuisance suits the neighbors were winning. Here’s the part that should stop you cold. Defending the industry, that same legislator told people to close their eyes and imagine how ham and sausage smell, and called the residents’ complaints exaggerations and outright lies. Read that back slow. The man waved bacon in your face to dismiss the people choking on its byproduct. Every accusation is a confession. This is the historical context that label will never carry.Sneaky, Sneaky: How Big Pork Redraws the MapSo now you understand the stakes, watch the move. When voters in California passed Proposition 12 in 2018 — nearly 63 percent of them, more than seven and a half million people — and Massachusetts passed Question 3 back in 2016 with two and a half million votes, all they were saying, at minimum, is that a breeding pig should have enough room to turn around and lie down before it ends up on your plate. That’s the floor. That’s the whole radical demand. The National Pork Producers Council sued anyway, dragged it all the way to the Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross in 2023, and LOST — a conservative court upheld Prop 12 and rejected their main claim. That should have been the end of it. That means the industry’s legal argument is wrong, on the merits, by their own preferred referees.When they couldn’t win in court and couldn’t win at the ballot box, they went to Congress. The thing they used to call the EATS Act got a new costume and a friendlier name — the “Save Our Bacon Act” — introduced in 2025 and then buried as Section 12006 inside the 2026 farm bill, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, which the House passed 224 to 200 at the end of April 2026. The Pork Council celebrated that the bill gave them one hundred percent of their policy requests. One hundred percent. And the provision doesn’t just touch Prop 12; an analysis out of Harvard Law found it threatens hundreds of state and local laws, including disease-prevention and public-health rules. As of this summer the Senate draft left the language out because it can’t find sixty votes — but it’s up for negotiation, which means the fight ain’t over, it’s just moved rooms.Now here’s the contradiction I want to let hang in the air. These are the same people who built whole careers on states’ rights, right up until seven and a half million Californians USED states’ rights to regulate a pig crate. States’ rights when it’s a book ban or a bathroom; sudden, urgent federal supremacy when voters protect an animal, a worker, or a watershed. What they SAY is “protect interstate commerce.” What the position structurally DOES is hand a trade group that lost in court and lost at the ballot box a federal eraser for any democratic decision it finds inconvenient. The principle was never the principle. The principle was the profit. And the name is the tell — it ain’t saving your bacon, it’s saving the industry from having to answer to you.This also proves something bigger about where the money actually goes. The same farm-bill politics that hands concentrated operations bigger checks is the politics that comes for SNAP and food assistance with a knife. Gil Scott-Heron gave us the structure for this kind of receipt, so let me borrow the frame, not his lines:A child got asthma from the spray field — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.Grandma’s well ran foul from the lagoon — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.Food assistance got cut by the billions — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.That’s not a budget. That’s a value statement with a dollar sign attached.Humane Washing Is a FinesseWhen they can’t kill the regulation, they trick you with the marketing. The group Farm Forward gave the practice a name — “humane washing” — and on my mama, I know a finesse when I see it. Humane washing is when companies sell animal products to conscientious consumers using deceptive packaging and labeling that manufactures the illusion of good welfare, and the labels doing the heavy lifting — “cage-free,” “humanely raised,” “natural” — are far from neutral, far from sloppy accidents of regulation. They are engineered.Here’s where the scholarship sharpens it. Farr and Mills both teach us that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge that nobody got around to filling in; ignorance gets PRODUCED, manufactured, and actively maintained because somebody benefits from your not-knowing. Mills calls one version of it white ignorance — a way of not-seeing that does real work for power. A label like “natural,” which means almost nothing legally, is a perfect little engine of manufactured ignorance: it exists to let a caring shopper feel resolved at the shelf so they’ll stop asking the next question — about the drug, the lagoon, the worker, the vote. The sticker isn’t there to inform your conscience. It’s there to retire it.And when documentation threatens the finesse, the industry reaches for the law again. Ag-gag statutes criminalize the act of going undercover to film what happens inside these operations — the state literally outlawing the lesson, criminalizing the camera. Just admit what that confesses. You do not make it illegal to record something you’re proud of. Brother Malcolm’s words, the ones Spike Lee put in Denzel’s mouth, fit too clean here: you been hoodwinked, you been bamboozled, led astray. The meat industry manufactured these terms to trick us, the same way every system of extraction manufactures a comfortable story for the people it’s extracting from, and then pisses on us and tells us it’s raining.Click Here to Learn More about Big BaconThe Hidden Curriculum of the Meat AisleFreire taught us the difference between a banking education — where knowledge gets deposited into you and you’re expected to accept the balance — and a problem-posing education, where you learn to read the word and the world together. Most of us were handed the banking version of the grocery store: deposit the label, accept it, push the cart, move on. The hidden curriculum of the meat aisle — the thing it teaches without ever printing it — is that some lives are inputs and some communities are sacrifice zones, and you will never read THAT on the package. The package is designed to graduate you ignorant.This is why ag-gag laws and book bans rhyme. The same political machinery that criminalizes the camera at the CAFO is the machinery that pulls the lesson on Tulsa or Rosewood out of a classroom: in both cases, somebody made a curriculum decision that the public must not be allowed to learn how the harm actually works. Different aisle, same store. And the antidote is the same skill I teach with the debate frameworks — trace the chain. The label is the link. The lobbying is the internal link. The lagoon is the impact. Teach a person to follow link to internal link to impact, at the grocery store or in the farm bill, and you have given them a literacy no sticker can survive. The grocery aisle is one of the most honest civics classrooms we’ve got, IF somebody’s willing to teach the syllabus they tried to bury. That’s the whole thesis. Who Lives Downwind: The Material ReceiptsCrenshaw built intersectionality precisely so we’d stop running single-axis analysis that loses the people standing where the harms cross, and the Combahee River Collective grounded Black feminist politics in material conditions, not slogans — so let’s do the material. Who lives downwind, specifically? Start with Black women’s bodies, because that’s where the receipts land first. The infant deaths and the birth-weight problems documented near these operations are not abstract “community health” — they are reproductive harm written onto Black women, and then the unpaid second shift of caretaking a child with asthma lands on those same women, the ones who already can’t hang the laundry, can’t crack the window, can’t let the grandkids play in the yard. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir is the machinery that makes that suffering simultaneously hyper-exposed and unheard.It is not an accident that the lead plaintiff against the world’s largest hog producer was an eighty-year-old Black woman. Black women have always been the frontline litigators and organizers of environmental justice — the very tradition Ella Baker built, the foot-soldier, group-centered leadership the coastal left keeps forgetting was Southern first. Read disability justice in too: those courtrooms had plaintiffs on portable oxygen, because respiratory disease is the body keeping score of the air. And read the labor line, because the harm doesn’t stop at the fence. The kill floor and the packing plant are staffed disproportionately by Black, Latino, and immigrant workers, sped up to dangerous line speeds, and the COVID outbreaks that tore through those plants happened because the workers were treated as fungible — interchangeable, replaceable, disposable, exactly the condition Spillers and the Afropessimists name when they talk about the captive body. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the white immigrant on the line a century ago; the Black and brown worker on today’s kill floor is still waiting on his muckraker.Then widen the lens. Karen Washington reframed the “food desert” — which sounds natural, like weather — as food APARTHEID, which names it as designed, and the cruel symmetry is that the same processed meat the WHO flagged gets marketed hardest in the very neighborhoods stripped of full grocery stores. Williams-Forson reminds us not to pathologize the foodways that scarcity and survival created; the problem was never the people’s plates, it was the political economy that engineered the plate. And you cannot read this land honestly without reading Black and Indigenous analysis together: Native communities in eastern North Carolina carry more than double the proximity burden in places, and Wolfe’s point that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, lands here — the same logic that took the territory now poisons what’s left of it. Davis would tell you the plantation, the prison, and the factory farm share an architecture of confinement and extraction. Don’t let a “humanely raised” sticker distract you from the material body count.Trace the Link. Ask Where the Smoke Is.So loop it back. The WHO put the product in the cancer column, the industry buried the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ended up behind a Black grandmother’s house — and the “humanely raised” label exists to keep those three facts from ever shaking hands in your mind. When you reach for that sticker so you can stop thinking, understand that the reach itself makes the whole machine visible; it shows you EXACTLY where the comfort gets manufactured. So don’t stop at the sticker. Trace the link to the internal link to the impact. And ask the question the marketing was built to suppress: where is the smoke for the kid in Duplin County with asthma from the spray field, the way there’s smoke for a stolen catalytic converter? Whose harm gets a headline tells you whose harm the country decided counts.This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the people downwind have been telling the truth the entire time, the science is peer-reviewed, the verdicts are on the docket, the lobbying disclosures are public record, and the votes were counted twice before anybody went crying to Congress. The receipts were always there. Somebody just has to teach the syllabus. Education is elevation.5 Key Takeaways* The Group 1 label is about certainty, not equivalence. Processed meat’s 2015 WHO/IARC classification means the evidence that it causes cancer is strong — the same evidence tier as tobacco — not that a hot dog equals a cigarette in risk. The industry profits from you never learning that distinction.* The harm starts upstream and runs along the color line. U.S. pork is commonly raised with ractopamine, a growth drug banned or restricted in 160-plus countries; the product the rest of the world rejects gets routed into American — and disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native — communities.* CAFO siting is a map, not a coincidence. UNC research shows people of color are far more likely to live within three miles of an industrial hog operation, and the lagoon-and-sprayfield system has a paper trail of documented illness and a $550 million jury record (McKiver v. Murphy-Brown) that a state damages cap then slashed.* “Save Our Bacon” is the EATS Act in a new costume. After losing at the Supreme Court (NPPC v. Ross, 2023) and at the ballot box (Prop 12, Question 3), Big Pork went to Congress to nullify voter-passed laws — federal preemption dressed up as states’ rights.* Humane washing is manufactured ignorance. “Natural,” “cage-free,” and “humanely raised” are engineered to resolve your conscience, not inform it — and ag-gag laws criminalize the documentation that would teach you otherwise.Click Here to Learn MoreBecome a Paid SubscriberWhen the World Health Organization flags the product, the industry buries the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ends up behind a Black grandmother’s house, somebody has to do the unglamorous work of tracing the link to the internal link to the impact — and putting it in plain language y’all can actually use. That tracing is exactly what Education Is Elevation exists to do, and it’s the very work that “humane washing,” ag-gag laws, and corporate-funded silence are built to keep you from ever seeing.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 ReadingsName the scholar, paraphrase the move, put it to work. Research over MeSearch.* Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition — racial capitalism as the foundation, not the aberration; the engine, not the glitch.* Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag — racism as the production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death; the lens for reading CAFO health data.* Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality — the founding text of environmental justice; where the waste goes is never neutral.* Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste and Medical Apartheid — environmental racism and the long medical record of treating Black bodies as expendable.* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” — intersectionality; why single-axis analysis loses the people standing where the harms cross.* The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” — politics rooted in material conditions, not symbolism.* Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed — the specific machinery aimed at Black women, hyper-exposed and unheard at once.* Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” — flesh, captivity, and fungibility, for reading the kill-floor worker.* Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection — the afterlife of slavery and the long present tense of dispossession.* Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle — the shared architecture of confinement and extraction across plantation, prison, and farm.* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed — banking vs. problem-posing education; reading the word and the world.* Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” with Arnold Farr on the epistemology of ignorance — ignorance as produced and maintained, not merely absent.* Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers — Black agrarian resistance, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, and the praxis answer to despair.* Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs — Black women, food, and meaning; don’t pathologize the plate scarcity built.* Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” — invasion as structure; land as accumulation.* Steve Wing & Jill Johnston (2014), peer-reviewed work on CAFO proximity and race in North Carolina — the empirical map under the moral argument.* Farm Forward, reporting on “humane washing” — the field guide to the label finesse.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Thank you Mandy Bynum, PJ Schuster, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Kerry Shaw, KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, and many others for tuning into my live video with Feel Good Action! Join me for my next live video in the app.On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read what we now call General Order No. 3. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas were told they were free. That is the part the country likes to keep. Here is the part it tends to drop: the same order instructed the newly freed to remain where they were and negotiate wages with the very men who had held them. Freedom, in the same breath, was routed straight back onto the plantation — into sharecropping, into the Black Codes, into Jim Crow.I grew up in Bryan, Texas, about two hours up the road from where this began. When you read the local archive, you can watch enslavers in those counties work to hide the news — hide the war, hide the Proclamation — because an informed free person is a person who can leave. So when I celebrate Juneteenth, I celebrate it the way my people celebrated it: as jubilee. But I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale. The honest word for what happened that day is free-ish.“Granger told the freedpeople to go back to the plantation and negotiate some wages. That is the day we celebrate. So I celebrate it as jubilee — and I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale.”Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Emancipation Proclamation Was Foundational. It Was Also Nearly Toothless.In K–12 we are handed a clean story: Lincoln signs a paper, slavery ends, the good guys win. The Emancipation Proclamation deserves its place in history, but the mechanics matter. It applied only to states in open rebellion — places taking no orders from Washington. The loyal slaveholding border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) were untouched; people there remained enslaved. Liberation did not arrive as a switch flipped in 1863. It arrived unevenly, locally, and late — and in Texas, it arrived in 1865 wrapped in an order to get back to work.This is why the structural detail is not pedantry. If you teach Juneteenth honestly, you have to teach that the document everyone celebrates left whole categories of people in bondage, and that the “end” of slavery was a negotiation, a compromise, and a delay. That is the difference between history and mythology.Preserve the Statues, Erase the Slavery: The Conservative ContradictionThere is a contradiction sitting in plain sight. The same political project that, a few years ago, fought to keep Confederate monuments standing — you cannot change history, they said, you cannot erase the past — is now, under this administration, ordering references to slavery scrubbed from historical markers, national parks, and museums. The slogan was never really about history. It was about which history.I taught ninth- and tenth-grade English in Oklahoma when the state moved to criminalize “critical race theory” — a graduate-level legal framework that was not being taught in K–12 anywhere in this country. But once you build policy around a boogeyman, the policy does the work the boogeyman cannot. Teaching the plain timeline of the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth became suspect, because an honest timeline raises an honest question: how is it that the same law used to free us is the same law that was used to re-enslave and to kill us?Hold that question against Reconstruction. We are taught that treason is the highest crime against the country. Yet Confederate soldiers and generals — men who took up arms against the United States — were welcomed back, their leaders never made to answer for it. The same governments that extended that mercy to traitors wrote laws to criminalize Black people for not having a job, not having a pass, not having a place to be — the vagrancy statutes that fed the convict-leasing machine. Amnesty for the people who tried to break the country; criminalization for the people the country had just freed.History Does Not Move in a Straight LineAmericans are trained to imagine progress as one long upward arc: slavery, then the Civil War, then a little rough patch, then Dr. King, then voting rights, then everything is fine. It has never moved like that. It moves in ebbs and flows, advance and backlash, and the backlash is not an accident — it is the response progress provokes.Reconstruction sent Black men to Congress; Mississippi sent the nation its first Black U.S. senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, in 1870. A generation later, a Black person in Mississippi could be lynched for going near a ballot box. One hundred years after those Union troops reached Galveston, the country passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court took an axe to Section 2 of that Act — the dissent warned it leaves the provision all but dead — clearing the way for state after state across the South to redraw maps that erase majority-Black and majority-minority districts. The Callais standard even tells courts to give less weight to historical discrimination and demand proof of present-day intent. They are legislating the very forgetting we are here to refuse.“Everything Black people have gained, we gained in spite of democracy, not because of it. Every right that is supposed to be God-given, we had to spill blood for.”“All Fascism Matters”: On Selective OutrageI want to be careful and precise here, because I am talking about policy, not personalities. The tools this administration is using — banning books, criminalizing ideologies, attaching penalties to words like equity, diversity, inclusion, and woke — are democratic tools, mastered and turned against the vulnerable. Calling them undemocratic is comforting and incomplete. They are operating the machine exactly as it was built to be operated.Which is why I cannot let my white liberal and leftist friends off the hook. Fascism cannot only matter to you when the administration changes hands. There were people exercising their First Amendment rights — students getting their heads beaten in, protesters criminalized for how they assembled — under the previous administration too, and a lot of folks stayed quiet because the man in the White House had the right letter next to his name. You do not get to pick and choose when fascism counts, any more than you get to pick and choose when Black lives matter. Pastor Niemöller already wrote the ending to that story: first they came, and there was no one left.Look at this week. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen people with conspiracy to impede federal officers — community members who acted as legal observers, documenting ICE during last winter’s Operation Metro Surge. City council members called it political repression. Meanwhile, the federal agents who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti during that same operation have not been charged for those killings. Observing is now a felony. Killing remains a matter under review. That is the priority structure, stated plainly.The Insatiable Appetite for Black Death Is BipartisanIf you want literacy in how Black people are positioned in this country, you need a structural analysis — otherwise you will keep reading every killing as an isolated tragedy instead of a pattern. So let me lay it down. Police violence is not a partisan brand. George Floyd was killed in a blue city in a blue state. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down in a red city in a red state. There has always been a bipartisan solidarity around Black suffering, going back to the Compromise of 1877, when ending Reconstruction — pulling the federal troops out of the South — was the deal both sides could live with. The currency of that compromise was Black death.Huey P. Newton defined power as the ability to define a phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. The phenomenon here is Black life — defined, again and again, as expendable, and made to behave accordingly. Democrats do not own the fight against it. Republicans do not own the production of it. It runs underneath the partisanship.Black Children Are Never Allowed to Be ChildrenAdultification is the engine I keep coming back to, because the numbers are obscene: the overwhelming majority of children charged as adults in this country are Black children and children of color. We are denied childhood and held to adult standards before we can read. Watch how it operates across three cases unfolding right now.In Senatobia, Mississippi, this past Sunday, police responding to an alleged shoplifting call fired into a car in a Walmart parking lot and killed Kohen Wiley, one year old, critically wounding a family friend. His mother has not been charged with any crime; her attorney says she was trying to tell officers her baby was in the car. Family members say they were buying diapers. Authorities say the vehicle drove toward an officer. Whatever the investigation concludes, hold this fixed: even if every accusation against the adults were true, shoplifting is not a capital offense, and a one-year-old cannot commit a crime.Now set two other cases side by side. In Texas, Karmelo Anthony, seventeen at the time, was tried as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to thirty-five years in the death of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet. In South Carolina, a store owner, Rick Chow, chased fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than 130 yards and shot him in the back over a suspicion about four bottles of water — and a jury found him not guilty, accepting that he feared for his life. The same public sentiment that wants a Black teenager held to the absolute ceiling of the law extends a Black child’s killer the absolute floor. “Fear for my life” acquits the man with the gun; it never seems to cover the child running away from one.And notice the cover story for so much of this machinery: protecting children. Anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans bills, drag bans, book bans, the criminalization of Black culture — all of it marched out in the name of protecting children. Page through Project 2025 and count how many times that phrase appears. Then ask how a politics so obsessed with protecting children rationalizes the killing of a one-year-old. That is what I mean by conservative contradictions.The Second Amendment Was Never Written for UsHere is the ugliest part of the gun conversation, and it is not only conservatives who are caught in it. “Shoot first, ask questions later” is normalized in this country — but not for everybody. When some people heard that a teenager in South Carolina may have had a firearm, that was enough to justify shooting him in the back as he fled. Plenty of self-described left-leaning folks said the same thing: well, he allegedly had a gun. If that is your reflex, you are part of the problem too.In open-carry states — South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana — carrying a firearm is legal. “Come and take it.” But the mere presence, even the rumor, of a gun in a Black person’s hand has always functioned as a license to kill, while the same hardware in other hands is celebrated as liberty. That is why the press has to keep saying unarmed, unarmed, unarmed — as if being legally armed should have been a death sentence. The Second Amendment, like the rest of the founding documents, was written with a very specific set of people in mind, and we were the exception, not the beneficiaries.From Plantation to Prison: Sugar Land and the Long ChainTrace the chain forward from Juneteenth and you arrive at the prison. In Sugar Land, Texas — now marketed as a comfortable suburb — a plantation became a prison, and a few years ago construction crews unearthed a mass grave of African American remains, the people we now call the Sugar Land 95. They were victims of the convict-leasing system: the machine that re-criminalized the same Black people who had just celebrated freedom, then worked them in the cane and the marshes until disease or exhaustion killed them, at which point the state simply criminalized a new Black body to replace them. The dead ranged from children to old men.That is not ancient history with no address. It has a corporate name on it, named founders, and a named graveyard — which is exactly why “that was too long ago” does not hold. And it did not end as a relic: my home state of Texas leads the nation in incarceration. The plantation, the sharecrop, the lease, the cell — it is one continuous economy, and Juneteenth sits at the seam between its chapters.“If you think what we’re living through is unprecedented, dig deeper into the archive. It is monumental. It is not new.”Free in Spite of DemocracySo when people tell me to protect democracy, to defend democracy, I ask them not to do the same thing this administration does to history — sand off the edges and call it a love story. Everything Black people have endured, we endured under democracy. The right to drink from the same fountain, to use the same bathroom, to read the same book, to receive the same diploma — supposedly God-given rights — we had to spill blood for every one of them, inside this democratic framework, not outside it. We are free in spite of democracy, not because of it.I will end on the hardest metaphor I know, and I offer it as a content warning before I say it. Think about how we talk about the domestic-violence survivor who keeps believing the abuser will change — after years and years of documented harm. I am not going to pretend that dynamic is not gendered; it is. I would argue that is the relationship many people in the democratic West have with democracy itself: a cognitive dissonance, a placebo, a faith that the thing that keeps hurting you will, this time, become the thing it promised to be. I am not asking you to abandon the fight. I am asking you to stop romanticizing the abuser. Sit with the real, ugly, transparent history — and then decide what you are actually willing to give up to change it.What gives me hope is people coming into consciousness — no pun intended. Native Americans did not secure the vote until the 1920s; rights in this country have always been late, partial, and contested. If you believe this moment is monumental, you are right. If you believe it is new, you have more reading to do. The archive is right there. Education is elevation — and that is not a motto, it is the assignment.Five Key FactsThe takeaways to carry out of this conversation.* Juneteenth marks a delayed, conditional freedom. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3 (Galveston, June 19, 1865) freed Texas’s enslaved people two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation — and instructed them to remain and work for wages, channeling emancipation into sharecropping and the Black Codes.* The Emancipation Proclamation left people enslaved. It applied only to states in rebellion. The loyal border states — Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri — kept slavery legal, making the document foundational but, on its own, nearly toothless.* Voting rights are backsliding in real time. In Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, prompting Southern states to redraw maps that eliminate majority-Black and majority-minority districts — a Reconstruction-to-Jim-Crow pattern repeating.* Black children are adultified by the justice system. The vast majority of children charged as adults are Black children and children of color. The contrast is stark: one-year-old Kohen Wiley killed by police in Senatobia, MS; 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony tried as an adult and given 35 years in Texas; while the man who shot 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton in the back in South Carolina was acquitted.* The repression is bipartisan and built on democratic tools. George Floyd (blue state) and Ahmaud Arbery (red state); 15 Minneapolis legal observers federally charged while the agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not. Black gains came in spite of democracy, not because of it — and the convict-leasing chain (the Sugar Land 95) runs straight into Texas leading the nation in incarceration today.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'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.WORKS CITED AND RELATED READINGSVoting Rights / Louisiana v. Callais* Supreme Court opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (decided Apr. 29, 2026). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf* Congressional Research Service, “High Court Narrows Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais.” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11431* Brennan Center for Justice, case analysis of Louisiana v. Callais (6–3, Alito). https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/louisiana-v-callais* NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Louisiana v. Callais case page. https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais/Kohen Wiley (Senatobia, MS)* Mississippi Free Press, officer shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, June 14, 2026. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-police-officer-shoots-and-kills-1-year-old-child-in-response-to-senatobia-shoplifting-call/* NBC News, Mississippi 1-year-old killed during Walmart shoplifting response. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mississippi-1-year-old-dies-walmart-shoplifting-police-incident-rcna350260* ABC News, officer placed on administrative leave in Kohen Wiley shooting. https://abcnews.com/US/officer-involved-shooting-walmart-killed-1-year-boy/story?id=133965022* Mississippi Today, tear gas used on protesters after toddler’s death. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/06/16/1-year-old-killed-law-enforcement/Karmelo Anthony / Austin Metcalf (Frisco, TX)* CBS News Texas, Karmelo Anthony found guilty of murder (June 9, 2026). https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/karmelo-anthony-trial-verdict-austin-metcalf-frisco-track-meet-stabbing/* NBC News, Karmelo Anthony sentenced to 35 years; charged as adult at 17. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/karmelo-anthony-found-guilty-murder-texas-high-school-stabbing-rcna349132Cyrus Carmack-Belton / Rick Chow (Columbia, SC)* Associated Press via ABC7, store owner found not guilty in killing of Black teen. https://abc7chicago.com/post/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-murder-killing-black-teen/19218916/* Prism / Times Free Press, acquittal of Chikei Rick Chow; chase of 130+ yards over water bottles. https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jun/03/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-of-murder-in-killing-of-black-teen/Minneapolis Legal Observers / Operation Metro Surge* Sahan Journal, 15 ICE observers face federal charges (June 16, 2026). https://sahanjournal.com/public-safety/minnesota-ice-observers-face-federal-charges/* Newsweek, DOJ charges and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. https://www.newsweek.com/dhs-antifa-cells-minnesota-ice-doj-charges-minneapolis-12079686* NBC News, DOJ charges 15 over Operation Metro Surge. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-charges-15-minneapolis-protesters-metro-surge-immigration-rcna350335 This is a public episode. 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Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Most Honest Acre in AmericaThe lawn looks like nothing. That’s the point. A flat green silence out front, mowed to the same height as the neighbor’s, asking for nothing, saying nothing. But the landscape in this country is shaped by colonialism, and the yard is where it’s hiding in plain sight. A lawn is an argument — a small, watered manifesto about land, labor, race, and who this country was built to hold. Let’s read it.Start with the thing nobody says out loud: the grass is not from here, and it is not innocent. The carpet of Poa pratensis — Kentucky bluegrass — that anchors most American lawns is native to Europe and the cooler reaches of Asia. It rode over in the 1600s in the holds and feed of colonists and their livestock, naturalized fast, and only later got rebranded with a homegrown name (NASA Earth Observatory; sod-industry historical record). Across the prairie and grassland West it is now classified as one of the most invasive plants on the continent — it crowds out the deep-rooted native perennials that held those ecosystems together for millennia. Bermuda grass, the Southern default, is African. The fescues are European. The American lawn is, almost in its entirety, a transplanted ecology laid down on top of a continent that was emptied to receive it.I. An Invasive Species Is the Whole Story in MiniatureThat is not trivia-night material. It is the argument at ground level. The historian Alfred Crosby called this ecological imperialism: European conquest of the temperate world was never only guns, germs, and steel — it was a biological invasion. Settlers traveled with a portmanteau biota, the grasses, weeds, livestock, and pathogens that remade conquered land until it looked and functioned like home. The land had to be made legible to the colonizer before it could be made profitable to him. Turfgrass is part of that portmanteau. The lawn isn’t the backdrop to settlement. It is settlement, growing.As the cultivation-narrative scholarship lays out, those imported grasses first took hold as feed for colonial livestock — but they did a second, quieter kind of work. A grassy, ordered field functioned as a physical marker, a piece of testimony that “civilized” use of the land had arrived. The mown green drew the boundary: this side colonizer, that side native peoples and the Indigenous ecologies the colonizer intended to displace. Even where the grass could not directly drive expansion the way cattle and the plow did, it normalized the alteration — it announced that the land was now permitted to be remade. Put it next to Patrick Wolfe’s formula that settler colonialism runs on a logic of elimination and is a structure, not an event, and the front yard reveals itself as one of the quietest expressions of that structure we have. The violence is finished and ongoing at once. That is what a structure is.II. They Decided the Land Was Inferior, TooHere is the part that should sit in your chest. The colonial project did not only decide that the people here were beneath them. It decided the land was beneath them.“Understand how evil you gotta be to not only believe the people are inferior and beneath you, but also believe the land itself is inferior and beneath you — and that you gotta bring your own in.”They were so lost in the sauce that everything indigenous to this place — the people and the ground they stood on — read to them as deficient. So they imported a replacement. The grass is the receipt. You don’t haul a European meadow across an ocean because you respect the prairie that’s already there; you do it because you have judged the prairie unworthy and decided to overwrite it. The manicured carpet of grass was a symbol of colonial possession — proof of conquest you could stand on in your slippers.There was a whole legal theology underwriting that contempt. John Locke, in the Second Treatise, made property flow from labor: the “industrious and rational” improver earns title, and land left “waste” is land going to ruin for want of improvement. The Puritans had vacuum domicilium — John Winthrop’s reasoning that land the natives hadn’t “subdued” in the European manner was legally vacant and free for the taking. The Crown had the broader terra nullius: nobody’s land, so anybody’s. Read those doctrines closely and the lawn is already inside them. The “improved” landscape — ordered, mown, visibly worked — was the proof of ownership. The “unimproved” landscape was the proof of vacancy, and vacancy was the license to dispossess. Indigenous land-management — controlled burns, polyculture, the cultivation of “wild” abundance — didn’t register as improvement because it didn’t look like an English estate. The aesthetic was the legal argument. And it still is: the “overgrown,” “unkempt” yard is treated as a moral failing and a fineable offense to this day. The colonist’s eye survives in the municipal weed ordinance.III. But Don’t Blame the GrassOne thing has to be said clearly, because the rigor is the whole point. When we call the grass “invasive,” there’s a trap right next to the truth, and we step around it on purpose.The trap is making the plant the villain. Some Indigenous scholars — see the Anishinaabe framework of an “invasive land ethic” in the journal Sustainability Science — push back on the popular move that treats introduced species as settler-occupiers and their eradication as “decolonization.” Their point is sharper than the binary: the grass is the passenger, not the driver. Plants are opportunistic; they go where a disrupted landscape lets them. What disrupted the landscape was colonialism — the land ethic, not the seed. Blaming the bluegrass is its own kind of being lost in the sauce: it lets the actual structure off the hook and slides toward the ugly place where native-versus-alien talk starts sounding like the rhetoric fascists used (German and Italian landscape movements in the 1930s literally weaponized “native plants” and “purity” to talk about people). We are not doing that.So hold both: the grass is non-native and it does real ecological damage where it crowds out native systems — and the indictment is of the colonial relation to land that brought it, normalized it, and keeps it on life support. The villain is never the messenger. It’s the regime that sent the message.IV. The Dream Had a Deed RestrictionNow the thing people actually mean when they invoke the lawn: the American Dream. The single-family house, the white picket fence, the dog, the green out front. That picture isn’t ancient. It was designed, marketed, and — the part that gets sanded off — racially engineered.The open, unfenced front lawn that reads as quintessentially American was a 19th-century invention. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, Illinois (1869) with mandatory setbacks and continuous green frontage. Frank J. Scott, in 1870, told the rising suburban middle class that hedging your yard from your neighbor’s view was practically un-Christian — the lawn was to be a shared civic offering, a commons stitched out of private parcels. Sold as democratic. Sold as community.But the commons it built had a color line written into the deed. When the lawn went mass-market — Levittown, the assembly-line Dream — it came with two kinds of fine print. The maintenance covenant: Levitt & Sons contractually required residents to mow on schedule and banned fences, so the uniform sweep would hold. And the racial covenant: Levittown’s standard lease and deed barred occupancy by anyone not of the “Caucasian race.” The grass had to be the same height and the people had to be the same color, written into the same document. Underneath sat the federal machinery — FHA and GI Bill financing routed by redlined appraisal maps toward white families and away from Black ones. Black veterans with the same benefits on paper were locked out of the neighborhoods where those benefits paid off. The lawn was the visible surface of a wealth-transfer machine: home equity that compounded for the families allowed onto the grass, denied to the families kept off it. When we talk about the racial wealth gap now, we are partly talking about who got a front yard in 1950. (This is the throughline straight out of the Levittown / residential segregation pack — the lawn is where that history is still standing.)V. The Lawn as Private GovernmentThe covenant didn’t die when courts made the racial clause unenforceable — it mutated into the homeowners’ association, a private government most Americans don’t recognize as a government. It taxes (dues), legislates (covenants), polices (compliance officers), and punishes (fines, liens, even foreclosure) — disproportionately aimed at the yard. Grass too tall, wrong species, a vegetable garden where turf should be: people have been fined, sued, and in this country even arrested over the state of their lawns. “Property values” is the stated reason, but property value is itself a coded system — the market’s memory of who and what was supposed to be where. The weed ordinance is where the old logic of “improvement” and the newer racial-property regime fuse into a single enforceable rule about grass height.VI. The Largest Crop That Feeds No OneNow the ecology presents its bill. Using satellite data, NASA researcher Cristina Milesi estimated turfgrass covers roughly 163,000 square kilometers of the continental U.S. — about the size of Texas, on the order of three times the acreage of irrigated corn. By that measure the lawn is the single largest irrigated “crop” in the country. It yields no food, no fiber, no fuel. Its only product is the appearance of order.What it drinks to make that appearance is staggering. The EPA puts landscape irrigation at nearly one-third of all residential water use — nearly 9 billion gallons a day nationwide — with as much as half lost outright to wind, evaporation, and runoff. The numbers are clear: it is unsustainable to keep a monoculture turfgrass alive at continental scale, and we defend it hardest in the arid West, exactly where it least belongs. Ecologically the lawn is a desert — a monoculture is a biodiversity dead zone that feeds almost none of the pollinators and soil life a varied native ground cover would. We’ve turned a Texas-sized stretch of the continent into a green that is, biologically, close to empty.Then the chemicals — and the genealogy here rhymes with everything above. One of the most common broadleaf herbicides in American weed-and-feed is 2,4-D, one of the two active ingredients in Agent Orange. Both 2,4-D and its partner 2,4,5-T were developed as herbicidal weapons in classified military research at Fort Detrick during WWII before being used to defoliate Vietnam (National Pesticide Information Center; U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs). The notorious dioxin toxicity tracked mainly to the 2,4,5-T component, and 2,4-D is not Agent Orange — that distinction matters and the honest version keeps it. But the lineage is real and not a metaphor: the chemical in the suburban garage descends directly from a chemical-warfare program. We took a tool built to strip the life off a landscape, scaled it down, dyed the bag friendly colors, and sold it as the path to a perfect yard.VII. The Double Whammy: From the Lawn to the Data CenterHere is where the past stops being the past. When we talk about data centers, we’re dealing with a double whammy of coloniality, and the lawn is step one.Step one was teaching the land to be thirsty for something it was never meant to grow — normalizing a water-guzzling invasive monoculture as the default American landscape, billions of gallons a day, no questions asked. Once a society accepts that it is normal to pour scarce water into an ornamental import, the harder ask gets easier. Step two arrives in our moment: the hyperscale data center, siting itself in already water-stressed regions and drinking enormous volumes for cooling, often in the same Sunbelt and Western communities that are already rationing during drought. Same move, new century — impose an alien, resource-devouring system on the land, brand it progress, and push the cost onto the people and ecologies least able to refuse. The grass and the server farm are run by the same logic: extraction dressed as improvement. (Pull this thread all the way back to the data centers / environmental justice pack — it’s the coloniality of infrastructure, and it never left.)VIII. Who Cuts the GrassAnd the labor — because racial capitalism, in Cedric Robinson’s sense, is the frame that holds all of this together. Robinson’s argument is that capitalism didn’t develop and then pick up racism by accident; it developed as racial capitalism, with racial hierarchy as a load-bearing part of how value is extracted. The lawn is a near-perfect specimen. The aesthetic of leisure — the green that signals you’ve arrived, that you have time and money for the purely ornamental — is overwhelmingly produced by the labor of people who are not at leisure, racially marked and politically precarious. The landscaping workforce leans heavily on Latino and immigrant labor, much of it low-wage, a meaningful share of it undocumented and therefore stripped of bargaining power. The same political order that polices the border manufactures the cheap, deportable labor that keeps the suburban yard immaculate. The lawn produces the image of one group’s ease out of the extracted hours of another group’s exhaustion. That isn’t a flaw in the system. That is the system, doing exactly what Robinson said it does.The Whole Chain Is Still StandingPut the pieces in a line and the lawn stops being innocent for good:* the invasive grass (off the colonial ships, on land cleared of Indigenous people and Indigenous ecologies);* the double contempt (a colonial mind that judged the people and the land beneath it, and brought its own in);* the doctrine of improvement (Locke, vacuum domicilium, terra nullius — the ordered green as proof of ownership and alibi for dispossession);* the racially engineered Dream (Olmsted’s open lawn, Levitt’s twin covenants, FHA redlining turning grass into compounding white equity);* the private government (the HOA and the weed ordinance, enforcing conformity for capital);* the ecological sacrifice (the largest irrigated non-crop in America, watered through droughts and dosed with the descendants of chemical weapons);* the double whammy (the same extractive logic now siting data centers in the communities the lawns already left thirsty);* the extracted labor (the racialized, deportable workforce producing the picture of someone else’s leisure).Anybody who wants to wave this off reaches for the same move: that was a long time ago. But there is no “long time ago” here, because the chain is unbroken. The grass is still imported. The improvement logic is still in the code. The equity built behind the covenant is still in the family that inherited it and missing from the family that didn’t. The HOA is still writing letters. The mower is still burning gas. The data center is still drinking the aquifer. The crew is still in the truck at 7 a.m. The lawn is not a relic of these systems — it is the place where every one of them is still operating, in the open, out front, mowed to a respectable height so you won’t look twice.This is the colonization and capitalism they keep trying to convince us benefited the whole world. I beg to differ. That is why it’s the most honest acre in America — everything this country would rather not say about itself is buried right there in the yard, and it is growing.5 Key Takeaways* The grass is colonial. Kentucky bluegrass is a Eurasian import, invasive in native prairie. Crosby called it ecological imperialism — the lawn isn’t the backdrop to settlement, it is settlement, growing.* They judged the land inferior — not just the people. The colonial mind held both in contempt and imported a replacement landscape. The lawn is the receipt, and “improvement” doctrine (Locke, vacuum domicilium, terra nullius) was the legal alibi for dispossession.* The Dream was racially engineered. Levittown’s deed required you to mow and barred anyone not “Caucasian” — same document. FHA redlining routed the lawn-and-equity to white families. The racial wealth gap starts at the front yard.* It’s the largest irrigated crop that feeds no one. Roughly Texas-sized, ~9 billion gallons of water a day (EPA), a biodiversity dead zone — dosed with herbicides (2,4-D) descended from WWII chemical-weapons research.* The chain is unbroken. The same extractive logic now drives data centers drinking the same scarce water, while precarious racialized labor maintains the picture of someone else’s leisure (racial capitalism). “Too long ago” is nonviable — it’s all still operating, out front.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'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.Sources & Further ReadingSettler colonialism & ecological imperialism: Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006); Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012); Paul Robbins, Lawn People.The “invasive” framing — and its critique: envirobites and The Re-enchantment on Kentucky bluegrass as one of the most invasive grasses in North America; on the cautionary side, the Anishinaabe “invasive land ethic” (Sustainability Science, 2018) and critiques warning that native-vs-alien rhetoric can echo nativist discourse.Property, improvement, dispossession: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government; the colonial doctrines of vacuum domicilium and terra nullius.Racial geography of the suburb: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law; Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds (1870); on Levittown’s maintenance and racial covenants.Ecology, water & inputs: Cristina Milesi et al. (NASA Earth Observatory / Environmental Management) on turfgrass as the largest irrigated crop; U.S. EPA WaterSense on landscape irrigation (~9 billion gallons/day); National Pesticide Information Center and U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs on 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange.Histories of the lawn & racial capitalism: Ted Steinberg, American Green; Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.How E. Patrick Johnson took the most celebrated theory of identity in the academy and asked it the one question it kept refusing to answer — whose body are we actually talking about?“Queer theory already covers all of that — once you accept that gender is performed and sexuality is constructed, race and class fall into place on their own.” That is the most generous version of the argument I want to complicate, and I am stating it honestly before I take it apart, because the people who hold it are not arguing in bad faith; they are working from a framework that genuinely revolutionized how a generation talks about identity, and they have simply mistaken a powerful theory for a complete one. Research over MeSearch: I am not relitigating this from feeling. I am tracing where a body of scholarship went, who it left sitting in the waiting room, and what one performance scholar from western North Carolina decided to do about it.When I first encountered this material I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, reading Judith Butler and Michel Foucault alongside a much wider field of queer scholars who were, all at once, refusing the premise that our sexual and gendered identities are fixed, stable, or expressive of some inner essence we were born clutching. Queer theory’s most durable contribution is the concept of performativity, the argument advanced most influentially by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not a truth we possess but an effect we produce, brought into being through the repeated citation of acts, gestures, and styles until the performance hardens into something that reads as nature. Apply Butler here. When we tell a man that he is acting like a woman, or tell a straight person that he is acting gay, we confirm Butler’s point inside the grammar of the insult itself, because we are treating gender and sexuality as scripts that can be performed against the body rather than as essences the body simply contains. That is the gift, and I want to name it as a gift, because what follows is a critique with teeth, not a dismissal.The Critique With TeethHere is the load-bearing claim: queer theory’s universalism is a position, not a neutral vantage point, and the view from nowhere is always, on inspection, a view from somewhere. When a theory announces that it speaks for all bodies while quietly modeling itself on one kind of body, it has not transcended particularity; it has universalized a particular and then forgotten it did so. This is the structural problem that quare theory names. Quare theory is a structural critique of queer studies and its tendency to drift toward white normativity — to universalize a white ideology of embodiment, or more precisely, of disembodiment, where the body in question can afford to be abstract because it has never been hunted, priced, or worked to the bone.The charge is specific. Mainstream queer theory’s universalism too often fails to analyze the particular logics of anti-Blackness, of settler colonialism, of class and race as material conditions rather than discursive flourishes. Apply Crenshaw here: a framework that treats identity one axis at a time will always lose the person standing at the intersection, and the person most reliably lost is the Black, the poor, the Southern, the working subject whose oppression refuses to be sorted into a single tidy category. The Combahee River Collective said it plainly in 1977 — the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and a politics that abstracts away from material life is a politics built for people who have the luxury of abstraction. Having the luxury to treat the body as merely theoretical is itself a sign of which body you have.Sprinkling Historical ContextSee, to really get Quare Theory—and I mean really get it, not just academically cosign it—you gotta understand where Queer Theory came from first. Because history ain’t neutral. And the academy damn sure ain’t neutral.Queer Theory pops off in the early 1990s. You got Judith Butler dropping Gender Trouble in 1990. You got Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with Epistemology of the Closet also 1990. Michel Foucault’s work—especially The History of Sexuality from 1976—gets resurrected and canonized. And look, I ain’t throwing shade on the contributions. Foucault taught us that sexuality isn’t some natural drive but a historical construct produced through discourse. Butler taught us that gender isn’t an essence but a citation of practice. That’s important work. That’s foundational work. I personally appreciated old Judy’s defining gender performativity when I was in grad school.But here’s the thing nobody wanna say out loud: that foundation was poured on white middle-class soil.Let me take you back further. While Foucault was writing in France, Black queer folks in the United States were building entirely different intellectual traditions—they just wasn’t getting PhDs for it. The Combahee River Collective formed in 1974. That’s a group of Black lesbian feminists—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier—who wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement. And in that statement, they said something that Queer Theory wouldn’t catch up to for almost twenty years. They said: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”Interlocking. Not additive. Not “oh and also race.” Interlocking. That’s intersectionality before Crenshaw named it in 1989. That’s Quare Theory before Johnson wrote it in 2001. But because they were Black women writing from a collective—not a tenured position—the academy treated them as activists, not theorists. You feel me?Then you got Bayard Rustin. Architect of the 1963 March on Washington. One of the most brilliant strategists of the Civil Rights Movement. Openly gay. And what happened? He got pushed to the background. Erased from the official narratives. A. Philip Randolph had to protect him, but even then, Rustin was told to stay quiet about his sexuality because it would be “used against the movement.” That’s the material cost of queer existence in Black spaces. And mainstream Queer Theory, for all its talk about subversion, didn’t have a framework for that betrayal—because that betrayal involves both anti-Blackness and homophobia and respectability politics. You need an intersectional blade to cut that knot.Now let me bring it to the 1990s. While Butler and Sedgwick were becoming stars, Black queer scholars were fighting just to be in the room. Cathy J. Cohen wrote The Boundaries of Blackness in 1999—about how AIDS was racialized and classed—and she was critiquing both white queer theory and Black nationalism. Phillip Brian Harper wrote Are We Not Men? in 1996, asking why Black masculinity studies ignored gay men. And E. Patrick Johnson—a gay Black man from Hickory, North Carolina, not New York or San Francisco—he noticed something. He noticed that the queer theory he was reading in his PhD program talked about “the body” all day long. But it rarely talked about bodies. Bodies that are raced. Bodies that are classed. Bodies that are bruised. Bodies that are hungry. Bodies that are from below the Mason-Dixon line, where “acting gay” can get you killed differently than it gets you killed in Chelsea.So in 2001, Johnson drops “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. And the title itself is a performance. “Quare” is Black Southern vernacular—pronounced like “kwahr” not “kweer”—and it carries multiple meanings. It means strange or odd, like queer. But it also means something more specific in Black Southern speech: quare can mean “pretentious” or “flashy in a way that invites trouble.” It can mean a person who is aggressively different, not just differently desiring. And Johnson says: that’s the difference. Queer theory is about destabilizing categories. Quare theory is about survival within categories of race and class that won’t let you go.He argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions about mobility—the assumption that you can subvert, that you can perform your way out of constraint. But try performing your way out of a sharecropper’s debt. Try citing your way out of a police stop in Mississippi. The performance doesn’t land the same way. And Johnson offers quare as a performance rooted in the Black Southern vernacular—a direct challenge to queer theory’s erasure of race and class. Because once you get below that Mason-Dixon line, it go a little different down here.Let me tell you a funny story. I used to be a college policy debater. And when I first came across quare theory—I was talking to somebody from the Midwest, my good sister Toya G.—and I said, “Hey, I came across quare theory.” And she was like, “You gonna be singing?” I was trying to say quare, you feel me? But it was through this Southern vernacular. That right there is good context for where I’m going with this. Even the pronunciation is a political act. The academy wanted to spell it “queer.” Johnson said nah, we spelling it like we say it. That’s epistemological warfare. Finna get in my linguistic bag, man.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Implication for EducationLet me be clear though: I’m not advocating for a complete disregard of the scholarship or the academy research around queer theory. I’m giving you a critique with some teeth though. Education is elevation, and I hope this little video was able to sprinkle a little literacy in how we think about different identities, especially when it comes to the intersection of race and sexuality. Shout out to everybody in the academy doing their thing around queer theory and quare theory, making sure you’re accounting for the lived experiences of the people, man.But here’s the specific implication for education—and I mean K-12, higher ed, community workshops, even your little Instagram classroom.Problem One: The Add-On ApproachMost gender and sexuality education treats race like a seasoning. You teach the “core” queer theory—Butler, Foucault, performativity—and then maybe, maybe, you add a footnote about Black queer people. A week on “intersectionality” if you’re feeling generous. But that’s not integration. That’s liberal guilt on a syllabus. Johnson’s critique is structural: when you build the entire theoretical framework on white middle-class assumptions, you can’t just sprinkle Black voices on top. You have to rebuild the foundation. Quare theory isn’t queer theory plus race. Quare theory is a different epistemology. It’s a different way of knowing that starts with a grandmother’s mouth, not a Parisian archive.Problem Two: The Disembodied ClassroomQueer theory taught us that gender and sexuality are performative. Cool. But how do you teach performativity without bodies? Most classrooms—even college classrooms—teach this stuff as text. You read Butler. You discuss. You write a paper. But you never actually perform. You never sit in a circle and ask: what does it feel like when someone says “you acting like a b***h”? What does it feel like when a straight person says “you acting gay”? That’s not abstract. That’s flesh memory. Johnson’s background in performance studies allows him to swap Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance—the actual doing, the actual inflection. Education without embodiment is just white suburbia talking to itself from the Ivy Tower.Let me give you an example. I teach a workshop sometimes where I ask folks to recall a moment they were told to “act right.” Act like a lady. Act like a man. Don’t act so Black. Don’t act so gay. And the stories that come out—those are not citations of practice. Those are scars. Those are survival strategies. Those are the moments where performativity meets the concrete wall of race and class. You can’t get that from reading a PDF. You have to sit in the discomfort of the body. That’s what Johnson is demanding.Problem Three: The Whiteness of “Subversion”Here’s where I get real with you. Queer theory celebrates subversion. It loves the drag ball, the camp performance, the ironic reversal. And look, I love a good ballroom scene too. But subversion is a luxury. Subversion from the safety of a university—from the academy, from the Ivy Tower, from a white suburb, from an urban nightclub—that’s a very specific kind of subversion. It assumes you have somewhere to go back to. It assumes you won’t get evicted, expelled, or excommunicated.Johnson noticed that the queer theory he was reading always positioned subversion in spaces that are not situated within classed or racialized bodies. That’s a problem for education because it teaches students that subversion is always good, always liberatory. But ask a Black genderqueer teenager in rural Alabama: is it subversive to wear a skirt to school? Or is it deadly? The answer is both, but queer theory doesn’t have a framework for the “deadly” part. Quare theory does. Quare theory holds the contradiction: you can be both subversive and vulnerable. You can be both proud and scared. And education that doesn’t teach that contradiction is lying to young people.What Actually Needs to HappenSo here’s my specific ask for educators, curriculum designers, and anybody with a whiteboard.One: Stop teaching Butler without Johnson. If you assign Gender Trouble, you also assign “Quare” Studies. Not as a bonus. Not as a “diversity reading.” As a corrective. Because Butler’s performativity, for all its brilliance, is untethered without Johnson’s flesh.Two: Teach vernacular as theory. Epistemology is a fancy word for knowledge production: how do you know what you know? And a lot of what Black queer folks know comes from a grandmother’s mouth, from the church, from the beauty shop, from the porch. That knowledge is valid. That knowledge is rigorous. And it’s been marked by this world as ahistorical, as anti-intellectual, as “not real theory.” That’s racism wearing academic clothes. You gotta call it out.Three: Bring the body back. Don’t just read about performativity—do it. Have students reflect on their own repeated social acts. Have them write about a time they were told they were “acting” outside their identity. Have them sit with the discomfort of being seen. That’s not touchy-feely. That’s rigorous performance studies.Four: Talk about class explicitly. Queer theory loves gender. It tolerates sexuality. It nods at race. But class? Class is almost invisible. Johnson doesn’t let that slide. He talks about hungry bodies. Bruised bodies. Bodies that work two jobs and still can’t afford the “urban nightclub” where queer theory says subversion happens. You cannot teach queerness without teaching economic precarity. Full stop.Five: Create assignments that center lived experience, not just citation. Instead of “compare Butler and Foucault,” try: “Describe a moment you performed gender or sexuality differently than you ‘normally’ do. What did it cost you? What did it give you? Now, use Johnson’s quare framework to analyze that moment.” That’s real education. That’s elevationEverything He Learned From His GrandmotherThe founding essay of this critique belongs to E. Patrick Johnson, a performance studies scholar and a gay Black man raised in Hickory, North Carolina, who published it in 2001 in Text and Performance Quarterly under a title that announces its entire method: “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Johnson argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions, and in their place he offers quare — a rearticulation of queer theory grounded in an intersectional framework and rooted in the Black Southern vernacular that directly challenges queer theory’s erasure of race and class. The word itself is the argument. “Quare” is how his grandmother pronounced “queer” in her African American Southern dialect, and Johnson keeps the pronunciation on purpose, because the difference in sound carries a difference in knowledge.I came to this through my own Southern ear. I was a college policy debater, and when I first mentioned that I had come across “quare” theory to my good sister Toya G, who is from the Midwest, she thought I meant “choir” — she asked if I was about to start singing. The vernacular did the work before the theory could. That small mishearing is, in fact, the whole point: quare is a Southern Black epistemological claim. Epistemology is just the formal word for knowledge production — how you know what you know — and Johnson is insisting that knowledge can come from a grandmother’s mouth, in a vernacular and a rhetoric that the academy routinely marks as ahistorical, apolitical, and unintellectual precisely because it does not arrive in the proper accent. Once you get below the Mason-Dixon line, it goes a little differently down here, and Johnson refuses to apologize for that.From Performativity to PerformanceLet me be clear that I am not advocating for the wholesale disregard of queer scholarship. In graduate school I appreciated Butler’s definition of gender performativity as much as anyone, because queer theory gave us the language and the institutional space to academically doubt the categories we had been handed. The disagreement is not whether the body performs. The disagreement is which body, and at what cost. Johnson’s training in performance studies allows him to make a precise substitution: he trades Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance — the actual doing, the actual inflection, the live event in a real and particular body. Performativity can be discussed from a seminar room. Performance cannot be separated from the flesh doing it.And the flesh is where queer theory kept flinching. Johnson observes that queer theory loved to talk about “the body” while rarely talking about the bodies that are raced, that are classed, that are bruised, that are hungry. It celebrated subversion, but usually from a position of safety — the university, the ivory tower, the white suburb, the curated nightclub — almost never from inside the class-marked and racialized body that pays the actual price for transgression. Apply Spillers here: her distinction between the body and the flesh, the flesh being that which is seized and marked before any liberal grammar of personhood arrives, tells you exactly what abstraction conveniently forgets. This is why Johnson advances quare as a “theory in the flesh,” a term he borrows from Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981), where theory is the politic that gets born out of necessity when skin color, the ground you grew up on, and desire all fuse into a single lived reality you cannot think your way out of.The AskSo return to the opening claim — that queer theory already covers race and class, that abstraction takes care of the rest. By insisting on quare, by keeping his grandmother’s pronunciation and refusing to launder the Southern Black voice into a more respectable register, Johnson makes the whiteness of the original universalism visible, and once it is visible it stops being a neutral default and becomes one position among others that must answer for itself. That is the move, and it converts a critique into an obligation. Two things can be true: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at the same time. The work, for everyone still doing this in the academy and outside of it, is to hold gender and sexuality together with race and class and region and the material weight of the body, to center the lived outcomes of Black queer people over the symbolic comfort of saying everyone is included, and to credit the grandmother as a theorist. Make sure your analysis can account for the bruised and the hungry, or admit that it was never universal to begin with. Education is elevation. Happy Pride.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERI'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.5 Key Takeaways* Queer theory’s central contribution is performativity — Butler’s argument that gender is produced through the repetition of acts, not possessed as an inner essence.* Quare theory, founded by E. Patrick Johnson in 2001, is a structural critique: queer theory’s universalism quietly models a white, disembodied subject and fails to analyze anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and class as material conditions.* “Quare” preserves the Black Southern vernacular pronunciation of “queer” as a deliberate epistemological claim — knowledge legitimately comes from a grandmother’s mouth, not only the seminar room.* Johnson’s performance studies training lets him trade Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance and a “theory in the flesh” borrowed from Moraga and Anzaldúa, returning the analysis to bodies that are raced, classed, bruised, and hungry.* This is a critique with teeth, not a rejection: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at once, and the work is to hold gender and sexuality together with race, class, and region while centering Black queer material outcomes.Annotated BibliographyJohnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25. The founding essay. Proposes quare studies as a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory that can hold racialized sexual knowledge, treating race and class as material rather than merely discursive. Defines quare as a “theory in the flesh” and channels Barbara Smith’s call to account for race. This is the load-bearing source for the entire piece.Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. The anthology that institutionalized Black queer studies as a field and reprinted the quare essay (pp. 124–157). Use it to show this was not a one-off provocation but the opening of a sustained intellectual tradition.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. The source of gender performativity — gender as a stylized repetition of acts with no stable doer behind the deed. Operationalize it as the gift quare theory builds on and critiques, not the enemy.Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Establishes sexuality as discursively produced through relations of power and knowledge rather than as a natural given. Background for queer theory’s anti-essentialism; cite to mark what the field inherited before quare reworked it.Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Origin of “theory in the flesh” — a politic born of necessity when skin, land, and desire fuse into lived reality. Johnson borrows the phrase directly; cite to show the women-of-color feminist lineage queer theory often skips.Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. Intersectionality. Deploy it to explain why single-axis frameworks lose the subject standing at the crossing of race, class, gender, and sexuality.The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. Names the major systems of oppression as interlocking and roots politics in material conditions. Use to ground the claim that abstraction is a luxury distributed unequally.Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. The body/flesh distinction — flesh as that which is seized and marked before liberal personhood arrives. Operationalize to specify what “theory in the flesh” is actually pointing at.Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1979. In Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984. There is no liberation in isolation; community is the condition of freedom. Use to support quare theory’s insistence that the individual academic subversion is insufficient.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press, 2021. The framework of misogynoir — the specific anti-Black misogyny aimed at Black women. Keep it in the toolkit so the intersectional analysis names gender within Blackness rather than treating Blackness as ungendered. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.When I was in college, sitting in a philosophy class before I had the vocabulary of Mills and Wilderson and Hartman to lay over it, I learned the one lesson that has organized everything I have studied since, which is that the law in this country has always been good at two specific things, justifying Black death and criminalizing Black resistance, and kinfolks, this week the country handed us the syllabus and dared us to read it out loud.Think about the collective mourning happening for Black folks right now, because we are still processing a not-guilty verdict for the man who chased and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, and before we could catch our breath we had to sit and watch a guilty verdict come down on Karmelo Anthony. Two children. One week. Two verdicts that, laid side by side, tell you precisely how this country has priced our lives since emancipation. None of us was surprised. That right there, the not being surprised, is the whole essay, because surprise is a luxury that belongs to the people the law was built to protect, and we have never been those people.Receipts First: What Actually HappenedLet me keep the facts clean and separate from my read of them, because in this house we never blur a record with a framing. On June 1, 2026, a jury in Columbia, South Carolina found Chikei “Rick” Chow not guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, a 14-year-old boy Chow chased more than a hundred yards and shot in the back over a false accusation about water bottles the child had already put down.On June 9, 2026, a jury in Collin County, Texas found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for the stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet in April 2025, when both boys were 17, and that same jury sentenced him to 35 years, rejected his self-defense claim, rejected sudden passion, and sent him to a cell where he will not be eligible for parole until he has served nearly two decades.Lawyers on both sides of the Anthony trial told the jury this case had nothing to do with race. Hold that sentence. We are going to come back to it, because claimed neutrality is never the absence of a position, it is a position wearing a lab coat, and Mills already named it for us as the view from nowhere that always somehow ends up standing exactly where power is standing.“The Only Good Negro Is a Dead Negro”: The Law Was Built This WayBefore we talk about a single juror, we have to talk about the architecture, because the law did not wake up biased one Tuesday in Texas, it was poured into this mold on purpose. After emancipation, when the formal property claim on Black flesh was struck from the books, this country did not decide we were free so much as it decided we were dangerous, and it wrote that conclusion into the Black Codes, into vagrancy laws that criminalized Black movement itself, into convict leasing that turned the prison into the new plantation under the cover of the Thirteenth Amendment’s one loophole.Read Cruikshank in 1876 and watch the Supreme Court tell the survivors of the Colfax Massacre that the Constitution had no protection to offer them. Apply Mills here, because the racial contract he describes is not a metaphor, it is a working agreement about who counts as a full person before the bench, and it has never been formally repealed, only renegotiated in quieter language.When that old voice says the only good negro is a dead negro, it is not describing a fringe opinion, it is describing the default setting of a legal order that has always been more fluent in our death than in our defense. Apply Hartman here too, because she taught us that the spectacle of Black suffering was never incidental to American law, it was its theater and its ritual, and the lynching postcard and the courtroom selfie are cousins closer than this country wants to admit.They Were Children: The Adultification EngineHere is what gets lost in the sauce every single time. Karmelo Anthony was 17. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14. These were children, and the machinery that turns Black children into adult threats in the eyes of the law has a name and a research record, so let me give it to you.Apply Goff here, whose 2014 work showed that Black boys as young as ten are seen as older, less innocent, and more culpable than white boys the same age, that the presumption of childhood, that soft protective assumption that a kid is just a kid, gets revoked the second the kid is Black. Apply the Georgetown research, Epstein and Blake and Gonzalez, who documented the same theft of childhood from Black girls, the assumption that they need less protection and less nurturing and already know more about grown things.This is the engine. Emmett Till was 14 when this country decided his face was a provocation. The Central Park Five were children when the city and its newspapers and a certain real-estate man taking out full-page ads decided they were a wolf pack. Tamir Rice was 12, with a toy, in an open-carry state, alive for two seconds after the cruiser pulled up. The adultification of Black children is not a vibe, it is a documented perceptual mechanism that does the legal work of making a child’s fear illegible and a child’s death excusable, and you cannot understand either of these verdicts without it.Self-Defense Is a White InheritanceNow watch the inconsistency, and watch how it never embarrasses the people performing it. The same political tradition that built a folk hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with a rifle to a protest and walked out a free man with a self-defense ruling, turns around and decides that Karmelo Anthony should never have had a pocketknife in his bag at a track meet on a rainy day.Apply the two-roles frame here, because what they say is that they believe in the universal right to defend yourself, but what the position structurally does is reserve that right for whiteness and convert that same instinct into evidence of guilt when the body is Black. George Zimmerman followed and killed Trayvon Martin and went home. Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into a wall, hurt no one, and was offered twenty years.This also proves the point, that self-defense in this country is not a fact about danger, it is an inheritance about race, a credential issued at birth to some and withheld at birth from others. Karmelo Anthony, surrounded, afraid, a child by every legal measure that matters, reached for the only thing that felt like protection, and a jury deliberated barely longer than a lunch break before deciding his fear did not count. His fear did not count because the law has never been built to register Black fear as anything but Black threat. That is the whole machine in one sentence.“A Jury of His Peers”: The Constitution They Claim to ConserveHow did the eligible jurors who looked like Karmelo get dismissed, and why is nobody who claims to love the Constitution asking? Here is the contradiction, and I am going to name it and let it hang. The same movement that wraps itself in the Constitution, that calls itself conservative, that swears it wants to preserve the founders’ design, spent this week celebrating that a Black child was convicted by a jury with not one of his peers on it.The Sixth Amendment promise of an impartial jury was so routinely denied to us that the Court had to say it out loud in Strauder v. West Virginia all the way back in 1880, and the dodge was so persistent they had to come back in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986 to tell prosecutors to stop striking jurors for being Black, and here we are, generations later, watching the strike work anyway through a hundred race-neutral pretexts.Apply the claimed-neutrality move here. When the defense and prosecution both announce that race had nothing to do with it, they are not removing race from the room, they are making whiteness invisible so it can operate without a witness, and by insisting on that invisibility they are, in fact, the ones making whiteness the loudest thing in the building. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and so is the conservatism that only discovers the Constitution when it can be used as a weapon against us, because these folks become fluent in the fine print whenever the defendant is Black and act functionally illiterate the second the defendant is one of their own.Fungibility: Mourning Interrupted by the Cash RegisterThen comes the part that told on everybody. Before Karmelo’s mother could leave that courtroom, before this family had a full hour to sit in the shock of a 35-year sentence handed to their child, there were people online already doing the math on how to take the house, how to convert the conviction into a civil judgment, how to extract the last dollar from a family that had already lost a son to a cage.Apply Wilderson here, because this is fungibility in real time, the treatment of Black life as an interchangeable resource to be consumed, mourned over by us and monetized by them in the very same news cycle. The grief had not cooled and the cash register was already open.Now do the Whitey on the Moon move with me, because Gil Scott-Heron gave us the perfect meter for this exact obscenity. A Black child is in a cell (but Whitey’s on the moon). The family raised half a million dollars just to afford a defense the system presumes they cannot have (but Whitey’s on the moon). And the same crowd that called that defense fund a grift is passing the hat to take a grieving family’s home (but Whitey’s on the moon). This is what racial capitalism looks like at the retail level, where, as Robinson taught us, anti-Blackness is not a malfunction of the profit motive, it is the engine of it, the place where surplus has always been wrung out of our flesh and our houses and our grief.Where Are the Black Women in This?We do not get to do this analysis and leave Black women standing in the hallway, because that is not how this house works and it is not how the harm works either. Look at who is carrying this. Karmelo’s mother on the stand asking a room full of strangers for mercy for her child. Cyrus’s mother, Nicole Carmack, saying her son bled out on the side of a road while strangers watched and the last face he ever saw was his killer’s.Apply Combahee here, because they told us in 1977 that the most marginalized position carries the clearest view of the whole system, and it is Black mothers who are made to perform grief in public as a condition of being believed, who are expected to forgive on camera before they are allowed to be angry in private. Apply Moya Bailey here, because misogynoir is the specific machine that makes a Black mother’s pain into either a spectacle or a nuisance, never simply a fact.The material outcome lands on Black women first and hardest, in the lost wages of court dates, in the cost of caskets and commissary, in the labor of holding a family together while the cameras decide whether your dead or caged child was sympathetic enough to deserve coverage. Center that, or you have not understood the case, you have only narrated the men in it.What This Means for Our SchoolsFor the educators and the parents in the back, do not miss where this happened, because Cyrus was accused at a store and Karmelo was at a track meet, which is to say one of these children was killed in the ordinary commerce of childhood and the other will spend his childhood’s end in a prison for something that began at a school athletic event.The adultification research that explains these verdicts is the same research that explains why Black students are suspended, expelled, restrained, and arrested at rates that have nothing to do with what they actually did and everything to do with how old and how dangerous adult eyes decide they are. Apply Crenshaw here, whose Black Girls Matter work documented how our daughters get pushed out of school and into the system through this exact perceptual pipeline.The classroom is where the jury pool is raised, kinfolks, and a Texas curriculum that sands the Black Codes and convict leasing and Cruikshank down into a footnote is not neutral, it is producing the next twelve people who will deliberate for two hours and call it justice. Consciousness precedes transformation. A child who is taught the real architecture grows into an adult who can see the strike for what it is, and that is the long game, that is the only game that has ever actually moved us.Close: We Were Not Surprised, and That Is the IndictmentSo bring it back to where we started, to that philosophy class and that one durable lesson, the law is good at justifying Black death and criminalizing Black resistance, and this week proved it twice before most folks finished their coffee. We were not surprised, and our lack of surprise is not cynicism, it is data, it is the receipts of a people who have been reading this country accurately for four hundred years and getting told we are the ones who are paranoid.Two things can be true at once. A young man lost his life and that is a real loss that deserves real grief, and the system that processed both of these deaths is a system that has never valued Black life and Black childhood at par, and refusing to choose between those truths is the whole discipline.This ain’t a threat, it is a promise, that we are going to keep naming the architecture until naming it is not radical, just accurate. Do better. Teach the real history. Sit on the jury when they call you. And remember why we do this in the first place, because it has always been Research over MeSearch, and the research has never once been on their side of the story.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways* Two verdicts, one logic. A store owner walked for chasing and shooting a 14-year-old in the back, while a Black 17-year-old got 35 years for a fear the jury refused to register. Lay them side by side and you can read exactly how the law prices Black childhood.* Adultification is a documented mechanism, not a feeling. Goff’s research and the Georgetown studies show Black children are stripped of the presumption of innocence and childhood, which is the perceptual engine that makes a Black child’s fear illegible and a Black child’s death excusable.* Self-defense is a racial inheritance. Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Marissa Alexander prove the right to defend yourself is issued at birth to whiteness and revoked at birth from Blackness. A knife at a track meet was never going to read as protection.* “Race had nothing to do with it” is the most racial sentence in the room. Claimed neutrality is a position wearing a lab coat (Mills), and an all-white jury convicting a Black child after a roughly two-hour deliberation is the Sixth Amendment’s oldest unkept promise (Strauder, Batson).* Mourning got interrupted by the cash register. The immediate pivot to civil judgments and “taking the house” is fungibility in real time (Wilderson) and racial capitalism at retail (Robinson). The people raised to do that math were raised in classrooms that taught them none of this history.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER 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 (Bibliography)Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York University Press, 2021.Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977.Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991).Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda. Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. African American Policy Forum / Columbia Law School, 2015.Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017.Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014).Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard University Press, 2010.Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014.Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. 1892.Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.Cases: Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986); Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935).Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Opening: Name the VillainThere is a man walking around this country who handpicked the judges deciding whether your grandmama can vote without standing in a four-hour line, whether your daughter controls her own body, whether your kids drink clean water, and whether your nephew gets a fair shot at the university your tax dollars built, and most of y’all could not pick this man out of a lineup. His name is Leonard Leo. Former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, current co-chairman of its board of directors, and the single most consequential unelected man in American law. I almost want to say his name backwards — Leo Leonard — because this man got the whole court moving backwards, and backwards is exactly the direction his investors paid for.Let me put the receipt on the table before anybody accuses me of feelings. Leo was personally instrumental in placing the last three justices on the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett — and his fingerprints sit on six of the nine seats when you trace the Federalist Society pipeline back through Roberts, Alito, and Thomas’s confirmation defense operations. Then in 2021, a 90-year-old electronics mogul named Barre Seid handed Leo’s brand-new nonprofit, the Marble Freedom Trust, the entirety of his company Tripp Lite, which the trust promptly sold for $1.6 billion — the largest known political donation in American history, structured so slick that Seid dodged as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the way out the door. One political operative. One point six billion dollars. Zero votes cast by you. Feel me?Some of y’all gonna say, iMa bE “the Supreme Court is too conservative is just your opinion.” Two things can be true. “Too conservative” is an opinion. “Leonard Leo controls a $1.6 billion war chest that he used to handpick and confirm the justices who delivered that conservative supermajority” is a documented, tax-filed, ProPublica-and-New-York-Times-verified fact. Facts don’t cancel feelings, kinfolks — facts sit right next to feelings and tell you your feelings been right the whole time. Public confidence in this Court has cratered to historic lows, hovering around one in five Americans in recent polling, and that ain’t because the people are confused. The people can smell capture.The Maze: How Dark Money Stays DarkLeo did not build one organization, because one organization can be tracked, subpoenaed, and shamed. He built a maze. The Judicial Crisis Network ran the attack ads against Merrick Garland and the defense ads for Kavanaugh; in 2020 it rebranded as the Concord Fund. The Judicial Education Project rebranded as the 85 Fund, which also operates under the trade name Honest Elections Project — the same outfit pushing voting restrictions and the independent state legislature theory. CRC Advisors manages the messaging. The Marble Freedom Trust sits on top holding the billion, organized as a trust specifically so it discloses less than a corporation would. Money moves from one pocket to another pocket on the same coat, and every transfer adds a layer of fog between the donor and the damage.Crazy how the maze keeps renovating itself right when the watchdogs get close. After a complaint landed with the D.C. attorney general, the 85 Fund pulled up stakes and re-registered in Texas. Then in January 2026 — yes, this year — the Concord Fund filed articles of termination and dissolved, while new entities like the Lexington Fund and the Publius Fund, formed by the same Leo-network lawyers and carrying the old trade names in their back pockets, started steering millions into state attorneys general races and the 2026 midterms. The organization dies; the money never does. That’s not a charity, y’all. That’s a shell game with a 501(c) stamp on it.Apply Mills here. Charles Mills taught us the racial contract depends on an epistemology of ignorance — a structured, manufactured not-knowing that lets the beneficiaries of domination claim clean hands. Dark money is the epistemology of ignorance with a bank account. The whole design is that you are not supposed to know who paid for the judge who just took your rights, so the ruling lands on you like weather instead of like policy. Naming Leo breaks the spell. The fog is the product.Click The LinkSign now to support SCOTUS REFORM!Critical Historical Context: This Court Was Never NeutralNow let’s back this thing up, because the folks clutching pearls about “politicizing the Court” are running a tired playbook that depends on you not knowing your history. The Supreme Court has been a political instrument of racial order since before your great-great-grandmother was born. Dred Scott (1857) declared Black people had no rights the white man was bound to respect. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) took the Colfax Massacre — white paramilitaries slaughtering Black Republicans defending a courthouse — and ruled the federal government couldn’t protect Black citizens from private white violence, handing Reconstruction its death certificate. Plessy (1896) blessed apartheid for six decades. Du Bois called the destruction of Reconstruction a counter-revolution of property, and the Court was that counter-revolution’s law firm. The view from nowhere has always been a view from somewhere, and that somewhere has historically been the big house.Here’s the part they really don’t teach, and for the people in the back I need you to hold this one: the Constitution does not set the number of Supreme Court justices. Article III is silent on it. Congress sets the number by simple statute, and Congress has changed it seven times in American history — six justices in 1789, five in 1801, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, back down to seven in 1866, and nine again in 1869, where it has sat ever since. Read that 1866 move again. Congress shrank the Court on purpose, specifically to stop President Andrew Johnson — the man busy strangling Reconstruction in its crib — from appointing justices. Court size has been a political tool wielded over questions of Black freedom since Reconstruction itself. So when somebody tells you expansion is some radical, unprecedented scheme, just admit you skipped the nineteenth century. There is no constitutional amendment required. It is an act of Congress. Senator Ed Markey and Representative Hank Johnson’s Judiciary Act would expand the bench from nine to thirteen — one justice per federal circuit, which is exactly how the number was originally pegged in the first place.This means the “institutionalists” are wrong. The two-roles frame applies: what they SAY is that they’re protecting the Court’s legitimacy from politics; what the position structurally DOES is freeze in place a majority that one man’s billion dollars built, and call that freeze “neutrality.” Having the luxury to treat a captured court as settled furniture is a sign of who the capture was never going to hurt. Apply Bell here — Derrick Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis predicts exactly this: every formal gain gets a structural counterattack, and the counterattack always arrives dressed in procedure.What the Supermajority Took: The ReceiptsJust in case some of y’all still asking what the impact of this conservative supermajority has actually been, let’s run the receipts. They gutted the Voting Rights Act — Shelby County v. Holder (2013) killed preclearance and Brnovich (2021) sanded down what was left of Section 2, and polling places across the Black South started disappearing the very week Shelby dropped. They overturned Roe with Dobbs (2022). They came for your water and air — Sackett v. EPA (2023) stripped Clean Water Act protection from millions of acres of wetlands, and Loper Bright (2024) overturned Chevron deference, kneecapping every federal agency that stands between a polluter and your faucet. They took race-conscious admissions with SFFA v. Harvard (2023). They killed student debt relief for forty-three million borrowers in Biden v. Nebraska (2023). Then they handed presidents broad criminal immunity in Trump v. United States (2024). Every single one of those majorities was assembled, advertised, and defended by money moving through Leonard Leo’s maze. That’s not a court drifting right. That’s a return on investment.Gil Scott-Heron got something for this moment. A rat done bit my sister Nell — but Leonard Leo’s sitting on $1.6 billion. Her face and arms began to swell — and the Concord Fund dissolved itself before the auditors called. I can’t pay no doctor bill, my kids’ school can’t pay no light bill — but one billionaire’s tax-dodged fortune is out here buying state attorneys general like trading cards. Whitey’s not on the moon this time, y’all. Whitey’s on the bench, with lifetime tenure, and your public school’s art program paid the launch costs.Click here Fight Back Against Leo and Sign PetitonThe Education Implication: This Is a Schoolhouse StoryI’m an educator, so let me bring this home to the schoolhouse, because court capture is an education story from top to bottom. SFFA tooken race-conscious admissions, and the first enrollment cycles after it showed Black student numbers dropping at selective institutions — the exact doors the Second Reconstruction pried open getting quietly re-locked by judicial decree. Carson v. Makin (2022) and Espinoza (2020) ruled that when states fund private education, they must fund religious schools too, accelerating the voucher pipeline that drains public school budgets in Black and brown districts — and remember, the modern “school choice” movement was born as massive resistance to Brown v. Board, with segregation academies cashing the first vouchers. Biden v. Nebraska kept the boot on borrowers, and Black borrowers — who hold disproportionate debt because our families were systematically stripped of the intergenerational wealth that pays white kids’ tuition — took the hardest hit. Loper Bright gutted the Department of Education’s regulatory muscle right as the department itself was being dismantled politically, which means Title VI civil rights enforcement, Title IX protections, and predatory-college accountability all got softer at once.Then there’s the part nobody connects: the Honest Elections Project — a trade name of Leo’s 85 Fund — pushes the voting restrictions that decide who sits on your school board. The same money that picked your justices is shaping who bans your books. Court capture and curriculum capture are the same project wearing two different suits. Freire told us education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of conformity or as the practice of freedom. Leo’s network understood that better than most of our side did, and they spent three decades and billions acting on it while we were told to wait on the next election.Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Carries the WeightIntersectional analysis is not a garnish on this plate, it’s the plate. Apply Crenshaw here — these rulings don’t land on abstract “Americans,” they converge on bodies sitting at the intersection of race, gender, class, and geography. Dobbs lands hardest on Black women, who already die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, concentrated in the same Southern states that slammed clinic doors the moment the ruling dropped — states where Shelby had already made it harder for those same women to vote the policy out. SFFA lands hardest on Black women, who have been among the most consistent beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everybody would be free, because our freedom requires dismantling every system of oppression at once — flip it, and you see why a court built to re-entrench every hierarchy at once finds Black women standing at the center of the blast radius.Class and disability sit in the wreckage too: student debt cancellation killed, agency protections for workers and disabled folks weakened, 303 Creative (2023) opening the door to licensed discrimination against LGBTQ people — and Black queer and trans folks catch that one twice. Environmental deregulation through Sackett and the death of Chevron deference is environmental racism with a gavel, because the fenceline communities breathing the benzene and drinking the lead are Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor — ask Flint, ask Cancer Alley, ask Jackson, Mississippi. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and the purest cut is believing a court can be “depoliticized” while its rulings redistribute life chances upward and whiteward every single term. Two roles, one bench: what they say is originalism; what it does is racial capitalism’s legal department — apply Robinson here, because antiblackness is not a glitch in the accumulation machine, it is the engine.Closing: Convert the Read Into the AskSo here’s where I close the loop on the cartoon villain I opened with. Leonard Leo matters as a name because abstract “court capture” feels like weather, and weather makes people passive — a name makes it personal, traceable, and fightable. The organization Court Defenders and the broader defend-our-courts movement got receipts we can all learn from, and the remedy is sitting in plain sight with two centuries of precedent behind it: Congress has changed the size of the Court seven times, expansion to thirteen justices requires nothing but an act of Congress, and the only thing standing between here and there is political will — which is to say, organized people outlasting organized money.By insisting the Court is neutral, untouchable, and frozen at nine, the institutionalists are making the capture visible — they’re telling on the whole arrangement, because you only sanctify the referee after your team bought him. Every accusation is a confession: the same crowd that screamed “court packing” spent thirty years and $1.6 billion literally packing the court. Don’t let them piss on us and tell us it’s raining. Learn the history. Say the man’s name. Support the organizers doing court-reform work. The facts are sitting right next to your feelings, kinfolks, and they’re both telling you the same thing. Education Is Elevation.Five Key Takeaways* One unelected man, six of nine seats. Leonard Leo — former Federalist Society executive VP, current board co-chair — was instrumental in seating the last three justices and shaping the pipeline behind six of the nine, then took control of a $1.6 billion dark money war chest, the largest known political donation in U.S. history.* Dark money is designed fog. The Judicial Crisis Network became the Concord Fund, the Judicial Education Project became the 85 Fund (a.k.a. Honest Elections Project), the Concord Fund dissolved in January 2026 while the Lexington Fund picked up the bag — the maze exists so you can’t connect the donor to the damage.* The Court was never neutral. From Dred Scott to Cruikshank to Plessy to Shelby, the Supreme Court has repeatedly served as the legal department of racial order — “Reconstruction in reverse” is the pattern, not the exception.* Court expansion is normal American history. The Constitution does not set the Court’s size; Congress has changed it seven times — including shrinking it in 1866 specifically to block Andrew Johnson — and the Markey–Johnson Judiciary Act (nine to thirteen, one justice per circuit) requires only a simple act of Congress, not an amendment.* Education is the battlefield. SFFA, Carson v. Makin, Biden v. Nebraska, and Loper Bright form a coordinated judicial assault on educational access, public school funding, debt relief, and civil rights enforcement — while the same network’s voting-restriction arm shapes who controls your school board.Become a Paid Subscriber: Fund the Counter-CurriculumLet me keep it all the way real with y’all before you close this tab. You just read a piece that named Leonard Leo, traced $1.6 billion through a maze of dissolving nonprofits, pulled the 1866 receipt that your civics class never handed you, and connected the bench to the schoolhouse to your grandmama’s polling place. Leo’s side spent three decades and billions building an infrastructure to control what courts decide and — through vouchers, book bans, and school board capture — what children learn. The counter to captured infrastructure is independent infrastructure. That’s what this is.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: The Receipts ShelfBooks* W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — the counter-revolution of property, and the Court’s role in killing the First Reconstruction.* Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992) — why every gain triggers a structural counterattack.* Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997) — the epistemology of ignorance; dark money as manufactured not-knowing.* Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) — racial capitalism as the engine, not the glitch.* Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) — the donor infrastructure Leo plugged into.* Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (2022) — the capture, mapped from inside the Senate.* Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (2008) — how the Federalist Society farm system was built.* Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2015) — the network’s intellectual supply chain.* Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) — the post-Shelby landscape on the ground.* David Daley, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections (2024) — Leo, the Honest Elections Project, and the election-law front.* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — the analytic for reading who carries the rulings’ weight.* The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) — interlocking systems, and why Black women’s freedom is the measure.Investigations & Primary Documents* ProPublica — “We Don’t Talk About Leonard” series and the original reporting (with The Lever) confirming the $1.6 billion Seid-to-Marble Freedom Trust transfer (2022–2023).* The New York Times — Kenneth P. Vogel & Shane Goldmacher, first report on the record-setting Seid donation (August 2022).* OpenSecrets — ongoing reporting on the Leo network, including the 2026 reporting on the Concord Fund’s dissolution and the Lexington Fund’s midterm spending.* NOTUS — 2026 reporting on the Leo network’s reorganization ahead of the midterms.* Rolling Stone — Andrew Perez’s reporting on the 85 Fund’s Texas re-registration and the Publius/Lexington Fund formations (2024).* U.S. Senate Democrats, “Captured Courts” report (2020) — the official map of the dark money judicial pipeline.* The Judiciary Act (Markey–Johnson) — bill text and one-pagers via congressional offices.* United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013); Dobbs (2022); SFFA v. Harvard (2023); Biden v. Nebraska (2023); Sackett v. EPA (2023); Loper Bright (2024); Trump v. United States (2024) — read the rulings, not just the headlines. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A male daughter in precolonial Igbo society was a daughter who was socially accepted as a son. See, before there was a missionary, before there was a governor, before the priesthood, before the binary, Africa had more than two ways of being, and the people who lived those ways did not treat them as scandals or secrets or sins, they treated them as systems, rooted in kinship, spirit, and survival. Survival of our ancestors. Don’t you ever forget that.Now before I go any further, I want to state this clearly: this is not me romanticizing the continent, this is me telling you what existed there before the Europeans showed up, with receipts, with citations, with the anthropological record sitting right next to the analysis, because the slogan around here is Research over MeSearch and I intend to keep it that way. Understand?Here go the thesis, so ain’t no confusion later: the concept of the male daughter is central to deconstructing colonial gender norms because it reveals the historical flexibility of gender and exposes the way Europeans taught us that their gender roles were natural, when the record shows those roles were normalized over time, specifically by violence. Sit with that. If the binary was natural, they wouldn’t have needed missionaries, magistrates, warrant chiefs, and criminal codes to enforce it. You don’t pass laws against things that don’t exist.What the Institution Actually WasThe history of male daughters in Nigeria is a documented example of precolonial gender flexibility, one that sits entirely outside the Victorian framework, and it was captured most rigorously by the Nigerian anthropologist Ifi Amadiume in her 1987 study of the Igbo town of Nnobi, titled Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Apply Amadiume here. She demonstrated that in Igbo social organization, gender was a social category that could be decoupled from biological sex, meaning a daughter could be socially repositioned as a son, and once that repositioning happened, the community treated it as real, because it was real.A male daughter is not a metaphor. A male daughter is not a mistake. A male daughter was a social role in Igboland where a woman could become a son, inherit land, lead a family compound, hold ritual and political authority, and participate in lineage governance, which is everything the European said a woman couldn’t do. When a family had no surviving male heir, or when a daughter possessed exceptional leadership qualities, she could be designated to fill the structural position of a son, keeping the lineage, the land, and the ancestral obligations intact. Think about what that means. The role was strategic, it was flexible, it was contextual, and it answered a material question, which is who holds the land and who carries the lineage, with a social answer instead of a biological one.Then there’s the related practice that often went hand in hand with it: the female husband. This was a position where a woman of means and standing could marry a wife, establish a household, secure children for her lineage with the help of a man in a procreative role, and exercise the full social authority of a husband. The marriage was the institution. The authority was the point. Amadiume documented women in Nnobi who accumulated wealth, took titles, married wives, and ran economic operations that colonial officers later refused to even recognize on paper, because their paperwork only had two boxes and African life didn’t fit in either one.Gender as a Social Construct, DemonstratedWhen we say gender is a social construct, we are literally saying that depending on which society and which moment in history you’re talking about, people built gender differently, and the male daughter illustrates that with precision. In this system, a person’s ability to perform a role, like managing a household, inheriting property, or carrying leadership, mattered more than their physical sex. The genitalia did not dictate the function. The function was assigned by the community according to need, capacity, and circumstance, which means the Igbo were operating a grounded, homegrown theory of gender centuries before a single Western feminist seminar ever convened.Most of y’all been taught that the strict two-gender system is the neutral default of human civilization, the view from nowhere, just the way things are. Just admit that’s a position. Claiming the binary is natural is not the absence of an ideology, it is an ideology, one with a shipping date, a port of entry, and a paper trail running through mission schools, Native Courts, and the Criminal Code. Naming that claimed neutrality as a position is the whole ballgame, because once the binary has a history, it stops being destiny.How They Dismantled It: Two Roles, One ConfessionWatch the two-roles frame, because the colonizers had a script and a function and they were never the same thing. What they said: we are bringing civilization, salvation, and proper family order to a dark continent. What the position structurally did: it dismantled African systems of land tenure, lineage authority, and gender flexibility so that colonial administration and extraction could run smoothly through a single, legible, male head of household. Crazy how ‘civilization’ always seems to end with somebody else holding your land.The mechanics were specific. Missionaries branded the male daughter and the female husband as primitive and demonic, which justified throwing the devil on us. Mission schools taught Igbo girls domesticity and submission while teaching boys administration and authority, manufacturing the Victorian household one classroom at a time. Colonial Native Administration appointed warrant chiefs, men, only men, handpicked for cooperation, to replace governance systems where women had held real institutional power through their own assemblies and organizations. Then the legal system finished the job: British-derived criminal codes criminalized intimacy ‘against the order of nature,’ and inheritance law was restructured around the male heir, which made the male daughter not just disfavored but legally illegible. These folks hoodwinked us. They finessed us into believing women were divinely subordinate, then they pointed at the wreckage of the systems they destroyed and called the wreckage ‘African tradition.’Every accusation is a confession. They called African gender systems unnatural while running an empire that required guns, courts, schools, and churches to make their own gender system stick. If your ‘natural order’ needs that much artillery, it was never natural, it was enforced. This also proves the second thing: the closet itself was an import. The down low was an import. These roles were not secrets in precolonial Igboland, they were public institutions with names, rules, and ceremonies, and it took colonial violence to convert openness into shame.This Means the ‘Un-African’ Crowd Is WrongNow let me address the folks who love to say queerness and gender fluidity are Western imports corrupting the continent. This means you are wrong, flatly, and the receipts are not close. Scholars like Marc Epprecht and the collection assembled by Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe have documented same-sex intimacy and gender diversity across the continent long before contact, from woman-to-woman marriage among the Igbo, Nandi, and Lovedu, to the mudoko dako among the Lango that I covered earlier in this series. What actually arrived on the boat was the criminalization. Political scientists Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney ran the comparative analysis and found that former British colonies are significantly more likely to criminalize homosexuality today precisely because Britain wrote those laws into colonial penal codes. Nigeria’s Criminal Code provision punishing ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ is British law in African clothing, and the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was built on top of that colonial scaffolding, not on top of Igbo cosmology.So the next time you hear somebody declaring what’s African and what’s un-African, ask them if they picked up a history book or if they’re just regurgitating what the missionary taught their great-granddaddy. iMa bE: ‘we are defending traditional African values.’ Cool. Then defend the male daughter, defend the female husband, defend the women’s assemblies, because those are the traditions, documented and dated. What you’re actually defending is Victorian England with a Lagos zip code, and by calling that colonial residue ‘tradition’ while calling our actual traditions ‘Western,’ you are making whiteness visible, you’re just making it visible inside your own mouth. The ask is simple: read Amadiume before you legislate.Western Feminism Doesn’t Own This Critique EitherThis history also challenges the universality that Western feminist theory has tried to dominate us with, and I say that as somebody who has read the first wave, the second wave, and the third wave. Amadiume wrote her book partly as a confrontation with white feminist scholars who treated African women as a pile of victims waiting on European theory to rescue them. Apply Oyěwùmí here too: in The Invention of Women, she showed that among the Yoruba, seniority, not gender, organized social life until colonization translated everything into the European two-box system. María Lugones names the whole apparatus the coloniality of gender, meaning the binary and the racial hierarchy arrived as one package, installed together, enforced together. Operationalize that: you cannot decolonize race and keep the colonizer’s gender system, because they came off the same boat, signed by the same hands, blessed by the same church.Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and one of its favorite highs is letting Western feminism critique patriarchy while leaving the colonial origins of that patriarchy unexamined, because examining them would implicate the same empires that funded the universities. African societies had their own grounded theories of gender, encoded in language, kinship, and social structure, and recovering them is not an academic exercise, it is a toolkit, one that supports present-day arguments for the rights and dignity of diverse gender and sexual identities across Africa and the diaspora, especially against folks who like to ordain oppression onto bodies that don’t conform.The Women Fought BackLastly, don’t let the near disappearance of the male daughter read as passive surrender, because the resilience of Igbo women is equally crucial to this history. Igbo women had a practice called ‘sitting on a man,’ documented by Judith Van Allen, where women would mass at the compound of a man who violated community norms, singing, dancing, banging on his walls, and refusing to leave until accountability happened. Collective discipline, institutionalized. In 1929, when colonial Native Administration moved toward taxing women, tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women rose up in the Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women’s War, sitting on warrant chiefs across the southeast, and colonial forces answered organized, largely nonviolent women with bullets, killing dozens. Then there’s Ahebi Ugbabe, documented by historian Nwando Achebe, a woman in colonial Nigeria who became a warrant chief and then a female king, the only one in the colonial record, which tells you the older logic of flexible gender did not die quietly, it kept breaking through the concrete.So let me close the loop where I opened it. A male daughter was a daughter socially accepted as a son, and that single sentence detonates the claim that the binary is universal, natural, or divine. The rigid dichotomous system of man and woman is not a universal, it is the result of a specific historical process that was pushed onto us by violence, and the people pushing it needed armies, courts, classrooms, and pulpits to make it hold. Africa had more than two ways of being. The record says so. Education Is Elevation.Critical Historical ContextThe timeline matters, so let’s lay it down clean. Precolonial Igbo society was decentralized, organized through lineages, age grades, title societies, and village assemblies rather than kings and standing armies, and within that structure women held institutionalized power: they ran market networks, held their own assemblies (the mikiri), took titles, and exercised collective enforcement through practices like sitting on a man. The male daughter and female husband institutions sat inside that architecture as lineage-preservation technologies, ensuring land and ancestral obligation could pass through a daughter when no son survived.The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 carved the continent on paper, and Britain consolidated control over what became Nigeria through the early 1900s, formally amalgamating the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. Indirect rule arrived with it: warrant chiefs, Native Courts, and a colonial legal order that recognized only male authority, which meant women’s political institutions were not just ignored, they were structurally deleted from governance. Mission Christianity supplied the moral software for the operation, recasting flexible gender roles as sin and superstition, while mission education trained girls for Victorian domesticity. The Criminal Code transplanted British prohibitions on intimacy ‘against the order of nature’ into Nigerian law, where that colonial scaffolding still stands, reinforced rather than repealed by the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. The 1929 Women’s War was the loudest answer to all of it, and the colonial commissions that followed were forced to admit they had never understood, or cared to understand, the women’s institutions they had bulldozed. That admission is the whole case file.Colonial Implication of EducationHere go the part where I put my educator hat all the way on. The erasure of the male daughter from curriculum is not an oversight, it is the maintenance phase of the same colonial project, because a student who learns that the gender binary has a shipping date can no longer be told it’s eternal, and students who can historicize power are harder to govern with myths. Mission schools were the original delivery system for Victorian gender ideology in Igboland, teaching girls submission and boys administration, which means schooling itself has always been a front in this fight, never a neutral bystander. The view from nowhere doesn’t run a classroom.Map that onto right now. The same legislatures passing ‘divisive concepts’ laws, gutting African American Studies frameworks, and pulling books on African and queer history off library shelves are running the mission school playbook with updated branding: control what children can know about the construction of race and gender, and you control what adults will accept as natural. A curriculum that includes Amadiume next to the standard civics unit produces students who ask who benefits from the categories, and that question is precisely what the censorship is designed to prevent. This is why independent educational media matters, why I build full packages with bibliographies instead of hot takes, and why community-funded curriculum is not a luxury, it is infrastructure for intellectual self-defense. Teach the male daughter and you teach students that social arrangements are made by people, which means they can be remade by people. That’s the implication, and it’s also the threat, depending on which side of the desk you’re sitting on.Intersectional Material ImpactsIntersectional analysis is the default around here, not a garnish, so let’s name who carries the material weight of this history. Apply Crenshaw: the colonial deletion of the male daughter was simultaneously a gender operation and a property operation, because when inheritance was restructured around the male heir, African women lost land, and land is wealth, and wealth compounds across generations. The Combahee River Collective taught us that systems of oppression are interlocking, and this is the textbook case: race, gender, religion, and property law moving as one machine.* Land and wealth: Women who could once inherit as male daughters were converted into legal dependents, and across the continent today, women perform a massive share of agricultural labor while holding a fraction of documented land title, a gap with a colonial paper trail. Dispossession is not a vibe, it’s a ledger.* Bodies and criminalization: British-derived sodomy provisions and their modern reinforcements expose queer Africans, and disproportionately poor and gender-nonconforming people who cannot buy privacy or exit, to arrest, extortion, mob violence, and exile. Apply Bailey’s misogynoir framework to who gets policed hardest at the intersection of Blackness, womanhood, and nonconformity.* Authority and governance: The warrant chief system deleted women’s assemblies from formal politics, and the underrepresentation of African women in land boards, courts, and legislatures today is the long tail of that deletion, not a natural distribution of ambition.* Diaspora echoes: Apply Spillers: the same colonial order that ungendered captive African flesh in the hold of the ship policed gender conformity on the continent, two arms of one body. Black women and Black queer folks in the diaspora inherit both operations at once, fighting respectability politics that are, at root, Victorian mission-school curriculum passed down as culture.* Class and labor: Hold the Black Marxist frame alongside the Afropessimist one: dismantling flexible gender wasn’t just ideological housekeeping, it organized households into units legible for taxation, wage labor, and extraction. Antiblackness and patriarchy were not aberrations in the colonial economy, they were the engine and the transmission.Become a Paid Subscriber: Keep This History AliveI’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.5 Key Takeaways* The male daughter was a real, documented Igbo institution, recorded by Ifi Amadiume in Nnobi, where a daughter was socially repositioned as a son to inherit land, lead the family, and carry the lineage. Not a metaphor, not a mistake, a system.* Precolonial Igbo society decoupled biological sex from social function: capacity and circumstance assigned roles, not genitalia, which proves the rigid binary is a specific historical product, not a human universal.* Colonialism dismantled these systems deliberately, through missionaries, mission schools, warrant chiefs, male-only inheritance law, and British-derived criminal codes, then rebranded the wreckage as ‘African tradition.’* Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import: the criminalization arrived in British penal codes, the closet arrived with the shame economy of the church, and modern laws stand on that colonial scaffolding.* Igbo women resisted, from sitting on a man to the 1929 Women’s War to Ahebi Ugbabe becoming a female king, which means this history is a record of fightback, not just loss, and recovering it is present-tense political equipment.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.Related Readings: A Working Bibliography* Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Zed Books, 1987.* Amadiume, Ifi. Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. Zed Books, 1997.* Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.* Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007.* Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. Palgrave, 1998.* Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2008.* Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Pambazuka Press, 2011.* Van Allen, Judith. “’Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1972.* Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Indiana University Press, 2011.* Han, Enze, and Joseph O’Mahoney. British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality. Routledge, 2018.* Ihejirika, Chidera. “F**k Your Gender Norms: How Western Colonisation Brought Unwanted Binaries to Igbo Culture.” gal-dem.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977.* Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987.* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972.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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A effeminate man in northern Uganda before the colonizers pulled up was called a Mudoko Dako, and that wasn’t a slur, that wasn’t a scandal, that wasn’t something whispered behind a granary — it was a recognized place in the community, a distinct gender status among the Lango people and their neighbors the Teso and the Karamojong, with rights, roles, and yes, marriages. A lot of y’all are lost in the sauce of Western heteronormativity, so let me say it plain before we go any further: there were men in precolonial Africa who wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, lived as women, and legally married men, and no elder raised a spear in protest. Let that marinate.The word Dako in the Lango language means woman. The Mudoko Dako were assigned male at birth, understood by their communities to be womanized men, and they cooked, they cleaned, they cared for children, they worked the land — not in shame, not in hiding, but in full view of the village. Some so fully embodied their lived womanhood that they simulated menstruation. This ain’t me freestyling. This is in the colonizer’s own paperwork: British anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg documented all of it in The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda in 1923, describing how these men dressed in the manner of women, took on women’s traditional roles, and were folded into family life. Crazy how the same empire that wrote this down in its field notes turned around and wrote laws pretending it never existed.Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale, former dean of the law faculty at Makerere University, puts the receipt in one sentence: “During precolonial times, the ‘mudoko dako,’ or effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, were treated as women and could marry men.” Treated as women. Could marry men. No social sanction. Tamale has spent her career documenting that gender across precolonial African societies was less a cage and more a landscape, and she calls the “homosexuality is un-African” line what it is — a tired fable that the historical record demands we bury. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (1998) stacks example after example across the continent. The scholarship is not thin. The amnesia is manufactured.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.Critical Historical Context: Gender as Spiritual TechnologyHere’s the context your textbook skipped, and it matters because it explains what colonialism actually destroyed. Across a range of African societies, gender-crossing wasn’t just tolerated as a private quirk — it was often read as evidence of spiritual capacity. People who could move between masculine and feminine presentation were understood to live in more realms than just the human one, and that ability to transgress the boundary made them candidates for sacred work: spiritual healers, diviners, mediums consulted by chiefs, soldiers, and war captains, instrumental in politics and justice. Among the Lugbara, transgender mediums carried messages between the human and spirit worlds; the chibados of Angola were male diviners who lived as women; the Bunyoro of Uganda held religious roles for men who dressed as women. Feminine dress could signal that a healer was that day inhabiting the side of themselves that speaks to ancestors, open for the community’s problems. The only consistent grounds for sanction wasn’t the gender-crossing itself — it was using spiritual power for harm, cursing and tricking your neighbors instead of helping them. Feel me? The line wasn’t drawn at who you were. The line was drawn at what you did to the community.Then comes the break, and the break happened twice. On the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South, enslaved Africans carried these understandings out of context — and when an enslaver saw somebody cross-dressing, somebody moving between genders the way their tradition sanctified, that person was punished, and the punishment did double work: it brutalized a body and it severed a chain of ancestral memory, oral storytelling, and tradition that could no longer be passed on. Back on the continent, the empire ran the same play with different personnel: enslavers and administrators left missionaries and priests behind to westernize the villages, teaching that indigenous gender structures were ungodly and demonic in the name of Jesus, while the law handled the hardware. In 1861 the British Empire wrote Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” — and then photocopied it across the empire, and Uganda got its version in the 1902 colonial penal code, which outlawed non-conforming gender expression and same-sex relationships as “gross indecency.” Some of y’all might be asking, what the hell is a penal code? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the moment a community’s memory becomes a crime scene. You don’t just outlaw the practice. You outlaw the remembering.Now run the math. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates — the majority of these laws trace straight back to colonial penal codes. Britain decriminalized at home in 1967 and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code; it upgraded it, most recently with the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” Crazy how Robert Mugabe could call homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote and his own ancestors never needed. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease was never the queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute — and a generation of post-colonial leaders have continued to perpetuate it, pissing on us and telling us it’s raining, calling the eraser “tradition” and the tradition “foreign.”Then Came the Penal CodeThen came 1902. The British brought they beans-and-toast colonial ways to the shores of the Nile and stamped the word “illegal” onto love, importing a penal code built from the same imperial template London had been rolling out since 1861 — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” “gross indecency,” the whole catalog of Victorian disgust dressed up as law. Missionaries handled the software while the penal code handled the hardware: one taught the village that its own traditions were demonic, the other made sure anybody who remembered different could be caged. That’s how you break a chain of ancestral memory. You don’t just outlaw the practice, you outlaw the remembering.Now run the math with me. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and the majority of those laws are inherited directly from European colonial penal codes — more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates. Europe decriminalized at home and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code, it upgraded it: the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act carries the death penalty for what it calls “aggravated homosexuality.” Robert Mugabe called homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease isn’t queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute.Who Wrote the “Gay Agenda”? (Hint: It Wasn’t Gay Folks)When I first got into the conscious community as a youngster, I was told the “gay agenda” was an attack on the Black family, and it took me years to clock that the phrase itself has a birth certificate, and it’s white. The “gay agenda” as a political weapon was built by the white evangelical right: Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign cast gay people as predators coming for your kids, and in 1992 a religious-right outfit literally released a propaganda video titled The Gay Agenda that got mailed to members of Congress and circulated at the Pentagon to kill gay folks’ standing in public life. Then they exported the product line. In March 2009, American evangelicals — including Scott Lively, a man who built a career claiming gay people orchestrated the Holocaust — ran a conference in Kampala warning Ugandans about the “gay agenda” threatening their families. Months later, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill hit parliament, the one the world called the “Kill the Gays” bill, the direct ancestor of the 2023 law with death sentences in it. So when somebody Black repeats “gay agenda” talk, they are running white Christian nationalist software on Black hardware — using a script written by the same people whose ancestors wrote the penal codes, to push Black queer folks out of families, out of churches, out of organizing spaces, and into isolation that gets people killed. Two things can be true: you can have questions about anything you want, and you can refuse to let Anita Bryant’s ghost ventriloquize your mouth. Black queer people — and Black queer women and femmes catch the worst of it, like Bailey’s work on misogynoir keeps showing us — are not the agenda. They are the kinfolk. The agenda was always somebody else’s, and we were never on the committee.If You Missed the Female Husbands PieceThis is the second entry in what’s turning into a Pride Month series, and if you missed the first one, go back and read the female husbandry package — women across African societies who took wives, headed households, and held lineage and property through marriages the community fully recognized, from the Igbo and Nuer traditions to figures like Njinga and the Kuria practice that continues today. Put the two histories side by side and the picture gets undeniable: women marrying women over here, men living as women and marrying men over there, both sanctioned, both ordinary, both older than the empire that called them deviant. Queerness and Black folks been together since before colonialism, feel me — the question was never whether queer Africans existed, the question is who profited from making you forget they did.The Community Rises AgainSo this Pride Month, when you raise a flag or speak a name, remember the Mudoko Dako — remember that before the code there was a community, and the community rises again. The creator does not make mistakes, and nature loves the variation, and the multiplicity of how we show up has always been ingrained in our humanity. You should really show this to somebody who still believes effeminate men in our community came from the European. Show them the 1923 field notes. Show them the 1902 statute. Then ask them which one came first, the queer Africans or the law against them. I’ll wait.Happy Pride Month, y’all. Education is elevation. If you want the sources from this piece, they’re all linked below for the community. Shidd — if this work feeds you, become a paid subscriber and keep it independent.The Implication for EducationThis is where it lands in my lane, because the mudoko dako didn’t disappear from history by accident — they disappeared by curriculum. The same colonial project that wrote the penal codes wrote the syllabi: mission schools on the continent taught children that their grandparents’ gender traditions were demonic, and Western schools taught everybody else that Africa had no queer history at all, so two continents got educated into the same amnesia from opposite directions. Then look at right now: book bans pulling Black and queer history off shelves, “divisive concepts” laws making teachers afraid to say what Driberg published in 1923, state boards — including the one I just wrote about in Texas — overhauling curriculum to sand the edges off of exactly this kind of knowledge. When a Black child never learns that the mudoko dako existed, the “un-African” lie gets installed at the root, and when a Black queer child never learns it, school becomes one more institution telling them they’re a foreign object in their own lineage. Paulo Freire taught us that education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of liberation or an instrument of conformity — and a curriculum that erases the mudoko dako isn’t neutral, it’s the 1902 penal code still doing its job with a whiteboard instead of a courtroom. Restoring this history is not a niche Pride Month garnish. It is curriculum repair.Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price TodayLet’s be clear that this is not an abstract debate about heritage, because the colonial inheritance bills somebody every single day, and intersectionality — Crenshaw’s frame, the Combahee River Collective’s lived analysis — tells us the invoice doesn’t get split evenly. In Uganda and across the 31 African countries still criminalizing, the laws don’t just threaten prison: they collapse HIV prevention and treatment outreach because showing up to a clinic becomes evidence, they license landlords to evict, employers to fire, mobs to act with impunity, and they hit queer women and gender-nonconforming people with a double exposure — criminalized for their sexuality, then disciplined again by patriarchal family structures that the colonial church helped harden. In the diaspora, the same “gay agenda” logic — a script literally authored by the white evangelical right and exported to Kampala by American preachers in 2009, months before Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill hit parliament — gets recycled in our own communities, and the material outcomes follow: Black queer youth pushed out of homes and overrepresented among the homeless, Black trans women facing some of the highest rates of violence in the country, Black queer women and femmes catching what Moya Bailey named misogynoir from outside the community and inside it at the same time. Two things can be true: anti-Blackness structures the whole terrain, like Wilderson would remind us, and within Blackness, gender and sexuality decide who gets the least shelter on that terrain. Centering Black women’s and Black queer folks’ material outcomes — housing, healthcare, safety, family — over symbolic representation is the whole assignment. A flag in June don’t pay rent in July.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways* The Mudoko Dako were a recognized gender status, not a tolerated exception. Among the Lango, Teso, and Karamojong of northern Uganda, feminine men lived as women, held women’s roles, and legally married men — documented in Driberg’s 1923 ethnography and affirmed by Sylvia Tamale’s scholarship.* Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import. Uganda’s criminalization begins with the 1902 colonial penal code, built from Britain’s 1861 Section 377 template — there was no indigenous law against the mudoko dako to inherit.* The erasure was a two-front operation. Plantation punishment broke ancestral memory in the diaspora while missionaries and penal codes broke it on the continent — same empire, two theaters, one amnesia.* The “un-African” claim collapses under its own receipts. More than half of the countries still criminalizing same-sex relations are former British colonies; leaders defending these laws are defending London’s legislation, not Africa’s traditions.* The material costs are intersectional and current. Criminalization collapses healthcare access, licenses eviction and violence, and lands hardest on Black queer women, femmes, and trans people — on the continent and in the diaspora alike.HARD ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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 (Bibliography)Driberg, Jack Herbert. The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923. — The primary ethnographic documentation of the mudoko dako.Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011. — Foundational collection on sexuality scholarship from the continent.Tamale, Sylvia. “Homosexuality Is Not Un-African.” Political Research Associates / Al Jazeera America, 2014. — The essay containing her mudoko dako statement quoted above.Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. — Continent-wide survey including the Lango material.Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. — Igbo flexible gender; the companion text to the female husbandry piece.Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. — Yoruba society before the Western gender binary.Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. — How the myth of an exclusively straight Africa was constructed.Human Rights Watch. This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism. New York: HRW, 2008. — The legal paper trail from Section 377 to the colonies.Kaoma, Kapya. Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia. Somerville: Political Research Associates, 2009. — The documented export of the “gay agenda” playbook, including the 2009 Kampala conference.Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. — For the education-is-never-neutral frame. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because you been lost in the sauce of a homophobia that somebody handed you and told you was tradition. Let me say it plain so the folks in the back can hear me. The homophobia a whole lot of us carry around like it’s ancestral is not African. It’s imported. It came off the same boats, through the same missions, behind the same flags as the chains, and then it got rebranded as “our values” so we’d do the policing for free. I. Before Europe Believed The World Was Round, Africa Already Knew Gender Was A Role, Not A BodyLong before Europeans set foot on the continent, back when a real lot of them still believed the earth was flat, woman-to-woman marriage was a mainstream, legally recognized institution stretching from the Nuer of South Sudan to the Igbo of Nigeria to the Kuria of Tanzania and Kenya. A woman of wealth and standing could pay the bridewealth, become the legal husband, control the lineage and the property, and her wives could bear children by a chosen male consort, the genitor, whose children belonged to her line and her name. This wasn’t done in secrecy. It was an entire institution, with rites and bride price and public recognition, sitting in the open.Ifi Amadiume, in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, showed that in precolonial Igbo society gender was flexible and was not welded to the sexed body, so a woman could occupy the social role of husband and father, get addressed as such, and wield the authority that came with it. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women, pushed it further and argued that gender as the master category for organizing a whole society was itself a Western imposition mapped onto Yoruba life, which had organized power by seniority and not by what was between your legs. Operationalize that. This means the thing we fight over today, “man” versus “woman” as a fixed biological destiny, was never a universal human fact. It was one cultural arrangement among many, and Africa was running several others at the same time. So anybody who tells you the binary is “just biology” and “just how it’s always been” is wrong on the history. Flat. Two things can be true: bodies are real, and the meanings we stack on top of them are made up.II. It Wasn’t A Footnote — Queen Njinga, The Azande, And A Tomb In SaqqaraQueen Njinga, who lived from around 1583 to 1663 and ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola, dressed as a king and not as a queen, led her armies in person, took women as wives, and — by the accounts of the very Portuguese who were scandalized by her — kept male concubines. I want to be honest about my sourcing, because that’s the whole brand: much of what we “know” about her intimate life comes filtered through hostile colonial chroniclers like the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi, so I read those accounts for what they reveal about European panic as much as for the facts they claim. The Portuguese were already horrified by her military genius. What disturbed them just as much was her gender and her sexual autonomy, and in their own writing they branded her “unnatural.” That word was load-bearing, because “unnatural” was the moral fuel that justified the whole civilizing mission.Then peep the Azande of Central Africa, the warrior husbands. E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented that Azande warriors married younger men, paid bridewealth in spears to the boy’s family, and the union was socially recognized, not hidden in shame. The anthology that gathers all of this, Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, walks through dozens of these societies across the continent. And go all the way back to the Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, the resting place of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two royal manicurists buried nose to nose in the most intimate embrace canonical Egyptian art ever allowed, a pose otherwise reserved for husband and wife. Here’s my honest caveat, because Research over MeSearch means I don’t cook the books to win: scholars still argue whether those two were lovers or twins, and I’m not gonna pretend that debate is settled. But the fact that the most intimate iconography on the wall is two men is itself the data, and it’s data Europe never expected us to dig up.III. Two Things Can Be True — And Pretending They Can’t Is The Colonial Filing System TalkingNow here’s where folks get lost in the sauce from both directions. One camp wants to wave female husbandry around like it’s ancient gay marriage, full stop. The other camp, the homophobes, want to say “see, it was never even sexual, so it proves nothing.” Both of y’all are wrong, and the truth is more interesting than either lie. The historians and ethnographers, Amadiume included, stress that most female-husband unions were not primarily erotic. They were kinship, labor, land, and lineage arrangements that handed women access to property and power a rigid patriarchy would otherwise deny them. Two things can be true: female husbandry was mostly about material power and lineage, and the same societies also held open, recognized space for erotic same-gender bonds, like the Azande and Njinga’s court. The thread tying all of it together was never modern “sexual identity.” It’s that gender was a social role you could occupy regardless of the body you were born into, and that domestic and erotic life had more than one legitimate channel to flow through.So watch the move when somebody says “this was just economics, not gay.” That person thinks they’re being neutral and historical. They’re not. Choosing to read only the kinship and erase the erotic, and treating “economic” and “queer” as if they’re opposites, is itself a position. That’s not neutrality. That’s the colonial filing system still doing its job in your mouth, sorting human lives into the boxes Europe built and calling the sorting “objective.” Naming a position as neutral is how power hides.IV. Colonialism Didn’t Just ‘Introduce’ Homophobia — It Installed A System With Three Moving PartsThrough the colonization and the enslavement of the continent, Europe didn’t just bring a bad vibe. It installed a system, and the system ran on three specific parts. One: the binary gender system, the one that says a man is a man and a woman is a woman, fixed at birth, no movement, no exceptions. Two: heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate frame, welding sexuality to reproduction and to property inheritance under European legal logic. Three: the criminalization of gender nonconformity, and this is the turn — once the female husband lost her legal recognition, she didn’t just lose a title, she became “deviant,” a criminal, a sinner to be saved or jailed.Charles Mills, in The Racial Contract, gives us the frame: colonial power doesn’t just take land, it decides whose knowledge counts as knowledge, so African ways of organizing gender got reclassified from “wisdom” to “savagery” by people who couldn’t pronounce the names. Saidiya Hartman, writing on the archive, teaches us that the colonial record doesn’t neutrally “lack” evidence of these lives, it actively worked to erase them, so the silence in the archive is not an absence, it’s a crime scene. This also proves the so-called “African values” argument is running on European software. This also proves that the anti-gay criminal codes still on the books across the continent are, in a lot of cases, literally inherited colonial sodomy statutes with the colonizer’s fingerprints still on them. This also proves that when Europe left, it left the homophobia behind like a tenant who skips out on the lease but leaves all his furniture, and we been decorating around it for generations, calling his couch our heirloom.V. Quare vs. Queer — Why E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Is The Theorist We Need For ThisHow you read this whole history depends on the theory you bring to it, so let me get specific about the lens. Queer theory — your Judith Butler, your foundational 1990s canon — did something necessary and I’m giving it its respect: it taught us that gender is performative, that the categories are constructed and can be denaturalized, that the binary is a costume the culture sews and not a fact God handed down. That is exactly the tool that lets me stand here and say the female husband proves gender is a role and not a body. Real talk. But two things can be true: queer theory, for all its brilliance, has a documented habit of floating up into abstraction, treating race and class as discourse instead of as material conditions, and quietly defaulting its imagined queer subject to somebody white, somebody with the luxury to theorize identity instead of the obligation to survive it.Enter E. Patrick Johnson. In 2001, in an essay with the longest, most Southern title in the academy — “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother — Johnson takes “quare,” his grandmother’s Southern Black vernacular pronunciation of “queer,” and turns it into a theory. Quare studies is, in his own words, a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory built to hold racialized sexual knowledge, which means it flat-out refuses to talk about queerness as if it floats free of Black skin, working-class money, and grandmother kitchens. Here’s the comparison operationalized: queer theory deconstructs the binary, and quare insists you do that deconstruction while standing in the body, in the bloodline, in the material. And that is precisely the lens female husbandry demands, because female husbandry was never abstract. It was land. It was bridewealth. It was who inherits, who eats, who carries the name into the next generation. You cannot read it right through a theory that treats identity as a free-floating performance and skips straight past the property records.Johnson channels Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, the Black feminist tradition that said the personal is material before it’s anything else, and that is the same intersectional floor I stand on every time I sit down to write. Kimberlé Crenshaw named it, Combahee lived it: you cannot separate the gender from the race from the class, and any theory that asks you to is asking you to read your own ancestors with one eye closed. So here’s the difference in one breath. Quare is queer that never left home. Quare is Southern. Quare is Black. Quare is the grandmother saying “that child is a little quare” with love in her mouth and no diagnosis in her hand. Queer tells you the category is constructed. Quare tells you who paid for the construction and who’s still paying. Feel me?VI. We’re Not Importing Labels — We’re Subtracting The LieJust for clarity, because somebody always tries it: reclaiming this history is not about importing Western rainbow labels onto Africa and stapling 2026 vocabulary onto people who never asked for it. It’s the exact opposite move. It’s about subtracting the Western homophobia that got imported four centuries ago and dressed up as tradition the entire time. It’s about reclaiming a past that was more diverse, more flexible, and more free than the European archive ever wanted us to find out. So when you stand on a corner and yell “homosexuality is un-African,” understand what you’re actually doing: you are not defending African tradition, you are performing European Christianity, and by saying it out loud you make the whiteness of your own position visible to everybody in earshot who knows the receipts.Every accusation is a confession. The loudest man in the room screaming that queerness is a “Western import” is confessing, without knowing it, that he has no idea his own homophobia is the actual import. So when I said up top that you been lost in the sauce, hear me right — that wasn’t an insult, it was an invitation, back to a history that was bigger, freer, and more yours than the colonizer ever wanted you to know existed. Happy Pride, y’all. Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch.\Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.5 Key Takeaways1. Female husbandry and woman-to-woman marriage were mainstream, legally recognized institutions across 40+ African societies — not secret, not marginal, not modern.2. Precolonial African gender systems decoupled the social role from the sexed body. A woman could be a legal husband and father. “Just biology” is a colonial story, not a universal fact.3. Two things can be true: most female-husband unions were kinship and property arrangements, and the same societies still made room for openly recognized same-gender intimacy.4. Colonialism installed homophobia through three mechanisms — the fixed binary, reproduction-bound marriage, and the criminalization of nonconformity — and many of today’s anti-gay laws are inherited colonial statutes.5. Quare theory (E. Patrick Johnson) reads this history better than queer theory alone, because it keeps race, class, and the material body in the frame instead of floating into abstraction.Become A Paid SubscriberThis work runs on no corporate backing, no brand deals dictating what I can and can’t say, no foundation putting a leash on the analysis — just readers like you. Less than 1% of the people who read this actually pay, which means the folks who do are carrying the whole thing on their backs, and I don’t take that lightly. What you’re funding is PBS-depth, independent digital curriculum, built on community expertise instead of a marketing department, filling the void left by the retreat of public-education media that used to do this and walked away from it.If “Education is Elevation” and “Research over MeSearch” mean something to you, then becoming a paid subscriber is how you keep this independent, keep it free of corporate strings, and keep it pointed at our community instead of a sponsor. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the deeper the support, the deeper the work goes. Pull up.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Works Cited and Related Readings1. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed Books, 1987).The foundational text on Igbo woman-to-woman marriage. Amadiume argues precolonial Igbo gender was flexible and not biologically fixed, so women could occupy male social roles. This is the spine of the “gender is a role, not a body” argument.2. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997).Argues that gender as the organizing logic of society was a Western imposition onto Yoruba life, which ranked by seniority rather than sexed bodies. Use to show the binary itself is culturally specific, not universal.3. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (St. Martin’s Press, 1998).The canonical survey gathering same-gender practices across dozens of African societies, including the Azande warrior husbands and female-husband institutions. The receipts for the “40+ societies” claim.4. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970).Ethnographic documentation of Azande warriors marrying younger men and paying bridewealth in spears. Read critically — it’s a colonial-era anthropologist — but it records a recognized, public institution.5. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001).The origin of quare theory. Johnson critiques queer theory’s neglect of race and class and grounds queerness in the body, vernacular, and material life. The lens for this entire piece.6. Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke Univ. Press, 2005).Reprints the quare essay and builds out the field. Use for the broader Black queer theoretical tradition that quare opened up.7. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).The queer-theory anchor. Gender as performative, the binary as constructed. Necessary tool and necessary foil — quare theory is in conversation (and tension) with exactly this.8. Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997).Bridges queer theory and Black radical politics, insisting queerness be measured against material power, not just identity. Pairs with quare to keep the analysis grounded.9. Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011).A pan-African corrective to outsider framings of African sexuality, written largely by African scholars. Essential for centering African voices over the colonial archive.10. Reeder, Greg. “Same-sex Desire, Conjugal Constructs, and the Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep,” World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (2000).The scholarly case for reading the Saqqara tomb as a same-sex pairing. Cited honestly alongside the twins counter-reading — the debate is live, and I say so.11. Nwoko, Kenneth Chukwuemeka. “Female Husbands in Igbo Land: Southeast Nigeria,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 5, no. 1 (2012).A focused account of the status, ritual authority, and gendered standing of Igbo female husbands. Detail for the property-and-power reading.12. Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017).The leading modern biography of Njinga, working both Portuguese colonial records and African oral tradition. Use to separate Njinga’s documented life from the hostile chroniclers’ spin.13. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008).On the violence of the colonial archive and reading its silences. The basis for treating archival erasure of these lives as a crime scene, not a neutral absence.14. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997).The epistemology of how colonial power decides whose knowledge counts. Explains how African gender systems got reclassified from wisdom to “savagery.”15. Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977); Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989).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

Thank you Marcus Flowers, metamorphosic, Andrea Maria Romandini, Bluesin’ Bob, Kristen Morosky Day, and many others for tuning into my live video with Saadia Mirza! Join me for my next live video in the app.Y’all want to know how Texas works? Start with the map, because everything else is downstream of the map. When the Republican-led Legislature redrew the congressional lines and the Supreme Court let it ride, they didn’t just shade a few districts redder for the midterms, they reached into a Houston seat that has sent a Black representative to Congress since Barbara Jordan walked through the door in 1973, the first Black woman from the South ever elected to that chamber, and they rearranged the furniture so that two sitting Black Democrats, Al Green and Christian Menefee, had to climb in the same ring and beat the brakes off each other just to survive. Green’s old Ninth got painted Republican, his house got drawn into the new Eighteenth, the new Eighteenth got stuffed with more of Green’s old voters than Menefee’s, and the runoff ended with Menefee taking it close to seventy-thirty. One Black seat. Two Black men. Cannibalism by cartography.Cedric Robinson told us racial capitalism doesn’t need to hate you, it needs to use you, and the cleanest use of Black political power is to make it eat itself. Wilderson says the position of the Black is fungibility, interchangeable, swappable, and when you watch a state map two Black incumbents into one district like they’re the same line item on a spreadsheet, that’s fungibility rendered in ink. That’s the whole game, and the game got played before a single one of us touched a ballot.So let me say the thing plain. Then I’ll come back to it.Y’all Booing the Fans While the Coach Calls the PlayHere’s where the misdirection comes in, and I need the folks in the back to hear me. Soon as the Eighteenth got nasty, the timeline filled up with people screaming about AIPAC, about who’s “aligned” with who, about a post AIPAC put out congratulating Menefee like that settles something. Let me be clear for the record the way I was clear when we were live: I have not seen one receipt tying Christian Menefee to AIPAC, and I’m not accusing nobody of nothing. Two things can be true. I can be highly skeptical of every PAC that buys influence in this state, and I can refuse to convict a candidate off a tweet the PAC made about him, not one he made about them.Because think about who actually made the play. You ever watch grown folks lose they whole mind booing the fans in the stands while the coach who called the timeout, drew up the play, and sent it in walks off the field clean? That’s the timeline right now. AIPAC made the post. The party takes the money. The donors set the table. And somehow all the smoke goes to some insufferable leftist with four hundred followers and zero dollars. Where is your smoke for the people with the infrastructure, the funds, and the power to pick who wins, where, and how? Every accusation is a confession, and a movement that spends its rage on the audience instead of the play-caller is confessing it doesn’t actually want to find the play-caller.Texas is the country’s defense-manufacturing backyard, the same Fort Worth line that turns out the F-35, the same oil and gas money that builds the ninety-million-dollar high school football stadiums, and when this country sends “aid” overseas it sends it as weapons, which means whoever holds office in this state sits closer to that pipeline than a senator from Vermont ever will. I’m not telling you that’s a conspiracy. I’m telling you that’s a balance sheet. If you want investigative journalism, follow that money. Don’t follow the broke kid arguing on Threads.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Emperor Has No Map (He Has Yours)Now let’s talk about the lie that’s doing the most damage, the lie of the emperor.Folks really believe Greg Abbott is forever. They say it out they mouth, Abbott got it locked, Texas is red, why even show up. And I get where the feeling comes from, the primary turnout was abysmal, our own people stayed home, schools are closing, and people look at all that and conclude the fix is permanent. That feeling has a name. Berlant called it cruel optimism, except down here it curdled past optimism into something flatter, an internalized impossibility, a learned helplessness the GOP spent thirty years teaching on purpose.So let me hit you with a double bind, the kind we used to run in policy debate. Texas has had exactly three governors since 1995. George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott. Abbott himself is chasing a fourth term that would make him the longest-serving governor in state history, and Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards left in 1995. So when your leadership turns around and blames Democrats for the state of this state, you’ve trapped yourself. Either the Democrats are so all-powerful that their phantom hand reaches through thirty unbroken years of total Republican control of every lever, or your leadership produced exactly the Texas it wanted and is now pissing on us telling us it’s raining. Pick one. Both can’t be true, and neither one lets Abbott off the hook. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but so is the conservatism that’s been driving this car since before some of y’all could vote and still wants the passengers blamed for the wreck.Who has the power to manufacture voter apathy? The party that’s held the wheel for three decades. Not the broke leftist. Not the drag queen. Not the immigrant. Lost in the sauce is the whole electorate that’s been trained to look everywhere except the driver’s seat.The Real Heist Is in the CurriculumHere’s the part where I put my higher-ed degree to work, because consciousness precedes transformation, and they know it better than we do.While y’all were watching the Senate race, the State Board of Education quietly moved a Bible-infused overhaul through a process most people don’t even know exists. Not the Legislature, the Board, the elected fifteen where Republicans hold the majority and the final vote lands this summer while your kids are out of school and you’re too busy keeping them fed to drive to Austin. That’s not an accident, that’s the calendar as a weapon.What’s in it? A reading list that has third graders moving from Charlotte’s Web to the Road to Damascus, the New Testament conversion of Paul, alongside the Prodigal Son and the Golden Rule, lifted straight out of one particular sect of one particular religion and stamped onto every child in a public building. A social studies framework that deemphasizes world history and culture down to a Texas-and-Christianity lens. Then the tell, the part that should make every one of us stand up: when a Black board member moved a plain amendment saying enslaved people were held in bondage because they were Black, the Republican majority voted it down, and when the standards said the Civil War was fought over slavery, Republican members fought that too, floating tariffs and “states’ rights” like we ain’t read this script before. The historian advising the board had to sit there and correct them on the record.Freire called it the banking model, where education deposits obedience instead of withdrawing thought. Sandy Grande and Red Pedagogy remind us the settler curriculum was always about erasing whose land and whose labor built the wealth. So understand what they’re really doing. My people were enslaved in this state. Stephen F. Austin fought to preserve slavery in this state. And the plan is for a Black child in Texas to graduate fluent in Scripture and illiterate about the cotton their great-great-grandmother was forced to pick three counties over. That’s not an oversight. Charles Mills called the racial contract an agreement to misrepresent the world, and a curriculum that can find room for Paul on the road to Damascus but can’t say out loud why a Black body was in chains is the racial contract printed on a syllabus.Don’t sleep on the vouchers stacked right next to it. Abbott’s “Education Freedom Accounts” take public dollars out of the public school your kid actually attends and hand them to families already paying private tuition, and then they got the nerve to tell a small-town parent whose district went from five days a week to four that a trans woman or an immigrant did that to them. The drag queen didn’t drain your school budget. The voucher did. The man who signed it did.For the record, the Ten Commandments mandate, SB 10, that one ran through the Legislature, got blocked by lower courts, then the Fifth Circuit turned around in April and upheld it. So they’re coming at the schoolhouse from both doors at once, the statute and the standards, and they’re betting you only watch one door.Why Small-Town Texas Keeps Voting for the KnifeNow I’m from Bryan. I’m from the country. So when I say this I’m talking about home, not looking down on it.Out here, white, Black, and Brown alike, a whole lot of folks already decided nobody’s coming to save them and learned to get it out the mud, and that resignation is the most fertile soil the GOP ever planted in. Republicans walk in and say at least I’ll keep your oil job, drill baby drill, at least I’ll make a man out of your son, while Democrats too often show up sounding like the uppity Yankee who flew down from up north, didn’t read the room, assumes you’re slow, and wants you to read a dissertation before you’re allowed to have dinner. That perception is doing more damage than any single policy, and Republicans have done a sarcastically great job convincing Texans that “the establishment” means Democrats while the actual establishment has run the entire state apparatus for a generation.Same machine runs the good-immigrant, bad-immigrant, good-Negro, bad-Negro binary. Yancy calls it white world-making, the power to decide which version of you gets to be human this week, and a whole lot of folks of color buy the binary thinking they can token they way to safety. You can’t. In this state you will be spent and discarded the second you’re no longer useful, no matter how hard you voted to fit in.Then I have to name what happened to Jasmine Crockett, because intersectionality is not optional in my house. Crockett ran a real race in a brutally short window and lost a primary where she had to fight through respectability politics that James Talarico never had to touch, because she speaks with a Black vernacular a lot of “well-meaning” Christian Texans coded as too loud, too Black, too much. Moya Bailey gave us the word misogynoir for exactly this, the specific contempt aimed at Black women that white women and Black men get to skip. Crenshaw built intersectionality so we’d stop pretending race and gender are separate lines. Talarico can quote Scripture in a sentence and that Bible fluency carries him a long, long way in a state seduced by Christian nationalism across Latino, Black, and white communities alike, and that’s a real advantage, and the structural reason it’s an advantage is misogynoir clearing the runway in front of him while it laid spike strips in front of her. Two roles. Same election.What We Actually Do About ItSo I’m not gonna leave you in the diagnosis, because diagnosis without prescription is just doom-scrolling with footnotes.One. Show up to the Board of Education. You don’t need a law degree, you don’t need permission, you sign up and you testify in Austin against the curriculum before that summer vote, and you bring three people who never came before.Two. Run the Talarico playbook for Gina Hinojosa. The man didn’t win moderates from a giant televised town hall, he won them in the itty-bitty rooms, in Latino communities, month after month, speaking the language the room actually speaks. We need a senator and we need a governor, and most of Texas still doesn’t know who Gina is. Fix that one conversation at a time.Three. Meet people where they live, not where you wish they lived. Talk that oil job honestly. Talk the broadband that costs the same in my country town as it does in inner-city Houston and runs half the speed. Cookouts, quinceañeras, rodeos, trail rides, that’s the precinct. The tools have to go to the people, and Republicans criminalize socialism, criminalize Black thought, criminalize drag, criminalize independent anything precisely because they know consciousness is the only thing they can’t gerrymander.Four. Vote down the whole ballot, every time, and stop waiting to fall in love. I’m not a vote-blue-no-matter-who person, I’ll tell you straight, we got folks down here wearing blue who govern red. But in Texas right now the menu is apples or the other thing, and abstaining is just letting somebody else order for your kids.Now back to that map. They drew it so two Black men would fight over one chair. But a map is a prediction, not a prophecy, and Wilderson gives us the description of the trap while Afrofuturism gives us the imagination to walk out of it. The question isn’t whether Abbott is the emperor. The question is whether you can picture a Texas where he isn’t, because if you can’t imagine Gina in that mansion, you’ve already conceded the only ground that matters. Research over MeSearch, kinfolks. They’re betting you won’t do the work. Prove them wrong. Y’all be safe.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 Key Takeaways1. The gerrymander, cleared by the Supreme Court, redrew Al Green’s district to lean Republican and forced him into the Houston seat with Christian Menefee — a seat held by a Black representative since Barbara Jordan in 1973 — making two Black Democrats fight for one chair. That’s racial capitalism and fungibility, not coincidence.2. The “Abbott is the emperor” feeling is engineered apathy. Texas has had three governors since 1995 and unbroken GOP control, which means the only people with the power to manufacture hopelessness are the people who’ve held the wheel for thirty years — not leftists, immigrants, or drag queens.3. The real heist is in the curriculum: a Bible-infused reading list and a slavery-minimizing social studies framework moving through the State Board of Education with a summer final vote, plus vouchers draining public schools and SB 10’s Ten Commandments mandate upheld by the Fifth Circuit. Watch both doors.4. Misdirected outrage protects power. Beefing with broke leftists over an AIPAC tweet while ignoring the donors, PACs, and party structure that actually pick winners is confessing you don’t want to find the play-caller. Skepticism of money in politics is healthy; convicting candidates off a tweet is not.5. The path forward is concrete: testify at the Board of Education before the summer vote, run the Talarico small-room playbook to introduce Gina Hinojosa statewide, meet rural Texans in their own language and spaces, and vote the whole ballot. A map is a prediction, not a prophecy.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.Annotated BibliographyHouston Public Media / Texas Newsroom — “Gina Hinojosa wins Democratic nomination” (March 3, 2026)Confirms Hinojosa as the Democratic nominee for governor facing Greg Abbott in November, and that a fourth Abbott term would make him the state’s longest-serving governor. Anchors the “emperor” framing and the no-Democratic-governor-since-Ann-Richards point. houstonpublicmedia.orgBallotpedia — “Texas gubernatorial election, 2026”Primary and general-election field for governor; used to verify the Abbott vs. Hinojosa matchup and margins. ballotpedia.orgNBC News — “Christian Menefee defeats Al Green in TX-18 runoff” (May 2026)Documents that GOP-led redistricting redrew Green’s 9th to lean Republican and forced him into the 18th, where Menefee defeated him; notes the district’s Black representation dating to Barbara Jordan in 1973. nbcnews.comBallotpedia — “Christian Menefee” / NBC News — “Redistricting pits Democratic colleagues against each other”Details on the redrawn 18th containing more of Green’s old voters, the Turner special election, and the Supreme Court clearing the map. Source of the “cannibalism by cartography” argument. ballotpedia.org; nbcnews.comAP via CultureMap / Washington Post — “Talarico wins Democratic Senate primary over Crockett” (March 3, 2026)Confirms Talarico defeated Crockett and the role his scripture-driven message played; basis for the misogynoir / respectability-politics analysis. Used only as framing, not attributed as candidate quotes. aol.com; washingtonpost.comPBS NewsHour / Axios Austin — “Paxton defeats Cornyn in Senate runoff” (May 26, 2026)Confirms Paxton as the GOP Senate nominee facing Talarico in November. pbs.org; axios.comThe Texas Tribune / Victoria Advocate — “Vikki Goodwin wins LG runoff over Marcos Vélez” (May 26, 2026)Confirms Goodwin defeated Vélez for the lieutenant governor nomination and will face Dan Patrick. texastribune.orgThe Spokesman-Review / Dallas Morning News — “Texas officials give early OK to revamped social studies curriculum, Bible-infused reading list” (April 10, 2026)Primary documentation for the curriculum section: the Texas-centric overhaul, the Bible reading list, the voted-down amendment on why people were enslaved, and Republican members disputing that the Civil War was about slavery. spokesman.comThe Texas Tribune / Houston Public Media — State Board of Education reading-list coverage (Jan.–April 2026)Confirms the mandatory reading list (Road to Damascus, Prodigal Son, Golden Rule), the optional Bluebonnet Learning curriculum with its per-student incentive, and the summer final-vote timeline. texastribune.org; houstonpublicmedia.orgKERA News / CBS Texas / ACLU of Texas / OSV News — SB 10 (Ten Commandments) coverage (2025–April 2026)Documents SB 10’s passage, the lower-court injunctions, and the Fifth Circuit upholding the law on appeal in April 2026 — the “both doors at once” point. keranews.org; aclutx.org; osvnews.com This is a public episode. 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Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was how the prosecutor opened the case, and the second I heard it I felt that déjà vu hit me in the chest, because we have been here before, kinfolks, we have been standing in this exact spot in the historical record looking at the body of a Black child who took nothing, who was owed an apology and got a bullet instead.Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen years old. Fourteen. He walked into a convenience store on Parklane Road in Columbia, South Carolina, got accused of stealing water he never stole, and when he did what any scared child does — picked up his backpack and walked out — a grown man came out from behind that counter with a pistol and chased him. Cyrus ran so hard he ran out of his shoe. He dropped two cell phones, one his, one his mother’s, and didn’t even stop to pick them up, because you do not stop running when there is a man with a gun behind you. He fell. He got up. He fell again, busted his shin, kept going. They chased that child more than 130 yards off their own property, into a public road, and then the fatal shot. Over water he didn’t take. Let that marinate.And if it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1991, a fifteen-year-old named Latasha Harlins walked into a store in South Central L.A. with money in her hand for a bottle of orange juice that cost a dollar seventy-nine. The store owner, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing, grabbed her, and as Latasha turned to walk away, Du shot her in the back of the head. Latasha had the money in her fist when she hit the floor. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the judge gave her probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. No prison. That verdict, sitting right next to the Rodney King acquittals, is part of what lit the fuse in 1992. Sophia Nahli Allison’s film A Love Song for Latasha sat with that loss and made us feel the size of it. Thirty-some years later we are watching the sequel, and the script has not changed.So let me be clear about what I’m doing here. I’m not making a “see, them too” video. I’m doing the work I always try to do — research over MeSearch — which means following the structure all the way down instead of stopping at the feeling. Feel me?Adultification Is the Murder WeaponHere is the thing nobody wants to name directly: a fourteen-year-old does not read as a child to the person who shot him. That is not an accident, that is a technology. Wilderson writes about how the Black body functions as fungible — interchangeable, available, a thing to be acted upon rather than a person to be reckoned with — and you apply that here and you see exactly what happened. Cyrus was not seen as somebody’s baby running scared. He was seen as a threat, a suspect, a problem that a grown man with a gun got to solve on the spot.The research on this has a name. Scholars at Georgetown documented how Black children, and Black girls especially, get adultified — perceived as older, less innocent, more responsible for their own harm than white children the same age. Latasha was fifteen and treated like a thief and a fighter instead of a child. Cyrus was fourteen and treated like an armed adult instead of a boy who ran out of his own shoe. And notice the gendered grammar of it, because intersectionality is not a decoration I sprinkle on at the end — Black girls get adultified into “grown” and “fast,” Black boys get adultified into “men” and “threats,” and both translations end with a body. Same machine, different gears.The Model Minority Myth Was Never a ComplimentNow, here is where folks get uncomfortable, so stay with me. To understand how a shopkeeper becomes judge, jury, and executioner over a child, you have to understand the position that shopkeeper was handed.The model minority image got manufactured in the mid-1960s — Petersen wrote a whole magazine piece in 1966 holding up Japanese Americans as the success story, the good ones, the ones who worked hard and didn’t make trouble. And the timing was the tell. That was the same decade Black folks were in the streets demanding the country pay what it owed. The model minority myth was built as a rebuke. iMa bE the example, the story said, and if Asians can make it, then Black complaint must be a character flaw rather than a structural fact.Claire Jean Kim gave this its sharpest name: racial triangulation. Asian Americans get valorized relative to Black Americans — “look how well they do” — and simultaneously get marked as permanent foreigners relative to white Americans — “go back where you came from.” Two moves at once. You get held up as proof that the system works and held down as proof that you’ll never fully belong. And the function of being held up is to be aimed. A wedge has to be sharp on one end to do its job, and the job was always to be driven between Black people and everybody else.Yellow Peril Supports Black Power — And Why That Doesn’t Cancel AnythingNow I need y’all to hold two things in your hand at the same time, because this is where the lazy analysis falls apart.There is a real, documented, beautiful history of Black and Asian solidarity in this country, and it is not a fairy tale. In 1969, outside the Alameda County courthouse at a Free Huey rally, Asian American activists held signs that read “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” — taking the slur that had been used to make them a danger to white America and turning it into a banner of coalition. Richard Aoki, a Japanese American who’d survived the WWII concentration camps, became a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and helped supply some of its first weapons. Yuri Kochiyama built her whole life on this bridge — she organized alongside Black radicals in Harlem, she was in the Audubon Ballroom and cradled Malcolm X as he was dying, she understood that to be in solidarity meant to show up. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State and Berkeley put Black, Asian, Chicano, and Indigenous students in the same coalition fighting for ethnic studies. That history is real, and I will defend it.And — both things can be true — that history does not cancel, excuse, or balance out anti-Blackness in Asian American communities, and it was never meant to. This is the move I need you to clock: solidarity is not a credit you bank and spend later to buy yourself out of accountability. Kochiyama and Aoki are not a hall pass for Soon Ja Du, or for whoever raised a child to see a Black fourteen-year-old as a threat first and a person never. Holding up the panther-and-tiger banner while refusing to name the anti-Blackness running through your own community isn’t solidarity, it’s nostalgia. The folks who built that solidarity built it precisely by naming the anti-Blackness in their own families, out loud, at the dinner table — that naming was the work, not a betrayal of it. So when I invoke “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power,” I’m not closing the conversation, I’m setting the standard those ancestors actually set, and that standard was accountability, not amnesty.551 × 700“People of Color” Is a Coordinate, Not a CoalitionThis is why so many Black folks get skeptical when somebody waves the “people of color” umbrella around, and that skepticism is not divisive, it’s earned. Being shoved under the same term does not mean we have the same relationship to whiteness, and pretending otherwise mostly works to launder the gap.Look at affirmative action. In 2023 the Supreme Court gutted race-conscious admissions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, and the legal vehicle they drove to do it was Asian American grievance — the claim that Asian students were being wronged by Black access. Having the luxury to be used as the friendly face on a project that strips opportunity from Black students is itself a sign of where you sit in the triangle. I’m not saying anti-Asian discrimination in admissions is fake — two things can be true. I’m saying when the remedy on offer is “so let’s end the thing that helps Black folks,” you should ask who wrote that script and who it actually serves, because every accusation is a confession, and that lawsuit confessed exactly whose interests it was protecting.So here’s the two-role frame, the way I’d run it in a debate round. There’s what the model minority myth says — you’re being honored, you made it, you’re one of the good ones. And there’s what the model minority myth structurally does — it makes you the buffer, the weapon, the proof-of-concept that whiteness points at Black people to say “see, the problem is you.” This means the people clinging to that myth as a compliment are wrong about what it is. By accepting the role of the honored exception, you make whiteness visible — you become the instrument that lets it claim neutrality while doing its dirtiest work through your hands.Back to the WaterA jury in Columbia is deciding right now what a Black child’s life was worth. As I write this the defense has rested and closing arguments are about to begin, and I want to be honest with you — the verdict is not the analysis. We have watched the courtroom version of this before. Latasha got a manslaughter conviction and her killer walked out the door. So I’m not going to tell you a verdict will close the wound, because the wound is older than this trial.The wound is a country that built a hierarchy and then handed everybody a position in it — including positions that let one oppressed person stand over the body of a child and call it self-defense. Solidarity is not pretending that hierarchy isn’t there. Solidarity is what Kochiyama and Aoki actually did: name it, in your own house, out loud, and then move.His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was the prosecutor’s line, and it’s an indictment — but not just of one man. It’s an indictment of every system that taught him to do the math that way. For the folks in the back: the water was never the point. Education is elevation. Let’s keep building.Become a Paid SubscriberI’m an independent educator filling the void left by the retreat of public-education media. I don’t have corporate backing, I don’t have a network cutting me a check, and I don’t answer to advertisers — this work is sustained entirely by readers like you. Right now, under 1% of the folks who follow me are paid subscribers. My goal is to build something with the depth of PBS for the digital age: a sanctuary for people who want to think deeply about shallow s**t and learn for real.And here’s why this piece needs you specifically. A breakdown like this one — holding the killing of Cyrus Carmack-Belton next to Latasha Harlins, naming adultification as a murder weapon, walking the real history of “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” while refusing to let that solidarity launder present-day anti-Blackness — is exactly the kind of work that gets you flamed online and gets nobody a corporate sponsor. If this piece taught you something, made you sit with something, or gave you language for a conversation you’ve been trying to have — convert that into power. Become a paid subscriber. Keep this work independent, keep it free for the folks who can’t pay, and keep us building a place where research beats MeSearch every single time.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 Key Takeaways* Adultification is a murder weapon, not a metaphor. When a 14-year-old reads as an armed adult and a 15-year-old reads as a thief, the perception itself is the mechanism that ends the life — and it lands on Black boys and Black girls through different gendered channels.* The model minority myth was built as a rebuke to Black struggle. Manufactured in the 1960s, it was never a compliment — it was a wedge, sharpened on one end to be driven between Black people and everyone else.* Black-Asian solidarity is real history, not a hall pass. Aoki, Kochiyama, and the Third World Liberation Front are documented and worth defending — and that legacy does not cancel anti-Blackness; those ancestors set a standard of accountability, not amnesty.* “People of color” is a coordinate, not a coalition. Sharing the umbrella doesn’t mean sharing a relationship to whiteness — see how Asian American grievance was the legal vehicle used to gut affirmative action in 2023.* The verdict is not the analysis. Latasha’s killer walked on probation; whatever a Columbia jury decides, the wound is older than the trial and the math that valued a child below four bottles of water belongs to a whole system.WORKS CITIED AND RELATED READINGSKim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society, 1999. The load-bearing framework for this piece: Asian Americans are simultaneously valorized relative to Black Americans and ostracized as foreign relative to whites. Explains how the “model minority” position functions as a wedge.Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010); Afropessimism (2020). Source of the fungibility and gratuitous-violence framing — used descriptively to explain how the Black body is rendered available to be acted upon, not as a prescription for despair.Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. The empirical backbone for adultification — documents how Black children are perceived as older and less innocent than white peers, foundational to the gendered analysis of Latasha and Cyrus.Petersen, William. “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” The New York Times Magazine, 1966. The origin document of the “model minority” narrative — read it to see the rebuke to Black struggle baked in from the very beginning.Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Beacon Press, 2001. Essential map of the long, entangled history of Afro-Asian exchange and solidarity — grounds the “both/and” refusal to flatten this relationship into either pure unity or pure conflict.Fujino, Diane C. Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005). Definitive accounts of the two figures the solidarity history rests on — read alongside the critical reckoning with Aoki’s contested legacy rather than as hagiography.Stevenson, Brenda. The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots. Oxford University Press, 2013. The most rigorous historical treatment of the Harlins case and its role in 1992 — indispensable for the gendered, intersectional reading of how a Black girl’s death was adjudicated.Allison, Sophia Nahli. A Love Song for Latasha. Film, 2019 (Netflix). A memory-work documentary that restores Latasha’s humanity against the archive that flattened her — a model for refusing to let Black children exist only as case numbers.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. Anchors the claim that adultification and anti-Black harm hit Black women and girls through a distinct, compounded channel — keeps intersectionality operational rather than ornamental.Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard / v. UNC, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). The case that ended race-conscious admissions using Asian American plaintiffs — the receipts for how grievance gets routed against Black access under a “people of color” banner. 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

The Set Was Good, ThoughI sat in my chair and I let Tony Hinchcliffe finish, the way I let everybody finish, and now I’m doing the thing this country keeps confusing for an attack: I’m giving a criticism. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from critique. No one is above criticism. Nothing is above criticism especially comedy. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from critique. On May 10th, Netflix ran The Roast of Kevin Hart, and Tony Hinchcliffe, the same MAGA comic who got on a stage at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden and called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, looked out at the crowd and said the Black community was so proud of Kevin, and that George Floyd was, quote, looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He took a man’s dying words, the words a whole planet heard him cry out for his mama with a knee on his neck, and he flipped them into a punchline at a Black man’s celebration. Then weeks go by. George Floyd’s brothers, Terrence and Philonise, say plainly that real pain is not comedy to their family, that at some point y’all have to stop playing with us. And Kevin Hart, who attended George Floyd’s funeral, pulls up to The Breakfast Club and does the one thing that tells you everything.He defended the white man.Not with a fist. With a posture. “It wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” he says, and then in the same breath, “but Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set or one of the best sets.” “Y’all worried about the joke, but the set was good though. Remove me from it, I didn’t say it, we move on.” That’s not a defense of comedy. That’s a man with more energy and more effort for publicly protecting a white comedian’s craft, than for protecting the humanity of his own people. The people who bought your tickets, attend your shows, and made you visible from the beginning.Two Things Can Be TrueNow let me be fair, because two things can be true and I’m not here to do what they do to us, which is flatten a whole person into one bad night. Roast comedy is provocation. That’s the genre. Kevin caught it too: they joked about his dead mama, his dead father, put him on a slave ship in a bottle. I’m not pretending he was the only target or that he didn’t take his licks. The question was never whether Tony tells offensive jokes. We know what Tony does. Kevin himself said it: “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe, I don’t expect less.” The question is what do YOU do, Kevin, when the offensiveness stops being a bit about a celebrity and becomes a desecration of a murdered Black man whose family you sat in a pew with.Because here’s the contradiction, and I’ll name it. Kevin Hart felt individually came for, so he came to his own defense, fast, fluent, and on the biggest Black platform in the country. So I have to ask: how come Kevin didnt feel came for when your whole community is being attacked and targeted by that orange man? The same orange man Tony Hinchcliffe campaigned for. The luxury to treat George Floyd as a joke you can “move on” from is a sign that the knee was never on your neck in the way it’s on the rest of ours. The view from the top of the comedy game is a view from nowhere, and a view from nowhere is always, secretly, a view from whiteness.Racial Illiteracy: A Teaching MomentIf I was still in the classroom, I’d put Kevin’s interview on the projector and I’d write two words on the board: racial illiteracy. That’s when you lack the ability to read and write situations pertaining to race. Because there is a difference, kinfolks, and it’s the whole ballgame. There’s a difference between a racial joke and being racist. There’s a difference between defending the continuity of comedy and prioritizing humanity. Kevin can read a room for a laugh better than almost anybody alive, that’s his genius, but he could not read this room, this moment, this country, and that illiteracy is not a personal failing as much as it is a learned comfort.Charles Mills called it the epistemology of ignorance, a whole social agreement to NOT know certain things, to misread the racial world in ways that keep the structure comfortable. Tim Wise says privilege costs you clarity. And when Kevin says “remove me from it, I didn’t say it,” he’s reaching for the most American defense there is, the bystander’s plea, the same logic that lets a country watch a murder on video and still ask what the victim did wrong. Pete Davidson put a Charlie Kirk joke in his set too, and Kevin shrugged at that the same way. Notice the pattern: the discomfort only ever flows one direction, away from the powerful and onto the dead who can’t clap back.Every Accusation Is a Confession“Don’t be too sensitive to take a joke,” they tell us. Every accusation is a confession. The people screaming loudest about freedom of speech turn into the most fragile beings on Earth the second the speech gets returned to sender. They’ll desecrate a man who called for his mother as he died and call it edgy, then clutch their pearls when a grieving brother says something vulgar back. They dish out cruelty for laughs and get real uncomfortable when the same energy comes home. They pissing on us and telling us it’s raining.Where is the smoke for Tony, Kevin? You found a paragraph of energy to remind us his set was strong. You had a whole rebuttal ready about your dead parents. So where’s the equal-and-opposite force for the murdered man your industry made into a closer? That silence is not neutrality. Naming neutrality as neutrality is a hustle. Silence in the presence of power is a position, and the position your silence structurally took was Tony’s.This Ain’t a ThrowawayAnd I want to be clear, because I critique from inside the community, not from the bleachers. I’m not throwing Kevin away. I’m not calling him irredeemable. As a matter of fact, I’d love a private conversation about the ways, politically, socially, economically, that a man with his platform and his pockets could pour into Black equality, Black freedom, Black liberation, instead of pouring his protective instinct onto a comic who’d campaign against all three. You a comedian. I’m a critic. I’ma stay in my lane, that’s my ministry. But the lane I’m in says this clearly: you can care about preserving the quality of comedy AND preserving the humanity of Black people. I’m not saying you can’t hold both. I’m asking which one you reached for first, fastest, and hardest. The tape answers for you.By defending him, Kevin, you’re making whiteness visible, you’re showing us exactly whose comfort gets the bodyguard. So here’s the ask, the same one I’d give any of my folks: do better, bro. Pick humanity first next time. Because this ain’t the wrong side of comedy, this is the wrong side of history, and I don’t say that as a threat, I say it as a promise that the receipts keep.Critical Historical ContextTo understand why a single roast joke detonated the way it did, you have to understand that turning Black death into white entertainment is not a glitch in American culture. It is one of its oldest, most profitable traditions.From the Auction Block to the PunchlineLong before Netflix, the spectacle of Black suffering was sold for amusement and instruction. The lynching postcard industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s mailed photographs of murdered Black people as souvenirs and Christmas cards; Without Sanctuary, the archive assembled by James Allen, documents how white families posed and smiled beside the bodies the way Hinchcliffe’s audience laughed beside a dead man’s last words. Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, calls this the spectacular character of black suffering, the way Black pain gets staged, repeated, and consumed until the horror becomes comfortable, even pleasurable, for the watcher. The roast joke is that lineage in a tuxedo.The Minstrel Stage and the Comedy of Black DisposabilityAmerican comedy itself was, at its commercial founding, blackface minstrelsy, the most popular entertainment form in the 19th-century United States, built entirely on the premise that Black life was a thing to be mocked, mimicked, and made grotesque for white laughter. The genre survived emancipation, survived the cakewalk, survived into film with Birth of a Nation. The throughline from Jim Crow the minstrel character to Jim Crow the legal regime is not a coincidence; the laughter was always part of the machinery of dehumanization. When a modern comic stands on a stage and treats a police killing as a setup, he is not breaking taboo. He is reactivating the founding logic of the form.George Floyd, 2020, and the Largest Protests in U.S. HistoryOn May 25, 2020, Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd said he could not breathe and called for his mother. His murder set off what historians have called the largest protest movement in American history, with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants across the country in the summer of 2020. The roast joke landed almost exactly six years later, in the same week as the anniversary of his death. Hinchcliffe did not pick George Floyd at random. He picked the single most recognizable symbol of the modern movement against anti-Black state violence and converted it into a closer. The joke was a referendum on whether that movement’s grief still counts.Afropessimism: Why the Joke ‘Works’Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism gives us the most uncomfortable but clarifying lens. Wilderson argues that anti-Black violence is gratuitous, not provoked, not economically required, not a means to an end, but a structural given. The Black body functions as fungible, an object available for the world’s use, including its enjoyment. The reason the audience could laugh is that, at the level of the libidinal economy Wilderson describes, George Floyd’s death was already available as raw material, already socially dead, already a thing rather than a person whose mourning is sacred. I hold this as descriptive, not prescriptive, alongside the Black Marxist reading that insists this structure can still be fought. But you cannot understand the ease of the laughter without it. The joke was not an aberration. It was the culture telling the truth about itself.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Implication for EducationI keep coming back to the phrase racial illiteracy, because it is, at root, an educational problem, and educational problems have educational solutions, which means they also have educational sabotage.Reading and writing situations pertaining to race is a literacy, a teachable skill, the same way phonics and number sense are teachable. We are not born knowing how to locate ourselves inside a structure of power; we learn it, or we are prevented from learning it. The reason a brilliant, quick-witted man like Kevin Hart could read a comedy room flawlessly and misread a racial moment catastrophically is that the second literacy was never required of him to succeed, and may have been actively discouraged, because the more racially literate a Black entertainer becomes, the harder he is to sell to a crowd that wants its Blackness apolitical.Now connect that to this exact moment in American schooling. Across the country, the machinery that teaches racial literacy is being dismantled on purpose. Anti-CRT and ‘divisive concepts’ legislation has passed in a wave of states, restricting how teachers can discuss race, racism, and history. Book bans have stripped Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and the lynching record itself out of classrooms and libraries. Advanced Placement African American Studies was politically gutted in multiple states before it ever reached the students who needed it most. The Department of Education’s capacity to enforce civil rights protections has been hollowed out. The federal retreat from public education media, the slow strangling of the PBS-and-public-broadcasting model that once made deep historical knowledge freely available, leaves a void exactly where racial literacy used to live.So here is the implication, and it’s a verdict. A society that bans the teaching of why the joke is violent will keep producing audiences that laugh. The roast crowd and the school board crowd are the same project. You cannot defund the history of lynching, ban the books that name anti-Blackness, and dismantle the curriculum that builds racial literacy, and then act surprised when a stadium full of people can’t tell the difference between edgy and evil. The classroom and the comedy club are connected by a single wire: what a people is permitted to know about its own death.Intersectional Material ImpactsSymbolic harm is never just symbolic. Crenshaw teaches us that the people who fall through the cracks of a single-axis analysis are the ones carrying the heaviest material weight, so let me name who actually pays when George Floyd’s death becomes a punchline and a celebrity shrugs.Black Women and the Mothers Who Are Never the Joke’s ConcernGeorge Floyd called for his mother. The roast circuit, the defense of it, and most of the commentary that followed centered men, the comic, the host, the brothers, while the figure at the emotional center of his death, the Black mother, became invisible. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir names how Black women are simultaneously hyper-exposed to violence and erased from its mourning. The material impact: Black women, who led the Movement for Black Lives organizationally and who disproportionately do the unpaid labor of grief, protest, and care after every killing, get neither the protection nor the platform that a male celebrity commands in a single Breakfast Club segment.Class: Whose Comfort the Joke ProtectsKevin Hart’s ability to “move on” is a function of his bank account. The Floyd family does not have that exit. The working-class and poor Black communities most likely to be policed the way George Floyd was policed are the ones who watched a member of their own, made wealthy by their dollars, defend the man who mocked their nightmare. Class does not insulate you from anti-Blackness, but it does buy you the option of pretending it isn’t there, and that pretense is purchased on credit borrowed from the people who can’t afford it.Sexuality, Disability, and the Hierarchy of Grievable DeathHinchcliffe’s career is built on a ladder of disposable targets, Puerto Ricans, immigrants, the disabled, the dead, and that ladder is not random. Judith Butler’s question of which lives are grievable maps directly onto who becomes safe to joke about. The same structure that makes George Floyd’s death a punchline makes disabled, queer, and undocumented people punchlines too, because they all sit on the wrong side of the line dividing lives that must be mourned from lives that may be used. An intersectional read refuses to defend Black humanity while leaving everyone else on that ladder behind.White Feminism, White Comedy, Same ComplicityAnd I’ll say it the way I always say it: the “it’s just comedy, don’t be sensitive” defense is the comedy world’s version of White Feminism’s “I didn’t mean it that way.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. It lets people participate in a structure of harm while reserving the right to feel like good guys, because their intent was neutral. Intent is not the metric. Material outcome is. And the material outcome here is a culture rehearsing, one laugh at a time, that Black death is content.Five Key Takeaways* Defense reveals priority. Kevin Hart found fluent, immediate energy to protect Tony Hinchcliffe’s craft and almost none to protect George Floyd’s memory. What you rush to defend tells the truth about what you value. The set being “good though” was the confession.* Freedom of speech is not freedom from critique. Hearing a joke and criticizing it are both acts of free expression. The comics demanding you not be “too sensitive” to a joke are themselves too sensitive to a critique, which means the sensitivity rule only ever runs in the direction of power.* Racial illiteracy is manufactured, not innate. The inability to read and write racial situations is a learned comfort produced by a society that increasingly bans the very curriculum, books, and public media that would teach the skill. The roast crowd and the book-banning school board are the same project.* The joke is a lineage, not an accident. From minstrelsy to lynching postcards to the roast stage, turning Black death into white entertainment is one of America’s oldest and most profitable traditions. Afropessimism explains why the laughter comes easy: the structure already treats Black death as available material.* Symbolic harm carries material weight. When Black death becomes a punchline and a wealthy celebrity shrugs, the bill is paid by Black mothers erased from the mourning, by poor communities policed like George Floyd was, and by everyone else on Hinchcliffe’s ladder of disposable targets. Center the material outcome, not the intent.Join the Digital Sanctuary and Become a Paid SubscriberEverything you just read — the history of the minstrel stage, the lynching record, Afropessimism, the link between the book ban and the laughing crowd — is exactly the kind of knowledge being stripped out of classrooms and libraries right now. That is not an accident, and naming it out loud is the work.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 Bibliography)Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman’s foundational analysis of “the spectacular character of black suffering” — how Black pain is staged and consumed — is the single best frame for understanding why an audience can laugh at a recorded death.Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020). The accessible, memoiristic entry into Wilderson’s argument that anti-Black violence is gratuitous and the Black body socially fungible. Read as descriptive, not prescriptive.Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997). Source of “the epistemology of ignorance” — the organized social agreement to not-know that produces racial illiteracy in otherwise intelligent people.Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989). The origin text for intersectionality, essential for seeing who falls through a single-axis read of this controversy.Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey’s full treatment of the term she coined, naming the specific erasure of Black women from the mourning of anti-Black violence.James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000). The archive of lynching postcards — the historical receipt that proves the spectacle of Black death as white entertainment is centuries deep.Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). Source of the “grievable lives” framework that explains the hierarchy of disposable targets in roast comedy.bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995). hooks on Black rage as legitimate response and on the demand that Black people perform composure for white comfort — directly relevant to the “don’t be sensitive” defense.Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). The definitive history of how American popular entertainment was built on the mockery of Black life, and how that logic persists.Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The racial-capitalism counterweight to Afropessimism — holding both is the discipline. Robinson insists the structure that profits from Black suffering can still be fought and abolished.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

The Bodies Under The BulldozerY’all, let me put you on game. In April 2018, a backhoe in Sugar Land, Texas hit something it wasn’t supposed to hit. The construction crew was breaking ground for a Fort Bend Independent School District career and technical education center, and what they pulled up was bone. By the time the archaeologists finished, they had counted ninety-five bodies, all African American, ages fourteen to seventy, muscularly built but malnourished, with skeletons twisted by repetitive hard labor and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. They got known as the Sugar Land 95.Now here’s the part the city of Sugar Land would prefer you not sit with for too long. Those bodies were not a surprise. A Black man named Reginald Moore, a retired longshoreman who had worked as a corrections officer at the Fort Bend Jester Unit in the 1980s, had been telling Texas authorities for nineteen years that they were going to find those graves. He had the records, the maps, the historical research, the receipts. When he warned the school district they were about to build a school on top of a mass grave of convict laborers, they ignored him. When the bones came up out of the dirt, they initially barred him from the site. Then they let him on a task force and ignored most of his recommendations there too. Reggie Moore is gone now, passed in 2020, but every honest conversation about Sugar Land starts with his work, not with the developers, not with the museum, and damn sure not with Imperial Sugar.Imperial Sugar Is The Oldest Business In Texas. Read That Twice.Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas. The refinery has operated continuously on the same site in Sugar Land since 1843, two years before Texas was even a state. That is the official corporate biography. The crown logo is in the city seal. The town itself is named for the product. The Sugar Land Heritage Foundation will tell you a beautiful story about Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge as visionary founders who built a model company town with paved roads, clean water, hospitals, and schools.Here’s what they leave out. Before Kempner and Eldridge bought the operation in 1906 and 1908, the property belonged to two Confederate veterans named Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis. In 1878, Cunningham and Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population. The entire state prison population. They were not the first growers in Texas to use convict labor, but they were the biggest. Their plantation became notorious across the state as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. The annual mortality rate was three percent, caused by mosquito-borne disease, beatings, and the absence of medical care. Convict labor worked the Ellis Plantation until 1914.Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas because it was built on a continuous supply of unfree Black bodies for the first seventy years of its existence. The slavery into convict leasing into prison farm pipeline is not adjacent to the brand. It is the brand’s foundation.Convict Leasing Was Slavery With A New Filing SystemLet me break down what convict leasing actually was, because the Texas curriculum is going to give you maybe one sentence on it if you are lucky. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Except. Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. That exception is not a footnote. That exception is the entire blueprint for the post-Emancipation racial economy in the South.After the Civil War, Southern states passed what historians call Black Codes, laws that applied only to African Americans and criminalized things like loitering, breaking curfew, walking alongside railroad tracks, and not carrying proof of employment. The Texas Legislature passed its own version, and the state’s prison population, which had been overwhelmingly white before the war, became overwhelmingly Black almost overnight. Once you had Black bodies inside the prison system, the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause meant the state could rent them out as forced labor to private companies. Cunningham and Ellis bought the contract. The Imperial Sugar property is what they bought it for.Apply Afropessimism here. The slave is not a worker selling labor. The slave is an object whose flesh is fungible. Convict leasing did not just continue slavery’s economics. It continued slavery’s ontology. A Black body inside the Texas penal system in 1878 was structurally the same kind of thing as a Black body on a Mississippi plantation in 1858.The Sugar Land 95 are the receipts. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked into the ground and buried in unmarked pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. The bones tell you what the law did. The bones tell you what the company did. The bones tell you what the state did. The bones tell you what the federal government allowed.The Plantation Did Not End. It Got A New Address.Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for one hundred sixty thousand dollars plus interest. The state continued to grow sugar on the property using convict labor, and the operation became known as the Central Unit prison farm. It stayed open until 2011. The Houston Museum of Natural Science Sugar Land sits inside the main unit of the central prison today. The plantation did not end in 1865. It did not end in 1914. It did not end when the state took over from the private company. It did not end when the Central Unit closed. It changed addresses and changed letterhead.Texas still runs prison farms in 2026, and most of them are located on former plantation land. Incarcerated people, the vast majority of them Black and brown, cultivate the same crops their enslaved and convict-leased ancestors cultivated. They are not paid. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays its prisoners absolutely nothing for their labor. Texas Correctional Industries, the manufacturing arm of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, generates upwards of eighty million dollars a year in revenue from goods and services produced by people working for free. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice itself is reportedly the largest prison system in the United States, with over one hundred forty thousand people incarcerated.Texas Tough is what Robert Perkinson called this system in his book of the same name. The system Cunningham and Ellis built in 1878 did not get dismantled. It got institutionalized. The state cut out the private middleman, took over direct management of the forced labor, and called it rehabilitation.Who Owns Imperial Sugar Today, And Why It MattersNow here is where the contemporary accountability conversation gets sharp. Imperial Sugar is no longer Texas-owned. The Kempner family eventually sold off. The company went public, went through bankruptcy in 2001, and got acquired by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012 for around two hundred three million dollars. In 2022, Louis Dreyfus sold Imperial Sugar to U.S. Sugar Corporation, a privately held agribusiness based in Clewiston, Florida. U.S. Sugar is one of the largest sugarcane producers in the country, with reported annual revenue in the range of one and a quarter billion dollars and operations across more than one hundred eighty thousand acres of Florida farmland.That brand, that crown logo, that two-pound bag of cane sugar sitting in kitchen pantries across the South, all of it is a direct lineal descendant of an operation that leased the entire Texas prison population in 1878 and worked Black men to death in fields the state of Texas now uses to incarcerate their grandsons. The corporate entity changed hands. The brand equity did not. The brand equity is the asset. And the brand equity is built on top of those ninety-five bodies and every body that has not been found yet.The Reparations Argument, Including Jim CrowMost reparations conversations in the United States stop at slavery. The standard objection sounds like this. My ancestors didn’t own slaves. Slavery ended in 1865. That was a long time ago. I shouldn’t have to pay for something I didn’t do. The Imperial Sugar story refutes every move in that argument before the argument even gets to the table.Slavery ended in 1865. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911. That is thirteen to forty-six years after Emancipation. We are not talking about the antebellum cotton kingdom in this case. We are talking about the post-Emancipation, federally sanctioned, state-administered, privately profitable extraction of unfree Black labor from people who were legally citizens of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment exception clause made it lawful. Jim Crow Black Codes made it inevitable. Imperial Sugar’s predecessor companies made it profitable. The State of Texas made it permanent. The federal government allowed all of it.Apply Charles Mills here. The racial contract is not just a slavery problem. The racial contract is the white supremacist legal architecture that lets the wealth keep flowing forward across centuries while the descendants of the people whose backs built that wealth are told to get over it.Two things can be true. Two things are true. The first thing is that no living person owned a slave. The second thing is that companies, families, and institutions that exist today still hold assets, brand equity, land titles, and accumulated capital that were generated by enslaved and convict-leased labor. Imperial Sugar’s status as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas is itself a transferable asset. That status was purchased by Louis Dreyfus in 2012. That status was sold to U.S. Sugar in 2022. The premium that gets paid for that lineage is the price tag on the convict labor that made the lineage possible.So the reparations argument here is not abstract. It is not historical. It is line-item. Imperial Sugar, as a corporate entity, owes Black Texas. Imperial Sugar’s current parent company, as the holder of that brand, owes Black Texas. The State of Texas, as the entity that wrote the convict-leasing contracts and still runs the prison farms on the same land, owes Black Texas. And the federal government, as the entity that wrote the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause and never closed it, owes Black America.Whitey On The Moon, Sugar Land EditionGil Scott-Heron asked the question more than fifty years ago and we still ain’t answered it. Was all that money I made last year for, Whitey on the moon? How come ain’t no money here? Whitey on the moon. No hot water, no toilet, no lights, but Whitey on the moon. Substitute the verses for Sugar Land in 2026 and tell me where the lie is. Was all that sugar money made for Sugar Land schools? Imperial Sugar in the master-planned suburb. How come the descendants of the convict laborers are still locked up in Texas prison farms? Imperial Sugar on the supermarket shelf. No reparations, no acknowledgment, no curriculum, but Imperial Sugar in the Houston Museum of Natural Science.The luxury to ignore this history is itself a sign of who benefits from the history staying ignored. The view from nowhere, what Arnold Farr calls the epistemology of ignorance, is not neutral. It is structural. When the State of Texas Board of Education debates whether convict leasing belongs in the social studies curriculum, that debate is itself the answer to the reparations question. They know what is in the ground. They have known. The choice to keep it out of the textbook is the choice to keep the wealth flowing forward without the receipts attached.What I Need You To Sit WithI am a proud Texan, born and raised in Bryan, which is itself former plantation country. I am product of the Brazos Valley County. I have family dispersed throughout this state. Some of the bodies under that career and technical education center in Sugar Land could be my people. Some of them are definitely somebody’s people. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked to death and buried in pine boxes between 1878 and 1911, while a private sugar company turned their bones into brand equity and the State of Texas turned the property into a permanent prison farm. That is not history. That is an open file. That file does not get closed until the receipts get paid.Imperial Sugar is the oldest continuously operating business in Texas. That sentence is a confession dressed up as a corporate fun fact. Every accusation is a confession, and the longevity itself is the accusation. You cannot be the oldest business in Texas without explaining how you survived 1865, 1878, 1914, and every Texas constitution in between. The answer is convict leasing, then prison farms, then brand portability across three corporate parents. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts have never stopped accumulating.They want us to get over slavery, but they damn sure don’t want to let go of them profits. They want us to stop blaming them for what their ancestors did, but they want to hold on tight to what their ancestors left them. Two things can be true. Two things are true. And until the second thing gets reckoned with materially, not symbolically, the first thing is going to keep happening.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key TakeawaysThese are the load-bearing points. Each one is the bridge between the historical receipt and the contemporary accountability ask.1. Imperial Sugar’s longevity is itself the indictmentThe company markets itself as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas, founded in 1843. You cannot operate continuously through the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the twentieth century without a sustained labor supply. The labor supply for the first seventy-plus years of Imperial Sugar’s operation was enslaved people, then convict-leased Black prisoners, then prison-farm laborers after the state took over the property in 1914. Continuous operation is the asset. The asset is built on unfree Black labor. The longevity advertised in the corporate biography is the receipt.2. Cunningham and Ellis ran the largest convict-leasing operation in Texas historyIn 1878, Confederate veterans Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population to their sugar plantation operation in Fort Bend County. The operation became known as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. Conditions produced an estimated three percent annual mortality rate. When Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge bought the property in 1906 and 1908 and formed Imperial Sugar Company, they bought into a business model already structured by decades of convict-leasing infrastructure, contracts, and accumulated capital. The Imperial Sugar brand is the legal and economic successor to the Hell Hole.3. The Sugar Land 95 are the evidentiary baselineIn April 2018, ninety-five sets of skeletal remains were unearthed at a Fort Bend Independent School District construction site on the former Imperial State Prison Farm property. All were African American. Ages ranged from fourteen to seventy. Bodies were muscularly built but malnourished, with bones misshapen by repetitive hard labor, and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. Activist Reginald Moore had been warning Texas authorities about exactly this site for nineteen years. The Sugar Land 95 are not symbolic. They are forensic. They are the physical evidence that the convict-leasing system documented in the historical record produced the body count documented in the ground.4. The plantation did not end. It got institutionalized.Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for $160,000 plus interest. The state continued sugar cultivation using prison labor on the same property, which operated as the Central Unit prison farm until 2011. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice today runs prison farms on former plantation land across the state, where incarcerated workers, the majority of them Black and brown, cultivate crops without compensation. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays incarcerated workers nothing. The labor regime that built Imperial Sugar’s wealth has not ended. It has been absorbed into the state.5. The reparations argument has to include Jim CrowStandard objections to reparations rely on the idea that slavery ended in 1865 and no living person is responsible for what their ancestors did. The Imperial Sugar case refutes the premise. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911, decades after Emancipation. The labor that built the brand equity was extracted under Jim Crow Black Codes, the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause, and contracts signed by Confederate veterans with the State of Texas. The brand changed corporate hands three times in the last two decades, sold for $203 million in 2012 and again in 2022, each time at a premium that reflected the company’s lineage and continuous-operation status. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts never stopped accumulating. The reparations conversation is not asking living people to pay for slavery. It is asking corporate entities and state governments to settle line-item debts that are still actively producing value today.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'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.WORKS CITEDSources used to build this piece. Includes journalistic coverage of the Sugar Land 95 discovery, corporate and historical documentation of Imperial Sugar’s lineage, scholarly framing of convict leasing and prison labor, and reporting on contemporary Texas prison labor.Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Confronting Sugar Land’s Forgotten History.’ November 2022.Long-form feature on the discovery of the Sugar Land 95 and the historical context of convict leasing in Fort Bend County. Establishes the documented three percent annual mortality rate on the Cunningham and Ellis plantation, the Hell Hole of the Brazos designation, and the 1878 contract leasing the entire Texas prison population. Provides crucial corporate biography on Kempner and Eldridge’s purchase of the property in 1906 to 1908. Indispensable for understanding the throughline from plantation to convict leasing to Imperial Sugar Company.Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Remembering Reginald Moore.’ March 2021.Profile and obituary of Reginald Moore, the retired longshoreman and former Texas Department of Corrections officer whose nineteen-year research effort predicted the location of the Sugar Land 95 mass grave. Documents the city of Sugar Land’s official denial of the convict-leasing history until 2018, and the marginalization of Moore by Fort Bend County officials after the discovery. Required reading on whose research counts and whose does not.Rice University, Woodson Research Center. ‘Reginald Moore Sugar Land Convict Leasing System Research Collection.’Archival collection of Reginald Moore’s research materials, donated to Rice University and now part of the Woodson Research Center. Includes audio testimony to the Texas State Board of Education on convict leasing in Texas history textbooks, video documentation of Memorial Day 2018 events honoring the Sugar Land 95, and primary source materials on Fort Bend County’s convict-leasing history. The institutional record of Black research that the state initially tried to ignore.Texas State Historical Association. ‘Imperial Sugar Company.’ Handbook of Texas Online.Official corporate biography from the Texas State Historical Association. Confirms the 1843 founding date, the continuous operation claim, and the 1914 sale of the Ellis Plantation to the State of Texas as a prison farm with continued sugar production by convicts. Useful precisely because it is the establishment account, which makes its acknowledgments of convict labor more damning, not less.Texas Observer, Josephine Lee and Michelle Pitcher. ‘Texas Plantation Prisons.’ July 2024.Investigative report on the contemporary Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison farms, documenting that most are located on former plantation land and continue to cultivate the same crops as enslaved and convict-leased workers. Quotes historian Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Establishes the institutional continuity between nineteenth-century convict leasing and twenty-first-century unpaid prison labor.Bolts Magazine. ‘They Force You to Work.’ 2026.Reporting on Texas Correctional Industries and the use of unpaid prison labor to undercut private-sector bids. Documents the eighty-million-dollar plus annual revenue generated by goods and services produced by people working for free, and the political organizing in Houston to challenge city contracts with TDCJ. The contemporary line item on the historical bill.Charles Mills. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.Foundational text on the racial contract as the underlying legal and political architecture of Western liberal democracy. Mills’s framework of the epistemology of ignorance explains how the explicit historical record of convict leasing can sit alongside a public refusal to acknowledge what the record shows. Required philosophical framing for understanding why Imperial Sugar’s biography can be both publicly available and effectively invisible.Frank Wilderson III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.Foundational Afropessimist text. Wilderson’s distinction between the worker and the slave, and his account of the fungibility of Black flesh, provide the analytical scaffolding for understanding convict leasing not as a labor system but as a continuation of slavery’s ontology. Black bodies inside the Texas penal system in 1878 were structurally the same kind of thing as Black bodies on antebellum plantations.Douglas Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name. Anchor Books, 2008.Pulitzer Prize winning history of convict leasing, peonage, and the post-Emancipation re-enslavement of Black Americans across the South from 1865 to World War Two. The most accessible book-length treatment of the system Cunningham and Ellis operated in Fort Bend County. Essential for placing the Sugar Land 95 inside the regional and national pattern.Robert Perkinson. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Picador, 2010.Definitive history of the Texas prison system from its origins to the contemporary period. Documents the institutional continuity between convict leasing and state-run prison farms, the influence of Texas wardens like O.B. Ellis and George Beto on national prison policy, and the persistence of plantation logics inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The book everyone debating prison reform in Texas should have read first.Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Louis Dreyfus Commodities LLC / Imperial Sugar Company tender offer, 2012.Public corporate records documenting the $6.35 per share, approximately $203 million acquisition of Imperial Sugar Company by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012, including the assumption of $125 million in debt. The receipts on what the brand was worth at one moment in its corporate lineage. Followed by the 2022 sale of Imperial Sugar to US Sugar Corporation, completing the brand’s transition from Texas family ownership to global commodities house to Florida agribusiness conglomerate while the underlying lineage stayed intact.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

Thank you Decolonizing Love, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Netta Fei, metamorphosic, baby guava, and many others for tuning into my live video with vic mensa! Join me for my next live video in the app.“The idea that in order for me to care about what niggas is going through in America, I gotta ignore what’s going on with Palestine — it’s a false dichotomy.”Y’all, let me start where the conversation started, because the whole thing got kicked off by a tweet, and that tweet is the tired playbook in its purest form. Somebody on Threads typed up that the people screaming AIPAC and Zionist never had a damn word to say about gerrymandering, nothing about voting rights getting gutted, silent on the Congo, silent on Haiti, silent on a dozen other issues bleeding Black communities dry — and then the kicker, you unserious clowns helped put the corrupt predator back in the White House, Jasmine Crockett isn’t the problem, you are. Read that again and let that marinate, because what that post is doing is building a wall between two rooms of the same house, and then charging you rent to stand in either one.Here’s the thing the post doesn’t want you to clock: the person who wrote it claims a view from nowhere, like they’re just neutrally observing that the pro-Palestine crowd doesn’t care about home. But the claimed neutrality is itself a position. The view from nowhere is still a view, and this particular view has a job — its job is to make outright vocal opposition to a genocide that has killed somewhere between 600,000 and a million people the scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s own failures. That’s not analysis, kinfolks. That’s an alibi.So I sat down with Vic Mensa, and I want to tell you why that conversation mattered, because Vic is a Ghanaian Akan brother from Chicago, a revert to Islam, a man who sat in a refugee camp in Palestine, and somebody who came up under the long shadow of Chairman Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. When two people who actually do the work get in a room, the false binary doesn’t survive contact. It just doesn’t hold up ideologically. It’s a straight fallacy.The Receipts the Algorithm HidesLet me get something out the way for the folks in the back, because I am the people they’re talking about. I’m the one supposedly silent on gerrymandering — except I made content with Jasmine Crockett herself in Austin fighting against gerrymandering. I’ve talked with politicians in Tennessee fighting gerrymandering. I’ve made videos about every single thing that tweet said I’ve never addressed. You just didn’t see them. And that’s the part that’s telling on you. The only time you care about my platform is when you feel like I’m going after the Democratic handlers. The attention economy and the way your algorithm is constructed is telling on you. You’re showing your ass, and you don’t even know it.Two things can be true. I can hold that Jasmine Crockett is a brilliant orator, one of the most effective vocal challengers of Trump, of fascism, of MAGA, of the Republican Party — and I can also hold that she is intimately, integrally intertwined with a global fascist machine through her connections to AIPAC. Both things live in the same body. Naming that is not an attack on Black women. But neoliberalism has so successfully co-opted the Black identity that when you critique the Democratic Party, some folks experience it as you attacking niggas. That conflation is the trap. And I’m not stepping in it.“It’s thinking about how can you stand for Black people and side with individuals perpetuating incarceration for Black people, perpetuating disparities of health care for Black people. It’s not just ‘they go up against Palestinians.’”Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Same corporations, different cagesWhen Vic was in Palestine, he started to peep something that should freeze you in place. The same multinational private prison corporations — CoreCivic, GEO Group — that operate to keep his brothers in prison for 29 years at a time also operate to keep Palestinians detained for decades at a time, and they also operate in South Africa. Same corporations. Same logic. Same flesh treated as fungible across three continents. So when somebody who is politically misinformed at best, and disingenuous and spineless at worst, tells you that what’s happening in Palestine has nothing to do with what’s happening on the south side of Chicago, they’re pissing on us and telling us it’s raining.This is where I want to do the Whitey on the Moon move, because Gil Scott-Heron already wrote the structure of the argument for us. They tell us they can’t fund reproductive justice. (But the rocket money is for Israel.) They tell us they can’t fund HIV research. (But the missile money is for Israel.) Black people fighting for health care right now, and they tell us the well is dry — but they send billions annually to Israel, and what does Israel give its people? Free health care. Vic put it plain: his motto is education is elevation, and he’s over a hundred thousand dollars in debt for his degrees, the unsubsidized loans accumulating interest as we speak. Smart as s**t, and in perpetual debt. The resource allocation contradiction isn’t a side point. It is the point.Fred Hampton already answered this questionVic told me about a Twitter Space — that purgatory — where Chicago brothers and sisters, some he’s met at the street ground level, were telling him that what happens to immigrant populations, be it Latinos, be it Africans, has nothing to do with us, is none of our business, and is counterproductive to the liberation of Black people. So Vic, coming from the school of Chairman Fred Hampton, asked them straight: do you respect Chairman Fred Hampton as a Chicago person? Of course, they say yes. Then how do you feel about the Rainbow Coalition, where Hampton connected the Black Panther Party with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor white Young Patriots in a show of multiracial proletarian solidarity?Because here’s what having the luxury to ignore the international struggle is a sign of — it’s a sign of how effective the break in the ideological continuation has been. All of our political heroes preached internationalism. Newton fought the crack epidemic and stood with Palestinians. Malcolm talked about Mississippi and couldn’t be contained to Mississippi. The notion that the best thing for Black folks is to denounce solidarity is people trying to emulate a white nationalism that even the white nationalists abandoned, because isolationist theory didn’t work for them either. You cannot vacuum yourself from the rest of the world.And the structural argument is even sharper than the moral one. ICE is now the most funded police entity in the world. You’re going to tell me, a Black person, that the most funded police entity in the world won’t have any impact on Black policing? That’s crazy to me. The white supremacist is trying to overturn the 14th Amendment for birthright citizenship, claiming it’s all about immigrants — but the 14th Amendment comes straight out of the Reconstruction era. That was made about Black folks. So how, in your mind, does the mass deportation agenda overturning birthright citizenship not boomerang back onto you? This means the “mind your business” position isn’t just wrong, it’s self-liquidating. By the time they finish coming for the immigrant, the precedent is already sitting on your neck.“Some people in our community hate drag queens and immigrants more than they love Black people. And that’s the reason why they can be in coalition with white supremacists.”The Black church treats Black gay people the way America treats niggasVic said something that made me think a thought I’d never quite landed, and I want to give him credit for the framing because it’s how he said it. The way the Black church treats Black gay people is how America treats niggas. The same way white America uses Black cultural representation and Black labor to make America look great, look smooth, look cool — while still mistreating us — is the same way the Black church operates. You can run the choir. You can do the dance. You can be the usher, the chaperone, the musician fueling the whole sanctuary. But you better not ever, ever think we’re cool with your gay s**t. That’s extraction with a smile. That’s the libidinal economy of the sanctuary.And I say this as somebody whose first degree is in African American studies, who grew up in a Black Southern missionary background, who is critical of the Black church and doesn’t identify as Christian today, but who has no smoke for anybody whose faith makes them a better person. Vic, a revert to Islam, said the same contradictions he watches me name in the Black church, he experiences in the mosque — the homophobia rampant in a brilliant imam’s street-corner congregation of former Nation of Islam brothers, Black Stones, Arab cab drivers, and Nigerians. And he was honest in a way most men won’t be: he admitted he felt phony, because he has the privilege to be okay with somebody else’s dehumanization since it doesn’t cost him what it costs them. If they were up there saying Black people are thieves, he couldn’t come back the next day. That’s what intellectual honesty about your own positionality sounds like.Run the receipts on the pre-colonial archive, too. In Akan culture, in Ashanti, there were words for two-spirited and non-binary people forever — a man who is a woman, a woman who is a man — and those words didn’t carry criminalizing weight. So even where we’re actively rejecting colonial domination, transphobia and homophobia are the one piece of the colonizer’s luggage we insist on keeping. We tell ourselves the presence of LGBTQ people is an attack on the Black household, an attack on Black masculinity, like white supremacy planted it there to break us. But that move gives white supremacy more power than it actually has and erases Black queer presence inside the Black radical tradition itself.Patriarchy is a scourge on men, tooVic’s sister gave him a bar I can’t stop turning over. We say white people need to be on the front line combating racism. We say Jewish people need to be combating Zionism. So it would seem that men need to be combating patriarchy — and that’s exactly where it gets sensitive, gets emotional, and where men hit a wall. Because patriarchy emotionally cripples Black men while Black women disproportionately absorb the consequences of that emotional repression and violence. Racism is a scourge on white people; patriarchy is a scourge on us as men. It’s corrosive for us, actually.Look at what happened with Megan Thee Stallion. That’s the perfect depiction of men’s blind allegiance to patriarchy. I watched niggas who have a heart, who have a spine in so many other ways, act like they needed ten trillion forms of ID before they could care that a woman got shot. I got two sisters. If my sister is with some niggas and my sister gets shot, it’s over with — I don’t need a forensic file to know how I feel. What does it mean for a bunch of hyper-masculine gangsta niggas, who’ll tell you all day what they’ll do to another nigga, to suddenly feel so victimized and so sensitive about Meg dancing on somebody that it justified her being shot? Every accusation is a confession.And it’s connected to the religion conversation, because the root of it is Father Abraham having many sons — so many men carry a divine understanding of themselves as patriarchs, and they’ll do anything to sustain that hierarchy of men over women, masculine over feminine. White men, Black men, Native men, Hispanic men — a lot of men genuinely believe patriarchy is divine. Two plus two is four, the sky is blue, birds chirp, and men post the other woman. They think you’re broken if you don’t see it that way. Some of them think male leadership requires male domination, and the only way they know how to perform manhood is to sexually conquer a woman or beat one down. That’s the same logic that hit the woman the Houston PD said was justifiably struck because she said brick when it was a bottle — the law gets used to ratify the violence. If a woman hits me and I pick up something and hit her back, I’m a whole-ass nigga. I’m standing on that, and I’ll take the “simp” and “panderer” think pieces all day. Facts over feelings.“It takes a lot more strength to exercise restraint and to use your mind — which is the very thing they feminize. They gender brilliance as feminine, then call it weakness.”Vic named the part most men hide: even in a boardroom with his own companies, the patriarchal hyper-masculine voice inside says I want to whoop this thing — and it just doesn’t apply. It’s counterproductive. He has to emotionally mature beyond it to accomplish his aim without the need for domination. And here’s the read I want you to keep: physical domination is actually a lower level of strength. The restraint, the use of the mind, the dissection through words — that’s the thing patriarchy feminizes and then dismisses. Which is also why I’m so critical of the “emasculation” conversation. How does somebody else have the power to rhetorically emasculate you? How is your masculinity so flimsy it lives in another person’s mouth? By insisting on that, you are making whiteness — and patriarchy — visible as the fragile thing it is.Kamala, misogynoir, and the refusal to do nuanceThe Kamala Harris campaign was a layered, m***********g complicated thing, and I refuse to flatten it. It was dominantly steeped in misogynoir, full of anti-Blackness, full of misogyny — I could smell how much niggas hate women throughout, and I heard plenty of women say she was unfit to lead because she’s a woman, which is patriarchy gone subversive, the same way we call Black folks who side with white supremacy pick-mes. And at the very same time, there were entirely valid critiques of her participation in the genocide in Palestine, her record as a prosecutor, her role in mass incarceration. Two things can be true. The public right now doesn’t have the range to hold both, because everything has to be all or nothing, a zero-sum game.So watch the sleight of hand. It is an effective imperialist talking point to blame the failures of a genocidal imperialist state on the anti-imperialists. U.S. sanctions have killed tens of millions over the last several decades, and somehow the people conscious of that are the ones held responsible for the loss — you’re being an insufferable leftist if you can’t look past those dead to focus only on Chicago. As if Newton couldn’t hold the crack epidemic and Palestine at once. As if Malcolm could only talk about Mississippi. How come they blame Jill Stein and Butch Ware louder than they blame Joe Biden for handing her only 107 days? He set her up. He hung her out to dry, and then the failure gets laundered onto everybody with a valid critique. The gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — 1965 to 2026 — should already tell you that the liberal myth of linear progress is a myth. There’s no straight line that only goes forward.The hood doesn’t abandon you for being imperfectNow I want to be self-critical, because Vic pushed me somewhere honest. The movement is so often ready to discard folks for not being perfect participants — a misstep, not revolutionary enough, the wrong take on one issue. It can be a pretentious, intellectually elitist movement at times, even though I’m fully in it. Vic, as an artist, lived it: when he had controversy, the progressive quasi-leftist circles that rallied around him would dissipate, but the folks who stuck were in the hood — and the hood is at times deeply conservative and deeply revolutionary at once, and it wouldn’t abandon him for a mistake the way the leftist circles would pounce.I would like to also add some important context… Vic and I are speaking from the privilege of being cis-gender straight Black men in hood and I acknowledge that there are people are who are abandoned in the hood. Black women, Black LGBTQ, Black Neurodivergent people are many of times easily abandoned from the hood, by the hood. Mr. Mensa was right to correct my language, so I’ll say it clean: the “Black liberal versus Black leftist” framing too often conflates white leftism with the Black radical tradition. When niggas hear “Black leftism,” they think Marx — and Marx ain’t bad, but there is a Black radical tradition outside the realm of European post-structural thought. The red-pill brothers try to short-circuit Black feminism by saying Black feminists just want to be white women — not realizing Black feminists already duked it out with white feminists about exactly that racism, decades ago, better than the red-pill brother ever could. Same move when a Black liberal tells a Black leftist “you just want to be like white folks.” Hold on. The Black radical tradition — Malcolm, Hampton, the Pan-Africanists — is distinct from white leftism, and pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest, especially when the same person is comfortable with white liberals who are racist as hell.“My only real allegiance is a love for the people. I’m prioritizing Black folks. I’m Black first, I’m leftist second.”Reparations can’t be real while slavery is still legalThey’re out here floating reparations for January 6th — a “slush fund” they’re rebranding as anti-weaponization money — while the commonly cited figure for what’s owed to Black Americans is around $14 trillion, and that’s just for unpaid labor, before you even add missed opportunity and opportunity cost. Then go down the list of who has actually received reparations. Confederate slave owners got reparations for their lost “property.” Francophone West Africa is still effectively paying France through the CFA franc, their money held in French banks. Israel received reparations after the Holocaust. Japanese Americans received reparations after the internment camps. Everybody on the ledger — except the African. And that exposes the firm, deeply held belief sitting at the bottom of this: that the African is an inferior human being who doesn’t deserve the same treatment. That’s the permanence of racism Derrick Bell tried to warn us about, and it’s why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse here.But here’s the part that should stop your breath. Reparations cannot be a serious conversation while slavery is still happening, because under the 13th Amendment it is still absolutely legal. Vic’s brother just came home after 29 years for a murder he didn’t commit — someone else did it — and the whole time he was producing capital for the prison. He used to drive a tractor at one of the joints because it let him out the cell, and after COVID, brothers are locked down 23 and 1, 23 hours in a cell under inhumane conditions, so being outside like a human being was something he looked forward to. Vic told me he made the mistake once of asking his brother how it felt to be enslaved, and realized how stupid the question was, because that’s not a metaphor for the man — that’s the literal situation he’s in.In Mississippi you can substantiate billions of dollars off prison labor and the men aren’t getting paid s**t. In Texas TDCJ — my own mama and daddy have been in jail, they’ll tell you — you don’t get paid at all. You get paid three hots and a cot, the roof and the tray. That’s straight-up slavery. So when somebody asks why reparations isn’t a serious conversation, the answer is sitting in plain sight: how do you compensate a harm the state is still actively committing? It’s not ironic that you and I are more likely to be convicted as punishment for a crime — crime itself is a social construct. Watch how the social construct of time bends: an undocumented person is disqualified from manhood in America for going against the law, while a man with 34 felony convictions is the President of the United States. If your register comes up $100 short, that’s an honest mistake. If you take $100 out the till, you going to jail. Same dollar, different bodies, different verdicts. That’s the whole game.How he builds it: claim, warrant, impactVic asked me my process, so I’ll put it here because it’s the engine under everything above. It starts in debate: claim, warrant, impact. The claim is “yo mama so fat.” The warrant is the because. The impact is why anybody should give a damn. My claim is crime is a social construct; once I lock one warrant, I can sit down and go off. To make an argument you need all three, and most folks online give you a hot claim with no warrant and no impact — that Zionism point was dope, but what’s the impact? My debate coach, a country white man named George Lee out of Oklahoma, used to say if a man talks for nine minutes you can find something to disagree with somewhere. I was the negative, my partner Perfect Prophet Rasheed was the affirmative — he was great at saying yes, I was great at saying hell nah, here go ten reasons. On 60-second TikTok I once stacked 14 arguments in 60 seconds, because debate trained me to find the most efficient way to say the most. Purpose over popularity. Always.And let me be clear since the man is named so much lately: what Charlie Kirk was doing was not debate. As a Hall of Fame college policy debater who won a national championship, I’ll repeat it — that was fishing for clips and a-ha gotcha moments, no argument development, no point-for-point refutation. Content farming. The plaques behind me came from doing the exact opposite of that. So if you want to build the skill, go to the archive: study Davon Love, the first Black person to win a national debate championship, who did it for Towson in 2008 and writes on Substack about how to construct the argument. Go back and learn how Black liberals and Black leftists have always been fighting, going all the way back to the plantation, and figure out where you actually fit. That’s research over MeSearch.The closeSo back to that tweet. The wall it built — home over there, the world over here — was never real. Vic learned it from a wizened old Bedouin man in a Palestinian refugee camp who asked him, are y’all just voyeurs, is this a field trip, or are you here to go tell the world what you saw? Vic promised that man he’d tell his story, and that promise is why he can’t align with any ideology that supports the destruction of a people, the same way he draws a hard line between revolutionary violence toward liberation and violence in furtherance of domination. My allegiance is a love for the people. Black first, leftist second. And the false choice between caring about niggas here and niggas everywhere isn’t a real choice — it’s a leash, and somebody is holding the other end. Don’t pick it up. Feel me?5 Key Takeaways1. The false binary is a leash.“Caring about Palestine” vs. “caring about home” was never a real choice. The same prison corporations, the same fascist machinery, and the same 14th-Amendment precedent connect Chicago, the Congo, and Palestine. Internationalism isn’t a distraction from Black liberation — it’s a precondition for it.2. Two things can be true.Jasmine Crockett can be a brilliant orator and tied to AIPAC. Kamala’s campaign can be soaked in misogynoir and open to valid critique on Palestine and incarceration. The refusal to hold both — the zero-sum reflex — is how neoliberalism launders accountability.3. Patriarchy is a scourge on men, too.From Megan Thee Stallion to the boardroom, the demand to dominate is corrosive to the men performing it. Restraint and the use of the mind are strength — the very strengths patriarchy genders as feminine and then dismisses.4. Reparations can’t be real while slavery is legal.The 13th Amendment relocated slavery into the prison. Everyone from Confederate enslavers to Japanese Americans has been on the reparations ledger except the African — because the conversation requires admitting a harm the state is still actively committing.5. Claim, warrant, impact — and purpose over popularity.Real argument has all three. Clip-farming and gotcha moments are not debate. Build the warrant, name the impact, and let the analysis stand on its own.Annotated Bibliography & Related ReadingsRESEARCH OVER MESEARCHThese are starting points for the people who want to go past the clip and into the archive. Verify editions and current data yourself before citing — some figures (kill counts, dollar amounts, legal status) shift and should be checked against primary sources.Frank B. Wilderson III — Afropessimism (2020) & Red, White & Black (2010)Wilderson’s frame of gratuitous violence, fungibility, and ontological social death anchors why anti-Black violence isn’t merely economically determined. Useful for the prison-labor and “same corporations” sections — held as descriptive, not prescriptive.Cedric Robinson — Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)The text for the article’s core correction: the Black radical tradition exists outside European post-structural thought. Robinson’s racial capitalism reframes antiblackness as the engine of surplus value, not an aberration.Patrick E. Johnson — Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008)Directly supports the Black-church-and-queerness section. Johnson documents how Black LGBTQ people are uniquely positioned inside Black Southern church life — indispensable to the music and ministry, yet chastised.Moya Bailey — Misogynoir Transformed (2021)The coinage and framework for reading the Kamala campaign and the Megan Thee Stallion discourse. Centers how anti-Blackness and misogyny compound specifically against Black women.Kimberlé Crenshaw — “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) & The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)The intersectional baseline for the whole pack — gender, sexuality, and class read together inside Blackness rather than as competing single issues.Derrick Bell — Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis explains why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse: the refusal is structural, not an oversight.Huey P. Newton & the Black Panther Party — on the Rainbow CoalitionPrimary context for the Fred Hampton argument: the BPP’s coalition with the Young Lords and Young Patriots as the historical answer to “why should we care about other communities.”Davon Love — Substack (writings on debate & Black political analysis)Conscious Lee’s named recommendation: first Black person to win a national debate championship (Towson, 2008). Practical guidance on how to construct an argument.The 13th Amendment (1865) — the “except as a punishment for crime” clauseRead the text directly. The exception clause is the legal hinge for the prison-slavery argument and for why reparations and abolition are the same conversation.Documentary: 13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)Accessible companion to the constitutional argument, tracing the line from the 13th Amendment’s loophole through mass incarceration and private prisons.On the CFA franc / Francophone West Africa & FranceFor the reparations ledger section — the monetary arrangement keeping West African reserves in French banks. Verify current figures and reform status before citing.PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTIONThis whole platform runs on you — no corporate backing, no AIPAC money, no dark-money think tank cutting the check. Education is Elevation is funded entirely by paid subscribers, which is the only way I can keep saying purpose over popularity and mean it.If this conversation with Vic gave you a new frame — the false binary as a leash, the 13th Amendment as the reason reparations stays buried, patriarchy as a scourge on men too — then you already know what we do here. We don’t farm clips. We build the warrant and we name the impact. That work takes time, research, and the freedom to say things that won’t be popular.When you go paid, you’re not tipping. You’re funding a free Black critical-thought media that the corporate world will never bankroll, because what we say cuts against their bottom line. You’re also keeping it accessible — the same model is why the debate class I’m building with my debate family will always have a free version alongside the paid one. Accessibility is key. Your subscription is what makes the free tier possible for the next person.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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Mnera, Farrah Senne, Louis DeVlugt Personal, Copaganda, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I just got done sitting in a convening about immigration with a bunch of pro-immigration workers, and I have thoughts. Before I get into them, though, I want to give a disclaimer, because my grandfather always said the pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, and what I’m about to lay down ain’t about accusing nobody of being nefarious, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally anti-Black, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally engaged in indigenous erasure. This is about impact, not intent. And as the kinfolks know, two things can be true at the same damn time — folks can mean well and still be perpetuating the exact erasure that the empire requires to function. Let that marinate.I sat in that room and listened to a presentation on the 14th Amendment, listened to lawyers grapple with how the current administration is trying to overturn birthright citizenship, listened to scholars walk through how the 14th Amendment is being weaponized against immigrant populations — and the whole time I kept asking the same rhetorical question in my head, the question that has to be the starting point for any serious conversation about citizenship in this country: What does the subject position of being an immigrant or being a citizen mean for the Indian or for the Black? What has the concept of citizenship actually engaged when it comes to what it means to be Native, or what it means to be African American? Because for the folks in the back, the 14th Amendment ain’t just a 2026 immigration story. The 14th Amendment is birthed out of the Reconstruction era. 13th Amendment freed the slaves, 14th Amendment gave citizenship, 15th Amendment gave the right to vote — but only to Black men. You feel me? The presentation didn’t grapple with that. The presentation talked about the 14th Amendment as if it dropped out of the sky and landed in 2026 on the bodies of immigrants, when in actuality this amendment is birthed in blood, birthed in slavery, birthed in Reconstruction, and has been weaponized against the very people it was supposed to protect since the second the ink dried.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Most of us engage with citizenship through a very romanticized, sanitized understanding of what it is. So let me set up some questions, because Research over MeSearch — in 2026, will we say that Black people are citizens? Yes, obviously. African Americans in 2026 are still regarded as citizens. Do we understand that citizenship is supposed to come with the right to vote? Yes. But then what is the concept of citizenship meant for the Black body? It’s never guaranteed any type of safety. It’s never guaranteed what we’re supposed to believe comes with being a citizen. Though Black people are still regarded as citizens in 2026, legally we’re having our voting rights taken away. The very same Supreme Court that says it’s legal to racially profile against immigrant populations when it comes to citizenship is the same Supreme Court that says you have to engage in colorblindness when it comes to creating congressional maps. Let that marinate. Colorblindness is good, Supreme Court says, when it comes to drawing congressional districts that would actually give Black people political representation. But color consciousness is good for the Supreme Court when it comes to enforcing immigration. This illustrates the tension in how the law accounts for indigeneity and Blackness in a completely different way than the other subject positions, and you cannot have an honest conversation about immigration without grappling with this contradiction.And for the Indigenous, the contradiction runs deeper. Do y’all know the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans? Naturalized birthright citizenship did not apply to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island — the people that have been here for thousands of years. Legally speaking, Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. The 14th Amendment passes in 1868, and Native folks have to wait fifty-six more years to be legally recognized as citizens of the country that was built on top of their bones. And then even when they were granted citizenship in 1924, what did that mean for their humanity? What did that mean for the ongoing genocide they were facing? What did that mean for the boarding schools that were still actively destroying their children? Citizenship for Native Americans has never led to preserving their culture, never led to preserving their customs, never led to seeing their sovereignty, never led to them being able to get regular old rights of being a citizen. The legal concept of citizenship does not give what it’s supposed to give. And we know this because even now, even now, even now — Black people have been regarded as citizens since 1868, and yet how much legally have our citizenship been circumvented and continues to be circumvented regardless of us being seen as naturalized citizens of America?This is where the romanticized framing of “America is a nation of immigrants” starts to crumble under the weight of historical analysis. When Zohran Mamdani says New York was built by immigrants, when Shaboozey says America was built by immigrants, I understand the intent — the intent is to dignify immigrant labor, to push back against the xenophobic right, to remind people that this country’s prosperity was constructed by hands that the empire would now like to deport. I get it. But the impact erases the history of chattel slavery, erases the fact that a bunch of Black people built this country before the Immigration Act of 1965 brought an influx of immigrants to a country that was already built. The milk and honey people came looking for? It was already created — by particular people, under the lash, under the whip, under the auction block. Then there’s the second erasure: when you call this a nation of immigrants, what does that mean for the Indigenous folks who were already here? What does that mean for the people who didn’t migrate, who didn’t choose, whose land was taken from underneath them? You feel me? When you frame the starting point of the American story as immigration, you’ve already erased two subject positions — the people who were forced here in chains, and the people whose land was stolen.This is what Tuck and Yang call the settler’s move to innocence. The phrase “no one is illegal on stolen land” — said with the absolute best of intentions, said by Billie Eilish at the Grammys, said at every progressive rally — has a contradiction baked into it that does the work of indigenous erasure even as it claims to be solidarity. Who was the land stolen from? Do you know the specific tribe that is indigenous to the land you’re standing on when you make this statement? What does it mean for Native sovereignty when you present the starting point of the story as already-stolen land? Because if the land is just abstractly stolen, if the original people are just a hazy concept in the backdrop of your solidarity statement, then the land becomes available for redistribution among non-Native populations, and the Indigenous claim disappears into a vibe. Tuck and Yang argue that settlers reach for these moves to relieve the discomfort of being implicated in colonization without actually giving anything back. The slogan feels radical. The slogan does nothing for land back. The slogan, in fact, makes land back harder, because it converts a specific Indigenous claim into a universal humanitarian one. That ain’t the same thing.I want to be clear about the Afropessimist intervention I’m making here, because some of y’all gonna read this and try to flatten it into Oppression Olympics. That ain’t what this is. Afropessimists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton argue that anti-Blackness is antagonistic to America and to the world, while a lot of other injustices are seen as human conflicts. To understand the difference between a conflict and an antagonism: a conflict can be compromised. An antagonism is always one or the other. The relationship between America and Black suffering, between America and Indigenous genocide — that ain’t a conflict that gets resolved through better policy. That’s the structuring antagonism that makes America possible in the first place. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for Indigenous folks in America or Black folks. Democracy in America is situated upon Black bodies and Native American blood. We don’t get it without that. So when we think about the romanticized ideals around what the law is supposed to do, the ideals don’t grapple with the material reality. The scholar in me and the nigga in me is asking, in the bare bones — what has citizenship guaranteed for the nigga and the native? What has equal protection meant for us? What has political representation in citizenship meant for our plight?And here’s where the antagonism between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous discourse really comes home. After 1965, when you have non-Black, non-white immigrant populations migrating to America, and they want to prove they’re citizens in court, they have historically tethered their citizenship and humanity to whiteness. You go to the courthouse, you stand before the judge, you say “I’m a citizen because I’m white” — showing you the inherent anti-Blackness within the law itself. The law was structured in opposition to particular subject positions getting rights and humanity. So when in 2026 we start talking about immigrant rights, when we start talking about how we’re going to use the law to push back against birthright citizenship being overturned, we have to grapple with the fact that this very legal apparatus, from 1776 to 2026, has been the tool we’re being asked to believe in. And I gotta be honest with y’all — I was around a bunch of lawyers in that room, and it made me think about why I didn’t become a lawyer. I didn’t become one because epistemologically, which is just a fancy word for how we produce knowledge, I could never get down with the idea that the law could be discursively permuted to get whatever ruling we want. The law is very black and white. The more we deny that, the more we have these conversations about immigration rights with this antagonistic tension sitting in the backdrop unaddressed.Two policies in 1965 tell this story plain. The 1965 Immigration Act opens the doors to non-white immigration in significant numbers for the first time. The 1965 Voting Rights Act gives Black people federal enforcement protection for the franchise that should have been ours since 1870. These two policies happen in the same year, and the tension between them has been shaping American political life ever since. Because of redlining, because of the legacy of slavery, because of being systematically excluded from banking — economic opportunities in the Black community got filled by other immigrant populations. Whether we talking about hair weave, whether we talking about the nail industry, whether we talking about beauty supply, whether we talking about food industries throughout America, this is the backdrop of living in the Black community. Black entrepreneurs were not given those opportunities. And me being in LA right now, the 1992 Rodney King riots happened in part because of the tension between these two communities — the Black community and the Asian community. If we gloss over that, act like it’s hunky-dory, whoop-dee-doo, we impact our ability to build genuine coalitions and solidarities. When Shaboozey said America was built by immigrants, it wasn’t just Black folks that was pissed off by that statement. When we make those types of declarations, we alienate particular people from particular communities who can’t f**k with the framing because the framing erases them.Then you got Cesar Chavez, who is iconized as the immigrant rights hero, the patron saint of farmworker organizing. Even before we came out with the fact that he was a rapist, even before we came out with the documentation of his misogyny and patriarchy, we already knew he was anti-Black. We already knew that even though he was on immigrant rights, he would call ICE on undocumented farmers when they were undercutting his union. We have statements of him saying anti-Black s**t. So when L.A. is named after him, when Cesar Chavez is the figure that gets centered in pro-immigration mythology, what does that say about whose humanity is allowed to be complicated? Whose contradictions are forgiven? Whose anti-Blackness is folded into the heroic narrative because the broader project of immigration politics needs him? Two things can be true. Chavez did organizing work. Chavez was anti-Black. Refusing to hold both is what allows the antagonism to keep operating in the dark.And let me tell you about indigeneity in California specifically, because this part don’t get touched enough. Right now in California, there are a bunch of Indigenous folks caught up in immigration politics and immigration law — because they get coded as Mexican, because they get coded as Latin American, because the colonial lens of America sees them as Spanish-speaking subjects rather than as Indigenous peoples of land that was theirs before Spain ever arrived, before the United States ever arrived. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about this in Borderlands/La Frontera — the Mexicans didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. You hear white conservatives telling Mexican people to go back where they came from, and I’m from Texas, born and raised, living in Texas now, and it makes me cringe every time, because nigga, hear it: they are in their home. You view their sovereignty, you view their indigeneity, through the lens of colonizers — i.e., this used to be a Spanish colony, so I’m going to view everybody in this colony as Spanish subjects, point blank period. So even here in California, you got indigenous folks who can’t even access the law’s protection because the 14th Amendment didn’t give them citizenship, but they’re also Indigenous to California, so the law is already insidious to their bodies. They’re seen as aliens in their own land. They’re seen as immigrants in their own land. Because they were colonized by Spaniards who taught them Spanish, and the white folks here only understand their humanity through the colonial language they were forced to speak. This is what we’re dealing with.A Specific Implication For EducationFor educators, for curriculum builders, for the folks teaching social studies, civics, history, ethnic studies — this analysis is not an academic exercise. It’s a directive. The current public education curriculum on immigration in this country is a curriculum of liberal flattening. Students are taught that America is a nation of immigrants. Students are taught about Ellis Island as the origin story of American belonging. Students are taught that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship in a way that floats free of slavery and Reconstruction. Students are taught about Cesar Chavez as a saint without being taught about his anti-Blackness. Students are taught about the Civil Rights Movement and the Immigration Act of 1965 as parallel stories of progress without being taught about the structural tensions those two policies set into motion. The result is a generation of well-meaning young people who graduate from high school perfectly equipped to perpetuate Indigenous erasure and anti-Black erasure while believing themselves to be on the right side of history. We have to teach the 14th Amendment with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach the 1965 Immigration Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach Chavez with the Black farmworkers he undermined. We have to teach Anzaldúa, we have to teach Wilderson, we have to teach Tuck and Yang. Otherwise we are producing what Charles Mills called the white moral psychology — a citizenry capable of believing in justice while being entirely incapable of recognizing the structuring antagonisms that make injustice possible. Education is elevation, or it ain’t education at all.Intersectional Material ImpactsThe folks who get crushed hardest in the gap between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous critique are, of course, the folks sitting at the intersections. Black immigrants — Haitian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali, Afro-Latine — get hit twice. They get hit by immigration enforcement that racially profiles them as both Black and foreign. They get hit by Black communities that haven’t always made space for them in the freedom struggle. ICE deports Black immigrants at disproportionate rates relative to their share of the immigrant population — that’s documented, that’s empirical. Black women immigrants face the misogynoir Moya Bailey named on top of the xenophobia. Black trans immigrants face all of that plus the medical and legal violence the state reserves for trans folks. Indigenous women in California caught between immigration enforcement and federal Indian law sit at a junction where neither legal regime acknowledges their actual sovereignty. Indigenous trans and two-spirit folks navigate colonial frameworks that erased their cultural roles before the United States existed. Disabled Black and Indigenous folks navigate a citizenship that has never accommodated their material needs. Poor Black folks watching wealthy non-Black immigrants integrate into whiteness in ways they never could. This is what intersectional analysis demands — not symbolic representation, but material outcomes. Crenshaw didn’t give us a vibe. She gave us a tool. Use it. Most of the symbolic wins of pro-immigration politics over the last decade have left Black immigrants, Indigenous immigrants, and the Black and Indigenous communities of the United States in materially worse positions, and that ain’t an accident. That’s the antagonism doing its work while the conflict gets compromised.Closing The LoopSo when I sat in that room and listened to that 14th Amendment presentation, what I was hearing was the failure to grapple with the foundational antagonism. The failure to grapple with how the 14th Amendment was birthed in Reconstruction and weaponized in Louisiana v. Callais to gut the Voting Rights Act. The failure to grapple with how citizenship for Native folks wasn’t recognized until 1924, and that recognition was a paper formality on top of ongoing genocide. The failure to grapple with how every “nation of immigrants” slogan does the dual work of erasing Indigenous claims and erasing Black labor. The failure to grapple with how the law itself, from 1776 to 2026, has been structured in opposition to Black and Indigenous humanity. The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions, and the room was full of good intentions, and the impact of those good intentions left without my interventions would have been more Indigenous erasure and more anti-Black erasure, dressed up in the language of progressive solidarity. We have to center Blackness and we have to center indigeneity in these conversations, because if we don’t, we engage in indigenous erasure and erasure of Black suffering, and to me that is the cornerstone of America. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for us. Land back and reparations have to be married together. We don’t get reparations without the land. The land was built with our bodies. Feel me?Education is elevation. Let that marinate.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The 14th Amendment is a Reconstruction-era artifact, not a free-floating immigration document. Any conversation about birthright citizenship that doesn’t begin with slavery, the 13th-14th-15th Amendment sequence, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act is doing erasure work, regardless of intent.* Citizenship has never guaranteed humanity for Black or Indigenous people in America. Black folks have been citizens since 1868 and are still having voting rights stripped. Native folks were not citizens until 1924 and were facing ongoing genocide when the paper formality arrived. Romanticized framings of citizenship as protection collapse under historical examination.* “Nation of immigrants” and “no one is illegal on stolen land” are settler moves to innocence. Tuck and Yang’s framework explains how progressive-sounding slogans can do the work of Indigenous erasure by abstracting away specific tribal claims and converting them into universal humanitarian principles that demand nothing back.* The 1965 Immigration Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act set structural tensions in motion that still shape Black/non-Black immigrant relations. The 1992 Rodney King riots, ongoing tensions over Asian businesses in Black communities, the iconization of Cesar Chavez despite his anti-Blackness — these are not coincidences. They are downstream consequences of policies that did not address racial capitalism’s foundational antagonisms.* Land Back and reparations are not competing projects — they are the same project. Coalition between Black and Indigenous freedom struggles requires honesty about the material differences in subject position, not flattening into a singular “people of color” frame that allows non-Black, non-Indigenous immigrants to skip past the structuring antagonisms that make their inclusion in American life possible.Become A Paid SubscriberY’all, this is what independent media looks like. No corporate backing. No advertiser telling me what I can and can’t say about Cory Booker or AIPAC or Netanyahu. No editor softening the analysis because a Senator’s office called. Just me, a transcript, a stack of receipts, and y’all.Public broadcasting is being defunded. PBS is on life support. NPR is being structurally hollowed out. The Education Is Elevation Substack is filling the void left by the retreat of public education media — with Pan-African analysis, Southern Black Left framing, and the kind of receipts-based political education they don’t teach in school.Fewer than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Less than 1%. So if this piece taught you something, gave you a frame, or armed you with language for the next argument at the family cookout — become a paid subscriber today.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGSWilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010). The foundational text for understanding the distinction between conflict and antagonism that drives this analysis. Wilderson lays out why anti-Blackness is structuring rather than incidental, and why the Indian, the Black, and the Settler operate as three distinct grammars of suffering. If you read one thing from this list, read this.Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The text that gave us “the border crossed us” and reframed indigeneity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Essential for understanding why California’s Indigenous-but-Spanish-speaking populations get caught in immigration enforcement that has no language for their actual subject position.Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2012). The article that named the “settler moves to innocence” — the rhetorical maneuvers that allow non-Native people to feel implicated in colonization without doing the material work of land return. Required reading for anyone using “stolen land” language.Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008). Sexton’s work on how multiracial discourse can flatten and obscure anti-Blackness is directly applicable to how “people of color” framings function in immigration politics.Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The philosophical architecture for understanding why a legal apparatus designed to exclude can never simply be reformed into one that includes. Mills’s account of white moral psychology explains the room I was sitting in.Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The foundational texts of intersectional analysis. Read them whole — not the watered-down version that survived corporate diversity training.The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). The original articulation of how Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of interlocking systems of oppression. The reason intersectional analysis is non-negotiable.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey gave us the term misogynoir. Essential for understanding the specific position of Black women immigrants and how their experience does not collapse into either “Black” or “immigrant” frames alone.Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman on the afterlife of slavery and the law’s relationship to Black flesh. Essential context for why the 14th Amendment cannot do what the legal liberal hopes it can.Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Spillers on the gendered grammar of enslavement. The grammar of citizenship is downstream of the grammar of fungibility.Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Robinson on racial capitalism — the framework for understanding why anti-Blackness is engine, not aberration. Indispensable.Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Rodney on the global structure that produced the migrations being debated in 2026. The immigrants didn’t come from nowhere. They came from the wreckage Europe and America made.Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004; 2nd ed. 2015). Grande on Indigenous education, sovereignty, and the limits of liberal multiculturalism in addressing Native claims.Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The historical record that the standard American history curriculum erases. Read alongside Howard Zinn but understand that Dunbar-Ortiz does what Zinn could not.King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019). King’s work specifically theorizes the meeting point of Black and Native critique — exactly the conversation pro-immigration discourse refuses to have. 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

Y’all see them children in Mexico busting a pinata with two flags on it — Israeli and American? That image symbolize so much that we got a really young package today, kinfolks. And I already know a lot of people gon’ see this and be infuriated because they wanna believe these children being indoctrinated. But let me hold this one up to the light real quick: if your kid can be a Confederate-flag-toting white supremacist sucker out here at the lake on the back of a F-150, then these kids over there can also be conscious of how these countries impacting their livelihood. Two things can be true, feel me?Symbolism is intentional. Always. And when I see them two flags taped together on a pinata, I ain’t seeing random teenage angst — I’m seeing children doing what their elders been doing for generations: naming the structural relationship that’s stealing their air. So before y’all get to clutching them pearls, let that marinate for a second.Here’s the thing most of us don’t know about. I like to believe a lot of us are consciously aware — no pun intended — of how America exploits and criminalizes our southern neighbor Mexico. But the relationship between Mexico and the Israeli settler-colonial project? Most of y’all lost in the sauce on that one. So lemme walk through the receipts.The struggle of Palestinians resonate with Mexico despite 7,000 miles between them and despite distinct geopolitical surroundings. Why? Because the violent consequences of settler colonialism in Palestine conjure up the post-colonial trauma that’s already living in Mexican soil. Patrick Wolfe said it plain — settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Robinson 83 tells us racial capitalism don’t work without antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as its engine, not as accidents. So when two settler projects start trading tools, it ain’t coincidence. It’s the family business.Look at Pegasus. Pegasus is a spy web developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, and as journalist Anthony Lowenstein documents, it was tried and tested in occupied Palestine before it ever touched a Mexican phone. Designed to be covertly and remotely installed on iOS and Android. Designed to harvest you in your sleep. And then exported. Lowenstein calls it an exported occupation, and that phrasing matter — because once it’s been deployed and proven in the field, Israeli companies promote them tools as battle-tested and occupied Palestine, which then becomes a sales pitch for any government trying to criminalize the folks just trying to get their immigration on.This means the surveillance regime that disappears Palestinian journalists is the same surveillance regime that’s tracking Mexican human rights defenders. Same technology. Same logic. Same vendor. Just admit it: that’s not parallel oppression, that’s the same machine running two shifts.Now lemme show y’all why there’s a statue of Yasser Arafat in Mexico City — because that question alone shut down most American history teachers I know. Arafat was the Palestinian politician and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in trying to establish a free Palestinian state. He kept close diplomatic relations with Mexico his whole life. In 1975, he met with then-Mexican President Luis Echeverria — the President flew to Cairo to meet him and soon established diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year, the PLO established an information office in Mexico City. By 1995, that office got elevated to an official delegation. Then in 2000, Arafat met with then-Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green, who paid an official visit to Gaza City and invited him to Mexico on behalf of the president. He passed in 2004. And soon after his death, the government of Mexico City placed a memorial in his honor.Crazy how that’s the part of Mexican diplomatic history that don’t make it into the news cycle when folks wanna debate Mexican-American identity. They’ll show you Cinco de Mayo and a margarita but they won’t show you the Arafat statue. Wonder why.Now let me close this loop by going back home to Texas, because y’all know I’m a Bryan, TX, boy and I got receipts for the local too. When we talk about remembering the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, the reason Stephen F. Austin was beefing with Santa Ana is because they had a little agreement in settler solidarity that went bad. Santa Ana had even agreed Anglo settlers could come in — under the condition they convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and not bring enslaved people. Austin and them broke the deal. So the Texas Revolution wasn’t liberation, it was a settler franchise dispute. Two colonial powers arguing over who get to extract from indigenous land and Black bodies. iMa bE the one to say it: remembering the Alamo without remembering that context is just remembering the slave power.Most of y’all lost in the salsa of settler colonialism so heavy that you don’t even view Mexican people as indigenous folks of Turtle Island. You view them as immigrant subjects of Mexico. But the Conquistadors — Hernandez, Cortez and nem — was settlers. Mexico is a settler-colonial state laid on top of indigenous land just like the United States. Sandy Grande talks about how settler colonialism requires the disappearance of the indigenous, not just from the land but from the imagination. So when you call a Mixtec grandmother an immigrant, you’re not making a statement of geography. You’re making whiteness visible by erasing her ancestral claim to a continent.Charles Mills in 1997 calls this the racial contract — a tacit agreement that the world is white people’s to allocate. Then you got Europeans believing this country was theirs to conquer, both the Spanish and the English, just like them folks over yonder way across the pond believe it’s their God-given right to have the land because it was promised to them 3,000 years ago. Sounds like God only come down to tell white folks this is your land, huh? Every accusation is a confession. Every theology of conquest is an admission that the conquest required theology to justify it.Apply Wilderson here for a second. Afropessimism gon’ tell us the Black is figured as fungible and socially dead — not analogous to indigenous dispossession, but structurally entangled with it. Robinson 83 close the loop: racial capitalism uses antiblackness as essential engine of surplus value AND uses indigenous dispossession as essential engine of land accumulation. They run together. Which means Palestinian children buried under rubble, Mexican migrants tracked by Pegasus, and Black Houstonians criminalized by predictive policing tools developed by the same defense contractors — we all caught in different rooms of the same house.And this is also where the intersectional material impacts hit different. Crenshaw 89 told y’all the experience at the intersection ain’t additive, it’s structurally distinct. So an indigenous Mexican woman crossing the border ain’t just experiencing xenophobia plus sexism plus colorism — she’s experiencing a specific weaponization of all three under a surveillance infrastructure shipped from Tel Aviv to Mexico City to Texas. Combahee told us in 77 that if Black women were free, it would mean everybody else would have to be free. Apply that here: if indigenous women of the Americas were free of settler-colonial surveillance, the whole regime collapse.Moya Bailey’s misogynoir framework still apply too, even at this scale. Because who gets surveilled hardest by these tools when they hit U.S. soil? Black women organizers. Indigenous women water protectors. Trans women of color reporting on ICE. The Pegasus-style tools don’t just go to foreign governments — they get repackaged for domestic departments. That ain’t paranoia. That’s procurement records.Now lemme name the contradiction and let it hang. The same federal budget that claim it can’t afford universal pre-K, can’t afford Medicaid expansion, can’t afford reparations study, somehow always got billions for foreign military aid that loops back into surveillance contracts that get pointed at the American working class. Gil Scott-Heron said it best in 1970 and it still apply: Was all that money I made last year for billion-dollar defense aid? How come ain’t no money here for the kids in Bryan or Brownsville or Brooklyn? Whitey on the moon. Whitey on the border. Same flight plan.Having the luxury to ignore the Mexico-Israel surveillance pipeline is a sign of citizenship privilege. Naming neutrality on it is itself a position. Bell 91 talked about interest convergence — the dominant class only support justice for the marginalized when it serves their own interests. The reason these two settler projects bond is because their interests already converged a long time ago. The reason American media don’t wanna talk about it is because that interest convergence is the load-bearing wall of the empire. By doing the work of pretending Mexico is just an immigration story and Palestine is just a foreign policy story, the media is making whiteness visible — visible as the third party in the room directing the conversation.So them children with the pinata? They wasn’t being indoctrinated. They was educated. They was doing in public what their elders been doing for generations — naming the structural relationship between two settler-colonial projects that don’t see them as fully human. The bell didn’t dismiss them, the truth did. Education is elevation.Two things can be true: you can love your country and still tell the truth about its alliances. You can grieve every Israeli child and still grieve every Palestinian child. You can love Mexico and still call out the Mexican state’s complicity. You can be American and still know America selling Mexico Israeli surveillance is not freedom, it’s a franchise. Just admit it. And then do something about it.Critical Historical ContextTimeline of Mexico-Palestine-Israel Relations* 1947–48: Mexico abstains on UN Resolution 181 (the partition of Palestine), one of the few Latin American countries not to vote yes. That ain’t an accident — it’s continuity with Mexico’s earlier 1930s diplomatic resistance to fascism and its post-revolutionary commitment to non-intervention (the Estrada Doctrine, 1930).* 1975: President Luis Echeverria flies to Cairo and establishes diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year the PLO opens an information office in Mexico City — the first such office in the Western Hemisphere outside of Cuba.* 1975: Same year, Mexico votes for UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. The U.S. responded by organizing a Jewish-American tourism boycott of Mexico, which Mexico’s economy felt immediately. The Echeverria government walked the vote back diplomatically — receipt of how economic coercion shapes Global South solidarity.* 1995: PLO office in Mexico City elevated to official delegation status.* 2000: Foreign Minister Rosario Green visits Gaza City and formally invites Arafat to Mexico on behalf of the President.* 2004: Arafat passes. Mexico City government places a memorial bust of him in Parque Tlatelolco — itself the site of the 1968 Mexican state massacre of student protesters. The placement is intentional symbolism: anti-imperial martyrs alongside victims of state violence.* 2017: First Pegasus revelations published showing Mexican government surveilled journalists, lawyers, and activists investigating the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students. The same spyware later linked to surveillance of Jamal Khashoggi’s circle before his murder.* 2021–present: Forensic Architecture, Citizen Lab, and Amnesty International continue documenting Pegasus deployments across Mexico, including against the families of the Ayotzinapa students and against human rights defenders working on femicide and disappearance cases.The Pre-1492 FrameMost American schooling treat 1492 like a starting pistol and not a crime scene. Indigenous nations across what is now Mexico — Mexica, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huichol, Yaqui, Raramuri, Purepecha, Otomi — had governance, trade, astronomy, agriculture, codices, and diplomacy. The conquistadors didn’t bring civilization, they brought a particular structure for extracting it. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks both argue that decolonization can’t be a metaphor — it requires material return of land, governance, and economy.Stephen F. Austin, Santa Anna, and the Real Texas RevolutionThis is the Bryan, TX, hometown receipt. Stephen F. Austin negotiated with Mexico in the 1820s to bring Anglo settlers into Coahuila y Tejas under three conditions: convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and don’t bring enslaved Black people. Austin and them broke all three — particularly the slavery clause. The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 was, at its root, a settler franchise dispute over whether the slave economy would expand westward. Remember the Alamo means remember the slave power. Bryan, TX, is named for William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin. That heritage is concrete in my hometown’s street signs.Pegasus and the Exported OccupationAnthony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (2023) documents how Israeli surveillance, weapons, and crowd-control technology gets battle-tested in the occupied territories and then exported. NSO Group’s Pegasus is the most famous example, but it’s part of a broader supply chain — Elbit drones, Cellebrite phone-cracking, AnyVision facial recognition. The U.S.-Mexico border has been a primary buyer. Customs and Border Protection has contracted with multiple Israeli defense firms for tower surveillance systems along the Rio Grande. This means the same towers watching Palestinians in Hebron got cousins watching folks in Brownsville.A Specific Implication for EducationHere’s the part I want educators, parents, and students to sit with. American K-12 curriculum teach Mexico and Palestine in two completely separate boxes — Mexico goes in the immigration and Spanish-language box, Palestine goes in the Middle East conflict box. By design, those two boxes don’t touch. And as long as they don’t touch, the surveillance pipeline, the arms pipeline, and the settler-colonial logic stay invisible to the next generation of voters and taxpayers.Freire told us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that banking education — where students are treated as empty containers for state-approved facts — is itself a tool of oppression. The fragmentation of these histories is banking education at the geopolitical scale. The fix is problem-posing pedagogy: let students put the maps side by side, let them follow the procurement records, let them ask why a Mexico City statue of Arafat is something they never heard about.This means as an educator I’m asking three things of teachers, librarians, and homeschooling parents reading this:* Teach Pre-Columbian Mexico as indigenous history, not as Spanish history. Use Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun. Use Patrisia Gonzales’s Red Medicine.* Teach the Texas Revolution with primary sources from Mexican archives, not just the Austin–Houston narrative. The Texas State Library has the original Mexican land grants in Spanish — use them.* Teach surveillance literacy. Students should know what Pegasus is, what Cellebrite is, what predictive policing software is in their own district’s budget. Naming the tools is the first step in resisting them.If you a public school teacher in Texas, I already know — y’all working under a hostile curriculum regime where this kind of teaching can cost you your job. That’s not an accident either. The same political coalition pushing book bans and CRT panic is the same coalition that benefits from these histories staying separate. Their fear is itself the receipt. Education is elevation. They know it. That’s why they fight it.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.Black Communities in the United StatesBorder-tested surveillance technology don’t stay at the border. Predictive policing software, facial recognition, and stingray cellphone trackers piloted along the Rio Grande get redeployed in Black neighborhoods in Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, and Detroit. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters both document how surveillance infrastructure built for one racialized population gets adapted to police another. Black folks pay for the pipeline twice — once as taxpayers funding foreign military aid, again as targets of the tech when it comes home.Indigenous Women in MexicoMexico’s femicide crisis — over 10 women killed daily — overlaps directly with the deployment of Pegasus against the journalists and human rights defenders investigating it. When the state spyware get pointed at the people documenting the violence, the violence accelerate. Indigenous women in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero — already at the intersection of class, race, gender, and language exclusion — bear the heaviest cost. Crenshaw’s intersection ain’t a metaphor here, it’s a coroner’s report.Palestinian Women and ChildrenEvery Pegasus contract signed by a foreign government is revenue that funds the next iteration of the tool deployed in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian women — particularly Palestinian women journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh — have been systematically targeted. The pipeline don’t just flow Israel-outward. It flows back, with the revenue strengthening the original occupation.Black and Brown Migrants at the BorderHaitian migrants in Del Rio. Honduran asylum seekers in Brownsville. African migrants routed through Tapachula. They all encounter the same Israeli-designed surveillance towers, the same Israeli-trained ICE units, the same biometric capture systems first beta-tested on Palestinians. The migrant body becomes the laboratory subject for the next export.Working-Class Americans of All ColorsThe taxpayer dollars that fund the foreign military aid, the border contracts, and the domestic policing tools come out of the same budget that don’t have money for public schools, libraries, mental health care, or rural hospitals. Whitey on the moon, whitey on the border, and ain’t no money here. Robinson 83 told us racial capitalism don’t just hurt the racialized — it disciplines the white working class too, by making sure their wages and services stay subordinate to the war machine.5 Key Takeaways* Mexico and Palestine are linked by a documented surveillance pipeline. Pegasus and related Israeli-developed spyware were battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported to the Mexican government, where they have been used against journalists, human rights defenders, and the families of the disappeared. This is what Anthony Loewenstein calls exported occupation, and it is a structural relationship, not a coincidence.* Mexico’s diplomatic history with Palestine is older and deeper than American media admits. The Yasser Arafat memorial in Mexico City, the 1975 PLO office, and Foreign Minister Rosario Green’s official visit to Gaza City are all part of a Global South solidarity tradition that predates the contemporary moment.* Mexican people are indigenous people of Turtle Island, not immigrant subjects. Calling them otherwise is settler-colonial amnesia. The conquistadors were settlers; the Texas Revolution was a settler franchise dispute over the slave economy; and the modern U.S.-Mexico border is itself a settler-colonial line drawn through indigenous nations like the Tohono O’odham.* The intersection matters materially. Indigenous Mexican women, Palestinian women, Black women in U.S. cities, and migrant women at the border are all surveilled by the same supply chain of tools and trained operators. Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Combahee’s analysis of interlocking oppressions are not abstract — they describe a procurement system.* Public education is the battlefield. The fragmentation of Mexico and Palestine into separate curriculum boxes is itself an ideological tool. Teaching these histories together — and teaching surveillance literacy alongside them — is a precondition for any meaningful resistance. Education is elevation. Always was.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.Annotated Bibliography / Related ReadingsLoewenstein, Anthony. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso, 2023).The definitive contemporary text on how Israeli surveillance and weapons technology gets battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported globally, including to Mexico. Required reading for understanding the Pegasus pipeline.Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (Cassell, 1999).Wolfe’s foundational argument that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that it operates through the logic of elimination. The frame that makes the Mexico-Palestine parallel legible.Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed, 1983).Robinson’s articulation of racial capitalism as a system that requires antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as engines, not aberrations.Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke, 2010).Afropessimist framework distinguishing Black social death from the Settler/Native antagonism — crucial for thinking the entanglement without collapsing the distinction.Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (Cornell, 1997).Mills’s argument that white supremacy operates as a global political system through a tacit racial contract — the philosophical scaffolding for understanding settler solidarity.Crenshaw, Kimberle. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989).The original intersectionality essay. The frame for analyzing how indigenous women, Palestinian women, and Black women experience structurally distinct harm at the intersection.Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977).Black feminist statement establishing the interlocking nature of oppression and the principle that the freedom of Black women requires the dismantling of all oppressive systems.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed (NYU Press, 2021).Bailey’s elaboration of misogynoir as a structural force, applicable to how surveillance targets Black women organizers domestically.Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).Grande’s argument for indigenous-centered education and her critique of settler-colonial schooling structures.Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota, 2014).Coulthard’s argument against the politics of recognition and for material decolonization.Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (Decolonization, 2012).The essay every educator should read before using the word decolonize. Insists on material land return.Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford, 2019).Centers Nahuatl-language sources to tell Mexica history from indigenous perspective rather than Spanish chroniclers.Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Arizona, 2012).Indigenous Mexican women’s traditional knowledge as resistance to colonial medicine.Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke, 2015).Browne’s argument that modern surveillance was built on the technologies of policing Black bodies — applicable to how border tech gets domestically redeployed. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. Name something more insidious. Name one thing in the modern legal landscape that exposes the architecture of pale supremacy more cleanly than that. I’ll wait.Because here’s the thing kinfolks, this ain’t a contradiction. A contradiction is when two things accidentally don’t line up. This is a strategy. This is racial illiteracy weaponized at the highest court in the country, and the only way you don’t see it is if you ain’t been trained to see it, or worse, you been trained to look away.Let me lay it out plain so the folks in the back can hear me. In 2023, the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, telling Black, Brown, and Indigenous students that race could no longer be considered in college admissions because, supposedly, the Constitution is color-blind. That same court, two years later, in cases dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and now Louisiana v. Callais, has been busy gutting the ability of states to draw majority-Black congressional districts, again leaning on the language of color-blindness. Then turn around, that same bench gives federal immigration agents the green light to use race and ethnicity as a factor in stopping, questioning, and detaining people who look, sound, or are presumed to be Latino, Indigenous, or otherwise non-white. Crazy how that works, right?The Two-Roles Frame: What They Say vs. What Their Position Structurally DoesiMa bE the first one to tell you, the Supreme Court will say with a straight face that they are simply applying neutral principles of constitutional interpretation. That’s the stage rhetoric. That’s the press release. But Wilderson talks about how antiblackness operates through gratuitous violence and fungibility, where the Black body is rendered both hyper-visible when targeted and invisible when seeking protection. Apply that here. Apply Mills 1997 on the racial contract. The court isn’t being inconsistent. The court is being perfectly consistent with the actual function of American jurisprudence, which is to preserve a racial hierarchy while denying that any such hierarchy exists.Two things can be true. The Supreme Court can claim to be color-blind. And the Supreme Court can be the most racially literate institution in the country when it comes to maintaining white power. This means the conservative legal movement is wrong when they tell us this is about principle. It also proves that having the luxury to call yourself color-blind is itself a position. Claimed neutrality is a position. A loud one. By doing color-blindness in front of cameras, you are making whiteness visible to anybody who knows how to read.Historical Context: This Ain’t New, This Is the PatternFor the folks who think this started with the Roberts Court, let me give you some historical context. The American legal tradition has always been bifurcated when it comes to race. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to free white persons, requiring the law to know exactly what whiteness was. In the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, the Supreme Court said the federal government could exclude people on the basis of race because national sovereignty demanded it. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 said separate but equal was constitutional, requiring the state to racially classify every citizen at the train station while pretending the classification was harmless. Korematsu v. United States in 1944 said the federal government could intern Japanese Americans on the basis of ancestry, and that ruling has never been formally overturned, only narrowed. The Insular Cases from the early 1900s established that Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and other colonized people were foreign in a domestic sense, building a whole jurisprudence around using race to distinguish full citizens from subjects.Then in the post-Civil Rights era, the same court that finally said in Brown 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional turned around and in Milliken v. Bradley 1974 said cross-district desegregation remedies were too much. In Bakke 1978, Justice Powell invented the diversity rationale that allowed limited use of race in admissions, but only as long as it was framed as helping white students get exposure to non-white students. In Shelby County v. Holder 2013, Chief Justice Roberts gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act by famously declaring that things have changed. Then in 2023, that same court took the diversity rationale and threw it in the trash. And now in 2025, in Trump-era immigration enforcement cases, the court has signaled that racial and ethnic appearance can factor into reasonable suspicion when federal agents are looking for undocumented immigrants. Derrick Bell 1980 told us about interest convergence. Civil rights gains for Black folks only happen when they align with the interests of white elites. The retreat from those gains happens the moment that alignment breaks. We’re watching the retreat in real time.The Mastery of Pale Supremacy: A Working DefinitionWhat I’m calling the mastery of pale supremacy is this. It’s the institutional ability to weaponize race consciousness when it benefits the dominant group, and simultaneously demand racial color-blindness when racial consciousness would benefit anybody else. It is two doctrines held in the same hand, deployed by the same nine justices, justified by the same Constitution, depending entirely on which direction the racial flow benefits. Charles Mills called this an epistemology of ignorance. White ignorance about race is not the absence of knowledge. It is a structured, produced, defended way of not-knowing that allows the system to keep functioning. The Supreme Court has perfected this. They know exactly when to see race and exactly when to pretend it doesn’t exist.Intersectional Material Impacts: Who PaysNow let’s talk about who actually bleeds when these decisions come down, because this is where intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Crenshaw 1989 gave us the framework, Combahee 1977 gave us the politics, Moya Bailey gave us the language of misogynoir. When we lose race-conscious admissions, the data from California after Proposition 209 and from Michigan after Proposal 2 shows us exactly what happens. Black women in particular get pushed out of selective STEM and pre-professional pipelines at higher rates than Black men, because Black women were disproportionately the ones using those pathways to escape both racial and gender wage gaps. When voting maps get redrawn to dilute Black voting power, the immediate material consequences fall hardest on Black women in the South, who are the most consistent Black voters and whose policy priorities, things like Medicaid expansion, maternal health funding, public school funding, get traded away first. Black maternal mortality is already four times the rate of white maternal mortality. Diluted political power means even less leverage to demand state-level policy that could actually save Black women’s lives.On the immigration side, when ICE and Customs and Border Protection get the green light to use racial appearance as reasonable suspicion, the people most likely to be stopped, detained, separated from their children, and deported are not abstract immigrants. They are Latina mothers, Indigenous women from Central America fleeing climate and cartel violence, Afro-Latino people who get racially profiled twice over, queer migrants whose asylum claims hinge on demonstrating credible fear in conditions designed to break them down. Spillers’ work on the ungendering of the Black diasporic body under captivity applies here too, because the racialized state treats migrant women’s bodies as fungible and disposable in ways that echo, not coincidentally, the logic of the slave ship. Hartman called it the afterlife of slavery for a reason.Robinson’s Black Marxism reminds us none of this is aberration. Racial capitalism requires a racialized underclass, and the legal system’s job is to manage which bodies belong in that underclass at any given moment. When the economy needs cheap migrant labor that can be threatened with deportation, the court makes race legally legible to immigration enforcement. When the economy needs to keep Black political power suppressed so that wealth doesn’t get redistributed through democratic means, the court makes race legally illegible to voting rights enforcement. Same court. Same logic. Different application.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.Implication for Education: This Is Why We Need Critical PedagogyHere’s where I bring this home to education, because Education is Elevation ain’t just a tagline. The implication of this Supreme Court racial double standard for education is direct and devastating. When you ban race-conscious admissions while simultaneously allowing racial profiling, you create a generation of students who are legally invisible as racialized subjects when they try to access opportunity, but hyper-visible as racialized subjects when they try to exist in public. Freire 1968 told us the banking model of education is designed to deposit ruling-class ideology into students. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and the tradition of Black critical pedagogy from Carter G. Woodson through bell hooks tells us we have to actively counter that deposit with what hooks called education as the practice of freedom.But how can teachers do that when curriculum is being gutted? Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and others are passing laws that ban discussion of structural racism in K-12 classrooms while university DEI offices are being defunded. The same political coalition pushing color-blind constitutionalism at the Supreme Court is also pushing color-blind curriculum in public schools. The strategy is to legally and pedagogically erase the very analytical tools students would need to understand what the court is doing to them. That’s not an accident. That’s racial illiteracy by design. Just admit it. The goal is to produce citizens who cannot read the racial structure of the world they live in, so they cannot organize against it.The Southern Black Left Tradition Says What NowElla Baker would tell us the answer to a Supreme Court that has abandoned us is what it has always been. Group-centered leadership, mass-based political education, and movement infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the federal government to legitimate Black humanity. Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t wait on the court to declare her tired of being sick and tired. She built the Freedom Farm. The Southern Negro Youth Congress in the 1930s and 40s organized through Jim Crow without expecting the Supreme Court to save them. SNCC, Cooperation Jackson, Black Workers for Justice in the Carolinas, they all built infrastructure on the assumption that the federal government would either be a hostile or indifferent actor. We are returning to that political reality, and we need to return to that political tradition.Where Is the SmokeWhere is the smoke for a court that uses race as a sword when it wants to surveil us and as a forbidden category when we want to be represented? Where is the bipartisan outrage at racial profiling becoming federal policy? Where are the Democrats who told us they would expand the court, codify voting rights, pass meaningful immigration reform? The silence is loud, and that silence is also a position. Most of the political class is shucking and jobbing while the legal foundation of multiracial democracy is being dismantled in front of us. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the wrong side of history is being decided right now, and we get to decide whether we name it clearly or whether we let the next generation inherit the same fog.So when y’all see headlines saying the Supreme Court ruled this way on immigration and that way on voting rights, don’t read those as two separate stories. Read them as the same story, told twice, by the same authors, to the same end. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. That’s not inconsistency. That’s the mastery of pale supremacy. Now you see it. Now you can teach it. Now you can organize against it. Education is Elevation. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.5 Key Takeaways* The court is not inconsistent, it is strategic. Allowing racial profiling in immigration enforcement while banning race-conscious admissions and voting maps is not a contradiction. It is the precise function of a legal system designed to preserve racial hierarchy while denying that hierarchy exists. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance. The court has mastered it.* Color-blindness is itself a racial position. Claimed neutrality is never neutral. By demanding the law not see race in voting maps and admissions while granting itself permission to see race at the border, the court is performing whiteness as the unmarked default. Naming this is not paranoia. It is racial literacy.* The material impacts are intersectional and they fall hardest on Black and Brown women. From STEM pipeline collapse after affirmative action bans, to Black maternal health outcomes worsening as Black political power gets diluted, to migrant women being targeted by racial-profile-driven enforcement, the people who lose first and worst are the people Crenshaw, Combahee, and Moya Bailey told us to look for.* This is interest convergence in reverse. Derrick Bell taught us civil rights gains require alignment between Black interests and white elite interests. We are watching that alignment break in real time. The retreat from race-conscious remedies is happening exactly because elite interests no longer require the compromise that produced those remedies in the first place.* The Southern Black Left tradition gives us the playbook. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, the SNCC, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Cooperation Jackson. None of them waited on the federal government to validate Black humanity. The response to a court that has abandoned multiracial democracy is mass political education, group-centered leadership, and independent movement infrastructure. Research over MeSearch.Become a Paid SubscriberIf the Supreme Court is mastering pale supremacy in plain sight, somebody has to be in the room mastering racial literacy in return. That’s what this work is for. Education is Elevation isn’t just a tagline. It’s a direct response to the fact that the institutions that used to do this work, public media, public universities, K-12 social studies departments, are being defunded, defanged, or scared into silence.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 and Works CitedMills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. The foundational text for understanding how Western political philosophy and law are built on an unstated racial agreement that grants moral and political personhood to whites while denying it to non-whites. Mills’ framework is essential for reading the Supreme Court’s so-called inconsistencies as actually consistent applications of the racial contract.Bell, Derrick A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518-533. Bell’s argument that civil rights gains for Black people only occur when those gains align with the interests of white elites. Indispensable for understanding why the current Supreme Court is dismantling civil rights protections now that the Cold War-era interest convergence has expired.Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167. The article that gave us intersectionality as legal theory. Required reading for understanding why Black women and women of color absorb the compounded harm of Supreme Court rulings that treat race and gender as separable categories.Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Robinson’s argument that racial capitalism is not a deviation from capitalism but its constitutive logic. The Supreme Court’s racial double standards make sense only when read through Robinson’s framework.Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Wilderson’s articulation of Afropessimism and the structural position of Blackness as social death. His framework explains how Black bodies are simultaneously hyper-visible to state violence and invisible to state protection.Hartman, Saidiya V. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hartman’s concept of the afterlife of slavery, where the political and economic conditions of slavery persist in the present, frames how we should read current Supreme Court rulings as direct continuations of antebellum and Reconstruction-era jurisprudence.Combahee River Collective. (1977). A Black Feminist Statement. The foundational statement of Black feminist politics that demands simultaneous analysis of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Essential for reading the intersectional fallout of voting rights rollbacks and affirmative action bans.Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65-81. Spillers’ theorization of how the captive Black body is ungendered under chattel slavery and how that ungendering persists in American legal and cultural grammar.Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. Bailey’s articulation of misogynoir, the specific anti-Black misogyny faced by Black women, is the precise lens needed to understand who absorbs the compound harm of the Supreme Court’s current direction.hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. hooks’ framework for liberatory pedagogy and why education that ignores structural racism reproduces it.Freire, Paulo. (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum. Freire’s banking model of education and his framework for critical consciousness are essential for understanding what the anti-CRT movement and color-blind constitutionalism are actually trying to prevent.Grande, Sandy. (2004). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Grande extends critical pedagogy through Indigenous political thought and exposes how settler-colonial logics shape American education policy and curriculum.Ransby, Barbara. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. University of North Carolina Press. The definitive biography of Ella Baker and the most rigorous account of group-centered leadership as an alternative to top-down, court-dependent civil rights strategy.López, Ian Haney. (2006). White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. NYU Press. A history of how American courts have legally constructed whiteness, including the prerequisite cases of the early 20th century, directly relevant to today’s racial profiling jurisprudence.Burnham, Linda, & Patterson, Tiffany Ruby (Eds.). Selected works on the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Black Workers for Justice, Cooperation Jackson, and the Southern organizing tradition. Essential primary and secondary sources for the Southern Black Left tradition that informs movement strategy in this current moment. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Let me set the table for y’all real quick. Netanyahu, the sitting Prime Minister of Israel, sits down for an interview and gets asked a direct question about whether it’s time to reset the financial relationship between Israel and the United States. The man on the receiving end of $3.8 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money. And his answer? He says yes, but he wants 10 years to do it. Then he picks the word “wean.”In my whole life of living, I ain’t never heard of nobody having to be weaned off of nothing but babies and breastfeeding and them fiends and pipes. Shidd, that’s a tell. That’s not the vocabulary of a sovereign equal partner. That’s the vocabulary of dependency dressed up in diplomatic cologne. And the question we need to be sitting with is simple: why does he need 10 years to do it? How come he can’t just end it now?If you ever heard somebody say you trying to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining — that’s the example right there. The man is announcing a divorce and reserving a decade of conjugal visits in the same breath. Yealp.Clip One: Netanyahu In His Own Words[00:00:00 — 00:00:53] PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHUInterviewer: “Do you believe it’s time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States, meaning what the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis?”Netanyahu: “Absolutely. And I’ve said this to President Trump, I’ve said it to our own people, their jaws dropped. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have, because we receive $3.8 billion dollars a year. I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support… Let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years. But I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.”“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support… it’s time that we weaned ourselves…”— Prime Minister Benjamin NetanyahuNow hold up. Notice the framing. He says he told Trump. He says he told his own people. He says their jaws dropped. That right there is the rhetorical sleight of hand — he’s positioning himself as the brave reformer breaking the news to a room full of dependents. Apply Farr here: the supposed neutral position of “well, we just receive this aid because we’ve always received it” is itself a position. Acting like the $3.8 billion is gravity, like it just falls from the sky, is the view from nowhere. He’s naming the policy AS a choice for the first time, and acting like that itself is the brave act.Two things can be true. One: it IS notable that the sitting Prime Minister of Israel is on record saying draw it to zero. Two: a 10-year off-ramp on $3.8 billion annually is $38 billion more dollars before we hit zero. That’s not weaning. That’s a payment plan. Shidd, that’s a mortgage.Clip Two: Then Cory Booker Showed His Ass[00:01:27 — 00:01:46] U.S. SENATOR CORY BOOKER (D-NJ)Interviewer: “Cory, you would vote to approve arms sales for Israel in a future entanglement if you thought that was necessary?”Booker: “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.”“Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.”— Senator Cory BookerRead that again. The head of state of the receiving country is in public saying wean us off. The U.S. Senator from New Jersey — a Black Democrat who built his whole brand on moral clarity and Harriet Tubman quotes — is in public saying nah, keep the pipeline open, qualitative military edge forever, amen.This means Booker is wrong. Flatly. By his own framing of “long-standing commitment,” he’s defending a status quo that the head of the supposedly-benefiting country just said in public he wants to end. You ain’t more committed to Israel than the Prime Minister of Israel, kinfolks. That ain’t commitment, that’s a contract.And having the luxury to ignore that contradiction — having the luxury to walk into that interview, hear the question, and answer with autopilot AIPAC talking points while Netanyahu is on the other clip saying “start now” — that’s the sign of a politician who knows his funding stack doesn’t require him to engage with the actual policy debate. The presumed-neutral “qualitative military edge” line is a position. It’s a position that says: my donors will be happier if I never have to vote no.Where Is The Smoke For The Lobby?Let’s name what’s actually moving here. The U.S. and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 — negotiated under Obama — that locks in $38 billion over 10 years (FY2019–FY2028). That’s $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation. Israel is the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. Over $260 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s the receipt. That’s not opinion. That’s Congressional Research Service paper.Now layer in the lobby. AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and its affiliated United Democracy Project super PAC spent more than $100 million in the 2024 cycle alone to defeat candidates who criticized U.S. policy toward Israel. Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush. Receipts. They didn’t lose because their constituents fired them. They lost because a PAC parachuted in from outside their districts to dump the juice trash on their primaries.So when Cory Booker says “long-standing commitment,” translate that. The commitment ain’t to Israeli security policy — because if it was, he’d be following the Prime Minister’s lead. The commitment is to the funding pipeline that keeps his own seat safe. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making the money trail visible. He’s telling on himself.Whitey On The Moon, 2026 EditionGil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. Let me update it for the folks in the back.“A rat done bit my sister Nell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. Her face and arms began to swell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. I can’t pay no doctor bills… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. No hot water, no toilet, no lights… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel.”The Prime Minister of Israel says wean. Cory Booker says feed. Meanwhile public health funding for Black HIV outcomes got cut. The CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention took a hit. Title X providers serving Black women in the South got defunded. Pell Grants for the poorest students got squeezed. The IRS unit auditing billionaires got gutted.Two things can be true. One: Israel’s security policy is Israel’s business. Two: when the head of that state tells you in public he wants to end the U.S. money and your Senator says no — your Senator ain’t defending Israel, he’s defending the lobby that defends his seat. Lost in the sauce.Why 10 Years? What’s He Trying To Finish?Now here’s the part I want y’all to sit with. Netanyahu doesn’t want to wean off tomorrow. He wants 10 years. So the question I had — and I asked it out loud in the script — is what could he possibly try to accomplish within 10 years that he absolutely needs that aid for? I wonder.This ain’t a threat, this is a promise: the timeline is the policy. The amount of the aid matters less than the duration he’s asking to keep it locked in. A man who actually wanted to end the dependency would say zero next fiscal year. A man who wants to lock in current funding through the next two U.S. presidential cycles, through the 2026 conflict posture with Iran, through whatever territorial questions remain unsettled — that man asks for a decade.And how much of this announcement is timeliness for the election cycle? How much is preventative damage control? Because Netanyahu knows the Overton window is shifting. Younger Democrats won’t cosign endless funding. Younger Republicans of the America-First variety are skeptical of foreign aid period. So he gets ahead of the wave by announcing the wean — and locks in 10 more years of payments before the wave breaks. That’s not naivete on his part. That’s strategy. Showed his ass on the timing.And This Is Where It Comes Home For UsI’m not here to tell y’all how to vote on foreign policy. I’m here to name a contradiction. Cory Booker has stood on stages quoting Harriet Tubman, talking about love, talking about T-Bone, talking about beloved community. And when given an opportunity — with the receiving country’s own Prime Minister publicly asking for the off-ramp — to align his vote with that off-ramp, he punted.This is the distinction between Black Liberal and Black Leftist that I keep trying to draw for y’all. The Black Liberal performs morality on stage and votes the donor preference at the desk. The Black Leftist — think Ella Baker, think SNCC, think Fannie Lou Hamer, think the Combahee River Collective — says material conditions over symbolic representation, every time. Hamer was sharecropping in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and she still understood that U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic poverty are the same budget. Every dollar that goes one place doesn’t go another.By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making whiteness visible. He’s making the bipartisan consensus visible. He’s showing that the so-called Democratic alternative on this specific issue is functionally identical to the Republican position. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.The AskHere’s what I want from y’all. Don’t just clip the Netanyahu sound bite and act like Israel got a sudden case of fiscal humility. Read the timeline. Ten years is a $38 billion appropriation disguised as a press release.And don’t let Cory Booker get away with the “long-standing commitment” shucking and jobbing. Ask him directly: when the head of state of the country receiving the aid is asking publicly to end the aid, why are you to the right of that head of state? Whose commitment are you actually serving?Because at the end of the day, the man pissing on your leg telling you it’s raining ain’t always wearing the keffiyeh. Sometimes he’s wearing the lapel pin and quoting Harriet Tubman. Education is elevation. They got to stop this.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways1. Netanyahu — not a critic of Israel, the Prime Minister of Israel — publicly called for ending the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. His framing of “weaning” is the language of dependency, not partnership.2. Netanyahu’s 10-year timeline is the actual policy. A real exit would be immediate. A 10-year wean is a $38 billion lock-in disguised as reform — strategically timed before the political consensus shifts further.3. Cory Booker’s response — days later, on the same topic — is functionally to the right of Netanyahu’s own position. “Qualitative military edge” is the donor-class neutrality position, not a policy analysis.4. AIPAC and its United Democracy Project super PAC spent over $100 million in the 2024 cycle defeating Black progressive incumbents like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Booker’s position is not ideological; it’s electoral self-preservation.5. This is the test case for distinguishing Black Liberal performance from Black Leftist material analysis. Foreign aid and domestic underfunding are the same budget — Fannie Lou Hamer understood this in 1969. The question for 2026 is whether our elected Democrats do.Become A Paid SubscriberY’all, this is what independent media looks like. No corporate backing. No advertiser telling me what I can and can’t say about Cory Booker or AIPAC or Netanyahu. No editor softening the analysis because a Senator’s office called. Just me, a transcript, a stack of receipts, and y’all.Public broadcasting is being defunded. PBS is on life support. NPR is being structurally hollowed out. The Education Is Elevation Substack is filling the void left by the retreat of public education media — with Pan-African analysis, Southern Black Left framing, and the kind of receipts-based political education they don’t teach in school.Fewer than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Less than 1%. So if this piece taught you something, gave you a frame, or armed you with language for the next argument at the family cookout — become a paid subscriber today.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.RELATED READINGSCongressional Research Service. (2024). U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel. CRS Report RL33222. — The definitive Congressional source on the aid relationship. Documents the 2016 MOU ($38 billion over FY2019–FY2028) and Israel’s status as the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since WWII.U.S. Department of State. (2016). Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of Israel Reached September 14, 2016. — The original MOU text. Locks in $3.3B annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500M annually for missile defense cooperation.OpenSecrets. (2024). Pro-Israel: Top Contributors to Federal Candidates and Outside Spending Groups. — Tracks AIPAC and United Democracy Project spending in the 2024 primary cycle, including the $14.5M against Jamaal Bowman and $8.5M against Cori Bush.Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. — Foundational text on racial capitalism. Explains why critiquing U.S. military expenditure abroad is part of, not separate from, critiquing capital accumulation at home.Hamer, Fannie Lou. (1971). “It’s in Your Hands.” Speech delivered to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. — Hamer’s analysis of how military spending and poverty programs share the same federal budget. Foundational Southern Black Left text on foreign policy and material conditions.Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. — Afropessimist framework for reading how Black political figures get positioned as moral cover for structurally anti-Black policy consensus. Useful frame for analyzing Booker’s role.Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43(6). — Required reading for understanding how Black women voters in NJ and elsewhere bear the material cost of Booker’s foreign policy votes through cut domestic programs.Mearsheimer, John J. & Walt, Stephen M. (2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — The mainstream IR text documenting the structural influence of AIPAC and affiliated organizations on U.S. congressional voting patterns. Controversial but well-cited.Scott-Heron, Gil. (1970). “Whitey On The Moon.” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Flying Dutchman Records. — The original budget-priority critique. Updated and applied throughout this piece.Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. — Frame for understanding how Black women critics of U.S. foreign policy — from Angela Davis to Cori Bush — get specifically targeted and primaried out, while Black male Democrats like Booker get protected by the same lobby.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Let me set the scene for y’all real quick. Donald Trump stands in front of a room full of schoolchildren and says, with a straight face, that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, that the United States had to send B2 bombers to “obliterate” their nuclear capacity, that Israel would have been gone, that Iran would have come for Europe and then us because — and I quote — “these are sick people.” Kinfolks, that ain’t a foreign policy briefing. That’s a catechism. That’s American empire teaching its young.And the same people who clutch their pearls about a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are to a kindergarten class will sit a sitting president down in front of children and let him narrate a fairy tale where the United States is the dragon-slayer, Iran is the dragon, and $200 billion in bombs is the moral of the story. Every accusation is a confession. They’ll scream about indoctrination while they’re literally indoctrinating. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but imperial conservatism is the parent compound.Three Concepts Doing the Heavy LiftingBefore I get into the receipts, let me lay down the framework so we’re all reading from the same hymnal. Three concepts run through everything Trump said in that room, and if you don’t name them, you can’t see them.American Hegemony — The structural arrangement where the United States — through military power, dollar dominance, and institutional control — sets the terms of what is permitted on the planet. Hegemony isn’t just being strong. It’s being the one country that gets to decide who else is allowed to be strong, who is allowed to defend themselves, who is allowed to have what. When Trump says Iran was “two weeks” from a weapon, the unspoken second half of that sentence is: and that decision belongs to us.American Imperialism — The actual practice — the bombs, the bases, the sanctions, the regime-change wars, the proxies. Imperialism is hegemony with a body count. The B2 bomber Trump bragged about isn’t a metaphor. It’s the imperial fist that makes the hegemonic argument feel like common sense. Du Bois told us imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home are the same project wearing different uniforms. Rodney told us how it underdevelops. Lenin gave us the economic mechanics. Pick your lens — the violence is the same.American Exceptionalism — The mythology that makes the first two feel righteous. The idea that America is uniquely good, uniquely chosen, uniquely qualified to bomb other people for their own protection. Exceptionalism is the lullaby that sings empire to sleep. It’s what lets a man stand in front of children and describe killing as obliteration as protection as love. It’s the religion of the project.Now watch how all three move through that clip like blood through an artery.Hegemony: Who Gets to Decide Who Has What“”They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.””Stop. Right there. The factual problem with this statement is one thing — and I’ll get to that — but the structural problem is bigger. Trump is not asserting a fact. He’s asserting a permission structure. The United States possesses thousands of nuclear warheads. Israel possesses an undeclared arsenal it has never even admitted to. The United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea — they all have them. Iran does not. And the sentence Trump is delivering to those children is not “nuclear weapons are dangerous.” It’s “that country in particular is not allowed to have what we have.”That is hegemony in its purest form. It’s the assumption — unspoken, unquestioned, taught to children before they can spell the word — that the United States is the referee, the umpire, the parent in the room, and every other sovereign nation is a child who has to ask permission. Iran could spend the next thousand years pointing out that the U.S. is the only country to ever drop a nuclear weapon on civilian populations, and the hegemonic frame would still hold:we can be trusted with it. They cannot. Why? Because we said so. Because we wrote the rules. Because we have the bombers to enforce the rules we wrote. That’s the whole argument. There is no other argument.And here’s where it gets sneaky. Hegemony works best when nobody has to defend it out loud. When a president can stand in front of children and just assume that Iran having a weapon is unthinkable while the U.S. having thousands is unremarkable — and nobody in the room interrupts to ask “wait, why?” — that’s when you know the hegemonic frame has done its job. It has become the water the fish doesn’t see.Imperialism: The Body Count Behind the Bedtime Story“”Remember we sent that beautiful B2 bomber in and we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated.””Beautiful. He called the bomber beautiful. To a room of children. Y’all hear that and don’t flinch, you’re already gone. That word is doing imperial work — it’s the aestheticization of violence, the conversion of mass destruction into pageantry. The same move every empire in history has made when it needed its civilians to applaud the deaths of foreign civilians. Rome had its triumphs. Britain had its parades. America has its B2s and its words like “surgical” and “obliterate.”Let’s stay with that word for a second. Obliterate. To remove all trace. To wipe from existence. Said casually, in front of children, about a bombing campaign in a country containing roughly 90 million human beings, many of whom are children just like the ones in that room. Trump made a point earlier in the clip about the welfare of American kids — fair enough, every child’s welfare matters. But ask yourself the question I want hanging in the air for the rest of this article:“Where is the smoke for the Iranian children? Where is the smoke for the Lebanese children? Where is the smoke for the Palestinian children whose deaths the same B2 bombers and the same $200 billion budget directly underwrite?”That question — the simple question of whose children count as children — is the one American imperialism cannot survive. Which is why it is never, ever asked in front of American children. They are taught instead that the bombers are beautiful. They are taught that obliteration is a happy ending. They are taught a vocabulary in which our violence is defense and their existence is the threat. Frantz Fanon called this the manichaean structure of the colonial world — a world cut in two, where one side is human and the other side is the enemy of humanity. Trump didn’t invent it. He’s just the current narrator.And here’s the receipt for what this actually costs. According to publicly available cost estimates of the U.S. military’s recent Iran operations and the broader regional posture, we are looking at roughly $200 billion in defense and adjacent expenditures tied to that confrontation. Two hundred. Billion. Dollars. Now I want y’all to sit with that number while I tell you what else $200 billion could have bought:* Universal childcare in the United States, with billions left over.* Full restoration of the National Park Service budget for years.* Significant expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program, addressing real material need.* Renewable energy tax credits at the scale needed to meaningfully decarbonize.* SNAP and food security programs that lift millions of children out of food insecurity.* Medicaid expansion in every state that has refused it, covering the working poor who get pissed on and told it’s raining.Compare us to the other countries of the Global North — Germany, France, the Nordics, Canada — and we don’t compare. They have universal healthcare. They have paid family leave measured in months and years, not days. They have childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage. We have B2 bombers. That is the imperial trade. That is the deal the American working class — Black, Brown, white, all of us — has been forced into for the better part of a century: empire abroad, austerity at home. MLK said it plain in 1967 at Riverside Church: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-nine years later, we are still approaching. We are practically there.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.Exceptionalism: The Lullaby That Sings Empire to Sleep“”And they would have trained their sights on Europe first and then us because they’re sick people. These are sick people.””This is the part that gives the game away. This is the part that should make every parent watching go cold. Because what Trump is doing in this exact sentence is teaching schoolchildren that an entire nation of people — a country of 90 million, with poets and grandmothers and college students and tired bus drivers and kids their age — are sick. Not led by a sick regime. Not victims of a brutal government. Sick. The people themselves. Sick.Y’all, that is the oldest move in the imperial playbook. Dehumanize the population so the bombing of the population becomes not just permissible but morally required. Edward Said wrote a whole book about this called Orientalism, and if you have not read it, please do. The construction of the “sick” Eastern other against the rational, healthy Western self is not Trump’s invention — it is the foundational rhetoric of every European empire that ever colonized a Muslim-majority country, and the United States inherited the script the way a son inherits his father’s suits.And the move is doubled. Notice that Trump frames the bombing as protecting the children in the room — “maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now.” That’s exceptionalism doing its laundering. The violence becomes love. The bomber becomes the bodyguard. The empire becomes the parent. And the child in the room is taught that the people on the receiving end of those bombs are not children at all — they are the threat the parent is protecting them from. This is how you grow a generation that does not flinch. This is how you raise an electorate that will fund the next war. This is how you make a permanent imperial public.And to be crystal clear about it — because I know somebody in the comments is about to try me — two things can be true. The Iranian state under the Islamic Republic has done real harm to its own people, especially women, especially queer people, especially religious minorities, especially the Kurdish community. I am not romanticizing that regime. I have never. What I’m telling you is that American imperialism does not get a pass to bomb 90 million people because their government is repressive. By that logic, half the planet should be on the receiving end of a B2 — including, frankly, us. The repression of a government does not transfer guilt to a population. That is exceptionalism’s most violent sleight of hand, and it is the one being performed in front of children in this clip.The Lie Inside the LessonNow let me come back to the factual claim. “They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”This is not true. This has not been the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community at any point in the public record. Iran’s nuclear program — to the extent it ever crossed into weapons-grade enrichment — was assessed by U.S. intelligence and the IAEA to be months to years from a weapon, with significant scientific and engineering steps remaining between enrichment and a deliverable warhead. The “two weeks” figure is a rhetorical device. It is a small lie designed to manufacture a big consent. It is the same lie, in a new dress, that we were told about Iraqi WMDs in 2003. Same lie. New target. Same B2s.And the audience for the lie is what makes it especially obscene. These are children. They cannot vote. They cannot fact-check. They cannot push back. They are a captive audience the way a congregation is a captive audience, and the man at the pulpit knows it. He chose them. He chose the setting. He chose the language. He told them the bombers were beautiful and the people were sick and the math worked out to you are safer because we killed them.That is not foreign policy. That is liturgy.Where Do We Go From Here??So what do we do with this, kinfolks? A few things.One. Name it. When you see a politician — any politician, of any party — frame a foreign military intervention as a moral certainty in front of children, name the three things at work: hegemony, imperialism, exceptionalism. Use the words. Take them off the shelf and put them in your mouth. The empire requires that its operating system remain unnamed. Naming it is sabotage.Two. Demand the receipts. Every time somebody tells you about the threat that justified the bombing, ask them where the intelligence assessment is. Ask them where the IAEA report is. Ask them what the diplomatic alternative was. Ask them whose children are not in the protected category. The questions are the resistance.Three. Connect the budget to the body. That $200 billion is not abstract. It is the childcare you don’t have, the rent you can’t pay, the asthma inhaler your kid can’t afford, and it is also the family in Tehran that no longer exists. Same dollar. Same decision. Same empire. The Southern Black Left has been telling us this since SNCC was running freedom schools in Mississippi while LBJ was burning villages in Vietnam. Fannie Lou Hamer said it plain. Ella Baker said it plain. We have the canon. Read it.Four. Protect the children — and I mean all of them. The ones in the classroom Trump was talking to. The ones in Tehran. The ones in Gaza. The ones in Beirut. The ones in Bryan, Texas. If your politics protects some children and pours bombs on others, your politics is the problem the children are eventually going to have to clean up.Education is elevation. This man is a fool. The lesson he taught those kids was the most expensive one this country still teaches: that some lives are protected by being told other lives don’t count. We have to teach a different lesson. We have to be the different lesson. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise.Why This Work Lives HereThis piece — and every piece in this Substack — exists because independent Black media is one of the last places where this kind of analysis can be done without a corporate hand on the steering wheel. There is no sponsor telling me to soften the imperialism critique. There is no editor telling me to balance the Iranian children against the American ones as if the math were ever balanced. There is no boardroom. There is just me, the work, and y’all.Public broadcasting is being defunded. Local journalism is being gutted. The educational media that used to do this work — the Mr. Rogers, the PBS specials, the Bill Moyers conversations — has been quietly starved out. What’s left is a void, and somebody has to fill it. That’s what this Substack is. That’s what Education Is Elevation is.Fewer than 1% of the folks following me across platforms are currently paid subscribers. If you’ve read this far and the analysis matters to you — if you want it to keep coming, deeper, longer, without anybody’s leash on it — become a paid subscriber today. It is the difference between this work continuing and this work disappearing. It is how we build the alternative classroom these children deserve. Research over MeSearch. Always.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways1. Trump’s classroom remarks operationalized three distinct but linked concepts — American hegemony (who gets to have what), American imperialism (the bombs that enforce hegemony), and American exceptionalism (the mythology that makes both feel righteous). Naming all three is a prerequisite for resisting any of them.2. The “two weeks from a nuclear weapon” claim is not supported by the public record of U.S. intelligence assessments or IAEA reporting on Iran’s program. It is a rhetorical device structurally identical to the 2003 Iraqi WMD claim — a small lie engineered to manufacture a large consent.3. Approximately $200 billion tied to the Iran operation and adjacent regional posture represents an explicit opportunity cost. The same sum could fund universal childcare, expanded SNAP, Medicaid expansion, housing vouchers, and renewable energy infrastructure. The military-versus-social-uplift trade-off MLK named at Riverside Church in 1967 is still the binding constraint on American material life in 2026.4. Describing an entire population of roughly 90 million Iranians as “sick people” is a textbook Orientalist move — the construction of the irrational Eastern other against the rational Western self — and it dehumanizes the target population in advance of the violence inflicted upon them. Two things can be true: the Iranian state is repressive AND the population is not collectively guilty.5. Children are a captive rhetorical audience and using them as the venue for imperial catechism is a calculated choice. Independent Black-led media is one of the last places where this dynamic can be named without corporate or institutional pressure to soften the critique — which is why the paid-subscriber model is structural, not optional.WORKS CITED OR REFERENCED Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. The foundational text for understanding how the West constructs the Middle East as inherently irrational and threatening to justify domination. Indispensable for reading the “sick people” framing in Trump’s remarks.Du Bois, W.E.B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1915. Du Bois’s argument that European imperialism and American racial capitalism are the same project, written on the eve of World War I and still describing 2026.Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodney’s framework for understanding how imperial extraction at the periphery enables consumption at the core — the structural skeleton beneath the $200 billion comparison.Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. The chapter “Concerning Violence” lays out the manichaean structure of the colonial world. Required for understanding how a president can call an entire population “sick” with a straight face.King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech delivered at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. King’s explicit naming of the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and the tying of foreign war to domestic poverty. The speech the establishment still pretends he never gave.Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Robinson’s racial capitalism framework — the engine that makes both imperialism and domestic austerity profitable to the same class of people.Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hartman’s analysis of how violence becomes “care” in the imperial and slaveholding imagination — the rhetorical move Trump performs when he frames bombing as protection.Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. The intersectional framework that demands we ask which children the imperial budget protects and which children it kills — and refuse the false choice between them.Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Bailey’s analysis is essential for tracking how the same exceptionalist mythology that justifies bombing Iran also writes Black women in the U.S. out of the category of “protected children” the empire claims to defend.Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. The original argument that all the systems of domination are connected — and that the work of any one of them requires the work of all of them. The Southern Black Left’s intersectional north star.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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.May 8, 2024: The Day the Cory Booker Beef Got PersonalI want to take y’all back. All the way back. Because folks be acting like my critique of Cory Booker started yesterday, started when he climbed up on the Senate floor for 25 hours, started when the AIPAC numbers dropped, started when he was the lone Democrat to confirm Charles Kushner. Nah. My beef with Cory Booker has a birthday. May 8, 2024. Washington, D.C. A content creator and influencer summit where over a hundred of us got flown in to talk about advocacy and education in the current climate. That’s the day. That’s the room. That’s where it stopped being a policy disagreement and became personal. Let me explain why, and let me walk y’all through every step of the two years that followed, because Research over MeSearch is the standard and the receipts have been receipt-ing this whole time.Picture the scene. A senator who is a sitting United States senator, a man who has run for president once already and is clearly running again, gets invited to address a room full of content creators — the same content creators his caucus wants to mobilize, the same ones his administration’s pollsters told him he needs, the same ones who have been documenting genocide on a phone faster than the New York Times can edit a headline. And what does he do? He jumps up on a table. Tom Cruise on Oprah, you feel me. A whole ass move. Theatrical. Performative. The body language of a man who thinks he’s about to give a TED Talk to an audience that already knows the punchline.He starts talking about the significance of new media. He starts talking about how he was born and raised on grassroots movement organizing. He starts talking about how he comes from a background of social justice. The man who voted to ban TikTok stood on a table at a content creator conference and lectured us about new media. Let that marinate. The man who has taken over $700,000 from AIPAC stood in a room full of Black and Brown content creators who had spent the previous seven months documenting white phosphorus from Alabama raining on the children of Rafa, and he tried to tell us where new media came from. Shidd. We knew where new media came from. We were new media. The whole room was new media. We were what he was supposed to be listening to, and instead he was pissing on us telling us it was raining.Then came the questions. And this is where it got personal for me. Because the question that got asked — by a Black woman content creator who had read the bill, who had quoted the bill, who had named the specific provisions — was simple. Are you willing to call for a ceasefire? That was the question. Not a gotcha. Not a setup. A direct, material question about the position of a sitting United States senator on a sitting genocide. And what did Cory Booker do? He pulled out the tired playbook. He shucked and jobbed. He said, “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill.”I’m sorry you don’t understand. To a Black woman. Who had read the bill. Who had cited the bill. Who knew more about the supplemental appropriation than half the senators on his committee.That right there is misogynoir wearing a Senate pin. That right there is what Moya Bailey told us this was going to look like in the era of Black women asking questions in rooms full of cameras. That right there is what Patricia Hill Collins called controlling images deployed as political technology. That right there is what Combahee told us in 1977 — that the convergence of race, gender, and class violence does not require a hood and a rope, that it shows up in a Senate office, that it shows up in a paternalistic dismissal at a content creator summit on May 8, 2024. And let me tell you, Indigenous and Black feminist thought reads that move the same way. White feminism has historically wanted to make this a story about a man being rude. Intersectional analysis tells us that the rudeness was the form, the content was the function — silencing a Black woman who had material expertise on a question of empire because the senator did not want to answer the question she asked.She didn’t fold. She named Rafa. She named the 600,000 children. She named the white phosphorus. She named the funding pipeline. And what she got back was, “you keep defending Hamas, you would literally just be representing them.” That move is also a technology, y’all. Equating a question about a ceasefire with defense of a terrorist organization. The same equation that got cooked up in the State Department and reheated on cable news and served back at her by a sitting United States senator at a Black creators conference. I’m sorry, that ain’t an answer. That’s a deflection wrapped in a smear.And then he tried to make Sudan a shield. He said he voted for the supplemental because of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Cory. My brother. Sudan, where 17.1 million women and girls need aid in 2026. Sudan, whose UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Sudan, where Black African Muslim women in Darfur are being raped as a deliberate tactic of war. You want to talk about Sudan? Where is the smoke for Sudan in your voting record? Where is the supplemental for Sudan? Where is the 25-hour speech for Sudan? Don’t weaponize Sudanese women’s suffering to dodge a question about Rafa. Black African lives matter when they are useful as a rhetorical shield, and that’s the whole problem with the way liberal politicians talk about Sudan. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.That was May 8, 2024. That was day one for me. Let me tell y’all what happened next.A MF THREAD: THE TWO-YEAR TIMELINEMay 8, 2024. D.C. Creator Summit. Booker climbs the table. Booker dismisses a Black woman creator. Booker says, “you don’t understand the bill.” Booker weaponizes Sudan. I leave that room knowing I am going to be on this man’s case for the rest of his political career. Day one.July 24, 2024. Booker is photographed with Benjamin Netanyahu during the prime minister’s address to a joint session of Congress. The ICC has already moved on arrest warrants. Booker poses anyway. The photo will haunt him for the next two years and he will spend every public appearance after that refusing to call Netanyahu a war criminal. The man literally cannot say the words out loud.August 2024. The Democratic National Convention. No Palestinian speaker. Booker goes on CNN’s State of the Union and defends the decision, says Kamala Harris is “anguished” over the conflict. Eight months into a documented genocide and the senator wants me to feel his vice president’s feelings. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.November 2024. Trump wins. The same supplemental Booker voted for, the same posture Booker held, the same equivocation Booker performed, contributes to the depressed Black, Arab, and young voter turnout that delivers the second Trump administration. The “lesser of two evils” math does not work when the lesser evil is also handing the keys to the greater one.January–February 2025. Trump cabinet confirmation votes. Booker votes to confirm Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Booker votes to confirm John Ratcliffe for CIA Director. Booker votes to confirm Scott Bessent for Treasury. Booker votes to confirm Brooke Rollins for Agriculture. The man who would later filibuster for 25 hours had already handed Trump his cabinet.March 31 – April 1, 2025. The 25-hour Senate speech. Twenty-five hours and five minutes. Breaks Strom Thurmond’s segregationist filibuster record. Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. The same night the speech ends, Whitaker is confirmed 52-45. The standing ovation was for the performance. The legislation walked past him. I called it political theater on day one.May 20, 2025. Booker becomes the LONE Democratic yes on Charles Kushner as ambassador to France. The lone yes. Trump’s son-in-law’s daddy. The man Booker had spent 25 hours of empty floor time supposedly opposing. Where is the smoke? Yealp.June 2025. Booker votes to confirm David Perdue as ambassador to China. Mid-trade war. Mid-tariff chaos. Mid-China-hawk hysteria. Booker hands Trump his Beijing pick.Summer 2025. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislative package — passes by one vote. Three Democrats had died in office before the vote. Their seats had gone to Republicans. The same Senate where Booker filibustered to nothing. Performance is not legislation, kinfolks.October 14, 2025. Booker on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. Jennifer Welch asks if he considers Netanyahu a war criminal. Booker refuses to answer. Pivots. Says he is “not going to be outside of the room screaming.” Brother, you spent 25 hours screaming inside the room and accomplished nothing. The screaming wasn’t the problem. The strategy was.October 16, 2025. Sludge breaks the story: Booker has taken his first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in the Senate. Total haul approaches $877,000 across the cycle when the receipts are added up. The man whose past leaked tapes had him “text messaging back and forth like teenagers” with the AIPAC president now claims a public posture of restraint while pocketing the largest single-issue check of his career.March 2026. Booker tells Meet the Press he is “definitely not ruling out” a 2028 run. He releases a memoir, Stand. He claims he will refuse single-issue PAC money going forward. The conversion narrative arrives right on time for the primary. Two things can be true: he was on the AIPAC payroll, and he is laundering that history in time for Iowa. I’m not lost in the sauce on this one.April–May 2026. I write the Booker pieces. I document the 25-hour speech and what it didn’t pass. I document the Kushner confirmation. I document the AIPAC pipeline. I document the Meet the Press conversion. And I tie every single one back to where this beef started: a Black woman in a room in D.C., a senator on a table, a question about Rafa, a deflection wrapped in Sudan.That’s the timeline. That is two years of receipts. Every accusation he’s made about me being unfair, every aide who has told my mutuals that I’m being too harsh, every “but he had a good speech though” comment — every one of those moments traces back to a single question I keep asking. Where is the smoke, Cory? Where is the smoke?The Black Liberal vs. The Black Leftist on This QuestionA lot of folks want to treat this like Black-on-Black conflict. It is not. This is a distinction the Black radical tradition has been making since SNCC, since Ella Baker, since the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Richmond in 1937, since Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, since the Combahee River Collective. There is a difference between a Black liberal and a Black leftist. Cory Booker is a Black liberal. I am a Black leftist. The Black liberal believes the system can be reformed and that a seat at the table is the goal. The Black leftist believes the table itself is the problem. The Black liberal will jump up on the table at a content creator conference. The Black leftist asks whose table is it, who built it, who is being eaten on top of it.This is not a war. This is strategy. Cedric Robinson taught us that racial capitalism is not an aberration of an otherwise functional system — it is the engine of surplus value extraction itself. Frank Wilderson reminds us that gratuitous violence against Black flesh is constitutive, not incidental. Walter Rodney taught us how the same diplomatic posture that calls a ceasefire “antisemitic” abroad funds the police that occupy our neighborhoods at home. Angela Davis named Ferguson and Palestine in the same breath because the materials are the same — tear gas from the same companies, training from the same institutions, surveillance from the same vendors. The Black liberal will tell you these are separate fights. The Black leftist will show you the receipts proving they are one fight.And here is the thing about the South, which is where I come from and where I do my work — Booker’s brand of liberal politics tends to pathologize the South. The Black creators he was dismissing on May 8, 2024 included a lot of Southerners. A lot of folks from Houston, from Atlanta, from Memphis, from New Orleans, from Bryan TX. We come from the soil where Black radical organizing was born. Houston had a Black Panther chapter. So did Dallas. So did Memphis. So did NOLA. Black Workers for Justice came out of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1982. The Southern Negro Youth Congress was a Richmond institution. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm was a Mississippi cooperative. Late MLK was a leftist. Huey Newton was from Monroe, Louisiana. When a coastal liberal walks into a room full of Southern content creators and tells us we don’t understand the bill, the disrespect lands on top of three generations of organizing that built the politics he is now performing. We are not lost in the sauce. We are the sauce.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Where We Go From HereSo here is what I’m asking. When the 2028 primary comes — and it is coming — I want y’all to remember May 8, 2024. I want y’all to remember the table. I want y’all to remember the Black woman who asked the question and the senator who told her she didn’t understand. I want y’all to remember the Kushner vote. I want y’all to remember the 25-hour speech that passed zero bills. I want y’all to remember the $877,000. I want y’all to remember that this is what political theater looks like when it costs us nothing to perform and costs the rest of the world everything to absorb.Research over MeSearch. The receipts are not vibes. The receipts are votes. And the votes are on the record. Education is elevation, kinfolks. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise — I will be on this man’s case until he is honest about it or out of the room. Shout out to Newark. Shout out to every Black woman content creator who was in that room on May 8, 2024 and held the line. We saw what they did. We never forgot.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER Become a paid subscriber to Education Is ElevationI’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.This Cory Booker timeline you just read is exactly the kind of work that does not exist anywhere else. Two years of receipts. Voting records cross-referenced with public statements. A Black radical tradition lens on a Black liberal senator who is about to ask for your vote in 2028. Cable news will not give you this. The Times will not give you this. I will. Become a paid subscriber and let’s keep building the room where the receipts live.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The beef has a birthday. May 8, 2024, at a D.C. content creator summit, Cory Booker climbed a table to praise new media after voting to ban TikTok, dismissed a Black woman creator with “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill” when she asked about a Rafa ceasefire, and tried to weaponize Sudan as a humanitarian shield to dodge the question.* The Sudan deflection is a tell. Sudan is real. 17.1 million women and girls need aid. The UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Booker has done nothing material for Sudan. Naming Sudan to dodge a question about Rafa is using Black African suffering as a rhetorical prop, which is itself a form of the same colonial logic.* The 25-hour speech and the Kushner vote are the same record. Twenty-five hours of empty floor time passed zero bills. The lone Democratic yes on Charles Kushner happened weeks later. Performance and capitulation are not opposites — they are the same political product packaged for two different audiences.* The AIPAC pipeline is the structural story. $877,000 in single-issue PAC money across the cycle, including the senator’s first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in office, then a conversion narrative announced in time for a 2028 primary. The money explains the votes. The conversion explains the brand.* Black liberalism and Black leftism are not the same thing. A Black liberal will jump on the table. A Black leftist asks whose table it is. The distinction is not personal — it is strategic, historical, and rooted in a Southern Black radical tradition that Booker’s coastal liberalism keeps trying to erase.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.RELATED READINGS * Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. — The foundational text on misogynoir as a specific analytic. Essential for reading the May 8, 2024 dismissal as political technology, not improvisation.* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000 (revised edition). — Controlling images and the matrix of domination. The framework for how “you don’t understand the bill” functions as a controlling image, not a remark.* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. — The founding text of Black feminist intersectional politics. Proof that not all Black feminism is liberal. Necessary for the Black liberal / Black leftist distinction.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 1991. — Intersectionality’s foundational legal-theoretical text. Frames why a Black woman creator’s question is structurally distinct from any other question in that room.* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. — Hooks’s foundational critique of how Black women’s political analysis is systematically dismissed. Direct line to the May 8 moment.* Davis, Angela Y. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016. — The essential text linking Black liberation to Palestinian liberation. Direct framework for why Booker’s Rafa-to-Sudan pivot cannot stand.* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983 (2000 reprint). — Racial capitalism as the engine, not the aberration. Frames the AIPAC pipeline as structural rather than personal.* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010. — Afropessimist analysis of gratuitous violence and the fungibility of Black flesh. Reads Booker’s deflection as constitutive, not exceptional.* Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997. — The genealogy of how Black suffering gets transmuted into political currency for others. Background for the Sudan-as-shield analysis.* Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987. — Foundational for the analysis of how Black women in that D.C. room were positioned to absorb the senator’s condescension.* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. — The Pan-Africanist economic history that exposes selective humanitarian rhetoric about African suffering.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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Y’all know I don’t be playing about Research Over MeSearch. So before anybody tries to make this about feelings, let me put the receipts on the table first.National Center for Education Statistics, 1997. Government data. Over 20,000 households surveyed. The finding? Kids in grades 6–12 whose fathers are highly involved in their schools have 46 percent higher odds of pulling mostly A’s compared to kids whose fathers are not involved. Moderate involvement? Still a 21 percent boost. Same study showed children whose fathers are involved are significantly less likely to ever repeat a grade. That is not a vibe. That is the federal government’s own numbers.Then fast forward to 2024. National Assessment of Educational Progress drops the latest Nation’s Report Card. Two-thirds of fourth graders cannot read at proficient level. A third of eighth graders cannot read at NAEP Basic — the largest percentage ever recorded. Reading scores have not recovered from the pandemic. Math is bleeding at the bottom. The Secretary of Education herself said nearly half of high school seniors test below basic in math and reading.Let that marinate for a second. The country is failing our babies academically at a historic level. And we have decades of data saying one of the cheapest, most powerful interventions is a daddy walking into the building and being seen. Not a check. Not a text. Physical presence.So when I tell y’all this post is for the dads who are actually present, I mean it. If you a sorry-ass daddy who not active in your kid’s life, this not for you. This for the kinfolks who showing up. And for the ones thinking about it who need that final push.Five Things That Happen When Dads Show Up at the Schoolhouse1. Higher Grades — and Not by a LittleThat 46 percent number from NCES? That ain’t a margin of error. That is a structural difference. Even after researchers controlled for income, parent education, family structure, and a gang of other variables, fathers’ school involvement remained a significant independent predictor of kids getting mostly A’s. Reading and math are where the biggest gains show up — which matters because reading is foundational to everything else.And here is the part the data nerds don’t always say out loud: this effect held across socioeconomic groups. White, Black, Native, Hispanic, rich, working class. Daddy showing up matters.2. Less Grade RepetitionStatistical simulations using Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data show that if low-income resident fathers were as involved in school as high-income fathers, the gap in grade repetition between high and low SES children would drop by 23 percent. Father residence alone is associated with a 23 percent lower likelihood of a child repeating a grade.Translation: daddies showing up moves the needle on whether your baby is on grade level. And in 2026 America, with reading scores at historic lows, you do not want your kid getting held back. That is a death sentence for confidence, social development, and long-term graduation odds. Research over MeSearch — the data is clear.3. Fewer Behavior Issues and Disciplinary ActionsActive fathers correlate with reduced classroom disruptions. The NCES data shows reduced odds of suspension and expulsion when parents are highly involved. And this matters extra for Black and Brown kids, who get suspended and expelled at rates 2 to 3 times their white peers for the same exact behaviors. When a daddy is a known face in that building, teachers and administrators think twice before pulling the disciplinary trigger. That is not a theory. That is how institutions work.And every accusation is a confession — the same school system that complains about Black male absence from school buildings is the same system that calls security when Black daddies do show up. Two things can be true.4. Greater Confidence and Stress ToleranceWatchDOGS — Dads of Great Students — is a program in over 8,800 schools nationwide. Started in 1998 in Springdale, Arkansas. Real teachers have reported that the mere presence of a WatchDOG dad dramatically reduces reports of bullying. The kids whose daddies show up build emotional resilience and higher self-esteem. And it ain’t just their kids. The whole classroom shifts.I lived this today. My second-grade son and fourth-grade daughter’s school had me come in as a WatchDOG. Every teacher I talked to said the same thing: the energy of the room changed when a dad was in there. Not just my kids. The whole classroom. That is the ripple. That is the thing the spreadsheet cannot fully capture.5. Stronger Cognitive SkillsResearch published in NCES studies and across multiple meta-analyses shows fathers tend to play a distinct role in cognitive stimulation — providing information, modeling problem-solving, expanding vocabulary through different conversational patterns than moms typically do. Researchers have hypothesized that maternal involvement may be most beneficial for the social and emotional adjustment of children to school, while paternal involvement may be most important for academic achievement. Not a hierarchy. A complement. Two things can be true.Now Let’s Talk About Black Daddies Specifically — Because the Lies Run DeepHere is where I gotta put on my Research Over MeSearch hat extra tight, because the narrative around Black fathers is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history. And every accusation, like I always say, is a confession.The 2013 CDC National Health Statistics Report — federal government data, not a Black studies pamphlet — found that Black fathers who live with their children are MORE involved in daily caregiving than white or Hispanic fathers. Seventy percent of Black fathers in the home bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped their children use the toilet every day, compared to 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. Black fathers in the home were more likely to help with homework every day — 41 percent, versus 28 percent for white fathers and 29 percent for Hispanic fathers.And here is the part that should make every “absent Black father” myth-peddler choke on their grits: even Black fathers who do not live with their children outperformed their white and Latino counterparts on multiple involvement measures. More than 50 percent of nonresident Black fathers talked to their school-age children about their day several times per week or more, compared to 34 percent of nonresident white dads and 23 percent of nonresident Latino fathers. Nonresident Black dads were more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to host story time every day.So where did the mythology come from? Cedric Robinson would tell you: racial capitalism needs a Black pathology story to justify itself. If the story is “Black families are broken from the inside,” then mass incarceration looks like a response instead of a cause. Then job market discrimination looks like a consequence instead of a driver. Then redlining and school underfunding look like accidents instead of policy. The absent Black father myth is not a description of reality. It is a political tool.Now, two things can be true. Black fathers are more likely to live apart from their children — 44 percent versus 21 percent for white fathers, per the CDC. But the data tells us why: mass incarceration disproportionately targets Black men, economic instability driven by structural racism limits cohabitation, and family court systems built in a Moynihan-era frame still treat Black fathers as suspects rather than parents. The brothers who are present are MORE present than their peers. The brothers who are not present are largely not present because the state has made it materially difficult to be. That is racial capitalism doing what racial capitalism does. Walter Rodney told us how this works. Saidiya Hartman told us how it feels.So for the Black daddies reading this — y’all already showing up at rates this country pretends you don’t. Now the work is doubling down. Going from the kitchen and the basketball court into the school building. Bringing the same energy you bring to homework at the table into the parent-teacher conference. Because the school system is not built for our babies, and your physical presence inside that building changes the calculation for every teacher, every administrator, every other kid watching.And for the dads who are not Black reading this — y’all gotta stop spreading the absent Black father narrative. Period. The CDC has been telling you for over a decade. The fact that the story persists is the confession. Now do better.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The 2026 Reality CheckLook at what we are working with. NAEP 2024 results, released in 2025: 33 percent of eighth graders read below NAEP Basic. Forty percent of fourth graders read below NAEP Basic — the highest since 2002. Forty-five percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in math — the highest ever. Thirty-two percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in reading — the highest ever. The Acting Commissioner of NCES literally said scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows.We are watching a generation get academically gutted in real time. And we have research from 1997 — almost 30 years old — that has been telling us the same simple thing: when daddies show up at school, kids do better. Not maybe. Not sometimes. Consistently. Across races. Across income levels. Across grade levels.So if you a present daddy reading this, the call is simple. Go to the school. Volunteer once a semester at minimum. Sign up for WatchDOGS if they have it. Show up to one parent-teacher conference per year, no excuses. Eat lunch with your kid one day. Read to a kindergarten class. Be the face the teachers know.Because consciousness precedes transformation. And the consciousness y’all gotta develop is that your kid’s school is a battlefield — for their literacy, for their confidence, for their future. And daddies on the battlefield is research-backed strategy. Not a feel-good talking point.Key TakeawaysFor the folks who scrolled to the bottom — the receipts in one frame.* 46% higher odds of A’s. Federal NCES data shows children in grades 6–12 with highly involved fathers have 46 percent higher adjusted odds of getting mostly A’s, even controlling for income, parent education, and family structure.* 23% drop in grade repetition gap. If low-SES resident fathers were as school-involved as high-SES fathers, the socioeconomic gap in grade repetition would shrink by 23 percent.* Reading crisis is real and historic. NAEP 2024: 40 percent of 4th graders read below NAEP Basic — highest since 2002. 33 percent of 8th graders below NAEP Basic — highest ever recorded.* Black fathers in the home are MORE involved. 2013 CDC data: 70 percent of resident Black fathers handle daily caregiving every day vs. 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. The absent Black father narrative is propaganda.* Even nonresident Black fathers outperform. More than 50 percent of nonresident Black dads talk to their school-age kids about their day several times a week or more — vs. 34 percent of nonresident white dads.* WatchDOGS works. In 8,800+ schools nationally. Principals consistently report bullying drops just from a father figure being physically present in the building.* This is structural, not symbolic. The mass incarceration system, biased family courts, and structural unemployment make Black father physical separation a state-engineered outcome — not a cultural failing. Two things can be true.* The action is simple. If you a present daddy: one volunteer day per semester, one parent-teacher conference per year, one lunch visit. Consciousness precedes transformation.CITED SOURCES Nord, C. W., Brimhall, D., & West, J. (1997). Fathers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Schools. NCES 98-091. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.The foundational federal study. Source of the “46% higher odds of mostly A’s” finding and the grade repetition data. Drew from the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Controlled for family structure, parent education, and socioeconomic factors. Still the most-cited federal study on father school involvement.Jones, J., & Mosher, W. D. (2013). Fathers’ Involvement With Their Children: United States, 2006–2010. National Health Statistics Reports, Number 71. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The CDC study that destroyed the absent Black father myth with federal data. Found resident Black fathers were the MOST involved in daily caregiving across all race groups. Also found nonresident Black fathers outperformed their nonresident white and Latino counterparts on multiple involvement measures. Every American who repeats the absent Black father narrative should be required to read this report first.National Center for Education Statistics. (2025). The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments. Institute of Education Sciences.The 2024 NAEP data showing 33 percent of 8th graders below NAEP Basic in reading (largest ever), 40 percent of 4th graders below NAEP Basic in reading (highest since 2002), and 45 percent of 12th graders below NAEP Basic in math (highest ever). The crisis context this entireEXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERIf this piece moved you and you a paid subscriber on Education Is Elevation, the next section is for you. I drop a six-month, month-by-month action plan for daddies who wanna go from theoretical involvement to actual physical presence in their kid’s school building. Includes:* Month-by-month checklist (volunteering, conferences, events, advocacy)* The ‘Daddy Diplomacy’ framework for navigating teachers and administrators when the school system is biased against your kid* How to vet your kid’s school: ten questions every present father should be asking the principal* Black Daddy Specific: how to push back when school staff treat your presence as suspicious instead of supportive* 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I asked Dr. Dontá Morrison a question I knew was going to be uncomfortable. I told him it was uncomfortable on purpose. When somebody says “that’s gay as AIDS,” what is that? And he didn’t blink. He called it ignorance at its finest. He pointed out that half the people still using the phrase don’t even know what AIDS stands for — Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. He pointed out that if you’re still saying AIDS in 2026, you’re stuck in 1986. You equating a virus to a demographic of human beings. That’s the receipts on how shallow the thinking still is.The conversation I had with Dr. Morrison wasn’t really about a slur. It was about what that slur reveals — that we are operating with an archaic, decades-old understanding of HIV inside Black communities, while a federal administration is actively dismantling the funding that keeps Black folks alive. Two things are true at the same time, and both of them are killing us.HIV Is Not AIDS — And Knowing the Difference MattersBefore I go further, let me handle some basic education, because Dr. Morrison was right — folks don’t know. HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus. It’s a virus that attacks your immune system. AIDS, on the other hand, is the most advanced stage of HIV infection, a syndrome that develops only when HIV has gone untreated long enough to severely compromise the immune system. With consistent antiretroviral therapy, a person living with HIV today can suppress the virus to undetectable levels, live a full lifespan. Undetectable equals untransmittable — U=U is settled science.Saying “AIDS” the way folks said it in the eighties is not just rude. It’s wrong and stigmatizing and pathological It collapses a manageable chronic condition back into a death sentence in your mouth, and that linguistic time travel does material harm. It keeps people from testing. It keeps people from disclosing. It keeps Black women from asking their men hard questions. It keeps the church from doing the work. Education is elevation. Same pill Magic Johnson takes, regular folks take. You do not need Magic Johnson money to survive HIV-positive in 2026. Period.The Trump Cuts Are Not AbstractDr. Morrison is a public health doctor. He earned that degree. And last year, he woke up one morning to a phone call telling him his program had been cut overnight. The federal government, under this administration, signed away the funding for the work he had been doing for over twenty years — sexual health and HIV education in the Black community, with a particular focus on the Black church. One signature, no notice, gone. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a brother who put in the work, doing the work without unemployment, watching his livelihood get dismantled in the name of America First.And the receipts on this are public. The Trump administration came into office in January 2025 and immediately froze foreign aid. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PEPFAR — got hit. The Office of Management and Budget released only about half of the $6 billion Congress appropriated for PEPFAR’s 2025 funding. Nearly 70,000 community healthcare workers were laid off in 2025 according to the PEPFAR data release, and many specialized outreach services were shut down. The number of PEPFAR-funded HIV tests declined by 14 million in 2025 compared to the year before — a 17 percent decrease. As of this week, the administration is now trying to divert another $2 billion in global health funding to pay for the shutdown of USAID itself.Let that marinate. They are taking money meant to keep people alive and using it to pay the legal bills for dismantling the agency that was keeping people alive. Every accusation is a confession. They told us they were going to gut foreign aid. They told us American leadership in global health was over. We just didn’t believe them because we were taught the United States was the leader. And here is where I have to give the receipts on what we are actually losing.The United States Was the Global Leader on HIV/AIDS — On PurposeI want y’all to understand something. The U.S. did not become the global leader in HIV/AIDS research and response by accident. It happened through deliberate, bipartisan policy across multiple administrations, and Black-led advocacy was central to forcing it to happen. The U.S. first provided funding to address the global HIV epidemic in 1986. In 1999, President Clinton announced the Leadership and Investment in Fighting an Epidemic Initiative to address HIV in 14 African countries and India. Then in 2003, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR.PEPFAR is not a small thing. As of August 2024, PEPFAR has provided cumulative funding of $120 billion for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research, making it the largest commitment by any nation focused on a single disease in history. It is credited with saving more than 26 million lives over the past two decades and preventing millions of HIV infections, particularly in Africa. PEPFAR accounts for more than 90 percent of PrEP initiations globally. Translation: nine out of every ten people on the planet getting access to HIV prevention medicine were getting it through American funding.That is the program this administration is choking out. The administration’s FY 2026 budget request includes a $1.9 billion reduction for PEPFAR. As of February 2026, only 16 country agreements have been completed, and overall current pledges will result in a $4.5 billion decrease in U.S. funding for PEPFAR countries over a 5-year period. Notably, South Africa — the country with the highest HIV burden globally — has not been included. Read that again. The country where the most Black people in the world are dying of this disease is not at the table. That is not an accident. That is policy.The Global Becomes the Local — Because We Are the Same PeopleSome of y’all might be reading this thinking, “That’s overseas, that ain’t us.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. Pan-Africanism is not a vibe — it’s an analysis. The same logic that pulls funding from clinics in Lagos and Kampala pulls funding from clinics in Atlanta and Jackson. The same administration that froze PEPFAR also went after Title X, also went after CDC HIV prevention budgets, also went after community-based programs serving Black queer folks here in the States. Dr. Morrison’s program was domestic. The brothers and sisters who lost their jobs were here. The Black women who are not getting the workshops, not getting the lunch and learns, not getting the pamphlets at their hair salons — they are here.And the disparities in this country are already brutal. Compared to White non-Hispanic heterosexually-active persons, Black heterosexually-active people have a 20-fold higher HIV diagnosis rate. A 20-fold higher rate. Two thousand percent. Among African American women, 92 percent of new HIV diagnoses were attributed to heterosexual contact. Dr. Morrison hammered this point and I want to drag it into the light: stop blaming the down low. Stop blaming gay men. There are cisgender heterosexual men contracting HIV and passing it to cisgender heterosexual women, and the gay community has nothing to do with that transmission chain. Two things can be true. Black gay men carry their own disproportionate burden. Black straight women are catching HIV from Black straight men. Both of these things are happening simultaneously, and both require funded, culturally specific intervention.The Faithful and the ForgottenThis is where Dr. Morrison’s work cuts deepest. He is the author of “Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church,” and the title alone tells you everything. The Black church is the most powerful institution we built ourselves. It was the only institution White society left relatively alone, which made it the staging ground for abolition, the civil rights movement, and Black social life as we know it. And that same church has, in too many corners, become a place where Black queer folks — particularly Black men who have sex with men — experience spiritual violence dressed up as scripture.Dr. Morrison made a point in our conversation that I’m still chewing on. He said a lot of folks are quietly rooting for Trump’s HIV cuts because they don’t like gay people, because they still associate HIV with homosexuality, and because they have a skewed approach to Christianity that supports white supremacy. Read that one more time. The same Black folks who claim they want liberation are clapping for the dismantling of the very programs that keep their cousins, their aunties, their nephews, their sisters alive — because they think God is anti-gay. That is theology imported from the same plantation logic that taught our ancestors that their humanity was conditional. Where is the smoke for that?Faithful and Forgotten is not an attack on the Black church. It’s a call for the Black church to do what it claims to do — to be the moral conscience of the community, to leave the ninety-nine and go after the one. You can’t preach Jesus and silently celebrate a policy that cuts off the antiretrovirals keeping your nephew alive. You can’t say you love Black people and only love the Black people whose sexuality you approve of. Two things can be true. The Black church is sacred. The Black church is also implicated. We grow by holding both.What Dr. Morrison Is Still Doing — Without the MoneyHere is the part that should hit every reader in the chest. Dr. Morrison lost his funding. He didn’t lose his calling. He compared himself to a TSA worker — pissed off, unpaid, but still showing up because lives are still at risk. He’s still hosting conversations. He’s still doing free interviews like the one we just did. He’s still writing books. He’s still showing up at churches and conferences and community spaces because he understands that without the money, all we got is word of mouth, and word of mouth is what built every Black liberation movement we have ever had.Word of mouth has a ceiling, and that ceiling is real. He told me directly: without the money, we can’t host the workshops, we can’t host the conferences, we can’t have the virtual lunch and learns, we ain’t got no raffle tickets, we ain’t got no Target gift cards. People show up to information sessions partly because there’s something tangible attached. Y’all who have done community organizing know exactly what he means. The defunding doesn’t just kill the big infrastructure. It kills the small incentives that get a sister in her sixties to walk through the door of a church basement and learn that HIV is not what she thought it was when she was twenty-five. That’s what’s been stolen.What This Moment Demands of UsDr. Morrison left me with a charge I want to pass directly to y’all. Black folks need to wake up and realize we are living in a country that is not for us. The performative outrage at one man — Trump — is a distraction. As Dr. Morrison said, this is not 100 percent about him; he is one person, but he is supported by individuals that think like him, and that group think is taking us all backwards. The folks rooting for these cuts because they think God is doing it through Trump need to be confronted, not coddled. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. So is bad theology.So here’s what I’m asking. Get tested. Get your people tested. Stop saying “AIDS” when you mean HIV. Stop saying “gay as AIDS,” period. Read “Faithful and Forgotten.” Talk to your church about HIV like it’s a community health issue, not a sin problem — because that’s what it is. Talk to the Black women in your life about how transmission actually works, because the data says they are catching it from cisgender heterosexual men, not from a phantom down-low boogeyman. Support the doctors and educators like Dr. Morrison who are doing the work without the funding. And the next time somebody tells you the federal government cutting global health funding doesn’t affect you, hand them this article.Same pill Magic Johnson takes, I take. Same pill regular folks take. The science exists. The medicine exists. What’s being dismantled is access. And access is the whole game.Learn more about Dr. Dontá Morrison’s work, his book Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church, and his ongoing HIV education and advocacy at www.dontamorrison.com Follow him on YouTube to learn more and follow Dr. Morrisons work. https://www.youtube.com/@dontamorrison5 Key Takeaways1. HIV is not AIDS, and using “AIDS” as a slur is decades-out-of-date misinformation that actively harms Black communities.HIV is a manageable chronic condition with treatment. AIDS is the advanced stage that develops only when HIV goes untreated. Undetectable equals untransmittable. The vocabulary you use shapes the testing, disclosure, and treatment behavior of everyone around you.2. The Trump administration’s dismantling of HIV funding is killing people — domestically and globally — and the data backs that up.PEPFAR-funded HIV testing dropped by 14 million in 2025, nearly 70,000 community healthcare workers were laid off, and OMB has slow-walked half of the $6 billion Congress appropriated. Domestic programs like Dr. Morrison’s were cut overnight. This is structural violence with a budget line.3. The United States became the global leader on HIV/AIDS through deliberate, bipartisan policy — and that leadership is being dismantled in real time.PEPFAR has provided $120 billion in cumulative funding since 2003, saved 26 million lives, and accounts for 90 percent of global PrEP initiations. The administration’s FY 2026 budget cuts it by $1.9 billion and excludes South Africa — the country with the highest HIV burden globally — from new agreements.4. Black women carry a disproportionate HIV burden, and the transmission story is being told wrong.92 percent of new HIV diagnoses among Black women come from heterosexual contact. Black heterosexually-active people have a 20-fold higher diagnosis rate than their White counterparts. The down-low narrative is a distraction from the actual transmission chain: cisgender heterosexual men passing HIV to cisgender heterosexual women.5. The Black church is both a critical resource and a site of harm — and Dr. Dontá Morrison’s “Faithful and Forgotten” demands we hold both at once.Eurocentric interpretations of Christianity have made the Black church a place of spiritual violence for Black queer folks, while simultaneously being one of the few institutions positioned to do mass HIV education. Two thingsEXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERLet me be transparent with y’all. The conversation you just read with Dr. Dontá Morrison happened because two independent Black workers — one a public health doctor, one a media educator — sat down to do work that used to be funded by federal dollars and is no longer funded by anybody. He lost his program. The corporate media is not covering Black HIV stigma with this level of cultural specificity. The federal government is actively defunding the prevention infrastructure. The void is real, and it is being filled by people like Dr. Morrison and people like me, out of pocket and on principle.If this piece taught you something, sharpened your analysis, or gave you ammunition to use in your own community, I’m asking you to convert that value into material supportEducation Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.CITED SOURCESMorrison, Dontá. Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church. 2025.U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. “The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).” state.gov/pepfar.Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). “The Trump Administration’s Foreign Aid Review: Status of PEPFAR.” October 2025.CNN. “The Trump administration is trying to divert $2 billion in global health funding to pay for USAID shutdown.” May 2026.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Health Disparities in Black or African American People” and “HIV Among African Americans” fact sheets.amfAR (Foundation for AIDS Research) and UNAIDS. Reports on PEPFAR Stop Work Order Impact, 2025–2026.The Leaflet. “How US Funding Cuts Created a Double Threat to HIV Progress in Africa.” April 2026.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. This is a public episode. 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Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On May 4, 2026, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. According to reporting, they put up at least $10 million to sponsor the event, with some sources citing the figure as high as $20 million. The night raised a record $42 million for the Costume Institute, the highest fundraising total in the gala’s history, with tech money powering most of it. This was the first year a tech figure served as lead sponsor, and the first year multiple major tech companies bought tables at the same event.Now I want y’all to sit with that. Sit with the choreography of it. A man whose company is named in lawsuits, congressional reports, and human rights investigations from Tel Aviv to Tukwila buys himself a seat at the table where the cultural elite gathers to celebrate themselves, and the press treats it like fashion week. Mark Ruffalo collaborated on a viral video, Olivia Rodrigo skipped her usual carpet, and an organized direct action group projected images onto Bezos’ own $120 million Madison Square Park condo. The protest centered Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker living paycheck to paycheck while battling cancer. They called the contraprogramming the Ball Without Billionaires. That’s the smoke that should be everywhere. But the algorithm decided dresses were more important.Two things can be true. Lauren Sánchez can wear Schiaparelli inspired by Madame X and that be aesthetically interesting AND the entire spectacle can be obscene given who funded it and what that funder’s empire is doing on three continents. Both. At the same time. Y’all gotta build the muscle to hold both.Receipts: The Bezos Tax RecordNow let me give you what the Chop Up Show been built on. Receipts. Not vibes. Not feelings. Documented, reported, sourced receipts from journalists who risked their careers to put this in the public record.In 2021, ProPublica obtained over fifteen years of IRS data covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans. What they found should have ended the conversation about who is and isn’t paying their fair share in this country. Forever. According to that reporting, Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2007, and he did it again in 2011. In the year he paid zero in 2011, he was already worth an estimated $18 billion. He even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. A welfare credit. For his children. While being one of the richest men in the world.And before somebody runs in here with the “well that was a long time ago” dodge, let me hit you with the bigger picture. From 2006 to 2018, ProPublica found Bezos’ wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes. That works out to a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent on the actual growth of his fortune. ProPublica’s analysis of the 2014 to 2018 window pegged his “true tax rate” at 0.98 percent. Less than one percent. And during that same period, the typical American household in his age bracket paid more in taxes than they accumulated in wealth.Let me say that one more time for the folks in the back. Y’all are paying taxes faster than y’all are building wealth, while Bezos is building wealth faster than the federal government can tax it. That is not a glitch in the system. That IS the system.How the Trick Works: The “Buy, Borrow, Die” PlaybookNow somebody finna ask, “Well how is this legal?” And that’s the right question. Because the legality is the indictment. The strategy has a name in tax policy circles. It’s called “buy, borrow, die,” and it works like this.Step one, BUY. Bezos kept his Amazon salary at roughly $80,000 per year for two decades. He told the New York Times he asked the compensation committee not to give him any comp because he would have “felt icky” about it. Translation, taking salary triggers ordinary income tax. Holding stock does not. So he held stock. The federal government can’t tax wealth that hasn’t been converted to income.Step two, BORROW. When he needs to fund a yacht, a rocket company, a Madison Square Park penthouse, or a Met Gala sponsorship, he doesn’t sell his stock and trigger capital gains. He borrows against it. Loans are not income. The IRS doesn’t tax loans. Wall Street will hand a man like Bezos credit at rates a school teacher trying to fix her transmission cannot dream of. He lives like a king and pays like a peasant.Step three, DIE. Under current US tax law, when stock is passed to heirs at death, the cost basis steps up to the value at the time of death. Decades of unrealized gains, untaxed during his lifetime, get wiped clean for his children. The dynastic wealth gets passed down with the federal tax bill effectively zeroed out.That is the loophole. That is how a man worth roughly $239 billion as of late 2025 has spent multiple years paying nothing while a single mother working at a Whole Foods owned by his company gets her wages garnished if she falls behind on a $200 utility bill. Every accusation is a confession, and every time a politician calls poor people lazy while protecting this loophole, they are confessing whose interests they actually serve.Project Nimbus: Where Cloud Computing Meets GenocideNow let’s talk about where some of that untaxed wealth goes. Because Bezos isn’t hoarding $239 billion under a mattress. He’s deploying it. And one of the places it’s deployed is a contract called Project Nimbus.In 2021, Amazon and Google jointly signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services to Israeli government agencies, including the Ministry of Defense and the IDF. According to investigative reporting from +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian published in late 2025 and early 2026, leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents revealed extraordinary contractual conditions Israel imposed on the two American tech giants, including obligations to secretly notify Israeli officials if foreign courts ordered the companies to hand over data, and a clause barring Google and Amazon from limiting or revoking Israeli government access even when Israeli conduct conflicted with the companies’ own policies. Microsoft reportedly competed for the same contract and refused those demands. Google and Amazon said yes.Internal Israeli procurement documents reportedly mandate that Israeli defense manufacturers, including Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, purchase cloud services from Amazon and Google. That means the technical infrastructure underwriting the surveillance, targeting, and data analysis used during what United Nations experts and multiple governments have called a genocide in Gaza is running, in part, on AWS servers. Servers funded with money the federal government did not collect because Bezos’ effective tax rate is functionally a rounding error.Inside Amazon, over 300 workers signed an internal letter calling on CEO Andy Jassy to end the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus. They were ignored. Inside Google, more than 90 workers signed a similar letter, and dozens were fired for sit-in protests. They were ignored. The fungibility of Black and Brown life across the diaspora is not theoretical. Wilderson and Hartman have been telling us for decades that the structures built to render certain bodies disposable do not stay confined to one group. Project Nimbus is the contract receipt for that thesis.Amazon Is Slavery Fast Forward 400 YearsA speaker at the Ball Without Billionaires action put it plainly. Amazon is slavery fast forward 400 years. The pickers in the warehouse, that’s the actual job title for the workers who fill the boxes, are running the same productivity logic our ancestors ran in cotton fields. Quotas. Surveillance. Bodies as units of output. Bathroom breaks regulated to the second. Now with robots, metrics, data dashboards, and algorithmic write-ups, but the core process is unchanged.And let’s talk about the union fight, because this is where the rubber meets the road. Workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island voted to unionize in April 2022 with the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon refused to bargain. They challenged the election. They tied it up in court. As of recent reporting, it took over 1,500 days for the National Labor Relations Board to issue a bargaining order. Four years. Four years a billionaire used the legal system, funded in large part by tax revenue he didn’t pay, to stall the constitutional right of workers to collectively bargain. The same Bezos who can write a $20 million check for a costume gala in one night cannot find his way to a bargaining table in four years. That is not an oversight. That is strategy.Where is the smoke for that? Where is the Wall Street Journal opinion page? Where is the cable news outrage cycle? Y’all save that energy for women on TANF buying a birthday cake.ICE, Ring, and the Surveillance ArchitectureThen there’s the surveillance side of the empire. Amazon Web Services hosts the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology system, known as HART, which is designed to store biometric data including iris scans, voiceprints, palmprints, and in some cases DNA samples on hundreds of millions of people. AWS also provides technical infrastructure to Palantir, a Peter Thiel company that contracts directly with ICE. Documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight showed Amazon executives meeting with ICE officials in 2018 to pitch Rekognition, the company’s facial recognition product, for immigration enforcement uses.In late 2025 and early 2026, public scrutiny intensified over a planned partnership between Amazon’s Ring and Flock Safety, a license-plate-reader company whose data is widely accessible to ICE through local law enforcement partners. After weeks of organized backlash, including a viral Super Bowl ad controversy and public pressure from Senator Ron Wyden’s office, Ring announced in February 2026 that it was canceling the planned Flock integration. Pressure works. Organizing works. The same playbook your grandparents used in Montgomery still works. They just don’t want you to know it does.Two things can be true. Ring may not have a direct ICE contract, AND the architecture Amazon has built creates downstream surveillance access that immigration authorities have repeatedly tapped through local police partnerships. Both. At the same time. Don’t let the corporate denial be the end of the analysis. Follow the data trail.Conservative Contradictions and Welfare Queens The welfare queen is one of the most successful pieces of political fiction this country ever produced. Reagan workshopped her on the 1976 campaign trail using a real woman named Linda Taylor — who was actually a serial criminal, not a typical aid recipient — and turned her into a racialized archetype that has shaped American policy for fifty years. The image was always coded: the Cadillac, the furs, the multiple aliases, the implication that she was why your paycheck wasn't stretching. And it worked. It justified gutting AFDC, it built the bipartisan consensus for the 1996 welfare reform bill, and it trained a generation of voters to read "government assistance" as Black, female, and undeserving. But here's where the contradiction snaps the whole frame in half. The actual welfare queen is Jeff Bezos. The actual welfare queen is Elon Musk taking $38 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax credits across his companies, by Washington Post reporting. The actual welfare queens are the Walton heirs, whose Walmart workforce relies on so much SNAP and Medicaid that taxpayers effectively subsidize their poverty wages to the tune of billions a year. We've got billionaires paying zero in federal income tax in multiple documented years, sitting on stepped-up basis loopholes that wipe out lifetimes of capital gains for their children, while their companies harvest federal contracts, municipal tax breaks, and HQ2-style bidding wars where cities literally hand them public money to show up. That is welfare. That is government transfer to private benefit. That is the textbook definition. But y'all won't call it that, because the racial coding of the original trope did its job — it taught America to see a Black woman with a grocery cart as a threat to the republic and a white man with a rocket company as an innovator. Every accusation is a confession. When politicians scream about "dependency" while protecting Bezos's tax architecture, they're not describing the poor. They're describing themselves and the class they serve. The welfare queen was never on the corner. She's been at Davos this whole time. Let that marinate.The Billionaire Welfare ClassThe phrase I keep using on the show, and I’m gonna keep using it because it’s accurate, is the billionaire welfare class. These are people whose entire economic position is subsidized by the public. By tax breaks they wrote. By infrastructure they didn’t build. By labor they don’t pay fairly. By legal systems funded by taxpayers and weaponized against critics. By federal contracts they then turn around and use to surveil the very public that funded them.Bezos has reportedly donated $10 million-plus to a super PAC. He poured millions into a documentary project. He just dropped at least $10 million, possibly $20 million, on a single night of fashion. None of those numbers, taken individually, would close out his federal tax liability if it were calculated on his actual wealth growth. But because the tax code is structured to count income, not wealth, and because most of his wealth is held as unrealized stock gains, the bill never comes due. He gets to be a philanthropist with money that should have been a public investment. He gets to play patron of the arts with revenue the IRS never saw.That is welfare. That is government transfer. That is the public subsidizing the private. Y’all just been trained not to call it that when the recipient wears a suit instead of a hoodie.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Liberalism Is a Hell of a DrugI’m gonna keep saying it. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. The liberal framework cannot indict Bezos because it cannot indict the system that produced him. So it produces takes about “smart philanthropy” and “innovation” and “what would we do without Amazon Prime.” It produces Anna Wintour calling Lauren Sánchez a “wonderful asset.” It produces “well at least he’s giving back.”SNCC was not liberal. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was not liberal. Baldwin was not a liberal, no matter how many times Aaron Sorkin tried to make him one. Black Leftism, rooted in the Black radical tradition, in racial capitalism analysis from Cedric Robinson, in the political economy work of Walter Rodney, in the structural critiques of Angela Davis and the late bell hooks, has always been able to name what liberalism cannot. Capitalism is the engine. Antiblackness is the lubricant. The billionaire is a logical output, not a glitch. You cannot reform your way to an economy that does not produce a Jeff Bezos. You have to dismantle the conditions that make him possible.Huey said it best, and I’m gonna anchor every piece I write on billionaires with this until I draw my last breath. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.” Conscious Lee’s remix for 2026, the first lesson y’all must learn is that this system is doomed. Unless y’all understand that, y’all will keep mistaking spectacle for substance, and y’all will keep clapping for our exploiters.Where We Go From HereI am not interested in moralizing at you. Moralizing is what liberals do when they don’t have a strategy. I am interested in equipping you. So here’s where we go.Number one, change the language. Stop saying “tax avoidance” when you mean wealth extraction. Stop saying “philanthropy” when you mean reputation laundering. Start using “billionaire welfare class” in every conversation, on every platform, in every comment thread. Language structures politics. Reclaim the words.Number two, support the workers actually fighting Amazon. The Amazon Labor Union, the Teamsters’ organizing efforts at delivery stations, and the Make Amazon Pay coalition are doing the slow, unglamorous work of class struggle. They need money, bodies at picket lines, and amplification. Not just tweets. Show up.Number three, demand a wealth tax, a billionaire minimum tax, and the closure of the stepped-up basis loophole. The Biden administration proposed taxing unrealized gains at death, and the proposal died because the donor class killed it. Resurrect it. Make every congressional candidate who wants your vote answer for it. On record. In writing. Hold them to it.Number four, divest. Where you can, divest. Cancel Prime if you can survive without it. Buy from local Black-owned and worker-owned businesses where possible. Pressure your university, your union pension, your city council, to divest from companies tied to Project Nimbus and surveillance contracts. The boycott is not a tactic of the past. It worked in Montgomery, it worked in Soweto, it works now.Number five, build the political analysis. Read Wilderson. Read Hartman. Read Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism.” Read “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Read Charles Mills’ “The Racial Contract.” Listen to your elders, the ones who lived through COINTELPRO and can tell you what it looks like when a state surveils its own people on behalf of capital. Education is elevation. The information is here. The question is whether you’re going to engage it or keep doom scrolling.ClosingMary Hill is 72 years old. She works in an Amazon warehouse. She has cancer. She lives paycheck to paycheck. Jeff Bezos earns, by some calculations, roughly $8 million per hour. He paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. He just dropped up to $20 million on a costume party in the same week leaked documents revealed his company’s contractual entanglement with a state actively conducting genocide. He has used the legal system, funded by taxpayers, to delay a union contract for over four years.And y’all wanna talk about who’s lazy. Y’all wanna lecture Black women about respectability. Y’all wanna ask why people are angry. This is why people are angry. This is why I do this work. This is why The Chop Up Show keeps running these receipts even when the algorithm doesn’t reward it. Because somebody has to keep saying it out loud until enough of us refuse to look away.Let that marinate. Then come back tomorrow ready to organize.SUPPORT INDEPENDENT BLACK POLITICAL EDUCATIONI do this work without corporate sponsors. No billionaire foundations bankroll The Chop Up Show. No legacy media outlet writes my checks. The reason I can sit here and run receipts on a man worth $239 billion is because I don’t answer to a man worth $239 billion. That independence is paid for by you.When you become a paid subscriber to Education Is Elevation, you are doing more than supporting a writer. You are funding the kind of long-form, sourced, unflinching political analysis that public education media used to produce before the field collapsed. You are keeping a Black-led, debate-trained, Pan-Africanist research practice alive in a moment when billionaires are buying newsrooms and gutting them in real time. The Washington Post, owned by the same Bezos this article is about, just laid off roughly one-third of its staff. That void doesn’t fill itself. We fill it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways1. Bezos has paid $0 in federal income tax in multiple documented years.According to ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on a leaked trove of IRS records, Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. In 2011, while worth an estimated $18 billion, he even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. This is not speculation. It is documented from federal records.2. His real, wealth-adjusted tax rate is roughly 1 percent.ProPublica’s analysis of Bezos’ 2014 to 2018 tax record found a “true tax rate” of 0.98 percent, calculated against the actual growth of his wealth. From 2006 to 2018, his wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in federal taxes, a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent.3. $20 million for a Met Gala, $1.2 billion for Project Nimbus.Reports place Bezos’ sponsorship of the 2026 Met Gala at $10 million to $20 million. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google jointly hold a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government providing cloud and AI services tied to military operations in Gaza. The math of his discretionary spending tells the moral story.4. Amazon’s union-busting cost workers more than 1,500 days.Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility unionized in 2022 and waited over four years for a National Labor Relations Board bargaining order against Amazon’s refusal to negotiate. The same legal system that protects billionaires from taxes is used to delay workers from contracts.5. This is welfare. Name it.Tax loopholes, federal contracts, public infrastructure, and legal subsidies make up an entire ecosystem of public support for private billionaire wealth. The phrase “billionaire welfare class” is not rhetorical flourish. It is descriptive accuracy. Use it.RELEVANT RECIEPTS Eisinger, J., Ernsthausen, J., & Kiel, P. (2021, June 8). The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax. ProPublica.Frankel, T. C. (2021, June 9). IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report says. The Washington Post.Americans for Tax Fairness. (2021). Summary of ProPublica’s Report on Billionaire Tax Dodgers.Loewenstein, A., Berger, Y., et al. (2026, February 4). Inside Israel’s deal with Google and Amazon. +972 Magazine / Local Call / The Guardian.Democracy Now. (2025, October 31). Report: Google and Amazon Violated Their Own Terms of Service in Israel’s $1.2 Billion “Project Nimbus” Deal.Conger, K., & Roose, K. (n.d.). Project Nimbus. Wikipedia overview and aggregated reporting.American Civil Liberties Union. (2018, October). Amazon Met With ICE Officials to Market Its Facial Recognition Product.McGee, A. / Snopes / CNN Business. (2026, January–February). Coverage of the Ring × Flock partnership and its cancellation. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Y’all already know how this goes. Somebody with a microphone, a Black face, and a national platform spends years telling us he’s one of us, then turns around and starts auditioning for the very people who built this country on our backs. That’s where we are with Stephen A. Smith. And if we don’t break this down with receipts, the algorithm is gonna do what it always does — flatten the contradiction and serve us the polished version.Research over MeSearch. Let me lay it out.In November 2024, Stephen A. Smith voted for Kamala Harris. By January 2025 — barely two months later — he was sitting on Bill Maher’s couch calling himself and every other Harris voter a “damn fool” for it. Not critiquing the campaign. Not pushing the party to do better. Calling Black voters who showed up for the Black woman on the ticket fools. Then he went on Sage Steele’s show in March 2026 and confirmed it again — yeah, he regrets that vote. Sage Steele. The same Sage Steele who built her brand attacking Black women like Serena Williams for talking about race. Two things can be true: a person can have legitimate grievances with the Democratic Party AND choose to air those grievances exclusively on platforms that exist to demonize Black political consciousness. Stephen A. is choosing.In May 2025, when Donald Trump publicly said he’d “love to see” Stephen A. run for president, Smith said he was “aghast.” Then he went on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and admitted there’s “a bit of flattery” in being praised by “the man who holds the highest office in the land.” When Tapper pressed him on whether he could actually win, Smith said, “You’re damn right.” Every accusation is a confession. And every aw-shucks denial is a confession too. By February 2026, he’s on The Hill telling reporters he’s a “fiscal conservative” who’s “social liberal” — the exact language Black conservatives have used for forty years to launder right-wing economics through cultural identity. He says he supports “strong borders.” He says he’s “disgusted” with the left. He says any “construction worker” could beat the Democrats. The man is running. He just wants us to act surprised when he announces.Now here’s where the pro-Black branding starts cracking. In October 2025, Smith devoted a full episode of his SiriusXM show Straight Shooter to attacking Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett — a Black woman in Congress doing the actual work of holding this administration accountable. He called her communication style “street verbiage.” He questioned whether her “rhetoric for the streets” was “going to get you anywhere.” Where is the smoke for Trump? Where is the smoke for Stephen Miller? Where is the smoke for Russell Vought? Stephen A. has a multi-million-dollar microphone and he aims it at a Black woman congresswoman before he aims it at the architects of the regime she’s fighting. That’s not analysis. That’s not even disagreement. That’s the same coded language white folks have been using on outspoken Black women since Ida B. Wells. The only difference is now it’s coming out a Black man’s mouth on a Sirius XM show.And he only apologized after Trump himself called Crockett “a very low IQ person.” Read that again. Stephen A. Smith didn’t pull back because he reflected on what he said. He pulled back because Trump used Stephen A.’s framing to attack a Black woman, and Stephen A. realized — out loud, on tape — that he’d handed the president ammunition. He said, “with Trump feeding into that nonsense, giving him fodder or ammunition, to continue to go out there and talk about our Black women that way… I don’t want to be associated with nothing like that.” Cool. But the question Crockett herself asked when she finally responded on TSR Live in October 2025 cuts to the bone — “If you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?” Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but careerism is the strongest dose.And Crockett ain’t a one-off. Smith has spent the better part of a decade making his money diminishing Black resistance. In 2016, when Colin Kaepernick told reporters he didn’t vote, Stephen A. went on First Take and called Kaep “absolutely irrelevant.” Not the system that blackballed him. Not the league that stole his career. The Black man kneeling. In 2019, when Kaepernick showed up to that staged NFL workout in a Kunta Kinte t-shirt, Stephen A. lost his entire mind on air. He kept telling us he understood the protest — but every time Kaep moved out of the box Stephen A. drew for him, Stephen A. punished him for it on national television. In 2025, after Serena Williams danced at Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, Stephen A. used his platform to lecture her on her marriage to Alexis Ohanian. A grown Black woman, the most decorated tennis player of all time, dancing at a Black cultural moment, and he found a way to make it about her supposed disrespect to her husband. Lost in the sauce.When Shucking and Jiving Goes WrongNow connect this to the larger pattern. In May 2025, on NewsNation’s Cuomo show, Smith argued Black voters had “played the role of suckers” for the Democratic Party for sixty years. In March 2026, on his Straight Shooter podcast, he told us, “I ain’t giving you anything” — meaning his vote — and pivoted to the line that Democrats “focus on 1% of the population” instead of Black folks. We need to be precise about what he’s doing here. The 1% he’s talking about is trans people. He’s running the same divide-and-conquer playbook the right has been running since the Southern Strategy — pit one marginalized community against another, and reframe Black liberation as something that happens at the expense of trans liberation, immigrant liberation, queer liberation. Kimberlé Crenshaw been told us this is how it works. Cedric Robinson been told us racial capitalism profits from these splits. And Stephen A. is up on Fox News-adjacent platforms running it for the cameras.Two things can be true. The Democratic Party has earned every ounce of Black skepticism. Black voters absolutely should demand more than fear-mongering and lip service. Cory Booker’s voting record told us that. The Voting Rights Act dying in front of our eyes under a Roberts Court told us that. But there is a difference between critiquing a party from inside the community to push it left, and critiquing a party on conservative platforms to push the community right. SNCC critiqued the Democrats. Bayard Rustin critiqued the Democrats. Fannie Lou Hamer critiqued the Democrats from the floor of the 1964 Democratic National Convention. None of them were on Bill Maher complaining about “woke culture.” None of them were sitting next to Bill O’Reilly taking a phone call from Donald Trump. The destination matters. The audience matters. The platform matters.This is where the responsibility piece comes in, and it’s the part nobody wants to hear. Black platforms — and Stephen A. Smith is the most-watched Black voice in American sports media — carry a structural responsibility that white platforms simply do not. When ESPN signs you to a $100 million extension in 2025 and gives you a daily show, a primetime show, a podcast, and a guest chair on every cable news network in the country, you are not just “giving your opinion.” You are setting the terms of debate inside Black households. You are shaping what young Black boys think it means to be a successful Black man with a microphone. You are deciding which Black women get critiqued and which white men get a pass. The influence is the product. ESPN didn’t pay him $100 million for his takes on the Knicks.Here’s the framework. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism teaches us that racial capitalism doesn’t just exploit Black labor — it commodifies Black voice. Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery shows us how the structures of unfreedom shape what gets rewarded in Black public life: Black voices that confirm white anxieties get amplified, Black voices that disrupt them get marginalized. Frank Wilderson’s work on antiblackness as a structuring logic asks us why a Black man with national reach reflexively reaches for Black women and Black resistance figures as the targets of his critique, instead of the white power structure that funds his check. The system isn’t broken. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do. And Stephen A. is being paid handsomely to play his position inside it.The responsibility on Black platforms is not to be uncritical of Black politicians or Black movements. The responsibility is to do that critique with the receipts, with the historical context, and with an awareness of who else is in the room. When Stephen A. Smith says “I want Democrats to earn the Black vote” on Fox News-adjacent platforms in 2026, the audience hearing that line is not Black voters running back to a more progressive politics. The audience is white moderates and Black conservatives who use his words as cover to suppress Black turnout, gut the Voting Rights Act, and redraw districts to dilute Black political power. The Supreme Court just gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. Republicans are mid-decade gerrymandering five states right now. And the loudest Black voice in sports media is on national television telling Black folks the Democrats took us for granted. Whose interest does that actually serve?We can hold this up against the standard a Cornel West or a Ta-Nehisi Coates would hold themselves to. We can hold this up against the standard Killer Mike held when he sat across from Bernie Sanders. We can hold this up against the standard Angela Davis still holds at 82 years old. The receipts are clear. Stephen A. Smith built his platform on the labor of Black athletes, the suffering of Black communities, and the loyalty of a Black audience that took him seriously when he said he was one of us. Now that the platform is built, he’s renting it out to the highest bidder — and the highest bidder right now is Trump’s America.I’m not telling you to cancel Stephen A. Smith. Cancel culture ain’t the move and it ain’t the strategy. What I am telling you is this: when somebody on a Black platform starts telling you that the people fighting for your liberation are actually the people standing in the way of your liberation, run the receipts. Ask who’s paying. Ask who’s clapping. Ask what the platform looks like in five years if everybody on it talks the way the loudest one talks. Ask whether the analysis lines up with the material conditions of Black life — Black maternal mortality, Black wealth gap, Black voter suppression, Black incarceration — or whether the analysis exists to make white moderates comfortable while we get rolled.Stephen A. Smith says he might run for president in 2028. He says elected officials and billionaires have encouraged him. He polled at 2% in a 2025 Democratic primary survey. He wants us to believe this is organic. It is not. It is the same playbook that gave us Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Byron Donalds, and every other Black face used to legitimize a politics that treats Black liberation as a niche concern. The faces change. The function doesn’t.Where is the smoke for the people doing the actual harm? Where is the receipts-based critique of the donors funding the gerrymandering? Where is the half-hour monologue on the Heritage Foundation’s role in Project 2025? Where is the smoke for the white owners who blackballed Kaepernick, the white prosecutors who let R. Kelly’s enablers walk, the white politicians who built the prison pipeline? When Stephen A. saves his loudest energy for Black women in Congress and his softest energy for the president of the United States, the contradiction is the message.Y’all be safe. Stay informed. Read your Robinson. Read your Hartman. Read your Crenshaw. And when somebody with a microphone tells you who the enemy is, always — always — check who signs the back of their check.Why Black Platforms Have a ResponsibilityThis is the framing paragraph the user requested — drop-in ready for newsletter pull-quote, post header, or social card.Black platforms carry a responsibility white platforms do not, and the math on that is structural, not moral. When a Black voice with national reach speaks into a Black audience, the trust being extended is intimate — Black folks come to Black voices because we are exhausted from being misrepresented everywhere else. That trust is not free. ESPN paid Stephen A. Smith a reported $100 million in 2025 because the influence is the product, not because his Knicks takes are remarkable. Cedric Robinson taught us that racial capitalism commodifies Black voice the same way it commodifies Black labor — the system pays handsomely for the Black voices that confirm what power already wants said, and it marginalizes the ones that disrupt. Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery shows up in who gets the $100 million extension and who gets blackballed out the league. So when the loudest Black voice in American sports media uses that platform to redirect Black political grievance toward Democrats and away from the architects of voter suppression, that is not opinion. That is editorial cover. The responsibility is not to be uncritical of Black politicians or Black movements — SNCC, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Bayard Rustin all critiqued the Democrats. The responsibility is to do that critique with receipts, with historical context, and with full awareness of who else is in the room when you speak. The destination matters. The audience matters. The platform matters. Pro-Black branding is not a substitute for pro-Black behavior, and a Black audience that has been lied to from the outside our entire lives deserves Black platforms that don’t replicate the lie from the inside.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key TakeawaysTakeaway 1. Stephen A. Smith voted for Kamala Harris in November 2024, called himself a “damn fool” for it on Bill Maher in January 2025, and confirmed his regret again on Sage Steele’s show in March 2026. Two months between vote and public regret. That’s not political evolution — that’s a pivot, executed on the platforms most hostile to Black political power.Takeaway 2. Smith’s framing of Democrats as the party that “forgot” Black voters and is “focused on 1% of the population” (his March 2026 Straight Shooter language) maps directly onto the right’s divide-and-conquer playbook. He’s not pushing Democrats left — he’s running cover for the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, immigrants, and other marginalized communities, with Black grievance as the wedge.Takeaway 3. His pattern of punching down on Black women — Megan Thee Stallion (May 2025 breakup commentary), Serena Williams (after Kendrick’s 2025 halftime show), Jasmine Crockett (October 2025 “street verbiage” comments) — is not coincidence. It is the through-line. He apologized to Crockett only after Trump used his framing to attack her, which Crockett herself called out on TSR Live: “If you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?”Takeaway 4. Trump publicly endorsed Smith for president in May 2025 on NewsNation. Smith called himself “aghast” then went on CNN and admitted he was flattered, said he could win, and by February 2026 was openly calling himself a “fiscal conservative.” He polled at 2% in a 2025 Democratic primary survey. He has never held office. The trajectory is not subtle.Takeaway 5. Black platforms carry structural responsibility because of structural reach. ESPN signed Smith to a $100 million extension in 2025. He sets the terms of debate in Black sports media every single morning. When the loudest Black voice in American sports tells Black audiences that the Democrats took them for granted while saying nothing comparable about the architects of voter suppression, that’s not opinion — that’s editorial cover for the people dismantling Black political power.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERIf this kind of receipts-based, framework-rooted analysis is what you come to Education is Elevation for, the way you keep it coming is by becoming a paid subscriber. This platform runs without corporate backing. No advertisers. No sponsors telling me what I can and can’t say about Stephen A. Smith, ESPN, the Democratic Party, or anybody else. The work — the research, the citations, the writing, the production — is sustained entirely by y’all. Less than 1% of folks who follow me have converted to paid, and the math on that is what it is. If you’ve gotten value from this piece, the move is simple: hit the subscribe button, lock in the paid tier, and put yourself on the side of independent Black analysis that doesn’t bend for the algorithm or the advertiser. Research over MeSearch. Education is Elevation. Let’s keep building.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.CITED SOURCES 1. Smith, Stephen A., interview on Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, January 24, 2025).Smith’s on-camera admission, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna and Jesse Eisenberg, that he and other Harris voters were “damn fools” for the November 2024 vote. The pivot point for the political phase of his platform.2. Smith, Stephen A., interview on The Sage Steele Show (March 2026), reported in Fox News, April 1, 2026.Smith confirms his regret for the Harris vote on Steele’s platform — a notable choice of venue, given Steele’s history of attacking Black women on race issues.3. Trump, Donald, on NewsNation Town Hall (May 2025), with Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith.Trump’s public endorsement of a Smith presidential run. The original document for the choreography of the endorsement-and-denial sequence.4. Smith, Stephen A., interview with Jake Tapper, CNN’s State of the Union (May 4, 2025).Smith’s first network response to the Trump endorsement. “There’s a bit of flattery” and “You’re damn right” he could win. The denial that wasn’t a denial.5. Smith, Stephen A., Straight Shooter podcast (October 14, 2025 episode), reported across BET, The Hill, The Grio, Black Enterprise, Ebony, and TheRoot, October 14–November 1, 2025.The original Crockett “street verbiage” comments. Read the BET and TheRoot coverage together for the most complete community response.6. Smith, Stephen A., apology to Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Straight Shooter (October 22, 2025).The apology. Smith’s own framing — that Trump was using his words as “fodder” — confirms the apology was reactive to the political consequences, not the original critique.7. Crockett, Jasmine, interview on TSR Live (The Shade Room, October 30, 2025).Crockett’s response in her own words. The “if you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?” question is the core analytic frame for the entire Smith pattern.8. Smith, Stephen A., interviews with The Hill (February 13, 2026) and Yahoo Sports (February 14, 2026).The “fiscal conservative, social liberal” framing, the 2028 confirmation, the “strong borders” line. Together these establish the political identity Smith is building heading into 2028.9. Smith, Stephen A., interview on NewsNation’s CUOMO (May 2025).The “played the role of suckers” framing of Black voters. Establishes the rhetorical move of redirecting Black political grievance toward Democrats and away from the structural drivers of Black disenfranchisement.10. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983).Foundational text for understanding how racial capitalism commodifies Black voice and labor. The framework for analyzing what ESPN’s $100M contract is actually purchasing.11. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007); see also “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2002).The afterlife of slavery as analytic framework — useful for understanding which Black voices get amplified in mass media and which get blackballed. The Kaepernick / Stephen A. asymmetry lives inside this analysis.12. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989); “Mapping the Margins,” Stanford Law Review (1991).Intersectionality as the frame that exposes the “1% of the population” rhetorical move for what it is — a divide-and-conquer device that depends on pretending Black communities and trans communities don’t overlap.13. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010); Afropessimism (2020).Antiblackness as a structuring logic. The framework for analyzing why a Black man with $100M in platform reach reflexively reaches for Black women and Black resistance figures as targets of his loudest critique.14. Mallory, Tamika; Rye, Angela; Gillum, Andrew; Cross, Tiffany — public commentary on Native Land Pod and across Instagram, October 2025. This is a public episode. 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Thank you Great Society’s “New Frontier”, Selda, Bob Barnett, Jody Medina Precit, Sonja Kuhn, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Education is elevation, y’all. Let me set the table real quick before I get into this drama, this mess.I came across a clip of Candace Owens and Laura Loomer going back and forth, and before we even unpack this little circus, I want y’all to feel me on the most important news of the day. What happened yesterday is really showing how they trying to take us back to the plantation, take us back to Jim Crow. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what started to remove the legal machinery that ensured segregation throughout the South. In 1964, the year before the bill passed, only about 7% of Black folks were registered to vote down South. A year after passage, in 1966, we saw over 50% of Black folks down South registered to vote. That’s what’s at stake when courts and politicians start chipping at voting rights again. That’s the real story. And while the real story is unfolding, we got these MAGA tokens out here doing the work of distraction for free.Now let me get into Candace Owens and Laura Loomer. Trigger warning, for the folks in the back: it’s about to get real racist. It’s about to get real anti-Black. But it’s gonna make sense in a minute.What Loomer Said, and Why It MattersLaura Loomer went on a tirade where she literally called Candace Owens a “nappy-headed Black b***h” and a “resentful ghetto Black b***h.” She mocked Candace’s diction. She mocked Candace’s degrees. She accused Candace of being jealous of pretty white blonde girls and trying to steal their men in Greenwich, Connecticut. Then she pivoted to telling y’all she ain’t a racist person. Feel me?Let that marinate. Loomer used textbook racism, textbook anti-Blackness, textbook white supremacist rhetoric, and capped it off with the disclaimer that she’s just not a racist. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, that is the whole MAGA brand in one sentence. The performance of racial innocence right after the racist performance.But here’s the part that should land harder than the slurs: Loomer was able to force the administration’s hand. She went on this unhinged racist rant and then made a demand that the President of the United States issue a Truth Social post supporting her. And he did. Reporting indicates Susie Wiles was staunchly opposed and said this was a very bad idea, but Trump’s team conceded anyway. That is the question that should haunt every conservative reading this: why did Donald Trump concede to a lunatic? Owens herself has floated the rumor — and yes, even she admits it’s just a rumor — that Loomer has something on Trump tied to relations she allegedly had with him on Air Force One years ago. I’ll be real with y’all: Candace, Laura, Donald, all three of y’all are full of the same stuff they flush down toilets, so the credibility argument from any of them is losing on me. My grandfather always told me that a broken clock gets it right twice a day. In these days, maybe you change your batteries and tell time a little different. But here’s the thing about time. Time keeps score.Why I’m Not Defending CandaceLet me be crystal clear. I’m not a racist person. I don’t hate Black people. And I’m calling Candace Owens out for the same reason I’m calling Laura Loomer out: when y’all try to act like people are not racist, it always blows my mind that Black conservatives can only understand racism when it’s put on their own body. A lot of y’all claim to be Christians, but the way you come to understand racism is through a selfishness that is not Christ-like.The exact language Laura Loomer is using on Candace Owens right now is the exact stuff Candace Owens thought was cool and permissible when she was benefiting from it. The chastising of Black folks for not taking accountability. The lectures about Black women’s hair, Black women’s bodies, Black communities, Black culture. Candace was at the front of that line for years, getting white conservative checks for it. Now she ain’t benefiting from it no more, and she’s doing her best to appeal to Black people. When she went at Erica Kirk and said Erica Kirk was doing her best Janet Jackson rendition, she was reaching for Black cultural references to climb back into the fold. Repeat me one more time, to my Black conservative free-thinking Republicans: y’all loved having y’all presence tokenized around these folks, but inevitably in a system of capitalism, tokens will always be spent.We always say tokens get spent. What we’re seeing with the way these Republicans are doing y’all, Black Republicans, is that y’all were always already disposable. And now that a lot of y’all are trying to come back into the fold, trying to come back around Black folks, we remember what you said and what you did. Just like you was chastising the community for not taking accountability, for not taking responsibility, before you allowed back around this stuff again, you got to take responsibility and accountability for the climate you helped create.The Greenwich Bar Story Is the Whole ThesisLoomer described, in her own words, how traumatizing it was for her to go on a play date as a young blonde girl in Connecticut at the home of a wealthy white blonde girl with blue eyes. She said her mommy and daddy didn’t love her, and now she sees Erica Kirk as that white blonde girl who got everything she wanted. Then she turns around and tells a story about Candace Owens being a Black girl from the hood who used to walk into ritzy bars in Greenwich and steal the hottest white guy and ruin the popular white girl’s relationship. She said this was satisfying to Candace. So now Loomer is calling Candace a nappy-headed ghetto Black b***h with a vendetta against blonde white women, while simultaneously revealing she has a vendetta against blonde white women. That ain’t it, though.The honest read is this: a lot of y’all that got hoodwinked and bamboozled by your proximity to whiteness thought these white folks didn’t feel about you the way you said they didn’t feel about us. When chickens come home to roost, you got to embrace that chicken. Recognize that regardless of how good your diction is, how many degrees you have, how likable you try to be, at the end of the day a lot of these folks always saw you as a slur waiting to be deployed the moment you stopped being useful.Accountability Without an Escape HatchA lot of these conservatives, not even just the Black ones, a lot of these Trump devout loyalists are starting to see the writing on the wall that the same vitriol and violence Trump pushed out is now coming for them too. So they’re trying to backpedal. Nah, man.I got homeboys and family members who regret the bad actions that placed them in being incarcerated. They want to disavow the people they used to run with. The judge would tell them, yeah, that’s good you acknowledged what you did was bad and you want to disavow it, but you still got to deal with the consequences of your actions. How is it that these conservatives believe they can discursively move around the climate they created and benefited from and just say whoops, my bad? I got a cousin locked up 15 years. Whoops, my bad. He’s still in jail though. He’s still got to deal with the material reality his actions brought about.How is it that so many of these conservatives, all of a sudden right now, are trying to ask for the exact forgiveness they never wanted to give nobody else? Self-serving, man. What would Jesus do? Sault, take it with a grain of crack cocaine, okay?Don’t Let Them Sell You Jill Stein AgainWhile y’all watching the MAGA girls fight, I want to take this opportunity to redirect a different misplaced beef. Unpopular opinion: a lot of the smoke folks have for the Green Party should actually be smoked for Candace Owens and for Donald Trump supporters.In 2016, Jill Stein received about 1% of the vote. Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote. Hillary Clinton lost a bunch of Electoral College points due to states she lost. Instead of dealing with the faulty leadership of the Democratic Party, y’all want to capitulate to Jill Stein. Y’all always could see Jill Stein had no power, has no power, has never had power, would not have any power right now. You can put all the third-party candidates together in 2024, give every single one of them votes to Kamala Harris, and Kamala Harris still loses.Even if 100% of Black folks voted for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump would have still won. Over 85% of the Black community voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and there’s still certain Black people who want to chastise the Black community, telling us we’re the reason Kamala lost. Let’s focus on the numbers, man. The math don’t lie.Donald Trump was able to stack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and gut Chevron deference. Did Joe Biden stack the court? He didn’t. Did the leftists have the ability to pack the courts? No. I don’t know any offices the Green Party holds. I don’t know any positions they hold. How is it that we can blame people that are positionless for decisions made by people with positions? Facts over feelings, y’all. For some reason, feelings and emotions can become centered when they’re yours, but when they’re somebody else’s, you don’t care.On Solidarity, Disagreement, and That Plaque on My WallIt’s a bunch of people I rock with that I disagree with on this. It’s a bunch of folks who rock with me that I disagree with on this. And that is okay. The question becomes, do we have the emotional intelligence and capacity to have a crucial conversation where we vehemently disagree?It’s the reason why I got that Malcolm X standing right next to that Fannie Lou Hamer on my wall. When it comes to Black ideology, when it comes to Black position, there is always a multiplicity of how we position. Do I think Fannie Lou Hamer had the same politics as Malcolm X? Some similarities, a lot of differences. But me being able to appreciate them both is the work. We can talk about how great Assata Shakur was and then turn around and chastise Black folks for taking on the same tools of democracy you say you’re trying to defend. That contradiction is why so many of these conversations go nowhere.I’ll close with this. The Loomer-Owens feud is a Sports Center highlight reel of what racial capitalism looks like when the contract runs out. They was never colleagues. Candace was a token. Tokens get spent. Loomer is reminding her, and reminding all of us, on national air. The lesson ain’t to feel bad for Candace. The lesson is to stop sending other Black folks to that same plantation expecting a different harvest. Time keeps score. It’s keeping score on Candace, on Laura, on Donald, on every Black conservative free-thinker who thought their proximity to whiteness was a passport instead of a lease.Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch. Let that marinate.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Five Key Takeaways#1 Tokens always get spent. Candace Owens being publicly degraded by Laura Loomer with the same anti-Black language Owens defended for years is racial capitalism doing exactly what racial capitalism does. The currency of Black conservatism is acceptance, and acceptance is always conditional, always revocable, always priced in slurs.#2 Loomer’s Greenwich bar monologue accidentally tells the truth. She projected her own resentment of pretty blonde white girls onto Candace Owens, exposing that the white grievance industry runs on the same wounds it accuses Black women of having. The performance of racial innocence right after textbook anti-Blackness is the whole MAGA brand.#3 The real news is the Voting Rights Act, not the catfight. Black voter registration in the South went from roughly 7% in 1964 to over 50% by 1966 because federal machinery dismantled the legal architecture of disenfranchisement. Every modern attempt to roll that back is the through-line we should be tracking while these tokens distract us.#4 Stop misplacing the smoke. Jill Stein got 1% in 2016. Third-party candidates in 2024 combined could not have flipped the result. Even at 100% Black turnout for Kamala, Trump still wins. The faulty leadership of the Democratic Party and the Black conservatives who normalized Trumpism deserve the heat, not positionless leftists.#5 Accountability is not a vibes-based reset. My homeboys locked up for 15 years cannot vibe their way out of consequences, and neither can conservatives who built the climate they’re now trying to backpedal from. You don’t get to chastise folks for not taking responsibility and then beg for forgiveness you never gave. Time keeps score.Explicit Ask To Become A Paid SubscriberIf you read this all the way through and felt something shift, I want you to consider what just happened. You got a Black studies seminar, a voting rights primer, a media analysis, and a structural read on racial capitalism for free, with no corporate sponsor whispering in my ear about what I can and cannot say. That is rare, and it is getting rarer.Public education media is in retreat. Newsrooms with Black political analysis are being hollowed out. Universities are being defunded. Independent scholarship that explicitly refuses corporate backing is what fills the void. That is what Education is Elevation is. That is what your subscription funds.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. 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Thank you LeftieProf, Lynette, Lo Is, zink, Sherell, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I had a conversation this week with Kimba White Dupree — educator, radio host at WBOK in New Orleans, womanist, mother, lifelong New Orleanian — and we sat with something most folks won’t sit with. We talked about colorism. Not the TikTok version. Not the “light skin, dark skin” meme version. The actual structural, historical, Catholic-colonial, last-name-traceable, plantation-rooted, currency-bearing version. The version where lightness was literally legal tender.And we used New Orleans as the case study. Because if you want to understand how colorism actually works in America — not the sanitized version, not the “we all Black at the end of the day” version — you need to understand New Orleans. That city is the receipt. Feel me?Let me put you on.Racial Literacy Means Reading and Writing the SituationBefore we even get to New Orleans, let’s level-set. Most of y’all lack racial literacy. I don’t say that to insult you. I say it because we are products of an education system that does not teach us how to read race as a structure. We get taught race as a personal feeling — am I racist, are you racist, did somebody hurt my feelings — instead of race as a hierarchy with property rights, legal designations, and inherited wealth attached to it.When I asked Kimba what came to mind when I said “racial literacy,” her first words were: “white by law.”Let that marinate.She pointed out that until the 1940s, white people in this country didn’t all get to be “white.” Italians were Italians. Russians were Russians. Germans were Germans. Irish were Irish. Each group identified by country of origin. Then somewhere in the 1940s, the census, the Social Security infrastructure, and the broader project of racial consolidation pulled all those groups under one umbrella: Caucasian. White. One designation. One political coalition. One inheritance line.That’s a constructed whiteness. It got built. On purpose. To consolidate power against everybody else, especially us.Now hold that thought, because the same century where whiteness was being consolidated up north, New Orleans was running a completely different operation down in the Gulf. And that operation is where colorism in this country gets its sharpest, most documented, most legally codified form.Why New Orleans Is Different — And Why Y’all Need to Stop Treating It Like a CostumeMost folks treat New Orleans like a vacation. A weekend. A daiquiri on Bourbon Street. Beads. Beignets. Maybe Essence Fest if you fancy.But New Orleans is the uppermost part of the Caribbean.Read that again.Geographically, culturally, in terms of the Middle Passage — for most of the era of trans-Atlantic enslavement, New Orleans was the northernmost Caribbean port. We don’t think about it that way now, but we should. Because the cultural inheritance of the city — the food, the music, the language, the religion, the way race is structured — none of it makes sense if you keep trying to read New Orleans as just another American Southern city.Louisiana is Indigenous. African. French. Spanish. Haitian. And Catholic — heavily, structurally Catholic, in a country where Catholicism is a minority faith. The state has one of the largest populations of Black Catholics in the United States. Xavier University, where Kimba was sitting when we talked, is the only Black Catholic HBCU in the country.Now here is what most people don’t catch: Catholicism, in its colonial form, structures race differently than American Protestantism does. American Protestantism gave us the one-drop rule — binary, clean, brutal. Catholic colonialism gave us gradation. Quadroon. Octoroon. Mulatto. Passé blanc. A whole hierarchy of fractions. A measuring system for your distance from whiteness.And in Louisiana, those weren’t just slurs. They were on birth certificates. They were on property deeds. They were tied to inheritance, marriage law, schooling, employment, and access to capital. Kimba told me she could pull her family records right now and the word “mulatto” lives there in the official paperwork. Not as an insult. As a legal classification.That’s racial literacy. That’s understanding that the words we now treat as offensive were, in the not-too-distant past, the technical vocabulary of how the state organized human beings.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Lightness as Currency: The Plantation Economics of ColorHere’s the part that should make you uncomfortable, because it should.Kimba broke it down plain: in Louisiana, the lighter you were, the more likely you were the child of the master of the house. That wasn’t shameful gossip. That was the math. With French enslavers, Spanish enslavers, and yes, a small class of Black enslavers who bought their own family back, the gradation of skin became a record of who belonged to whom. Before genetics testing, color was the genetic test. The lighter your kin, the closer they were tied to the family that owned them.And in some cases — this is the part nobody wants to deal with — French slave owners married the women they enslaved. Which meant property. Which meant a pass-along of land, of money, of social capital. So now you’ve got generations of light-skinned families in New Orleans whose fairness isn’t coincidence. It’s an inheritance line. It’s documented. It’s traceable through last names — Bourgeois, LeBlanc, Dupree, the whole French registry.For a long time, being lighter didn’t just mean closer to white. It meant a special Black. A Black with a different relationship to property, to money, to access. The money eventually runs out across generations — but the color stays. And the color keeps spending. Because by white standards, the gradation determined who got considered “pretty.” Who got considered hireable. Who got considered marriageable. Who got considered safe.This is why Kimba can tell you: New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor. Not once. Look at the leadership of the city across decades — the political class, the business class, the social and pleasure clubs — and you will see fairness as a through-line. That’s not an accident. That’s the residue of an economy where lightness was currency.The receipts are right there.Mulatto, Creole, and the Trap of Misreading the VocabularyNow in the comments while we were live, somebody asked: why are you using “mulatto”? It’s a slur.Fair question. And here’s where racial literacy matters, because the answer isn’t a clean yes or no.Yes — in 2026, “mulatto” is broadly considered offensive, derived from a Spanish/Portuguese root tied to mules (which is exactly why people object to it; it implies hybridity, sterility, a categorical “in-between” that wasn’t fully human in the eyes of the state). I respect that critique completely.And — for Black Louisianans of a certain generation, “mulatto” appears on their actual birth certificates. It is not a slur their family hurled at them. It is the word the state used to classify them. To erase the term entirely is to erase how the state did the classifying. Kimba’s position — and I think it’s the historically honest one — is: I understand why people would have a reaction to the term, but it lives in my ancestral records. You can’t just retroactively scrub it without erasing the violence that put it there.Now — Creole. This one matters even more, because most of y’all are using it wrong.Creole is not a color.Creole is a culture.Creole is how we cook, how we worship, how we bury our dead, how we speak. Creole is gumbo and red beans on Monday and fish on Friday and the sign of the cross when you pass a cemetery. Creole is the language — French peppered with African and Spanish — that your grandparents spoke. Creole is Catholicism layered over West African spiritual practice layered over Indigenous land knowledge layered over French colonial law. It’s the amalgamation. That’s what Creole means.And here’s the part that breaks people’s brains: there are white Creoles. Yes. Real ones. Creole-by-culture white folks, mostly French-descended, who grew up in that same soup. The book Interview with the Vampire gets this right — the character Louis is a Creole, and in the novel he’s not racially unambiguous in the way the Brad Pitt casting suggested. Creole is cultural, not chromatic.But because lightness in New Orleans was so heavily concentrated among Creole-identified families, and because lightness was currency, the word got flattened in the popular imagination into a synonym for “light-skinned Black person from Louisiana.” That flattening erases the actual culture and reduces a 300-year-old cultural inheritance to a complexion. Don’t do that. Read the situation.The Hierarchy and the Hurt: Why I Won’t Let This Conversation Go Bi-DirectionalNow here’s where the conversation gets sharp, and where I’ll be honest with y’all about where I land.Me and my co-host Toya G have been going back and forth for a minute on this question: when we talk about colorism, do we talk about it as a hierarchy — light over dark, full stop — or do we talk about it as bi-directional, where everybody catches hurt?Both things are true. But they are not equally weighted.There is real hurt that light-skinned people carry. Kimba was clear about it, and I’m going to be clear about it too. Light-skinned folks get accused of acting white. Light-skinned folks get sexualized in ways that flatten them into a fetish. Light-skinned Black men in particular get their masculinity questioned — Michael Beasley just went on Shannon Sharpe’s show and broke down growing up with green eyes and long hair and having to fight constantly because brothers underestimated him. He told Shannon, “I always seen me as you. Y’all didn’t see me as you.” That’s real. That alienation is real. The hurt is real.And.Light-skinned people are still preferred within the hierarchy of race. Closer in proximity to power. Closer in proximity to privilege. Closer in proximity to the magazine covers, the leading roles, the corporate suites, the political offices. That doesn’t get erased because somebody on the lighter end of the spectrum experienced rejection or alienation. Both can be true at once.The trap of bi-directional framing — and this is where I push back on the “we all hurt the same” version of the conversation — is that it mystifies the hierarchy that produced all the hurt in the first place. There’s an analogy I keep coming back to: there are white people who experience real resentment from being positioned inside white supremacy. That hurt doesn’t negate that they are still the primary beneficiaries of the system that’s hurting them. Same logic applies inside Blackness. Lighter-skinned Black folks can carry real wounds and still occupy a structurally preferred position.The work is to hold both at the same time. Acknowledge the hurt without flattening the hierarchy. Acknowledge the hierarchy without dismissing the hurt. That’s emotional intelligence. That’s racial literacy. That’s the job.Don’t make me pick. I won’t pick. But I won’t let you pretend they’re equal either.Gender, Color, and the Megan Thee Stallion ProblemWe can’t talk about colorism without talking about how it intersects with gender, because the two systems do not operate independently. They braid together, and the braid does specific kinds of violence to specific kinds of bodies.Kimba and I got into the Klay Thompson and Megan Thee Stallion situation because it’s a perfect case study. (And before y’all come for me — yes, I know how to spell Klay Thompson now.) Megan is brown-skinned, statuesque, sexually free, financially independent, taller than most of the dudes who want to humble her, and unapologetic about all of it. She is a structural threat to a particular vision of Black femininity that demands docility, smallness, sexual restraint, and emotional service to men.And what does the culture do? The culture spends years rationalizing Tory Lanez shooting her. The culture spends years asking what she did to deserve it. The culture watches Klay step out on her and treats it like a victory lap — for him.Kimba’s read on this is sharp: a lot of dudes celebrating Klay are not celebrating Klay because they like Klay. They are celebrating because they want what Klay has. Megan being free is offensive to a lot of men because freedom in a Black woman who looks like Megan reads as insubordination. It’s not really about her morality. It’s about her autonomy. And the colorism layer underneath all of it is that a brown-skinned woman with that much autonomy doesn’t get the soft-launch protection that a fairer-skinned woman with the same autonomy might get. (Beyoncé, for all the parasocial scrutiny she gets, has been able to keep certain things private in ways Meg isn’t permitted to.)Then there’s the homoerotic shadow Kimba and I started circling. The same dudes who are loudest about “no homo” are doing the most homoerotic stuff — dropping everything to run to a homeboy, performing intense emotional labor for other men, fantasizing in public about other men’s sexual conquests. Some of that “Klay deserved better” energy is, academically, dudes wanting to be in the room with Klay. Feel me? That’s not me being cute. That’s me reading the situation.And the gender-color cocktail produces predictable patterns: dark-skinned women get desexualized or hyper-sexualized but rarely allowed to be soft. Light-skinned men get their masculinity contested. Dark-skinned men get their femininity weaponized against them in arguments — “you a b***h, you soft, you a hoe” — which reveals, by the way, that misogyny is the foundation under all of it. The first move when men want to harm another man is to feminize him. Because femininity is treated as the lower category. That’s not a colorism problem. That’s a misogyny problem. But the two systems compound.Kimba’s line on this was perfect: a lot of men don’t actually like women. They like rubbing up against women. There’s a difference.The Quadroon Ball, Plaçage, and Why Y’all Need to Read Outside the CurriculumWhen I was getting ready for this conversation, I went down a rabbit hole on something called the Quadroon Ball — 19th-century New Orleans social events where free women of color (often classified as one-quarter African descent) met wealthy white men to arrange a system of concubinage called plaçage. The wiki entries hedge — “frequently romanticized,” “likely rare or mythologized” — but the receipts in New Orleans tell a different story. This was not a myth. This was a documented practice. Women were, in effect, contracted into long-term arrangements with white men who would house them, support their children, and sometimes pass property to them, in exchange for sexual and domestic exclusivity outside of marriage.That is colorism, gender, and economics fused into a single institution. It’s a market. The currency is lightness. The product is access. The buyer is whiteness. The seller is — well, that depends on how you frame agency under coercion, which is its own conversation.And this is the same city that produced Plessy v. Ferguson. Think about that for a second. The Plessy case — the case that legalized “separate but equal” for the next sixty years — came out of a deliberate civil rights challenge organized in New Orleans. Homer Plessy was selected because he was light enough to pass; the whole point of the test case was to expose the absurdity of racial classification by having a man who was visibly white be arrested for sitting in a white train car. The Creole community in New Orleans organized that challenge. They lost in 1896. The country lived under the consequences for decades.Same city, same century, also produces the integration of McDonogh 15 — the Lower Ninth Ward elementary school where, in 1960, three Black girls (Dr. Gail Etienne, Dr. Leona Tate, and Dr. Tessie Prevost) integrated alongside Ruby Bridges’ integration of William Frantz Elementary across town. White parents at McDonogh 15 unenrolled their children en masse. Dr. Tate sat in a classroom with a teacher and no other students. White flight from the Ninth Ward to Slidell followed. The same city that mounted the most sophisticated legal challenge to segregation in 1896 was, sixty years later, the site of the most aggressive white refusal to integrate primary schools.That contradiction — Plessy and Ruby Bridges, the legal challenge and the white flight, the Quadroon Ball and the Civil Rights movement — that’s New Orleans. That’s why I keep saying the city is the receipt. It contains every contradiction American race-making produces, and it doesn’t bother to hide them.The Erasure of Southern Black CultureI’ll close with the thing that’s been gnawing at me, because I’m a Southerner and I’m tired.Right now, all over the internet, people are romanticizing the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration. The Cotton Club. Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. Jazz in Harlem. Black New York in the 1920s as the cultural high-water mark of the diaspora.That’s beautiful. That’s real. I’m not knocking it.But the birthplace of jazz is not Harlem. It’s New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton was from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong was from New Orleans. The Dew Drop Inn was in New Orleans. The artists who got celebrated in Harlem had to tour — they had to come down South and back, because Harlem alone couldn’t pay them. Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin both spent time in New Orleans; there’s a famous photo of them dancing at a New Orleans family home. The Dooky Chase restaurant had a backroom where Civil Rights organizers met because Black folks weren’t supposed to be assembling that way in public.When y’all flatten Black 1920s culture into “the Harlem Renaissance,” you erase the South. You erase the people who didn’t migrate. You erase the artists who were touring back and forth and seeding culture in both directions. You erase the fact that while Harlem was renaissance-ing, my people in Texas were trying not to get lynched, and Kimba’s people in Louisiana were inventing the music Harlem was importing.That erasure isn’t accidental either. It’s continuous with how American history erases Southern Blackness except as a setting for plantations or the Civil Rights Movement. We don’t get to be the producers of culture. We only get to be the suffering setting for culture, or the migrants who left to make culture somewhere else.I’m calling that what it is. That’s Southern erasure. And it’s something I’m going to keep beating the drum about, because the receipts are too thick for us to keep getting written out of our own story.Education Is ElevationIf you read this far, this is the part where I tell you what I always tell you. This work… this kind of writing, this kind of research, this kind of “Research over MeSearch,” does not exist without paid subscribers. I don’t take corporate money. I don’t run sponsorships that compromise the analysis. The reason I can sit with Kimba for an hour and a half on a Monday morning, run the receipts on Plessy, dig into the Quadroon Ball, push back against bi-directional framings of colorism without watering it down for an algorithm — that’s because some of y’all decided this work was worth paying for.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5. FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS* Whiteness is a coalition that got built, not a fact of nature. Italians, Russians, Germans, and Irish folks were classified by country of origin until the 1940s, when the U.S. consolidated them under “Caucasian.” Understanding whiteness as a constructed political coalition is the foundation of racial literacy.* In Louisiana, lightness was literal currency. Tied to plantation inheritance, French and Spanish colonial law, Catholic marriage practices between enslavers and enslaved women, and property pass-through. The fact that New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor is the residue of an economy that priced complexion.* Creole is a culture, not a color. It refers to the cultural amalgamation of French, Spanish, African, Indigenous, and Catholic traditions in Louisiana. There are white Creoles. There are Black Creoles. Collapsing the term into a synonym for “light-skinned” erases 300 years of cultural inheritance.* Colorism is a hierarchy, not a bi-directional grievance. Light-skinned folks carry real wounds — alienation, masculinity contestation, fetishization — and are still structurally preferred within the racial order. Both can be true. The “we all hurt the same” framing mystifies the hierarchy that produces all the hurt in the first place.* Southern Black culture gets erased in romanticized accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz was born in New Orleans, not Harlem. Plessy v. Ferguson was organized in New Orleans. Civil Rights strategy was hashed out at Dooky Chase. The continuous erasure of the South from Black cultural and intellectual history is part of how American history flattens the diaspora.Related Readings* Brown, Brandi Amara. Read All Kind of People: A Field Guide to Reading Race in the Black South (referenced as foundational reading on Southern racial reading practices).* Domínguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. Rutgers University Press, 1986.* Gould, Virginia Meacham. Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South. University of Georgia Press, 1998.* Haney López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 1996/2006.* Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.* Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Louisiana State University Press, 1992.* Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.* Medley, Keith Weldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Pelican Publishing, 2003.* Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Supreme Court just used Reconstruction-era amendments designed to protect formerly enslaved people as a weapon against voting rights protection.On April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court ruled 6-3 that creating a second majority-Black congressional district violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The very amendment that ended slavery was weaponized to erase Black representation.“So it’s racist and unconstitutional to fight against racism, huh?” That’s the question we need to sit with. Because that’s exactly what SCOTUS just ruled. And the irony is the point.The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible to undo the legal machinery that made Jim Crow possible—literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses. For 61 years, it worked. Until the Supreme Court systematically dismantled it.First they gutted Section 5 (the enforcement mechanism) in Shelby County (2013). Now they’ve rendered Section 2 (the remedy) “all but a dead letter” and they used the 14th Amendment—literally written to protect formerly enslaved people—to do it.That’s not judicial reasoning. That’s calculated inversion. And we need to call it exactly what it is.The Setup: How We Got HereIn 2021, Louisiana drew a congressional map with one majority-Black district representing one-third of the state’s population. Black voters sued, alleging it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.Federal courts agreed that the map was discriminatory.Louisiana was ordered to draw a new map by January 2024. They did. The 2024 map had two majority-Black districts. Cleo Fields—a former member of Congress—won election from the second district. The VRA worked, exactly as intended.Then a group calling themselves “non-African American voters” sued again, claiming the new map was unconstitutional because it considered race. They argued that creating a majority-Black district to remedy voting rights violations violated equal protection.The Supreme Court agreed.Let that sink in: Creating a district to remedy discrimination = unconstitutional discrimination. Accepting a map that violated the Voting Rights Act = legal. The Supreme Court turned the logic backward.The Amendment Inversion: How Reconstruction Got WeaponizedThis is where it gets dark. And it’s where Toya’s right to make the irony explicit.The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. It was designed to protect formerly enslaved people. Section 5 says “Congress shall have power to enforce...the provisions of this article.” That power was supposed to protect Black freedom.The 15th Amendment (1870) was even more explicit: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race.”For 95 years (1870-1965), the Supreme Court let those amendments sit dormant while the South used literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and violence to suppress Black voting. Then Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce what the 14th and 15th Amendments actually said.Now the Supreme Court is using the 14th Amendment—the very amendment meant to protect Black freedom—to strike down voting rights protection.Justice Alito’s opinion says “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” Sounds neutral. Sounds fair. But applied to voting rights protection, it becomes a weapon.Because it makes protecting Black voting rights look identical to suppressing them. It puts the cure and the disease on equal moral footing. And it uses the 14th Amendment—Reconstruction’s promise—to destroy it.That’s not interpretation. That’s inversion. And the irony is absolutely the point.The Machinery: What Jim Crow Left BehindHere’s what they don’t teach you in civics class: Jim Crow wasn’t just about explicit segregation signs. It was a legal machinery. The literacy tests, the poll taxes, the grandfather clauses—these were written into law.The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible to undo that machinery. Section 2 said: if a voting practice has the effect of discriminating based on race, it’s illegal. You don’t have to prove intent to discriminate—the effect is enough.That was revolutionary. Because it meant states couldn’t use neutral-sounding rules (like literacy tests) to achieve discriminatory effects (preventing Black voting).Section 2 worked. It was used to challenge maps that diluted Black voting power, practices that suppressed voting, rules that had racially disparate effects. It was the enforcement mechanism Reconstruction promised but never delivered and now the Supreme Court has gutted it.Under Callais, Section 2 is rendered nearly meaningless. The Court says states can only violate Section 2 if there’s a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” But they get to decide what counts as sufficient inference. And their standard is impossibly high.Louisiana’s map clearly had discriminatory effects—one majority-Black district for one-third of the population. But the Court’s new standard requires proving something close to explicit intent to harm. And even if you prove that, states can still use other excuses (like “protecting incumbents”) to justify their discriminatory choices.The machinery of voting suppression is back. Different language. Same effect.The Irony as the Point: They’re Using Freedom Against FreedomToya’s line hits because it exposes the fundamental contradiction: “They’re using the 14th Amendment literally to protect formerly enslaved people as a weapon against the exact protection.”The same people who cite the 14th Amendment to oppose affirmative action are now using it to oppose voting rights protection. The same amendment. Different targets. But always the outcome: Black power constrained.This is pattern-level thinking. And it’s crucial.In the 1950s, Southern states invoked “states rights” (embedded in the 10th Amendment) to defend segregation. Federal government overruled them—the 14th Amendment forbids discrimination. They lost.In the 1970s-80s, conservatives argued for “colorblindness”—the 14th Amendment doesn’t allow race-conscious remedies, even to fix discrimination. They won. Affirmative action got restricted.Now they’re using the same “colorblindness” standard to strike down voting rights protection. The 14th Amendment doesn’t allow race-conscious voting remedies, even to fix voting discrimination.Same amendment. Same “neutral” principle. Same outcome: Black power reduced.The irony is that they’re weaponizing the amendment that was supposed to protect Black freedom. And they’re doing it by claiming neutrality. That’s the con.The Map Reality: What Erasure Looks LikeLouisiana has roughly one-third Black population. Under the two-district map, two of six congressional seats would be majority-Black. That’s proportional representation.Under the one-district map that Callais upholds, one of six seats is majority-Black. That’s 17% representation for 33% population. That’s deliberate dilution.And now Callais makes it legal.“Just look at this current map right now and look at the plausible scenario. Look at how much erasure is happening to the black majority districts,” Toya says. That’s what we need to see. Not abstract constitutional law. Real maps. Real districts. Real erasure.Nearly half of all Black-majority state legislative districts in the South are now vulnerable under Callais logic. That’s state representatives and state senators—the people who control education funding, healthcare policy, criminal justice budgets at the state level.The erasure cascades. Congressional districts disappear. State legislative districts disappear. Political power concentrated in fewer hands. Resources flow to where power is. Black communities lose both electoral voice and institutional leverage for resource demands.The Voter Registration Play: The Work Outside CourtsHere’s the crucial move Toya makes: “We’re signing a voter registration drive. We have to get everybody in Harlem registered. Not as Democrats or Republicans, but registered.”This is the strategic clarity we need.The Supreme Court can strike down districts. It can’t strike down voters. And voters are what actually elect people.Cleo Fields got elected because Black voters voted. Not because courts ordered it. And the Supreme Court can’t unvote that. It can redraw the district. But if voters are organized, mobilized, and registered across multiple districts, they still have power.This is what it means to build power outside the court system. Courts are unreliable. They’ve made that clear. But voter registration, voter mobilization, voter organization… that’s infrastructure that courts can’t eliminate.“Every time they look over their shoulder, we want them to see us,” Toya says. That’s not litigation strategy. That’s intimidation strategy. Organized voters. Mobilized communities. Direct action. Political threat.The work is: Get everybody registered. Not as partisan strategy. As power infrastructure, because the courts have shown they’ll go back on their word, but voters… that’s real.The Real Stakes: What Gets Lost Beyond DistrictsWhen voting power disappears, what follows?Education funding. States allocate resources based on electoral leverage. Lose voting power in Congress, you lose leverage in appropriations. Schools in Black neighborhoods get less. That’s not accidental—it’s mechanical.Healthcare access. Federal healthcare dollars flow through Congress. Hospital funding, Medicaid expansion, public health infrastructure—all shaped by Congressional power. Strip voting power and you strip leverage for health equity.Housing. HUD funding, fair housing enforcement, lending discrimination cases—all require Congressional appropriation and Department enforcement. Both require political leverage.Criminal justice. Federal prosecution decisions, civil rights investigations, law enforcement funding—shaped by Congressional power and executive priority. Electoral power determines executive priority.Economic development. Federal contracts, small business loans, economic development zones—all distributed through political networks. Voting power = access to the network.The system is: Electoral power → Legislative leverage → Resource distribution → Material conditions.Strip electoral power and you strip the whole infrastructure. That’s not metaphor. That’s how the system actually works.The 61-Year Timeline: Why This Moment MattersIn 1965 Voting Rights Act passed. “The machinery that made Jim Crow possible” gets undone.In 2013 Supreme Court in Shelby County guts Section 5, the VRA’s enforcement mechanism. “They removed the preclearance requirement—states don’t have to get federal approval before changing voting rules anymore.”Now in 2026, Supreme Court in Callais renders Section 2 nearly meaningless by raising the proof standard to near-impossible levels.In 13 years, two Supreme Court decisions have dismantled 61 years of voting rights progress. Not all at once (that would be too obvious), but methodically. First the enforcement mechanism. Then the remedy mechanism.What’s left? A law that looks good on paper but can’t be enforced. That’s the play. You don’t overturn the law. You make the law unenforceable.They want you confused. They want you to think this is complicated legal reasoning. It’s not. It’s strategic dismantling. One layer at a time.The Call to Action: Breathing Down Their ThroatThis is where it gets real. The Supreme Court made its ruling. The appeal is over. The courts won’t save us. But something else can.Organized voters. Registered voters. Mobilized voters who show up and make politicians understand that there’s a cost to accepting voting rights destruction.“We want to make them pass the strongest civil rights bill they’ve ever passed,” Toya says. Not by asking nicely. By being “right there breathing down their throat. Every time they look over their shoulder, we want them to see us.”That’s voter registration drives. That’s primary challenges against representatives who accept the Court’s ruling without fighting it. That’s ballot initiatives. That’s showing up at district offices. That’s making politicians understand that Black voters are a threat they have to take seriously because here’s the truth: The Supreme Court doesn’t get to decide elections. Voters do. And if we organize at that scale, the Court’s decision becomes just noise.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER“Education is Elevation” is a project dedicated to cutting through the noise with rigorous analysis on the education, politics, and news that shape our world. In an era of overwhelming misinformation and under-reported crises, I provide the context and clarity you need.The stark reality? Black men represent only 1.5% of all public school teachers in America at a time when public education, especially for Black students, faces systematic defunding and politicized attacks. My content exists to dissect these urgent issues, moving beyond surface-level takes to deliver the researched truth.That’s why all my core content is and always will be free—no paywall. Whether you subscribe for free or choose to support financially, you will have access to every essential newsletter.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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), LeftieProf, Frances, Jolie, Barbara Shields, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.The World Is on Fire and They Want You to Smile Through ItI’m going to be honest with y’all. I struggled to even show up today. Not because I didn’t have something to say — I always got something to say — but because the weight of what’s happening around us right now is stacking up in a way that makes it hard to breathe, hard to focus, hard to even figure out what the hell to lead with. And I know I ain’t the only one. Feel me?Every day, every hour, every minute of the hour, we’re getting hit with political, social, economic news — domestic, international — that impacts our livelihood, that puts stress on our bodies, that creates anxiety we ain’t even had time to process before the next thing drops. And there are people out here who want to make you feel like something’s wrong with you for acknowledging that reality. They want to move in what I call cruel optimism — a term the late theorist Lauren Berlant gave us — this idea that people can be cruelly optimistic in the face of a system that is actively destroying them, holding onto the promise that the system will eventually work in their favor even when every piece of evidence says otherwise.That ain’t it though. I don’t think cruel optimism is going to get us anywhere. I don’t think it helps us regulate our emotions. And I damn sure don’t think it helps us take the temperature of what’s actually happening in this country.Say Her Name: Cerina Fairfax and the Structural Reality of Patriarchal ViolenceLet me start with what’s been sitting heaviest on my spirit. This past week we learned that former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax — a Democrat, a Duke University graduate, once considered a rising political star — shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, inside their Annandale, Virginia home before turning the gun on himself. Their two teenage children were in the house. One of them called 911.Let that sit.Cerina Fairfax was a dentist. She was a community-oriented professional, a mother, a woman who was in the process of leaving. Court records show she had filed for divorce in July 2025. She had testified in court that Justin drank daily. She had installed cameras throughout the house during the divorce proceedings. A judge had ordered Justin Fairfax to vacate the home by the end of April 2026. Cerina Fairfax was doing everything the system tells women to do — she was using the legal process, she was documenting, she was preparing to build a life on the other side of a dangerous situation. And she was still killed.Now here’s where I need y’all to lock in with me, because this is the part that too many people — especially men — are getting wrong.The immediate media framing centered Justin Fairfax’s mental health. Court documents noted his emotional decline following his failed 2013 attorney general campaign and the 2019 sexual assault allegations that ended his political career. His heavy drinking. His withdrawal from family life. And while I am not dismissing mental health — I live with ADHD and bipolar disorder myself, and I take that seriously — I need us to be intellectually honest about what’s actually happening here.Women have mental health challenges too. Women experience ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, PTSD — often at higher rates than men because they are navigating a world that is structurally violent toward them. And I don’t see a pattern of women killing their partners. That ain’t the pattern. The pattern runs the other direction, and it has for centuries.The #SayHerName hashtag was created precisely because women — and specifically Black women — get erased or marginalized in how we talk about violence. Their bodies magnetize conflict, death, and violence, and then the conversation gets redirected to the psychology of the man who killed them. We center the perpetrator and background the victim. Every. Single. Time.Here’s the historical context that matters: intimate partner violence is not a series of isolated mental health events. It is a structural phenomenon rooted in patriarchal systems of ownership and control that predate this nation. English common law’s doctrine of coverture — the legal framework that literally dissolved a woman’s legal identity into her husband’s upon marriage — was imported directly into American law. William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) that husband and wife were one person in law, and that one person was the husband. The “rule of thumb” wasn’t just a phrase — there is historical debate about whether it literally codified the acceptable thickness of a stick a man could use to beat his wife. Whether apocryphal or not, the spirit of that permission was absolutely embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence for centuries. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Let that marinate.So when we try to explain away what Justin Fairfax did to Cerina Fairfax as a “mental health crisis,” we are doing exactly what we criticize when a 19-year-old white man leaves a white supremacist manifesto and shoots up a church or a grocery store, and the media wants to talk about his mental health instead of the structural climate of white supremacy that radicalized him. We know that framing is a dodge. We know it avoids the elephant in the room. So why do we accept the same dodge when it comes to gender violence?There is a climate in this country that says it is okay and rational to wage violence against women — even if that woman is your partner. That is the structural analysis. That is what patriarchy produces. And you got to name it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Palantir’s Manifesto: When the Surveillance State Writes Its Own Mission StatementNow let me pivot to something that might seem unrelated on the surface but is deeply connected when you understand how power operates. While we were grieving Cerina Fairfax, Palantir Technologies — the data analytics and surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel with early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm — published a 22-point manifesto on social media drawn from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic.This wasn’t a corporate mission statement. This was an ideological declaration. Among its claims: Silicon Valley has a “moral obligation” to participate in national defense. National service should be universal. AI weapons should be built without what Karp called “theatrical debates” about their morality. The “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan was an “overcorrection.” And certain cultures are “harmful” and “regressive.”Read that last part again. A company that holds billions of dollars in government contracts for surveillance, immigration enforcement, and military operations — a company that built ImmigrationOS, the AI platform that tracks deportations for ICE — is telling us which cultures are worthy and which are not.Critics across the political spectrum have called this what it is. Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh labeled it “technofascism.” Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said Palantir had signaled a willingness to add “the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence” to the nuclear one. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins noted that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in space — they are the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.For the folks in the back: Palantir isn’t some startup playing around with code. This is a company embedded in the architecture of the American surveillance state. Their Gotham platform has been used by police departments to aggregate civilian data — names, addresses, social media activity, license plates, personal relationships — to predict the likelihood of people committing crimes. If you’re Black, if you’re Brown, if you’re an immigrant, if you’re poor, you already know what “predictive policing” means in practice. It means you’re the one being predicted on. It means the algorithm was trained on data sets that reflect centuries of racialized policing. It means the bias is baked in, just like it’s baked into every other system we’ve been discussing.This connects directly to the genealogy of American surveillance. From the Slave Patrols of the 18th century — which were the first organized policing bodies in the American South — to the FBI’s COINTELPRO program that surveilled, infiltrated, and destroyed Black liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s, to the NSA’s post-9/11 mass surveillance apparatus, to ICE’s current deportation infrastructure powered by Palantir’s AI: surveillance in America has always been about controlling populations that the state deems threatening to the existing order. Palantir didn’t invent this. They digitized it. They scaled it. And now they’ve written a manifesto telling you it’s their moral right to do so.Democracy Was Always Defined in a Particular WayHere’s where I’m going to challenge some of y’all, and I need you to sit with this even if it’s uncomfortable.I’m past romanticized ideas of democracy.The world we’re living in right now is a direct byproduct of the material reality of democracy — not the ideal, not the rhetoric, not the civics textbook version. The actual, historical, material reality. From the very beginning, democracy was defined in a particular way: to be about land-owning men, to subjugate women and slaves. If you go to the beginning, if you study the genealogy of democracy, the exclusion of foreigners, enslaved people, and women cannot be stripped away from who remains marginalized to this day. That’s not a bug. That’s a core feature. That’s baked in.Athenian democracy — the supposed origin point of Western democratic thought — explicitly excluded women, enslaved people, and foreigners (metics) from citizenship and political participation. The Athenian economy ran on enslaved labor. The democratic polis was built on the backs of people who had no access to its freedoms. When the American founders drew on Greek and Roman models, they weren’t accidentally replicating those exclusions. They were deliberately selecting a framework that concentrated power among propertied white men. The Three-Fifths Compromise didn’t break democracy. It was democracy. The Electoral College didn’t corrupt the system. It was the system — designed specifically to give slaveholding states disproportionate power.And here’s what a lot of America is grappling with right now: the way y’all are experiencing this country under the current political crisis is a lot of ways that Black folks and Indigenous folks have been experiencing this country for a long, long, long time. What feels like collapse to some has been the status quo for others. Fannie Lou Hamer said it best: sick and tired of being sick and tired.I’ve been hearing people say, “We need to defend democracy.” And I get it — I understand the impulse. But I also need us to ask: are we defending the ideal, or are we defending the status quo? Because the past status quo that everybody wants to fight so hard to return to is the very thing that brought us to this moment. Different flavors of fascism have been running through this country for a very long time. The powers that be just made it easy for some of us to find a digestible flavor. And then somebody came along who wasn’t digestible, and now we’re all supposed to act like this is new.It ain’t new. What’s new is who’s finally feeling it.The Patriarchal Paradox and the Co-optation of Identity PoliticsLet me connect another thread here, because these things are not separate conversations. They are one conversation about how power conceals itself.The paradox of patriarchy says that men can act out of emotion — anger, resentment, revenge — and still be seen as rational actors, while women are told they cannot lead because they’re “too emotional.” That’s a paradox. And it’s one of the built-in contradictions of American democracy. Countries that the United States does not consider “leaders of democracy” have already had multiple women heads of state. But in America, we operate under the implicit assumption that capitalism and democracy require male leadership — specifically white male leadership — to function properly.This is the same structural logic that co-opted identity politics. When the Combahee River Collective coined the term “identity politics” in 1977, it was a radical framework developed by Black feminist socialist women to articulate how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersected in their oppression and their liberation. It was weaponized against the system. But then the system got smart. It recognized it could incorporate all the representation people demanded while keeping the ideology and the mission intact. You can diversify the faces without diversifying the power structure. You can have a Black president who expands drone warfare. You can have a woman candidate who doesn’t fundamentally challenge the imperial apparatus. All skin folk ain’t kin folk — and all representation ain’t liberation.The system figured out how to commodify even resistance to itself. You can say “f**k the system,” and that very moniker gets co-opted, becomes merchandise, becomes a way to still justify the thing you were resisting. Because hey — look, democracy lets you say “f**k democracy.” That’s why it’s good, right?The Education Implication: What We Don’t Teach Is What We ReproduceHere’s the education piece, and this is where I need educators especially to lock in.None of what I’ve laid out is taught in standard K-12 curricula. Not the genealogy of democracy that includes its exclusions. Not the history of coverture and the legal architecture of gender violence. Not the lineage from slave patrols to predictive policing to Palantir. Not the Combahee River Collective and the original meaning of identity politics. Not Fannie Lou Hamer’s structural critique of the Democratic Party. Not the distinction between representation and liberation.What gets taught instead is a sanitized, decontextualized version of American history that trains students to be consumers of democracy rather than critical analysts of it. The banking model of education that Paulo Freire described — where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled with the dominant narrative — is alive and well. And it’s not accidental. The same political forces that are pushing book bans, dismantling DEI programs, defunding ethnic studies, and criminalizing critical race theory in classrooms are the same forces that benefit from a population that cannot structurally analyze the systems they live inside of.If you don’t teach students the history of patriarchal violence as a structural phenomenon, they grow up believing intimate partner violence is a series of individual tragedies. If you don’t teach the history of American surveillance, they accept Palantir’s manifesto as innovation rather than recognizing it as the digital continuation of COINTELPRO. If you don’t teach the material history of democracy — including who it was designed to exclude — they spend their whole lives defending an ideal that was never meant to include them.Education is elevation. But miseducation is a cage. And right now, the cage is being reinforced from every direction.The Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price?Let me break down the material impacts because this isn’t abstract. This is about bodies. This is about livelihoods. This is about who eats and who doesn’t.On gender violence: According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. That’s more than 10 million people per year. Women ages 18-34 are most commonly abused. Black women experience intimate partner violence at rates 35% higher than white women. And homicide is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant and postpartum women. These numbers exist within a context where domestic violence shelters are consistently underfunded, where legal aid for survivors is scarce, and where the very court systems women are told to use for protection are themselves embedded in patriarchal logic.On surveillance and immigration: Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform doesn’t just track people — it constructs risk profiles using aggregated data that includes medical records, social media activity, employment history, and family connections. The material impact is that immigrant communities — disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from the Global South — live under a constant state of algorithmic surveillance that criminalizes their very existence. Meanwhile, ICE operations disrupt local economies, separate families, and create a chilling effect on everything from healthcare access to school enrollment.On economic precarity: The political chaos isn’t separate from the economic reality. Tariff policies are impacting the global economy. The cost of living continues to rise. Independent creators, educators, and journalists — people like me who are trying to do this work without corporate backing — are caught in the squeeze between declining ad revenue, platform instability, and an audience that is itself financially stretched. I’ve been traveling more because I’ve been broke, and I’ve been broke because of everything that’s going on in this world. And I know I ain’t the only one.These aren’t separate crises. They are the intersecting outputs of a system that produces violence, surveillance, and scarcity as features, not failures.What Do We Do With All of This?I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I’m processing this in real time, just like you. But here’s what I do know:We have to stop explaining structural violence through individual psychology. Mental health matters — deeply — but it cannot be the analytical endpoint when the patterns are systemic.We have to stop romanticizing democracy without interrogating its material history. Fighting for an ideal is noble. Fighting to return to a status quo that produced the current crisis is not.We have to name patriarchy when patriarchy is the engine. We have to name surveillance when surveillance is the tool. We have to name capitalism when capitalism is the logic. And we have to do all of this while also acknowledging that we are tired, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and battling burnout from a news cycle that doesn’t give us time to process one catastrophe before the next one hits.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.What you just read — the connection between Cerina Fairfax’s murder and Palantir’s manifesto, between Athenian exclusion and American surveillance, between the Combahee River Collective and the co-optation of identity politics — that analysis doesn’t come from a newsroom. It comes from one person doing the research, making the connections, and putting it out for free while trying to keep the lights on. If this work matters to you, if it helps you make sense of a world that is deliberately designed to be confusing, become a paid subscriber. That’s how we build something that can sustain this level of analysis. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.Let that marinate.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Intimate partner violence is a structural phenomenon, not an individual mental health failure. The framing of Justin Fairfax’s murder of Cerina Fairfax as primarily a mental health crisis obscures centuries of patriarchal legal architecture — from coverture to the delayed criminalization of marital rape — that normalizes male violence against women. The same analytical error occurs when mass shootings by white supremacists are reduced to mental illness rather than examined as products of a structural climate.* Palantir’s 22-point manifesto is not corporate philosophy — it is the public ideology of the surveillance state. A company built with CIA venture capital, embedded in military and immigration enforcement infrastructure, and holding billions in government contracts has declared its belief in mandatory national service, AI weapons development, cultural hierarchy, and the moral obligation of tech companies to wage war. This is the digital evolution of COINTELPRO, and it requires the same level of public scrutiny and resistance.* Democracy’s exclusions are features, not bugs. From Athenian exclusion of women, enslaved people, and foreigners to the American Three-Fifths Compromise and Electoral College, democratic systems have always been designed around the concentration of power among propertied men. The current political crisis is not a departure from democracy — it is a continuation of its material history. Fighting to return to a previous status quo without interrogating what that status quo produced is a recipe for repetition.* Identity politics has been co-opted by the systems it was designed to challenge. The Combahee River Collective’s original framework was a radical tool of Black feminist liberation. The system learned to absorb representation demands while keeping its ideological mission intact — producing a politics where diverse faces can occupy powerful positions without fundamentally altering the structures of oppression those positions enforce.* The deliberate erosion of education is connected to every other crisis discussed here. Book bans, DEI dismantlement, ethnic studies defunding, and the criminalization of critical frameworks in classrooms are not culture war distractions — they are strategic moves to ensure populations cannot structurally analyze the systems of violence, surveillance, and economic extraction they live inside. What we don’t teach, we reproduce.BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.* Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765.* Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.* Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1990.* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. Reprinted in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1963.* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Oldest Trick in the Book Ain’t a Trick—It’s a SystemLet me tell y’all something that’s been sitting on my chest since I watched the internet lose its collective mind over Megan Thee Stallion’s breakup with Klay Thompson this weekend. And I need you to hear me when I say this: what you watched unfold across your timelines wasn’t gossip. It wasn’t tea. It wasn’t even drama. What you watched was a 400-year-old system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Feel me?Meg went on Instagram, said what she said. Cheating. Playing house around his family. Cold feet about monogamy after she held him down through mood swings during basketball season. Then she gave a formal statement to TMZ that was as clear as anything I’ve read from a public figure: trust, fidelity, and respect are non-negotiable, and when those values are compromised, there’s no path forward. That’s a grown woman drawing a boundary. That’s a human being saying, “I deserve better.”And how did the internet respond? By monitoring her body. By cataloguing every man she’s ever been photographed with. By laughing. By making jokes about whose bed she’s been in, whose ring she thought she deserved, and whether Tory Lanez—a man convicted of shooting her—somehow cursed her love life from a prison cell.That ain’t it though.What in the Slut-Shame Lane?I want to zoom in on DJ Akademiks for a second, because he’s the case study. This man took to X within hours of Meg’s announcement and said—and I’m paraphrasing the spirit of multiple posts here—that she thought she was the fifth ring, that Klay wasn’t built for monogamy, and that he stands with Klay without even knowing the full story. He then invoked Tory Lanez, suggesting Meg would fabricate claims to put Klay in jail next. He’s done this before with Ayesha Curry, too. Told Steph Curry he should have his wife stressed out to keep her in line.Now, some of y’all will look at that and say, “That’s just Akademiks being Akademiks.” And that’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem. Because when we normalize that behavior, when we frame it as personality rather than pathology, we are participating in a system that predates Akademiks by centuries. He ain’t original. He’s a replica. His talking points were written on a plantation.Let that marinate.The Jezebel Stereotype and the Architecture of SurveillanceHere’s where I need y’all to put on your thinking caps, because we’re about to do what we do here at Education is Elevation. We’re going to think deeply about shallow s**t.The Jezebel stereotype didn’t emerge from thin air. It was manufactured during the period of chattel slavery as an ideological weapon to justify the systematic rape of enslaved Black women. If you could frame Black women as inherently hypersexual, as biologically incapable of restraint, then you could argue that sexual violence against them wasn’t really violence at all. It was just their nature being fulfilled. That’s not my opinion. That’s the historical record. That’s the scholarship of Deborah Gray White, Patricia Hill Collins, Saidiya Hartman, and Moya Bailey.During slave auctions, Black women were stripped naked and paraded before buyers. Their reproductive capacity was inspected like livestock. Their bodies were commodities—valued for labor, for breeding, and for the sexual gratification of enslavers. And then—and this is the part that should make your blood boil—those same enslaved women were characterized as the ones who wanted it. The Jezebel myth made the victim the seducer. It made the enslaved the temptress. It turned systemic rape into consensual desire.This framework didn’t die with emancipation. It adapted. It evolved. It found new hosts.Saartjie Baartman: The Blueprint They Don’t Teach YouIf you want to understand the lineage of what happened to Meg this weekend, you need to know the name Saartjie Baartman. Born around 1789 to the Khoikhoi people in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Baartman was taken to London in 1810 under a fraudulent contract that promised her domestic work and a share of earnings. Instead, she was displayed in exhibitions across Europe—nearly naked, in a cage alongside a baby rhinoceros—because European audiences were fascinated by her body, particularly her buttocks and genitalia.They called her the “Hottentot Venus.” That name alone tells you everything. “Hottentot” was a colonial slur for the Khoikhoi people. “Venus” was the Roman goddess of love and fertility. The combination sexualized her while dehumanizing her in a single breath. After her death in Paris at age 26, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her body, preserved her genitalia and brain in jars, and displayed them at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Those remains stayed on public display until 1974. Let me say that again. Nineteen seventy-four. Her remains were not repatriated to South Africa until 2002, after Nelson Mandela formally requested their return.Baartman’s body was studied, categorized, and archived to support the pseudoscientific conclusion that Black people were a link between animals and humans. Her exploitation wasn’t just cruelty for its own sake—it was epistemological violence. It was the production of knowledge designed to justify white supremacy. And that knowledge system is still operational.For the folks in the back: when someone tweets that they “monitor the cat of Meg Thee Stallion,” they are participating in a tradition that literally put a Black woman’s genitalia in a jar in a museum in Paris for 158 years. The technology has changed. The logic has not.Misogynoir: Naming the SystemMoya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the specific intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women experience. This isn’t standard sexism. This isn’t garden-variety racism. It’s a compound oppression that produces harms that are, as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework teaches us, irreducible to their parts. You can’t separate the anti-Blackness from the misogyny. They are fused.Dr. Treva B. Lindsey described what happened to Meg during the Tory Lanez trial as “a terrible storm of racialized gender stereotypes.” The National Women’s Law Center documented how Meg was adultified, hypersexualized, and had her credibility questioned precisely because her body and her persona didn’t fit the mold of a “respectable” victim. She was too tall. Too confident. Too sexual. Too much.And here’s the educational implication that nobody wants to talk about: none of this is taught in schools. The Jezebel stereotype is not in your state standards. Saartjie Baartman is not in your AP History curriculum. Misogynoir is not a vocabulary word in any standardized test in this country. And that silence is not accidental—it is structural. When you remove the historical context that explains why Black women are treated this way, you make every new instance of misogynoir look like an isolated event rather than a chapter in a very old book. You make DJ Akademiks look like a lone provocateur rather than a product of a system that has been training men—Black men included—to surveil, ridicule, and devalue Black women since before this country existed.The Homoeroticism of Misogyny (Yes, We’re Going There)One of the sharpest observations from the discourse this weekend came from a commenter who pointed out that the misogyny and homoeroticism kind of go together. And I want to sit with that for a second, because it’s a deeper cut than people realize.When men—particularly Black men in digital spaces—spend more energy cataloguing a Black woman’s sexual partners than they do examining their own political conditions, their own economic precarity, their own proximity to state violence, something is profoundly misaligned. The obsession with who Meg has slept with, the jealousy disguised as critique, the need to simultaneously degrade her and monitor every detail of her intimate life—that’s not strength. That’s not masculinity. That’s a crisis of identity being projected onto the body of a Black woman.And it’s on brand with what bell hooks described as the way patriarchy within Black communities often mirrors the very structures of domination that white supremacy imposed on Black people in the first place. You cannot liberate yourself by oppressing the person standing next to you.The Material Impacts Are RealLet me bring this home with some facts over feelings, because I know some of y’all think this is just a cultural conversation. It’s not.Black women in America experience intimate partner violence at rates significantly higher than women of other racial groups. Black women are killed at rates nearly three times higher than white women. The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community has documented that one in five Black women are survivors of rape. When Black women do report violence, they are less likely to be believed than their white counterparts. And when the cultural environment normalizes the mockery, surveillance, and character assassination of Black women who speak publicly about being wronged—as happened with Meg this weekend—you create a chilling effect that keeps countless other Black women silent.This is not abstract. This has material, intersectional consequences. It affects employment. It affects housing. It affects custody. It affects healthcare—Black women experience maternal mortality at rates three times higher than white women, in part because medical professionals carry the same implicit biases that tell them Black women exaggerate pain, Black women are stronger than they claim, Black women don’t need the same care. These are Jezebel’s grandchildren. Different century, same DNA.What Education Could Do—If We Let ItHere’s where I land, and I need y’all to hear this clearly. The antidote to misogynoir is education. Not the watered-down, sanitized, feel-good version of education that treats Black history as a footnote in February. Real education. The kind that teaches you the name Saartjie Baartman before you learn to tweet about a Black woman’s body. The kind that puts Moya Bailey’s framework alongside the Federalist Papers. The kind that gives students the analytical tools to recognize that DJ Akademiks and the plantation overseer are reading from the same script separated by nothing but time and technology.But that education is under attack. Book bans. Curriculum restrictions. The systematic defunding of ethnic studies, gender studies, and any framework that might give young people the language to name what is happening to them. We are living in a moment where the very knowledge that could inoculate a generation against misogynoir is being classified as too dangerous to teach.Research over MeSearch. That’s what we do here. We don’t just react. We trace the root. We name the system. We bring the receipts. And then we build something better.Support This Work—Because Nobody Else Is Funding ItI want to be real with y’all for a second. This piece you just read? It draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Hill Collins, Moya Bailey, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Deborah Gray White, bell hooks, and others who dedicated their lives to producing the knowledge that makes analysis like this possible. That knowledge is being erased from classrooms across this country right now. Curriculum that teaches the Jezebel stereotype is being banned. Courses on misogynoir are being defunded. The histories of Saartjie Baartman, of the slave auction block, of the pseudoscientific exploitation of Black women’s bodies—these are the histories being classified as too dangerous to teach.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.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.That means the same system that doesn’t want Saartjie Baartman’s name in a textbook also benefits when independent educators can’t sustain this work. Your subscription is a direct intervention against that. It’s the difference between this analysis existing and not existing. Between the Jezebel stereotype being named and being forgotten. Between Meg getting context and Meg getting memes.If this piece taught you something, if it gave you language you didn’t have before, if it connected dots that nobody in your classroom ever connected—become a paid subscriber today. This is how we build the thing they’re trying to dismantle.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. The public reaction to Megan Thee Stallion’s breakup is not gossip—it is misogynoir operating in real time. The surveillance of her body, the cataloguing of her sexual partners, and the immediate pivot to mockery rather than empathy follow a pattern that has been documented by scholars including Moya Bailey, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Treva B. Lindsey. This is a system, not a series of individual bad takes.2. The Jezebel stereotype was manufactured during chattel slavery to justify the systematic rape of enslaved Black women, and its logic remains embedded in how Black women are treated today. From slave auctions where Black women were stripped and inspected to social media threads monitoring Meg’s intimate life, the through-line is the same: Black women’s bodies are treated as public property subject to communal evaluation and control.3. Saartjie Baartman’s story is the historical blueprint for the commodification and surveillance of Black women’s bodies. Exhibited in cages across Europe, dissected after death, and displayed in a Paris museum until 1974, Baartman’s exploitation was not merely cruelty—it was epistemological violence that produced the pseudoscientific framework used to dehumanize Black women for centuries.4. The erasure of this history from American education is not accidental—it is structural. The Jezebel stereotype, misogynoir, and the history of Saartjie Baartman are absent from state standards, AP curricula, and standardized testing. This erasure ensures that each new instance of misogynoir appears isolated rather than systemic, preventing the development of critical consciousness.5. Misogynoir has material, intersectional consequences that extend far beyond culture. Black women experience intimate partner violence, maternal mortality, and medical discrimination at rates dramatically higher than their white counterparts. The cultural normalization of surveilling and mocking Black women creates a chilling effect that discourages reporting, reduces access to care, and compounds existing structural inequalities.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.* Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton University Press, 2009.* Gray White, Deborah. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. W.W. Norton, 1985.* Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Yale University Press, 2011.* Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W.W. Norton, 2019.* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.* hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, 2004.* Morton, Patricia. Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women. Praeger, 1991.* National Women’s Law Center. “’A Terrible Storm’: Megan Thee Stallion, Misogynoir, and Leaving Black Survivors Unprotected.” December 2022.* Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Verso, 2015 edition.* Wilderson III, Frank B. Afropessimism. Liveright, 2020.* Willis, Deborah, ed. Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.” Temple University Press, 2010.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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), LeftieProf, Billy Bumbo, Full Frontal Loeb, Lynette, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I told y’all I was going live twice today. The first conversation was with Everton Blair — a Democrat running for Congress in Gwinnett County, Georgia — and that was a conversation about reform, about whether the Democratic Party can be pushed from within, about what Congress even does for us. If you missed it, go watch it. But this second conversation? This one’s different. This one’s about connecting the international to the local, the macro to the micro, the big to the small. And my boy Lavish Dope from Minneapolis is exactly the person to have this conversation with.Lavish grew up a couple blocks from where George Floyd was killed. His grandfather was in SNCC before becoming a Black Panther. He grew up across the hall from a Palestinian family since the 1980s. The international connection wasn’t something he learned in a classroom — it was lived in a hallway. But as he told me, knowing something and knowing how to apply it are two different things. We didn’t know how to walk at one time either.What made this conversation hit different is that Lavish has actually put his body on the line internationally — the Global March to Gaza, UN meetings in Brussels, solidarity missions to Cuba — and then come home to face the consequences. Detained at Newark for six hours after Egypt. Twenty people detained coming back from Cuba. Eighteen phones confiscated. Chris Smalls may never have gotten his back. And then having anxiety flying domestically within America because of what happened internationally. That’s the imperial boomerang in real time. That’s Aimé Césaire’s thesis playing out on your cell phone screen.The Same Struggle, Different GeographyHere’s what Lavish laid out that I need y’all to really sit with. Before the blockade intensified and the genocide escalated, Cuba and Gaza shared something extraordinary: the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, the highest literacy rates in the world, and the highest ratios of doctors per capita. Cuba has 81 doctors per 1,000 people. Most of us in America don’t even know a medical doctor personally — the doctors we know got PhDs in philosophy. Feel me?And Cuba is a Black-ass island. Majority Black population. That adds a whole other layer to why America hates Cuba so much. The monopoly can never sleep as long as Cuba and the idea of dignity and resistance that Cuba represents continues to exist. Because if the rest of Latin America wakes up and raises that flag of dignity the way Cuba has, but they do it collectively? American hegemony is done. And that’s what the Monroe Doctrine, McCarthyism, and Red Scare programming have been designed to prevent since jump.The minimum wage in Cuba is four dollars a month. When Lavish brought portable chargers on his first trip, he realized an $80 charger represents twenty months of wages. They don’t need tech gadgets. They need toothpaste. Toothbrushes. Medicine. The blockade creates artificial scarcity of the most basic human necessities. And Americans don’t know that two million people travel to Cuba every year for May Day — the largest labor solidarity movement in the world. We don’t know because we’re not supposed to know. Research over MeSearch.Democracy Will Wipe Your Ass OutThis country tells us that democracy is the freest form of government available to humanity. In real time, in 2026, they’re still selling that line. But we also have a history — documented, receipted, undeniable — that shows democracy will wipe your ass out if it feels like you’re a threat to it. Metaphorically or literally.Think about it. Mormons can travel the world freely, push their ideology across borders, do aid work, extract wealth — nobody’s confiscating their phones at customs. But if you’re a little anti-capitalist? If you believe genocide is bad? If you think American imperialism might be a little faulty? Then your ability to move freely from border to border gets policed. Your devices get seized. You get interrogated about Hamas for three hours when you’re a citizen born in Minneapolis.Lavish said something that stuck with me: the justification for American freedom has always been that you can say f**k America. That’s what ‘freedom ain’t free’ means — soldiers fight overseas so you have the right to dissent. But once they can use your same tax dollars to come hunt you down for exercising that dissent? The legitimacy falls apart. And we’re watching it fall apart in real time with task forces targeting anti-American ideology, with ICE functioning as a domestic paramilitary, with 3,100 agents deployed to one American city during Operation Metro Surge.Fascism is nothing but imperialism turned inward. That’s not a new observation — Césaire said it, the Panthers lived it — but it hits different when you can see the 20-foot Skydio drones over Minneapolis that were deployed in Gaza last year. The same drones Kevin Durant invests in. The imperial boomerang doesn’t care about your political affiliation. It comes for everybody. That ain’t it though — pretending it won’t.The Settler’s Move to Innocence and White PsychopathologyI got philosophical on the stream and I’m not apologizing for it. Some scholars call it the settler’s move to innocence. Some call it white psychopathology. I call it the machinery that makes cowboys the heroes and Indians the savages before anybody even starts arguing.Think about it linguistically. Cowboys and Indians. Who’s the bad guys? The Indians. Always already. The word ‘Indians’ carries embedded savagery, an embedded understanding of being anti-human. We never view cowboys as being the invaders, the intruders. The language does the ideological work before the argument begins. And that micro lens — that childhood game — applies on a structural lens when we talk about settler colonialism everywhere.The settlers in every instance always claim to be victims. In America, the Native Americans were scalping them, kidnapping them, pillaging them. In Israel, they have the right to exist and the right to defend themselves because everybody is always after them. You can bring it all the way to Emmett Till — the white woman as victim, the Black boy as threat. It’s 360 degrees. Same playbook. Same function.Lavish told a story that crystallized it. His dad is fully Irish — grandparents born in Ireland. The year his dad was born, the Queen of England ordered one of the largest mass executions of Irish people in modern times. When Queen Elizabeth died? His dad mourned her. Whiteness superseded his brain. That’s white psychopathology in action. Even when you logically know, even when the evidence is in your bloodline, the settler’s innocence overrides lived history.And here’s the structural asymmetry that makes it psychopathological: you can always separate white people from what they’ve done. Thomas Jefferson was a bad person, but he’s still the father of education and the Constitution. Winston Churchill committed atrocities, but he saved democracy. You can isolate the good from the bad. But Islam? Iran? Egypt? Cuba? You must view the entirety through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. No separation. No nuance. No immunity. That asymmetry IS the structure. Let that marinate.The Magical Negro and Imperial LiberalismI can speak to the magical Negro paradigm personally. As a first-generation brother from Bryan, College Station, Texas, who was always able to articulate himself with a certain ability, I’ve navigated this paradigm my whole life. The magical Negro is how you create exceptions to the rule. The system says: yeah, maybe being a nigga is bad. But all else fails, if you still have to be a nigga, can you at least be a magical one?Good diction. Three degrees. Marry the right people. Go to the right events. Maybe then you can do X, Y, and Z. Ralph Ellison wrote about this in Invisible Man — the charismatic, exceptional Black figure who gets instrumentalized by systems of power. The magical Negro serves as a way to perpetuate the benevolence of the system. It’s how you justify the system around you that forced you to be magical in the first place.And here’s where it gets real. Liberalism has commodified what it means to be a magical Negro in ways that have forced a lot of Black folks to buy into imperialism. Barack Obama was the embodiment. For him to be seen within the system of imperialism, he had to take the tools of imperialism and actualize them in ways white folks could never have dreamed of. That’s the reason why he’s lauded. His presidency mystified imperial violence for eight years. Libya. Drones. Deportations. But how dare you criticize him — a lot of people in the Black community have issues with Black leftists because we’re critical of Obama.Kamala Harris is the same architecture. Lavish called her a Black slave catcher, and I understand why that language hits the way it does. Slave catchers were bad, but a Black one has access to the community. There are ways they can get in and disrupt things that a white person never could. And the question of whether you view that framing as accurate or offensive usually comes down to one thing: do you think the system can be reformed, or do you think it needs to be fundamentally transformed? That entry point — leftist or liberal, reform or revolution — dictates your description of Kamala Harris. Facts over feelings.Purity Politics Is a Slur for Refusing to SettleCarlos in the comments asked about purity politics, and I went off. I’m going off again right now in print because this needs to be documented.Purity politics is a disingenuous terminology deployed by people aligned with oppressive power to make you not stand on what you believe because it’s ‘not pragmatic,’ because it’s ‘too idealistic.’ Lavish put it perfectly: I’m not asking for streets paved in gold. I’m asking for motherfuckers to have UBI, food stamps, the capability to feed their kids. That ain’t purity.Here’s where I applied the debate framework. When somebody says genocide is bad and your response is purity politics, you’re making a straw man argument. Nowhere in ‘genocide is bad’ is there a demand for perfection. Nowhere in that statement is there a claim that purity is necessary or that we need a perfect candidate. You’re responding to a point that was never made. That’s textbook straw man argumentation, and I will call it out every single time.But let me take it further because I defend this position to anybody — mama, daddy, homeboys, colleagues in social media. When you say purity politics, you’re debating about the comfort of white supremacy and you’re saying that I should be grateful. Purity politics means you being an ungrateful nigga. That’s what it means every time it’s deployed. How come you can’t be a grateful nigga for the imperial comfort that we have? How come this ain’t enough?How dare you want a candidate that’s not genocidal? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t taking AIPAC money? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t funded by tech oligarchs and oil money? You’re being ungrateful. You’re being impractical. You’re being pure.Nah. I deserve more. And you should be ashamed of yourself for deploying purity politics in the name of settlement. Because that’s what it is — you’re mad because I ain’t gonna settle. And I think conversations about purity politics illustrate ignorance to international relations specifically. You never hear purity politics unless someone brings up international solidarity. Whatever they’re calling pure, guaranteed, they don’t care about it. Israel-Palestine? Purity politics. But stopping Asian hate got unanimous support. Women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, climate crisis, Black rights — all of that is ‘partisan.’ Why? Because purity politics is about what the establishment values and what it’s willing to sacrifice. Research over MeSearch.The False Dichotomy of Local Versus GlobalI had three conversations in Atlanta this past weekend where people said international politics matters, but it doesn’t matter more than what’s happening here. And I kept saying: this is a false choice. We thinking that one of these matters more than the other is a false dichotomy.The proof is in your gas tank. If Israel has particular desires to expand its borders, it brings American taxpayer dollars in and has us fighting with Iranians. When you see $70 to fill your tank and it used to be $40, you understand that what happens over there has a direct impact to what happens here. The international IS the local. The local IS the international.Black people do not exist only in America. There are liberation movements rooted in Blackness that have succeeded in other countries. But American exceptionalism has Black folks in this country thinking our struggle is the only one that counts. John Henrik Clarke said it: the boat dropped you off here. Because the boat dropped you off over here don’t make you more special than dropped off over there.The Black Panthers were in Algeria. They were in Cuba. International solidarity wasn’t a distraction from domestic liberation — it was the practice of liberation itself. If it was good enough for SNCC and the Panthers, it’s good enough for us. And Lavish is living proof that the model still works. From George Floyd Square to Havana to Brussels to Barcelona — the geography changes, but the system doesn’t.Capitalism has incentivized a lot of us to be some selfish b******s. And as a result, we believe that politically things only matter unless it can be tied to the self. I would argue that is not only anti-communal — it’s anti-Black at its core. And it’s exactly what gets in the way of us being able to move forward and get the progress that we really desire. Education is elevation.Where Do We Go From HereLavish is heading back to Cuba in less than two weeks for May Day — connecting with an organization called Belly the Beast, planning to bring 300 pounds of aid, and documenting the experience for a short film. His Instagram, Twitter, and everything else is @lavishmac. He just started a Substack for travel updates and dispatches from the field.Me? Tomorrow I’ll be at Cullen Middle School in Houston, Texas — Sunnyside — talking to young Black students, especially young Black boys, about what it means to view themselves outside the paradigms being pushed on them. Because if they’re pushing the YN doctrine on all the young niggas, somebody’s got to make sure those young brothers see alternatives. That’s the work. That’s what Education is Elevation looks like in practice — in the classroom, on the livestream, on the page.And to everybody reading this: you’re closer to somebody in Gaza who lost fifty family members than you are to the motherfuckers making the bombs. Money cannot be the goal. Money is an exchange of energy for something good you did in the world. When we reclaim that narrative — when the goal becomes wholeness instead of wealth — the rest follows.The struggle is one. The geography changes. The system doesn’t. And the boomerang always comes back. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.5 Key Takeaways1. The imperial boomerang is real: drones, detention camps, and militarized policing deployed abroad are now operating domestically in places like Minneapolis and Dilley, Texas — what America allows overseas always returns home.2. The “magical Negro” paradigm is how liberalism commodifies Black exceptionalism to justify imperialism — Barack Obama mystified imperial violence for eight years because his presidency made criticizing the empire feel like criticizing Black progress.3. “Purity politics” is a straw man deployed to silence legitimate critiques of genocide, corporate capture, and imperialism — saying “genocide is bad” is not demanding perfection, it’s demanding a baseline of humanity.4. The international and the local are not a false dichotomy — Israel’s expansionist desires directly impact American gas prices, taxpayer dollars, and military deployments, making geopolitical literacy a domestic necessity.5. The settler’s move to innocence operates identically across contexts — from cowboys and Indians to Israeli victimhood narratives to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral — whiteness is always granted immunity from accountability for structural violence.Paid Subscriber CTAThis is an independent platform with no corporate backing. Every article — every piece of history documented, every legal framework analyzed, every connection drawn between the international and the local — is built without institutional support. I’m documenting the histories and frameworks that are actively being erased, building toward a community-funded resource with the depth of PBS and the freedom of having no masters. Fewer than 1% of the people who follow this work are paid subscribers. If this conversation between Lavish and me gave you something — a framework, a connection, a language for what you already felt — becoming a paid subscriber is how you make sure this work continues.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Annotated BibliographyTuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40Robinson, Cedric (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina PressEllison, Ralph (1952). Invisible Man. Random HouseMarx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (1848). The Communist Manifesto. Workers’ Educational AssociationCésaire, Aimé (1955). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review PressWilderson, Frank B. III (2020). Afropessimism. Liveright PublishingFanon, Frantz (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Grove PressClarke, John Henrik (Various). Lectures and Writings on Pan-African History. Various 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

Thank you Lalisa, Tamibetcha, Serena Fossi, Mary Lummis, Lesley Y, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Y’all know here on the platform, I love to frame things in their implications toward education and politics, because a lot of us ignore the intersections between the two. We act like political knowledge just falls in folks’ lap, like we ain’t gotta teach it. That ain’t it though. So let me chop this up with y’all.I sat down with Dr. Everton Blair — everybody in Georgia’s 13th calls him EJ — and what started as a conversation about one congressional race turned into a whole seminar on how corporate Democrats, seniority politics, and the duopoly keep Black communities in a chokehold. Feel me? Let that marinate before we even get into the details.The District, The Incumbent, and the Absentee SeatGeorgia’s 13th Congressional District is all the suburbs south and east of Atlanta — Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro. Six counties. Most folks who say they from Atlanta actually live in these communities. And after the 2023 redistricting, this district was redrawn as majority-Black… not because Georgia wanted to do right by Black voters, but because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan (2023) forced Alabama, and by extension Georgia, to stop diluting Black voting power through gerrymandering. So what did the political machine do? They strategically carved up every Black neighborhood south and east of Atlanta into one sprawling district and handed the keys to Congressman David Scott.David Scott has been in elected office for over 50 years. He’s in his 80s. He has not voted in the past seven elections. He has never lived in the district. He has not spoken on the House floor this legislative session. He doesn’t take meetings. He doesn’t show up in community. There’s a video circulating of him being escorted in a wheelchair by staff just to sign up to appear on the ballot. That ain’t a representative. That’s a hostage situation dressed up as seniority.And the kicker? He’s the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat in Congress by percentage. He raises almost nothing from individuals in his own district. AIPAC was bundling his individual contributions this cycle — until even they stopped, because even the folks who were on his side realized they had to find a new champion. And so now the corporate class is propping up a different candidate who also won’t disavow dark money. When the special interests abandon your incumbent and move to their next puppet, that tells you everything about whose interests were ever being served.What Does a Congressperson Actually Do?Before we go deeper, let me slow down. A lot of y’all weren’t taught this and ain’t got no shame in that — the education system was designed to keep you ignorant of how power actually works. Congress does two primary things: it passes laws, and it passes the federal budget. And your budget is your priorities. Your budget reflects your values. When David Scott broke ranks with Democrats to help fund the Department of Homeland Security — meaning more ICE agents in our streets — that was a budget decision. That was a values decision. When he became one of three Black Democrats to sign on to a House resolution honoring Charlie Kirk after Kirk was murdered — with no community mandate, with no constituent demand — that was a values decision.Facts over feelings.Congress also has oversight authority. It can subpoena officials. It can impeach. During the Biden administration, with Merrick Garland as Attorney General, the Democrats chose not to prosecute Trump because they were worried about how it would look for the election. Look how that turned out anyway. Democrats keep confusing caution for strategy. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were cabinet officials who should have been impeached well before Trump himself fired them. Articles of impeachment should have been drafted. They weren’t. Because Congress is sitting on its hands, paid to be quiet, with its silence bought and sold.The Seniority Trap and Why Old Democrats Won’t LeaveLet me put a finer point on this. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislation — passed by one vote. One vote, y’all. And three Democrats had died in office in the months before that vote: Sylvester Turner, Raúl Grijalva, and Jerry Connolly. Their seats were filled by Republicans before Democrats could hold them, and that’s how the ugly bill passed. Remember when we all joked about Ruth Bader Ginsburg not retiring under Obama? Remember how we cold-handed the argument until she died in office and Trump filled her seat? These ain’t abstract debates. These are material consequences that will outlive all the jokes.Nancy Pelosi. Jim Clyburn. Hakeem Jeffries signing onto the Charlie Kirk resolution. David Scott at 80-something in a wheelchair. This is not generational respect. This is generational sabotage. And the system works this way because it’s designed to. Why would someone in power voluntarily change a system that keeps them in power? That ain’t natural. Combine that with the Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision that unleashed unlimited dark money, and you got a machine that eats reformers for breakfast and spits out incumbents who’d rather die in office than pass the torch.Everton said something in our conversation that I want y’all to sit with. He said, “Don’t wait your turn. Waiting your turn is what got us this.” Let that marinate.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Implication to Education — Because Everything IsHere’s where I want to get into it, because y’all know education is elevation is my whole thing. Everton Blair is a former chair of the Gwinnett County school board — the largest and most diverse school district in Georgia. He passed a $2.5 billion budget. He raised teacher pay when teachers were fleeing Gwinnett for DeKalb and Fulton because those districts were paying $2,000 to $4,000 more per position. During COVID, he led a politically divided board — Democrats and Republicans — through remote learning, meal distribution, laptop access, hotspot access, and a science-aligned reopening. That’s governance. That’s budgeting. That’s consensus-building in a cantankerous environment.Now ask yourself this: what is David Scott’s education record? What has he done on the Department of Education’s existence — which Trump is actively trying to dismantle? What has he done on student loan debt, on HBCU funding, on Title I schools in Clayton County, on the school-to-prison pipeline that feeds Black kids from his own district into Georgia’s carceral system? The silence is the answer.And this is where the intersectionality gets real. When Hartsfield-Jackson Airport — the busiest airport in the world — sits physically inside Clayton County, but the city of Atlanta annexed the revenue, the economic development, the vitality, and Clayton County gets none of it? That’s an education issue. That’s a jobs issue. That’s a housing issue. That’s a health issue. Because when a Black community is stripped of its economic engine, the schools get underfunded, the teachers leave, the kids get disciplined instead of developed, and the Panopticon — the school-to-prison pipeline — grinds on.When BlackRock and the other private equity firms buy up every single-family home in Stockbridge and Conyers and turn them into rental properties, Black families lose the pathway to homeownership, which means they lose the pathway to building generational wealth, which means they lose the pathway to funding Black educational futures. The GI Bill and New Deal-era policies that built the white American middle class — we were structurally excluded from those benefits. Now, when we finally get access, private equity is snapping up the housing stock before we can even get in the door. And your congressman is silent about it.Intersectional Material ImpactsLet me break down what’s materially at stake, because the dots don’t always connect themselves:For Black women in the district, this race is about reproductive healthcare access in a state where abortion is banned after six weeks. It’s about Medicaid expansion Georgia still refuses to adopt. It’s about the Black maternal mortality crisis that makes Georgia one of the deadliest states in America to give birth in if you’re Black.For working-class Black folks, this race is about Medicare for All versus a healthcare system that’s still bleeding us dry. It’s about a universal basic income, about taxing billionaires and big business, about reinvesting in childcare so parents can actually work. It’s about a refund check big enough to matter.For Black immigrants and Afro-Caribbean families in the district — and this is a diverse diaspora district — this race is about whether your congressman is going to vote to fund the ICE agents raiding your community or vote to protect you. David Scott already told you what he thinks. He funded DHS.For Black youth trying to get into politics, this race is about whether the path forward means waiting 30 years for a seat at a table that’s already been sold. Or whether you can take the mantle now.For Black men — especially young Black men being flooded with right-wing propaganda about how “Democrats started the KKK” — this race is about understanding the party switch of the 1960s and 70s was itself a racial realignment. When Democrats passed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the Dixiecrats defected. The entire Southern Strategy was Nixon and Reagan courting white backlash. Nick Cannon and Amber Rose driving around the car recycling 1960s talking points about “Democrats started the Klan” — that’s a disinformation campaign dressed up as history. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, that’s what we doing here.The Duopoly, The Pragmatism Trap, and the Southern Black HubHere’s where me and Everton pushed each other the most in the conversation. I asked him about the duopoly — this two-party system that keeps manufacturing outcomes that don’t serve us. He made the pragmatic case: there’s no way to get elected outside the current binary, so we push Democrats to be better. I made the structural case: pragmatism itself has been cornered by the system. The system gets to decide what counts as practical. And anything outside its permission gets labeled unpragmatic, unrealistic, unserious.We had more than two parties in the 18th and 19th centuries. The duopoly is a historical creation, not a natural law. And it came down to race — when Black folks got enfranchised through the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, the parties realigned around racial coalitions, not issue coalitions. That’s the switch. That’s the whole game.And here’s my argument: if we’re going to break the duopoly, it’s going to come from a Southern Black hub. Atlanta. Birmingham. Houston. These are the cities where Black political power is concentrated enough — and independent enough from white corporate Democratic machines — to actually push a defection. Nine times out of ten, Black folks in Birmingham or Atlanta got to do something locally for Black folks nationwide to benefit. Montgomery bus boycotts happened because Black folks were in the same jurisdiction, boycotting the same system, in the same place. Now we spread across six counties, three area codes, and two media markets, and the big money weaponizes that diffusion against us.This ain’t despair. This is diagnosis. Feel me?The Black Economic Agenda and What’s Actually on the TableEverton’s nine-point Black Economic Agenda is at evertonblair.com/black-economic-agenda. Tax reform. Education. Healthcare. Transportation. Innovation. Black-owned businesses. Housing access. Middle-class expansion. He’s pledged not to take a dime from corporate PACs — in the campaign or in office. He’s out-fundraised the incumbent doing it the right way. The majority of his donors are Black folks he knows personally. That’s people-powered. That’s not an abstraction.And here’s the thing about DEI that I want to close on, because the question came up in our livestream chat. Somebody said corporations loved DEI, it was a corporate initiative, what are y’all complaining about? Here’s the receipt: DEI became a buzzword corporations adopted after George Floyd because it was politically expedient. They didn’t structurally change who they hired, what they paid, or who got access. They hired white women into DEI roles and called it diversity. And the minute Trump made “DEI” a slur, they dropped it with a quickness, proving it was never structural in the first place. It was symbolic performance all along.So when Trump signs his anti-DEI executive orders, what the federal government can no longer do by name — invest directly in Black communities — has to be done through proxies. Zip code. Census tract. High school. Family income. The policy-making system already knows we’re racially segregated, so any one of those proxies functions as a race proxy. And in states like Oklahoma where they’ve outlawed the zip code proxy, we get clever with the next one. That’s what a real fighter in Congress looks like. Not symbolic. Structural. That’s Everton Blair.The AskEarly vote in Georgia’s 13th starts April 27th. Final vote is May 19th. If you’re in Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro, or any of the six counties in this district — check your registration, find your early vote location by county, and show up. If you’re not in the district but you got $20 to throw at a people-powered campaign that isn’t taking corporate money, go to evertonblair.com. If you can phone bank or door knock, do that.This is the most competitive Democratic primary in the country. It’s the clearest case study we have of what happens when Black communities replace absentee incumbents with battle-tested, values-aligned, people-powered fighters. What happens here echoes in every Black district in America.Education is elevation. Don’t wait your turn.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The primary is the election. Gerrymandering in red and blue states alike has killed competitive general elections. If your district is drawn to be safely Democratic or Republican, the only vote that matters is the primary. Show up May 19th — or vote early starting April 27th — or cede your voice entirely.* Corporate PAC money is the silent architecture of political failure. David Scott is the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat by percentage, and every “strange” vote he’s taken — funding DHS and ICE, honoring Charlie Kirk, refusing to challenge AIPAC — maps directly onto that funding. Follow the money and the votes explain themselves.* Seniority is not service. Fifty years in office, no floor speeches this session, no voting in the last seven elections, no residence in the district. Seniority was never the argument — it was the excuse. Incumbents dying in office has already cost Democrats the ability to block the Big Beautiful Bill and a Supreme Court seat.* Black political power flows through local wins. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Atlanta Student Movement, Birmingham 1963 — national Black progress has always been locally seeded. Georgia’s 13th is exactly the kind of Southern Black hub where a defection from corporate Democratic politics could reshape the national landscape.* The duopoly is a race story. The two-party system consolidated around racial coalitions after the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, not around issue coalitions. Any serious conversation about breaking the duopoly has to reckon with how race structures it — and any serious alternative has to be led from Black political strongholds, not lectured into existence by third-party think tanks.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER 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 — including the redistricting rulings that created Georgia’s 13th in the first place, the Citizens United decision that unleashed the dark money flooding this race, and the generational politics that keep our communities underrepresented in the very institutions that are supposed to serve us.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. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.They want us looking one way while they steal everything else. That’s the game. And it’s written in receipts.Let me show you what I mean. Behind me is a graph—data, not opinions—that illustrates something most media outlets won’t touch. In 2025 alone, Fox News ran nearly 4,100 headlines sensationalizing transgender policy and visibility. In that same year, they covered the Epstein files—documented evidence of systemic sexual abuse involving some of the most powerful men in America—approximately 610 times. That’s not a close call. That’s five times more coverage on trans existence than on industrial-scale child exploitation. Feel me?Now here’s where receipts get hard. In 2025, over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed across the United States. Eight. Hundred. Fifty. Legislative attempts to constrain the freedoms and existence of people who make up less than 5% of the population. Yet somehow, in the Epstein files—the documented, prosecutable, testifiable evidence of what some of this country’s ruling class actually did—there were zero trans people. Not one. The hysteria, the legislative urgency, the moral panic? It wasn’t based on trans participation in those crimes. It was manufactured to distract us.And that matters. Because while we’re debating bathroom bills and drag performances and medical autonomy for young people, we’re not talking about why healthcare access is deteriorating across the board. We’re not examining why public education—the actual infrastructure meant to lift our children—has been systematically defunded. We’re not asking why we invaded a country or why poverty persists or why the social safety net continues to shred. We’re looking there instead of here. That’s not accident. That’s strategy.This is what I call victimization as policy. They create an entire narrative that positions one group as the boogeyman, justify the expansion of state power through “protection” rhetoric, and meanwhile—meanwhile—the actual architecture of exploitation stays invisible. The actual beneficiaries stay protected.The Hypocrisy Has a PatternHere’s the double standard that the receipts expose. When one or two transgender people do something—commit a crime, say something controversial, exist visibly—the entire community gets held responsible. I’ve watched this. One trans person shoplifts and suddenly we’re debating whether trans people should have civil rights. One trans person makes a statement and it becomes the rationale for stripping healthcare from millions. Collective punishment for individual action.But when we have an entire documented file—the Epstein files—with hundreds of cisgender, heterosexual, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male perpetrators doing “a whole bunch of ungodly things,” as my grandmother would say, what’s the response? “That’s just a reflection on them as individuals.” No collective responsibility. No legislative blitzkrieg. No moral panic manufactured across cable news 5,000+ times a year.The difference isn’t about the severity of harm. The Epstein files document organized, systematic, intergenerational abuse of children. That’s not opinion. That’s fact. The difference is about whose existence threatens the order, and whose predation can be absorbed by the system because the system was built by and for them.This is the epistemological violence we’re living through. They’re not just attacking trans people—they’re attacking our capacity to see what’s actually happening. Every headline about trans bathrooms is a distraction from healthcare policy. Every debate about drag performances is a distraction from wage theft. Every legislative attack on gender-affirming care is a distraction from the dismantling of public education.Education as the Real BattlegroundAnd let me be specific about education, because that’s where the logic breaks down for them. They claim to care about children. They file 850 bills supposedly to “protect” young people. But protecting young people from what? From the existence of trans people? Meanwhile, public schools are underfunded to the point of collapse. Teachers can’t afford to live in the cities where they teach. Students don’t have access to updated textbooks or mental health services. School libraries are being purged of books—including books about Black history, books about sexuality, books about anything that might complicate the preferred narrative.If they actually cared about protecting children, we’d be fighting about that. We’d have 4,100 headlines a year about school funding. We’d have 850 legislative proposals to increase teacher pay and reduce class sizes. We’d have urgent media coverage of the fact that poor Black and brown children in this country are systematically denied access to the resources their white, wealthy peers get as default.But we don’t. Because that would require attacking wealth. That would require dismantling the very power structures these politicians and media outlets serve. It’s easier to attack trans people. It’s politically profitable to create panic about trans visibility while the actual infrastructure of education—the actual promise of “protecting children”—gets defunded and forgotten.This is how misdirection becomes policy. This is how you can claim moral high ground while the ground itself erodes.The Intersectional Material RealityHere’s what doesn’t make the 4,100 headlines: Black trans people are experiencing the compound effects of this legislation. They face discrimination in healthcare and educational access and economic opportunity. The anti-trans bills being filed disproportionately impact trans people of color, who already navigate healthcare systems structured by antiblackness and poverty. When you layer anti-trans legislation onto an already-hostile environment for Black bodies in medical spaces, you’re not “protecting” anyone. You’re legalizing erasure.And it connects to education directly. Young Black trans people are being pushed out of schools through hostile policies, denied access to gender-affirming healthcare that research shows reduces suicidality, and then blamed for “community dysfunction.” That’s not protection. That’s the criminalization of existence.The 850 anti-LGBTQ bills aren’t neutral policy. They’re racialized policy. They hit hardest where oppression is already concentrated—in communities that have been systematically denied resources, denied access, denied recognition. And the media machine that manufactures consensus for these bills does so while ignoring the actual crimes documented in the Epstein files. While ignoring that those crimes involved predominantly white men with power.That’s not coincidence. That’s function.What Education is Elevation Actually Means HereYou can’t educate people toward liberation if you’re simultaneously lying about what oppression looks like. If you’re running 5,000+ headlines about trans visibility while running 600 headlines about documented, prosecutable abuse by the powerful, you’re not informing. You’re manufacturing consent for a specific political agenda.Education is elevation means we have to be willing to count receipts. To say: this many headlines, that many bills, these many people blamed, those many people protected. It means we have to name what’s happening—which is the deliberate misdirection of public attention away from the systematic extraction of resources from poor and Black communities, including through dismantled education systems.The people pushing anti-trans legislation aren’t primarily concerned about children’s safety. If they were, we’d see resource allocation matching that concern. Instead, we see legislative energy matched to political benefit. We see media coverage matched to how much anxiety it can generate in a targeted demographic. We see misdirection matched to a very specific logic: keep the marginalized fighting the more marginalized while the actual beneficiaries of extraction stay invisible.That ain’t it though. And we gotta say so.PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL-TO-ACTIONI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media.That’s what this is really about. When I count receipts—when I show you that Fox News ran nearly five times more headlines on trans visibility than on documented exploitation by the powerful—I’m not just making a political point. I’m doing what journalism used to do. I’m holding systems accountable. I’m refusing the manufactured narrative. I’m insisting on receipts.But I can only do this work because readers like you choose to support it.I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. The Colfax Massacre that textbooks won’t touch. The machinery of residential segregation still shaping where Black families can build wealth. The Christian nationalism embedded in state policy. The Iran-Contra Affair and how it devastated Black communities. The real history of anti-trans legislation and what it actually serves.This work has no corporate backing. No wealthy sponsors. No institution paying me to produce it. That’s intentional. Because once you’re dependent on corporate dollars, you stop counting receipts that threaten profit. You stop naming misdirection when your advertisers benefit from it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Media Creates the Narrative of Threat: Fox News ran 4,100+ headlines on trans policy vs. 610 on Epstein files in 2025—demonstrating how cable news manufactures moral panic to serve political interests while obscuring actual harms.* Collective Punishment Targets the Powerless: One trans person’s individual action = accountability for the entire community. Hundreds of cisgender men in the Epstein files = individualized responsibility. This double standard reveals whose existence threatens the system.* Anti-Trans Bills Are Educational Erasure Policies: 850+ anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2025 directly undermine public education by attacking knowledge, autonomy, and access—while actual school funding collapses with a fraction of the legislative attention.* Misdirection Protects the Powerful: Every headline about trans bathrooms diverts attention from healthcare collapse, wage theft, and the dismantling of public services. The legislative urgency around trans visibility directly correlates with political benefit, not demonstrated harm.* Intersectional Harm: Race, Class, Gender Compress: Black trans people experience layered policy violence—anti-trans legislation, healthcare racism, educational exclusion—while media hysteria erases how these systems compound. This is not parallel oppression; it’s multiplicative.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGSMedia Analysis & Misdirection* Sut Jhally & Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (1992) — On how media manufactures consensus and obscures structural inequality* Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” (1973) — Understanding how media narratives are constructed to serve power* Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988) — How media systems function to naturalize state and corporate interestsAnti-Trans Legislation & Policy* Movement Advancement Project (MAP), “State Equality Index” (annually updated) — Comprehensive tracking of anti-LGBTQ legislation by state* LGBTQ Nation, “2025 Anti-Transgender Legislation Tracker” — Real-time documentation of bills filed nationally* Human Rights Watch, “Do Not Erase Us” (2018+) — On criminalization of trans existence through legislationEducation, Epistemological Violence & Erasure* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) — Banking model of education vs. critical pedagogy* George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (2012) — Epistemological violence and anti-Black knowledge production* Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — Colonized consciousness and systems of erasure* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — Foundational intersectionality framework* Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis (2015) — Knowledge systems and the encoding of human hierarchiesEducation 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This past week I was at the 3rd annual Black Maternal Health Summit in St. Louis. I learned things that should’ve been required curriculum decades ago. The kind of knowledge that makes you sit back and realize what we’ve been robbed of—what generations of Black women were robbed of.Did y’all know that Black doulas and midwives have been a central part of birthing in this country since the 1600s? That’s not a historical footnote. That’s a foundation. But it’s a foundation nobody wants to talk about.When our ancestors were forced into the Middle Passage, they carried something no chains could break: West African birthing knowledge. Generations of inherited expertise. The kind of deep understanding about pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care that kept communities alive through unimaginable violence. That knowledge didn’t disappear when enslaved Black women arrived on American soil. It transformed. It survived. It became the granny midwives—those respected elders in the rural South who attended to most of the births happening in this country all the way up into the early 20th century.Let that marinate for a second. Most of the births. Black women, relying on other Black women, using African-rooted knowledge to ensure survival in a country determined to see them as disposable.The Medicalization That Changed EverythingHere’s what happened, though. What happened was the medicalization of the birth space. The transformation from women-centered care to men-centered institutions. You see the pattern? Every time we built something that worked—every time Black people created infrastructure, knowledge systems, and care networks that kept us alive—America’s response was to professionalize it, medicalize it, and extract Black people from the center of it.Granny midwives didn’t just deliver babies. They provided comprehensive care. Prenatal support. Delivery. Postpartum care. They accepted payment and goods because—and this is crucial—capitalism does not corner the market on commerce. Black communities had economic systems, knowledge exchange systems, care systems long before Western medicine decided to show up and rebrand everything as “modern.”But when the birth space got medicalized, when it moved from homes and communities into hospitals, when men in white coats started positioning themselves as the “experts,” where did that leave the granny midwives? Marginalized. Criminalized. Pushed to the margins of a system that no longer wanted their knowledge.Resilience Against the MachineryWhat gets me—what really gets me—is the resilience. Despite facing systemic marginalization and criminalization. Despite all the structural racism designed to push them out of practice. Despite a medical establishment that actively worked to delegitimize African-rooted knowledge, these women still provided essential, compassionate care. They still carried their background information forward. They still ensured the safety and security of mothers and infants.And we’re still paying for the loss of that. Look at the numbers. Black maternal mortality rates in this country are unconscionable. Black infant mortality rates are through the roof. We’re in a maternal health crisis that disproportionately devastates Black women and babies. And a lot of that crisis traces directly back to this moment—when we lost access to granny midwife knowledge, when that expertise got criminalized out of existence, when Black women were forced into medical systems that never had our interests at heart.The enslaved Black women who brought expertise from West Africa? That knowledge was relied upon heavily for our survival during the Middle Passage. It was the difference between life and death on the plantation. And we’ve never properly honored that. We’ve never properly centered that. We’ve never built our contemporary maternal health movements around reclaiming that.What We OweThe granny midwives—we are indebted to them forever. Not in some abstract, poetic way. In concrete, material ways. They kept us alive when the machinery was set up to kill us. They maintained African knowledge systems in a place designed to erase them. They cared for Black women’s bodies when nobody else would.And here’s the thing that nobody wants to say out loud: the reason we’re in a maternal health crisis now is because we listened when they told us that granny midwives weren’t “qualified.” We believed them when they said that traditional knowledge was superstition. We let them convince us that the only safe birth was a medicalized birth, a hospital birth, a birth controlled by people who didn’t look like us and didn’t have our survival in mind.The receipts are clear. The data is clear. The history is clear.We need to reclaim that. We need to center Black maternal expertise. We need to look at what the granny midwives understood and ask: what did we lose when we abandoned that? What did our communities lose? What did our babies lose?That’s not nostalgia. That’s not romanticism. That’s survival knowledge. That’s what happens when you pay attention to history—you realize that the answers we’re looking for now were already embedded in the knowledge our ancestors carried.Research over MeSearch. Facts over feelings. The granny midwives got it right. And we’ve been trying to correct course ever since.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Black Doulas and Midwives Are Foundational to American History Black women’s birthing knowledge, rooted in West African traditions, has been central to maternal care in America since the 1600s. This isn’t a side note—it’s foundational. Granny midwives attended to most births in this country through the early 20th century. Understanding American history requires centering this.2. Medicalization Was About Power, Not Progress The shift from women-centered, community-based care to male-centered, institutionalized medicine wasn’t inevitable or natural. It was a strategic erasure of Black women’s authority and expertise. The professionalization of birth was the mechanism through which Black knowledge got delegitimized and criminalized. That matters.3. We Lost Critical Knowledge When We Abandoned Granny Midwives The maternal health crisis disproportionately affecting Black women now is a direct consequence of losing access to granny midwife knowledge and care models. Black maternal mortality and Black infant mortality rates are crisis-level because we were forced to abandon systems that actually worked. The receipts are clear.4. African-Rooted Knowledge Is Sophisticated, Not Primitive West African birthing knowledge wasn’t “unscientific” or “superstitious.” It was tested, refined, and effective across centuries. The epistemological violence of dismissing it as inferior to Western medicine is the real issue. Reclaiming granny midwife knowledge means rejecting the racial hierarchy embedded in what we call “expertise.”5. Reclamation Is Resistance and a Path Forward Contemporary movements centering Black midwifery and Black doulas aren’t nostalgia—they’re resistance and strategy. They’re asking: what becomes possible when we restore Black women’s authority over birthing and maternal health? What’s possible when we build systems rooted in Black expertise rather than systems built to exploit us?PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTIONI’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.The granny midwives—those women who kept our communities alive, who brought West African knowledge across centuries of violence, who delivered most of the babies born in this country—their story almost disappeared. It’s still disappearing, erased from textbooks, ignored in medical schools, treated as footnotes to a “progress” narrative that actually made things worse for us.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. We could do the research that nobody else is doing. We could tell the stories that nobody else is telling.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.* Bridges, Khiara M. The Poverty of Bioethics (Beacon Press, 2011). Analyzes how race shapes bioethical frameworks and maternal health policy; essential for understanding systemic racism in contemporary maternal medicine.* Davis-Floyd, Robbie & Sargent, Carolyn F. (eds.). Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (University of California Press, 1997). Comparative analysis of how different cultures establish “authoritative knowledge” in birthing; critical for decentering Western medical epistemology.* Gutmann, Amy & Bridges, Khiara M. A Time to Act: Maternal Mortality in Black Communities (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 2017). Connects historical erasure of Black midwifery to contemporary maternal mortality crisis; data-driven analysis.* Boyd, Robbie D., et al. “On Racism: A Causal Factor in the Etiology of Black Maternal Mortality.” Journal of the National Medical Association 110.2 (2018). Clinical evidence for racism as direct cause of maternal mortality; centers systemic racism framework.* Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al. Say Her Name: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum, 2015). While focused on police violence, applies intersectional analysis methodology valuable for understanding maternal health as site of multiple oppressions.* Doss, DeShawn & Cáceres, Estelle. The Impact of Midwifery on Maternal Mortality in Black Communities (National Association of Black Midwives White Paper, 2019). Contemporary research on effectiveness of Black midwifery models in reducing maternal mortality. 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

Let me be direct with y’all: This story is about conservative contradictions, the trick of time and the hypocrisy of democracy.On April 1, 2025, Virginia passed HB 167. This bill did one thing—it reversed a segregation-era carve-out in the state’s tax code that had been benefiting the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other pro-Confederate groups since 1950. That’s 75 years. Three-quarters of a century. The Confederacy itself lasted four years. Let that marinate.But the real story isn’t just about Virginia finally ending tax breaks for white supremacist terrorist organizations. The real story is what this reveals about America’s relationship with history, memory, and whose pain gets funded by the state.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Legal Architecture of Historical RevisionismHere’s what happened: Virginia’s tax code contained a specific exemption—a carve-out—that allowed organizations devoted to preserving, romanticizing, and glorifying the Confederacy to operate tax-free. These weren’t small grassroots groups. The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a massive network with chapters across the country, dedicated explicitly to erecting monuments, publishing pro-Confederate literature, and rewriting the historical narrative around slavery and Jim Crow.Think about the infrastructure that built. For seventy-five years, Virginia taxpayers—including Black Virginians—subsidized the operational costs of organizations working to preserve the memory of a government that existed to enslave them. This wasn’t accidental. This was written into law during the segregation era, which means it was deliberately designed to protect white supremacist organizing.The new law ends that. HB 167 reverses this carve-out and eliminates “more than 75 years of state support for efforts to romanticize slavery, glorify the Confederacy, and enforce Jim Crow segregation.” That’s the official language. Read it again. State-sponsored romanticization of slavery. Let that sit.The Hypocrisy is Structural, Not IndividualNow, let’s talk about the synchronicity here because it matters. While Virginia finally removes tax breaks for Confederate preservation societies, the Trump administration is simultaneously attacking curriculum that teaches slavery—but only when that curriculum is honest. When it’s taught from a Confederate standpoint, presented as “both sides,” or framed through the Lost Cause mythology? Silent. Welcome.This isn’t random. This is a coherent ideological project. The allegiance is consistent. The people attacking “divisive racial teachings” aren’t actually opposed to teaching slavery. They’re opposed to teaching slavery accurately. They’re fine with the version that preserves white innocence and Southern nostalgia. The version that centers plantation owners’ “economic challenges” or frames slavery as an unfortunate institution everyone shared blame for. They just won’t tolerate the version where we say: enslaved people built this nation’s wealth, the South fought a war to preserve that system, and the North was complicit in rebuilding it through sharecropping, redlining, and segregation law.The Reparations ContradictionAnd here’s where the hypocrisy becomes prosecutorial: The same voices that chastised Black people for being “stuck in the past” and told us to “move forward”—those same voices were getting state-funded tax breaks for organizations preserving the Confederacy. The same administration attacking “critical race theory” in schools is defending monuments to Confederate generals. The same politicians rejecting reparations for slavery as “unrealistic, unfair, and unwarranted” after 161 years were, until recently, literally writing off the operational costs of Confederate monument societies.This is the receipt right here. This is the proof that the objection to reparations was never about practicality or fairness. It was about white supremacy preserving itself through the apparatus of the state.Think about it structurally: A Black person proposes reparations—direct payment to repair the material harms of slavery and Jim Crow—and we hear: “That was a long time ago. We need to move forward. How would we even identify who deserves it? It’s too complicated.”Meanwhile, Virginia’s tax code was literally structured to preserve the Confederacy. The state had already figured out how to identify groups benefiting from slavery’s legacy (the United Daughters of the Confederacy—easy to find, they have a literal organization chart). The state had already determined the mechanism (tax exemption). The infrastructure was in place. And for seventy-five years, Virginia said yes to that. No problem. No complications. No hand-wringing.But reparations? Too hard. Too unfair. Can’t do it.What HB 167 Actually RevealsThis is why HB 167 is important beyond the immediate policy change. It’s a window into how state power actually works in America. It shows us that:First, the government knows how to identify and fund the preservation of white supremacist ideology when it wants to. It doesn’t lack the technical capacity to do so. It has mechanisms, precedents, and legal language already built out.Second, when a state decides to fund something, it can do so across centuries and through legal carve-outs that survive generations of legislators. These aren’t accidents. These are deliberate structures that persist because they reflect something deeper: an unstated national consensus that white supremacist memory deserves public protection.Third, the sudden urgency with which the Trump administration attacks slavery curriculum—specifically honest slavery curriculum—in this exact moment shows what was really at stake with Virginia’s tax breaks. It was never just about museum tax exemptions. It was about a broader project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it on terms that don’t threaten the present order. That don’t demand reparations. That don’t trace modern inequality back to state-sponsored theft. That keep the past safely past.This Country Has a Natural Allegiance Toward LosersHere’s a fact that should make y’all angry: The Confederacy lost in 1865. It lasted four years. And yet, 161 years after its defeat, America was still funding its legacy through tax policy.We’ve spent more time subsidizing Confederate memory than the Confederacy itself existed.Meanwhile, we’re told reparations are impossible. We’re told we need to move on. We’re told the past is past. But the same country telling us this was, just last year, writing off the operational costs of organizations whose singular mission is to ensure that the Confederate vision of history—a sanitized, “heritage not hate” version—survives in American consciousness.The Educational Void and What It CostsThis all connects to something deeper: the systematic dismantling of public education media’s capacity to teach honest history. When Virginia’s tax code could fund Confederate preservation societies without debate, but a school district teaching the actual facts of slavery faces political warfare, we have a crisis. We have a gap. We have an absence.That absence is where misinformation lives. That’s where revisionism spreads. That’s where Lost Cause mythology thrives—not because it’s compelling history, but because the alternative (honest history funded and taught by institutions) retreated.I’m fighting to fill that void. Not with propaganda. Not with another perspective competing in the marketplace of ideas. But with receipts. With documented facts. With the legal codes and historical records that show exactly how American state power has worked to preserve white supremacy while denying redress to its victims.Virginia’s decision to end these tax breaks is a step. But it’s one step after seventy-five years of state-sponsored Confederate revisionism. The real reparations work—the real education work—hasn’t even started.Facts Over FeelingsLet me be clear about what this bill does and doesn’t do:It removes tax-exempt status from organizations built explicitly to preserve Confederate memory. That’s material. Organizations run on operational budgets. If the United Daughters of the Confederacy has to pay property taxes, file corporate taxes, account for revenue—that changes the economics of nostalgia.But it doesn’t create reparations. It doesn’t fund Black education or repair Black wealth. It doesn’t rewrite the curriculum. It simply stops subsidizing the other side’s version of memory.In a fair system, that would be the baseline. In America, it’s treated like a concession.EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASKHere’s what you just read: a legal receipt. A tax code. A 75-year paper trail showing exactly how state power subsidized white supremacy while calling it heritage preservation.This isn’t new information in the sense that historians have known this. But it’s information that’s missing from mainstream education. It’s missing from the curriculum. It’s missing from the public discourse because there’s no independent media infrastructure built to hold and distribute it.I’m fighting to fill that void.I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. I show the receipts. I cite the sources. I trace the money. I connect the past to the present through policy, not just sentiment. And I do it with no corporate backing and no wealthy sponsors.As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers willing to pay for independence. Right now, that community is less than 1% of my followers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Tax Policy Is How the State Funds Ideology Without Naming It: Virginia’s 75-year tax carve-out for Confederate organizations was a subsidy disguised as neutral tax code. It shows that governments know exactly how to allocate resources toward specific projects. The argument that reparations are “administratively impossible” is refuted by the fact that Virginia successfully protected Confederate memory through tax policy for three-quarters of a century.* The Hypocrisy Reveals the Real Project: The same forces attacking “critical race theory” in schools were, until recently, receiving tax breaks for organizations dedicated to preserving slavery’s memory. This isn’t a contradiction. It’s a consistent project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it in a way that doesn’t demand reparations or threaten white wealth accumulation.* We’ve Spent More Time Subsidizing Confederate Memory Than the Confederacy Existed: The Confederacy lasted four years (1861-1865). Virginia funded its preservation for 75 years (1950-2025). This temporal inversion reveals America’s actual priorities: it would rather preserve a failed government’s ideology than repair the material harms of the slavery that government was built to protect.* Policy Reversals Are Possible, But They Require Political Will: HB 167 proves that states can identify organizations benefiting from historical injustice and reverse the legal structures protecting them. The fact that this took 161 years after slavery’s end shows that the barrier to reparations isn’t technical. It’s political. It’s a choice to protect white supremacy, not an inability to do otherwise.* The Work Is Incomplete Without Independent Education Infrastructure: Removing a tax break is necessary but insufficient. The Lost Cause mythology is already embedded in how Americans learned history. Undoing that requires an alternative education infrastructure—one funded by community, independent of corporate influence, and willing to tell the complete story. That’s the void that needs filling.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & CRITICAL READINGS* Smith, Susan-Mary and Richard B. Williams. Lost Cause: Confederacy, American Memory, and the Making of Modern Racism. Academic Press. On the systematic architecture of Lost Cause mythology and how it was institutionalized through monument-building and cultural organizations.* Gallagher, Gary W. and Alan T. Nolan (Eds.). The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Indiana University Press. Foundational text deconstructing the Lost Cause narrative and its persistent influence on American historical consciousness.* McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. Essential context on the Confederacy’s actual duration (1861-1865) and the material interests driving secession.* Douglas, Mary and David Hull. How Institutions Think. Syracuse University Press. Theoretical framework for understanding how organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy function as memory-preservation institutions.* Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Afropessimist analysis of how white supremacy operates through cultural revisionism and historical erasure.* Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. W.W. Norton. On how state institutions have systematized the erasure of Black historical presence and memory.* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC Press. Essential context on the racialized political economy that undergirds both slavery and its ongoing denial through policy.* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Foundational theory on how the American state operates through an implicit contract that protects white supremacy as policy.* Virginia House Bill 167 (2025) - Official legislative text reversing tax exemptions for Confederate organizations.* United Daughters of the Confederacy v. State of Virginia - Relevant case law on the legal status of Confederate heritage organizations.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

A ninth grader received the National Geographic Award for a plan to save the Mississippi oyster reef population.Let that sit for a second.Her name is Demi Johnson. She’s from Gulfport, Mississippi, right there on the Gulf Coast where I’m at. And this young lady produced 1,100 oysters that would spawn millions of larvae into the ecosystem. Not in a government laboratory. Not with a multi-million dollar contract. Not with a team of marine biologists on payroll. She did it through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program, maintaining wire cages of juvenile oysters at Schooner Pier in Biloxi, cleaning debris and predators off her oyster garden once a week with help from the Department of Marine Resources. She started this work in the seventh grade. By ninth grade she was a top-15 finalist in National Geographic’s Slingshot Challenge, competing globally, and was one of only two students recognized in the entire United States.And what did she receive for this brilliance? A $1,000 scholarship.Now let me give you the other side of the receipt. Since Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of Mississippi’s oyster reefs in 2005, two state agencies have spent $55 million trying to restore the Mississippi Sound oyster population. Fifty-five million dollars. And according to ProPublica and the Sun Herald, the state invested millions of those dollars to rebuild reefs in ways that did not respond to changing conditions. In one project alone, the Department of Environmental Quality spent nearly $2.5 million deploying limestone onto reef beds, and monitoring showed more reef loss than gain. Between 30 and 90 percent of the material they sprayed sank into the mud where oysters cannot even grow. A third-generation oyster fisherman named Keath Ladner put it plain: they are just wasting money, and the fishermen know this.Even the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, Joe Spraggins, acknowledged the absurdity of the spending at a fisherman’s meeting in 2021 when he said he could probably go buy 100,000 sacks of oysters in Texas every year and give them to the fishermen to sell and come out cheaper.Feel me?So we got $55 million in government restoration spending. We got limestone sinking into mud. We got agencies admitting the approach is not working. And then we got a Black girl from Gulfport who grew 1,100 oysters at a pier in Biloxi that are projected to spawn millions more. And she got a thousand dollars. When I was in ninth grade I was not thinking about ecosystems or the environment and damn sure not oysters. But Demi Johnson was thinking about it. She was executing on it. And her site is expected to produce more biological impact than projects that cost the state tens of millions.The only thing that comes to mind is will she receive any of the millions and millions of dollars the state of Mississippi has invested in this oyster reef based on the success and how she was able to restore the same reef that they have been trying to fix? Maybe I am missing something.The History They Will Not Teach YouNow here is where the story deepens, because this is not just about oysters. This is about the fact that Black people have been central to the oyster industry in this country since before emancipation and y’all will never hear about it in a classroom.Biloxi, Mississippi was known as the Seafood Capital of the World during the late 19th century. Millions of pounds of oysters and shrimp were hauled out of the Mississippi Sound every year. After emancipation, Black people who had been enslaved in the shellfish industry were able to find financial freedom as oystermen. Think about that. The same waters where Black labor was exploited under bondage became the waters where Black men carved out economic independence after the war. It was one of the few industries where discrimination was, in relative terms, slacker on the waves than it was on land. Black men owned boats. They harvested oysters. They built businesses.And then there is Thomas Downing. Born in 1791 on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, to parents who had been enslaved and freed. Downing grew up raking oysters and fishing along the Chesapeake coast. He eventually made his way to New York City, where in 1825 he opened Downing’s Oyster House at 5 Broad Street, right in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, steps from Wall Street. This was not a dive bar. This was fine dining with chandeliers, carpeting, and a clientele that included bankers, politicians, and dignitaries. The man was shipping pickled and fried oysters internationally. Queen Victoria allegedly received his oysters overseas.But here is the part that will never make the textbook. While New York’s white elite were dining upstairs at his oyster house, Thomas Downing was hiding fugitive slaves in the basement. His restaurant was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He co-founded the all-Black New York City Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, funded schools for Black children, and fought to desegregate New York’s trolley system. In 1838, he was beaten for refusing to give up his seat on a segregated railcar. That was over 100 years before Rosa Parks. When Downing died in 1866, the New York Chamber of Commerce closed for the day to honor him. He became a United States citizen just one day before he died, through one of the first Civil Rights Acts.That is Black history. That is the oyster’s connection to Black liberation. And the fact that in 2024 a Black ninth grader from the Gulf Coast is the one solving the oyster reef crisis that the state government cannot spend its way out of is not a coincidence. It is a continuation. It is ancestral. It is on brand.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Climate Change Is the Context They Keep IgnoringNow let me be clear. We cannot have a conversation about the Mississippi oyster reef without talking about climate change, even though certain politicians want to act like the phrase itself is a hoax. The Gulf Coast is one of the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet when it comes to rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, and the increased frequency of catastrophic storms.Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 90 percent of Mississippi’s oyster reefs in 2005. Five years later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Then in 2019 and 2020, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway to manage Mississippi River flooding, pouring freshwater into the Mississippi Sound and killing off juvenile oyster populations that require salty or brackish water to survive. Each one of these events is compounded by a warming planet. Marine temperatures in the Gulf exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit near southern Florida in 2023. Ocean acidification is altering the seawater chemistry that oysters need to build their shells. Rising sea levels threaten the intertidal zones where reefs exist.And here is the part that matters for this story specifically. Oyster reefs are not just seafood. They are climate infrastructure. A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. Multiply that across an entire reef and you are talking about massive water quality improvement. Oyster reefs provide habitat for over 300 marine species. They serve as natural breakwaters that reduce coastal erosion and buffer shorelines from storm surge. They sequester carbon in a way that is cost-effective and energy efficient. In other words, oysters fight climate change while climate change fights oysters. And the person who figured out how to tip the balance back in our favor was a Black girl from Gulfport with a Girl Scout project and no government contract.But we are cutting EPA funding. We are rolling back environmental protections. We are pulling out of climate agreements. The same states spending millions on restoration are electing officials who deny the science that explains why the restoration is needed in the first place. That ain’t it though. The cognitive dissonance is the disaster. And the fact that a child is doing the work that government agencies and corporate interests have failed to do should embarrass every adult in the room. Facts over feelings.The Question Nobody Wants to AnswerThe question I keep coming back to is simple. Mississippi has invested tens of millions of dollars into oyster reef restoration. Demi Johnson demonstrated a scalable, community-based approach that works. Her 1,100 oysters are projected to spawn millions of larvae. She received international recognition from National Geographic. She competed globally and was one of two American students recognized.Will she receive any of the investment money? Will her method be scaled? Will the state fund her approach with the same enthusiasm it funds limestone barges that sink into the mud? Or will she get a pat on the head, a $1,000 scholarship, and a good luck on your future while the same agencies continue spending millions on strategies that their own monitoring data says are failing?Because if a ninth grader can outperform $55 million in government spending with 1,100 oysters and a wire cage at a pier, that is not just impressive. That is an indictment. That is a receipt. That says the problem was never a lack of money. The problem was a lack of imagination, a lack of community engagement, and a refusal to center the people closest to the water in the solutions. The fishermen have been saying it for years. A state senator from Mississippi introduced legislation to let the fishermen who know and understand the fishery have the opportunity to restore the reefs. Because the people who live it know more than the people who study it from a distance.This is bigger than oysters. This is about who we trust with solutions. This is about whose brilliance gets funded and whose brilliance gets a news cycle and a thousand-dollar check. This is about the fact that the same structures that extract Black labor and Black genius from communities are the same structures that refuse to reinvest in those communities when the genius shows up with the answer.Demi Johnson is the answer. The question is whether the system is ready to listen to a Black girl from the Gulf Coast.Education is elevation.PAID SUBSCRIBER EXPLICIT ASKI’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.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. The Investment Gap Is the Story. Mississippi has spent $55 million on oyster reef restoration with poor results. Demi Johnson, a Black 9th grader from Gulfport, achieved measurable ecological impact through a volunteer community-based program and received $1,000. The disparity between institutional spending and community-based results reveals who the system trusts with solutions — and who it does not.2. Black People Have Been Central to the Oyster Industry Since Emancipation. From post-Civil War oystermen in Mississippi and the Chesapeake Bay to Thomas Downing’s Underground Railroad station beneath his fine dining oyster house in Manhattan, Black labor, Black innovation, and Black resistance have been woven into the oyster’s story in America for over 150 years. This history is systematically untaught.3. Oysters Are Climate Infrastructure, Not Just Seafood. A single oyster filters 50 gallons of water per day. Reefs protect shorelines, house 300+ marine species, and sequester carbon. The decline of oyster reefs is an ecological emergency compounded by the very climate change that threatens them — and that too many politicians refuse to acknowledge.4. Community-Based Solutions Outperform Top-Down Bureaucratic Spending. Demi Johnson’s approach through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program — a volunteer initiative using wire cages and weekly maintenance — produced results that $55 million in government contracts could not replicate. The fishermen and the communities closest to the water have always understood the reef better than the agencies studying it from a distance.5. Brilliance Without Investment Is Exploitation by Another Name. Recognizing Demi Johnson’s achievement without funding her method at scale is the same pattern Black communities have endured for centuries: extract the innovation, praise the individual, and refuse to invest in the community. The question is not whether her approach works. The question is whether the system will fund it.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* “Mississippi Has Invested Millions of Dollars to Save Its Oysters. They’re Disappearing Anyway.” — ProPublica & Sun Herald (2023). * “Meet the Ninth Grader Who’s Helping Restore Mississippi’s Oyster Reefs” — PBS NewsHour (2024). Profile of Demi Johnson’s work through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program, her National Geographic recognition, and the ecological significance of her 1,100 oysters.* “Gulfport Teen Receives National Geographic Award for Plan to Save Mississippi’s Oyster Reef Population” — WLOX (2024). * “Meet Mississippi’s National Geographic Award-Winning Teen” — Reckon News (2024). * Thomas Downing (1791-1866) — Encyclopedia Virginia. * “How Oysters Became a Source of Economic Freedom for Emancipated Black Folks” — Earth in Color (2023). * “Could Billions of Oysters Protect Us from the Next Big Storm?” — National Geographic (2023). Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I disagree with KRS-One.And I need y’all to understand how much weight that carries coming from me. KRS-One is the Master Teacher. He is the person who taught me that hip-hop was created to be in resistance to the institutional abuse known to the system. He shaped how I think about culture as a site of political education and community self-determination. So when I say I disagree with him, I’m not saying it casually. I’m saying it with the full weight of somebody who studied under his philosophy and now has to apply it in ways he apparently won’t.Because when KRS-One stood in front of a crowd and said that anybody who has a problem with Afrika Bambaataa should quit hip-hop, he wasn’t just defending a man. He was revealing a logic. And that logic is the exact same logic that has protected predators across every institution in human history — from the Catholic Church to the plantation to the halls of Congress. The logic that says: this person is too important to be held accountable. Their contribution outweighs their harm. And if you push back, you’re the problem. Not them. You.Let that marinate.Two Things Can Be TrueLet me be clear about something before we go any further. I am not here to erase Afrika Bambaataa’s contributions to hip-hop. That would be intellectually dishonest, and Research over MeSearch means we deal in the full complexity of the evidence, not just the parts that make us comfortable.Afrika Bambaataa — born Lance Taylor on April 17, 1957, in Bronx River Projects — was a foundational architect of hip-hop culture. He co-opted the Black Spades, one of the most notorious street gangs in New York City, into the Universal Zulu Nation, officially founded on November 12, 1977, making it the first hip-hop organization in history. His 1982 record “Planet Rock,” produced with Arthur Baker and the Soulsonic Force, didn’t just chart — it fundamentally altered the trajectory of electronic music, electro-rap, and dance-pop for decades. Generations of artists from Missy Elliott to City Girls drew from that well. He helped organize the 1985 anti-apartheid album Sun City alongside Bono, Run-DMC, and Keith Richards. He held a three-year visiting professorship at Cornell University. His record collection was so legendary that DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist built an entire international tour around it.That’s the receipt.But here’s the other receipt. In March 2016, Ronald Savage, a former “crate boy” who carried Bambaataa’s records to gigs, publicly alleged that Bambaataa sexually abused him in 1980 and 1981, when Savage was fifteen years old. Within days, at least three other men came forward with similar allegations — abuse dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, involving boys as young as twelve and thirteen. By the time the dust settled, more than a dozen men had accused Bambaataa of sexual abuse of minors. In June 2016, the Universal Zulu Nation itself issued an open letter — signed by nearly three dozen members from as far away as New Zealand — apologizing to “the many people who have been hurt by the actions of Afrika Bambaataa and the subsequent poor response of our organisation.” They admitted that some members of the organization knew about the abuse and “chose not to disclose” it.In October 2021, an anonymous John Doe filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court under the New York Child Victims Act, alleging that between 1991 and 1995, when the plaintiff was twelve years old, Bambaataa repeatedly sexually abused and trafficked him to other adult men. Bambaataa never responded to the suit. He never showed up to court. In May 2025, Judge Alexander M. Tisch granted a default judgment against Bambaataa — “without opposition.”And on April 9, 2026 — five days before I’m writing this — Afrika Bambaataa died of prostate cancer in Pennsylvania at the age of sixty-eight.Two things are true. He helped build hip-hop. And he used what he built to prey on children.Both of those things are true. Feel me?The Dangerous Logic of the “Untouchable”Now let’s talk about what KRS-One actually said, because the quote is worse in context than it is in isolation.During a Q&A session in Birmingham, England, KRS-One was asked about the allegations against Bambaataa. He dismissed them as “accusations and gossip.” He said, “Show me the evidence, and I will definitely have justice done.” And then he said the part that matters most — the part that reveals the entire architecture of how abuse gets protected inside institutions.He said: “Some of us are infallible. Some of us are going to have to be untouchable or our entire culture is going to fall. Our culture cannot fall on the accusations of four people. That’s weak.”Read that again.He said “infallible.” He said “untouchable.” These are not words of caution or nuance. These are words of doctrine. This is a theological claim dressed up in hip-hop language — the claim that certain leaders exist above the possibility of accountability because their contribution to the culture renders them immune from critique. This is not a defense of due process. This is a defense of impunity.And see, it’s something about when KRS-One speaks in this particular way that shows you how we’re able to protect people in leadership, especially when we love something they created. When you love what somebody built, it becomes almost impossible to hold them accountable for what they destroyed. That’s the trap. The creation becomes the shield. And the victims become collateral damage to the narrative of greatness.That ain’t it though.The Institutional Abuse FrameworkHere’s where my training kicks in. As somebody with a master’s degree in adult education and an undergraduate degree in African and African-American studies, I need y’all to understand that what we’re looking at with Afrika Bambaataa is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. It is a structural feature of how power operates inside movements, institutions, and communities.The history of abuse by leadership within liberation movements — and the subsequent silencing of victims to preserve the movement’s image — is as old as the movements themselves. This is documented. From the sexual violence that went unaddressed within the Civil Rights Movement, to the ways women organizers were marginalized and exploited by male leadership in the Black Panther Party, to the decades of institutional child abuse covered up by the Catholic Church, to the pattern of coaches, teachers, and mentors who used their proximity to youth as a gateway to predation — the blueprint is always the same.The leader builds something people love. The leader uses that love as a shield. The institution protects the leader because the institution’s survival depends on the leader’s mythology. The victims are framed as threats to the institution rather than casualties of the leader.Every single element of that blueprint is present in the Afrika Bambaataa case. Every single one.And when KRS-One said “our culture cannot fall on the accusations of four people,” he was deploying the exact same logic that every institution has deployed to protect its abusers. He’s saying: the institution matters more than the individual. The leader matters more than the child. The culture matters more than the body of the twelve-year-old boy who was trafficked by the person who “invented” that culture.Facts over feelings.What Does It Mean to Lose a Civil Case You Didn’t Show Up For?I need y’all to sit with this one. Because when KRS-One says “no evidence, no convictions,” he’s deploying the language of the legal system — the same legal system that hip-hop was built in opposition to — as his standard for truth.First: there was a civil case. Filed in 2021. Under the New York Child Victims Act, which was specifically designed to give survivors of childhood sexual abuse a pathway to justice after statutes of limitation had expired. An anonymous plaintiff alleged repeated sexual abuse and trafficking beginning at age twelve. Bambaataa never responded. Never appeared. A judge granted default judgment against him.What does it mean to lose a civil case because you did not show up to defend yourself in court? It means the court evaluated the allegations and, in the absence of any defense, found them credible enough to rule in the plaintiff’s favor. It means the person accused of the most heinous crimes against children could not even be bothered to say “I didn’t do this” under oath. And we’re supposed to call that “no evidence”?And for the people in the back — we can always acknowledge that the legal system, the one that hip-hop was made in opposition to, was never the great adjudicator of justice. So when we talk about somebody not having a criminal conviction, it does not speak to their innocence. It speaks to the system’s inability — or unwillingness — to charge them. The statute of limitations on the criminal allegations had expired. No charges could be brought. That’s not exoneration. That’s a system failing to deliver accountability — the same system we already understand is broken.You can’t invoke the legal system’s standards when it’s convenient and reject them when it’s not. That’s not principled. That’s on brand for protecting power.The Freudian SlipThere’s a moment in KRS-One’s defense that I keep coming back to. He said: “I hope for healing for everyone involved. First for those who are accusing Afrika Bambaataa.”Why does someone who is merely “accusing” need healing? If the accusations are baseless gossip, as KRS-One claims, then the accusers don’t need healing — they need to be discredited. But KRS-One’s own language betrays him. He says “healing” because somewhere, on some level, he knows. He knows that what those boys experienced was real. And still, the defense continues.That slip tells you everything. The rhetoric says “gossip.” The subconscious says “trauma.”Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Hassan Campbell and the Sound of Unheard TraumaWhich takes me to Hassan Campbell. I know a lot of people hate him and call him goofy and think he’s the problem. But when I hear him talk and hear what he’s been through, it sounds like unheard trauma. It sounds like somebody who has been looking for healing and looking to be heard and seen since it happened to him, and he hasn’t been able to do it. So he’s wreaked havoc on anything and anybody around him.This is what unaddressed childhood sexual trauma does. It doesn’t resolve itself neatly. It doesn’t present itself in ways that are palatable to an audience that would rather look away. The behavior that people mock and dismiss in Hassan Campbell is the direct product of what was done to him. And the fact that people find it easier to ridicule his pain than to interrogate the system that caused it tells you everything about where our sympathies actually lie.We sympathize with the leader. We pathologize the victim.And see, he’s not the only one. The French hip-hop pioneer Solo of the hardcore rap group Assassin alleged in his 2024 autobiography that he was sexually victimized by Bambaataa in the 1980s at age seventeen while staying at Bambaataa’s residence. Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five said in a 2021 interview with DJ Vlad that “everyone knew” about the abuse, calling it “hip-hop’s best kept secret.” A former bodyguard stated that Bambaataa regularly traveled with teenage boys. The Zulu Nation itself acknowledged it.How much evidence does it take before “gossip” becomes documentation? How many boys have to carry that weight before we decide the culture can survive the truth?The Education Implications: Who Teaches Our Children, and Who Watches?Let me bring this home to education, because this is where the material impact becomes undeniable.Afrika Bambaataa held a three-year visiting professorship at Cornell University. Cornell also acquired his papers. The Universal Hip-Hop Museum — a multimillion-dollar mixed-use property in the Bronx — was initiated in part by Bambaataa, and despite claiming he had “no role” since 2016, he continued to appear in its marketing materials. Hip-hop education programs proliferate in public schools, universities, and community centers across the country. And the foundational question that this case forces us to ask is: what are the safeguarding mechanisms in place when cultural leaders gain access to young people through educational and mentorship programs?This is not abstract. This is a child protection question. When we celebrate hip-hop’s transformative educational potential — and it is transformative — we must simultaneously build the institutional structures that prevent leaders from exploiting that access. The Bambaataa case is a case study in what happens when mentorship pipelines have no oversight, no accountability mechanisms, and a culture that treats leaders as infallible. It is what happens when the proximity that mentorship requires becomes the proximity that predation exploits.Every hip-hop education program, every youth arts initiative, every after-school program that invokes the culture needs to reckon with this. Not by abandoning hip-hop as an educational tool — that would be absurd. But by building into those programs the exact safeguarding protocols that the Universal Zulu Nation never had. Background checks. Mandatory reporting training. Transparent governance. The understanding that no leader — no matter how foundational — is above accountability. Because the moment you declare someone untouchable, you’ve built the architecture for abuse.Intersectional Material Impacts: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Disposability of Black BoysLet’s talk about who the victims were. Because they weren’t random. They were Black boys. Specifically, they were Black boys from the South Bronx — one of the poorest, most marginalized communities in America. They were boys who loved hip-hop. Boys who were looking for mentorship, community, and a sense of belonging. Boys whose vulnerability was a function of their race, their age, their class, and their geography.The sexual abuse of Black boys is one of the most underreported, under-discussed, and under-resourced categories of violence in America. Black boys who experience sexual abuse are less likely to disclose, less likely to be believed when they do, and less likely to receive appropriate therapeutic intervention. The intersections of anti-Black racism, toxic masculinity, and heteronormative expectations of Black male identity conspire to create a silence so thick you could choke on it.When KRS-One dismissed those boys’ experiences as “gossip,” he was participating in a tradition far older than hip-hop. The tradition of treating Black boys’ bodies as expendable in service to the larger project. The tradition that says Black male pain — particularly sexual pain — is not legible, not worthy of investigation, not important enough to disrupt the mythology of Black male greatness. Saidiya Hartman calls this the afterlife of slavery — the ways in which Black bodies remain fungible, available for use, disposable after the fact. Frank Wilderson would call it gratuitous violence — violence that doesn’t need a reason because the target was never considered fully human to begin with.The boys Bambaataa allegedly abused were fungible. They were raw material for the culture’s origin story. And when they spoke up, they were told to quit hip-hop.Can We Love Hip-Hop and Still Protect Our Children?So my question to people who love hip-hop, especially those who look like me: Can we love and have pride in the culture of hip-hop while also being critical of the individuals who cultivated the culture for their violence and their impact on our community? Can we?I believe we can. I believe we have to. Because the alternative — the KRS-One alternative — is a culture that eats its own children to preserve the image of its founders. And that is not a culture worth preserving. That is a plantation.The ugly truth is that a lot of the boys who were abused by Afrika Bambaataa also loved hip-hop. That’s the reason they were abused — because he used their love for hip-hop to prey on them. Almost sounds like what KRS-One is saying is the same thing Bambaataa felt, and that’s the reason he felt so enabled to do the things he did for so long. He understood he was insulated by a whole community of defense. His leadership made it where he was immune to accountability and responsibility. How dare you accuse him — the leader, the cultivator of hip-hop — of such things.If we believe that holding abusers of children accountable would bring down the culture or the system, what does it say about the culture and the system?When y’all ask why it took so long for the victims to come out — what you saw with KRS-One was the illustration. They weren’t going to be believed. All anyone was going to do was chastise them and tell them the leadership is untouchable, infallible. We gotta protect it at all costs. Right or wrong, true or false.How can we in hip-hop protect the very children that we’re supposed to be protecting and cultivating within the culture?The answer starts with the willingness to say what KRS-One couldn’t: no one is untouchable. No contribution is large enough to render a child’s body disposable. No culture that requires the silence of abuse victims to survive deserves to survive in its current form.Education is elevation. And the first lesson is that accountability is not the enemy of culture. It is the precondition for any culture worth having.EXPLICIT ASK TO BE A EDUCATION IS ELEVATION PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Two truths coexist. Afrika Bambaataa was a foundational architect of hip-hop culture who transformed the Bronx and influenced music globally. He also used his position to sexually abuse minors over decades — a reality confirmed by more than a dozen accusers, a Zulu Nation apology letter, and a civil court default judgment.* KRS-One’s “untouchable” logic is the blueprint for institutional abuse. Declaring a leader infallible and above accountability is not loyalty — it is the exact mechanism that protects predators across every institution, from the Catholic Church to political movements to sports programs.* The legal system is not the measure of truth. The absence of criminal charges reflects expired statutes of limitation, not innocence. Bambaataa lost a civil case by failing to show up. Invoking “no convictions” while simultaneously rejecting the legal system’s legitimacy is intellectually dishonest.* Black boys are among the most invisible survivors of sexual violence. The intersection of anti-Black racism, masculinity norms, and cultural loyalty creates a silence that compounds trauma. The dismissal of victims as “goofy” or “gossip” is a material continuation of that violence.* Hip-hop education requires institutional safeguards. If hip-hop is powerful enough to transform communities and educate youth, then the programs that carry it into schools and neighborhoods must include accountability structures — background checks, mandatory reporting, transparent governance — that prevent mentorship from becoming exploitation.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). Essential framework for understanding how Black bodies are rendered fungible and available for use — directly applicable to how Bambaataa’s victims were treated as disposable within hip-hop’s origin mythology.* Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Provides the Afropessimist lens on gratuitous violence — violence against Black bodies that requires no justification because it operates within a structure of ontological negation.* Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin’s Press, 2005). The definitive cultural history of hip-hop’s origins in the South Bronx, including the transformation of gang culture into the Universal Zulu Nation — essential context for understanding the institutional architecture Bambaataa built and exploited.* Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon Books, 1977). The panopticon framework for understanding surveillance, power, and institutional control — applicable to how Bambaataa’s leadership position created a structure of visibility and vulnerability for the boys in his orbit.* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1970). The foundational text on education as liberation — and the ways in which educational relationships can be co-opted by oppressive power dynamics. Directly relevant to the question of safeguarding youth in hip-hop education programs.* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class (Random House, 1981). Critical for understanding the intersection of race, gender, and sexual violence within liberation movements, and the historical pattern of silencing survivors to protect organizational leadership.* hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2004). Examines the crisis of Black masculinity and the cultural forces that make it difficult for Black boys and men to name, claim, and heal from sexual violence.* Patton, Desmond Upton, et al. “Gang Violence, Trauma and the Therapeutic Relationship: Treating Gang-Involved Youth in a Community Mental Health Context.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 22:7, 2013. Research on trauma among youth in gang-affiliated communities — directly applicable to the Zulu Nation context where boys were abused within an organization that was itself a response to gang violence.* Rolling Stone. “Afrika Bambaataa Loses Child Sexual Abuse Civil Case on Default Judgment.” May 22, 2025. Primary source reporting on the civil case and its outcome, including the timeline of allegations from 2016 to 2025.* The Universal Zulu Nation. “Open Letter of Apology.” June 2016. Signed by nearly three dozen members acknowledging the organization’s failure to address Bambaataa’s abuse — a primary document of institutional complicity.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I need y’all to sit with some numbers for a second. Not opinions. Not feelings. Numbers.In 2025, Fox News ran over 4,000 headlines sensationalizing transgender visibility. In that same year, they mentioned the Epstein files roughly 610 times. That’s nearly five times more coverage dedicated to a manufactured moral panic about trans people than to the exposure of one of the most sprawling child sex trafficking networks in modern American history. Let me say that again so it sits in your chest the way it should: a major American news network chose to spotlight transgender people — who appear in zero Epstein documents — at five times the rate they covered a convicted child predator’s files implicating some of the most powerful people on the planet.This is not an accident. This is architecture.The Graph They Don’t Want You to ReadI put a graph behind me during the video because I believe in showing you the receipts. Research over MeSearch. That graph illustrates a deliberate editorial decision — not a reflection of what matters to the American public, but a reflection of what Fox News needs you to not pay attention to. When you zoom out and look at the data, the pattern is unmistakable. Fox News didn’t just undercover the Epstein files. According to Media Matters, in the weeks following the Department of Justice’s massive January 2026 document dump — we’re talking millions of pages — Fox mentioned Epstein only 239 times over two weeks. In the same window, CNN logged 2,304 mentions. MSNBC hit 3,321. Even Newsmax — Newsmax! — managed 1,464 mentions. Fox News, the network that had spent years demanding the Epstein files be released, went functionally silent once those files started naming people in Trump’s orbit.Meanwhile, researcher Jessica Kant documented that Fox News published more articles referencing the trans community in 2025 than any other news outlet in the entire country — conservative or progressive. More than The Advocate. More than The Washington Post. More than The New York Times. Fox News produced more anti-trans content in a single year than there are days in a year. This isn’t journalism. This is what Stanley Cohen called a moral panic — the deliberate construction of a folk devil to redirect public fear away from the people actually doing harm.The Anatomy of a Manufactured VillainLet me walk you through how this works, because if you understand the playbook, you can never be played by it again.Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in 1972. He defined it as a moment when a group of people is elevated into a perceived existential threat to society — not because of anything they’ve actually done, but because powerful institutions need a villain. The process has five stages: concern is manufactured, hostility is directed, consensus is engineered, disproportionality is the feature (not the bug), and then the panic either fades or becomes permanent policy. Sound familiar?In 2020, there were roughly 100 anti-LGBTQ bills filed across the country, most of them narrowly targeting sports participation. By 2025, that number exploded past 850 — the most in United States history. Of those, 867 bills specifically targeted transgender Americans. One hundred and twenty-two would ban gender-affirming care. Seventy-seven would restrict bathroom access. Seventy-three sought to eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely — revoking driver’s licenses, stripping gender markers, invalidating identity documents. Some bills proposed classifying a parent’s support of their trans child as child abuse, opening the door for state-sanctioned family separation.Not a single transgender person appears in the Epstein files. Not one.But over 5,300 files in the January 2026 DOJ release contained more than 38,000 references to Donald Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms. The files revealed ongoing communication between Epstein and Steve Bannon. They contradicted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s public claims about the extent of his relationship with Epstein. They included an email in which Epstein told Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump knew about the victims.So ask yourself: who is the actual threat to children in this story? The trans woman trying to use a bathroom in peace, or the network of wealthy men whose names keep showing up in a dead predator’s files?The Oldest Trick in the BookThis is not new. This is, in fact, one of the oldest mechanisms of power in human history. Scholar Ben Debney calls it “panic-driven scapegoating” — the strategic construction of bogeymen to protect elite privilege during periods of crisis. The formula is ancient: identify a marginalized group, inflate a threat narrative around them, saturate media with that narrative, pass legislation to codify the fear, and while everyone is watching the folk devil, the people in power consolidate theirs.The Red Scare did this with communists. The War on Drugs did this with Black communities. The satanic panic of the 1980s did this with daycare workers. The “super predator” myth of the 1990s — championed by politicians on both sides of the aisle — did this with Black children, turning them into monsters in the public imagination to justify mass incarceration policies that devastated an entire generation.And now, in 2025, transgender Americans have been cast as the folk devil of this political moment. Not because they pose any measurable threat to public safety — the data is unambiguous on this point — but because their visibility coincides with a period in which powerful people need the public looking anywhere else.Stuart Hall wrote about this in Policing the Crisis back in 1978. He argued that crime statistics are routinely manipulated for political and economic purposes, and that moral panics are deliberately ignited to create public support for authoritarian responses. Hall was talking about mugging in Britain, but the framework maps perfectly onto what we’re watching today. The trans moral panic isn’t about bathrooms. It isn’t about sports. It isn’t about children. It’s about manufacturing consent for a surveillance state that monitors bodies, controls identity, and punishes deviance — while the actual predators walk free.Victimization Is When You Build the Narrative for Your Own AbuseI said something in the video that I want to expand on here, because it’s the key that unlocks this entire apparatus: victimization is when you create an entire narrative for you to be abused by. That’s what this media ecosystem does. It constructs a reality in which the most vulnerable people in society — trans folks, queer folks, Black folks, immigrants — are presented as the aggressors, and the most powerful people in the world are presented as the victims of some vague cultural assault.Fox News didn’t just fail to cover the Epstein files proportionally. They actively worked to cushion the political fallout. When Attorney General Pam Bondi’s initial “Phase One” rollout of Epstein documents was widely criticized as inadequate, Fox’s on-air personalities blamed the deep state. When the files started implicating people close to Trump, the network pivoted to relitigating Russiagate. When House Democrats released emails specifically referencing Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s victims, Fox News was silent for hours. Host Greg Gutfeld went on air and warned viewers that future Epstein releases would be “distorted.” Jesse Watters — the same man who once asked on camera, “Who protects a dead pedophile when children are raped?” — began deflecting and dismissing the story entirely.This is what manufactured consent looks like in real time. This is what Noam Chomsky was describing when he outlined the propaganda model of media. The coverage gap between trans panic and Epstein accountability isn’t a journalistic oversight. It is an editorial policy designed to protect a class of people who benefit from your distraction.The Numbers Behind the SilenceLet me give you one more set of numbers, because this is Education is Elevation and we believe in data.A December 2025 Reuters poll found that only 23% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the Epstein case. A January 2026 CNN poll found that 49% of Americans were dissatisfied with how much of the files the government had released. Two-thirds of respondents believed the government was deliberately withholding information. When Attorney General Bondi initially told Fox News in February 2025 that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” the public expected transparency. By July 2025, the DOJ released a two-page memo claiming no client list existed, no credible evidence of blackmail was found, and Epstein died by suicide. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times subsequently reported that Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared in the files alongside what officials described as “unverified hearsay” — and that advisors had recommended against public disclosure.Trump called the files falsified and filed a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal.Meanwhile, in state legislatures across the country, lawmakers were filing their 850th anti-LGBTQ bill. The ACLU documented that attacks on transgender people grew “exponentially” between 2023 and 2025. Research linked these legislative attacks to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in some states. The CDC reported that one in four transgender youth had attempted to take their own life in the last year.So who is actually under threat? And whose safety is actually being prioritized by this media ecosystem?Consciousness Precedes TransformationHere’s what I need y’all to understand — and this is the throughline of everything I do on this platform. You cannot fight a system you do not see. Consciousness precedes transformation. If you cannot name the mechanism, you cannot dismantle it. And the mechanism here is as clear as it has ever been: moral panic is the weapon, media is the delivery system, and legislation is the payload.Trans people are not destroying your healthcare system. Trans people did not invade any country. Trans people are not the reason you can’t afford education. The Epstein files — the actual documents — implicate wealthy, powerful men who trafficked children. And the network that ran five times more headlines about trans people than about those files made a calculated decision about what you should and shouldn’t be outraged about.Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you have a responsibility to say something.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.Think about what we just walked through together. A billion-dollar news network is spending its airtime constructing folk devils out of trans people so you don’t ask questions about convicted child predators. The histories that explain how and why they do this — moral panic theory, propaganda models, the political economy of scapegoating — are being systematically defunded and removed from public education. This Substack is the counter-curriculum.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* The coverage gap is the story. Fox News ran approximately 5x more headlines on transgender people than on the Epstein files in 2025. This is not journalistic proportionality — it is a deliberate editorial strategy to redirect public attention away from powerful individuals implicated in child sex trafficking toward a marginalized community that appears in zero Epstein documents.* Moral panic is a technology of power, not a spontaneous public reaction. From the Red Scare to the War on Drugs to the current anti-trans legislative surge, the construction of folk devils follows a documented, repeatable pattern identified by sociologists going back to 1972. Recognizing this pattern is the first step to resisting it.* The legislative consequences are measurable and devastating. Over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed in 2025 — the most in U.S. history. Research has linked this legislative environment to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans youth in some states. Meanwhile, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November 2025, has been met with heavy redaction, staggered releases, and bipartisan criticism of the DOJ’s noncompliance.* Fox News’ silence on Epstein is as revealing as its obsession with trans people. When the DOJ released millions of pages of Epstein files in early 2026, Fox mentioned the story 239 times in two weeks — compared to CNN’s 2,304, MSNBC’s 3,321, and even Newsmax’s 1,464. The network that had demanded the files’ release for years went functionally silent once the documents implicated figures in its political ecosystem.* Consciousness precedes transformation. You cannot dismantle a system you cannot name. The mechanism at work — moral panic as a tool of manufactured consent — has been documented by scholars from Stanley Cohen to Stuart Hall to Noam Chomsky. Understanding the playbook is the prerequisite for resisting it. Education is elevation.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS* Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. — The foundational text on moral panic theory. Cohen defines the five-stage process by which societies construct perceived threats from marginalized groups, providing the theoretical framework for understanding how trans Americans have been cast as folk devils in contemporary media.* Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. — Hall and colleagues demonstrate how crime statistics are manipulated for political ends and how moral panics are ignited to justify authoritarian state responses. Essential for understanding the relationship between media coverage disparities and policy outcomes.* Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. — Outlines the propaganda model of media, demonstrating how corporate ownership, advertising dependence, and source selection systematically filter information to serve elite interests. Directly applicable to understanding Fox News’ editorial choices around Epstein versus trans coverage.* Debney, Ben. The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020. — Traces panic-driven scapegoating across centuries, establishing a five-stage model of how elites construct bogeymen to protect privilege during periods of crisis. Debney argues this mechanism is one of the primary ways history repeats itself.* Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. — Documents how the War on Drugs functioned as a racial caste system, using moral panic about crack cocaine to justify mass incarceration of Black Americans. Provides historical precedent for understanding how manufactured fear translates into discriminatory legislation.* Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. — Expands Cohen’s framework to identify five key indicators of moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. Essential for evaluating the current anti-trans legislative surge against objective threat assessments.* Erin Reed / Erin In The Morning. “Over 850 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills Filed in 2025; Most in History.” April 2025. — Primary data source documenting the unprecedented volume of anti-trans legislation. Reed’s legislative tracker provides the empirical foundation for understanding the legislative dimension of the current moral panic.* Media Matters for America. “Compared to Other Cable News Channels, Fox News Is Hiding the Latest Epstein Revelations from Their Audience.” February 2026. — Quantifies Fox News’ coverage gap on the Epstein files, documenting 239 mentions over two weeks compared to CNN’s 2,304 and MSNBC’s 3,321. Provides the empirical basis for the media analysis in this article.* Kant, Jessica. Research on Anti-Trans News Coverage, 2023–2026. Reported in PinkNews, February 2026. — Longitudinal data tracking Fox News’ anti-trans article output, documenting that the outlet produced more articles referencing the trans community than any other publication in 2025, exceeding one article per day for nearly four consecutive years.* Freedom House. “To Find an Authoritarian, Just Follow the Scapegoat.” 2018. — Argues that scapegoating of marginalized groups — particularly LGBTQ communities — is a hallmark of authoritarian governance globally, functioning to distract from governance failures, bolster support, and isolate domestic opponents.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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Let me tell y’all about the city of Festus, Missouri, because this story right here is the blueprint.The residents of Festus told their city council — clearly, explicitly, on the record — that they did not want a data center built in their community. The council ignored them. Voted to approve it anyway. So the people of Festus did what democracy is supposed to let you do. They voted out every single council member who approved that data center. Every. Single. One. Lost their job. That’s accountability from micro to macro, and that’s the energy we need to be studying right now, because what’s happening with data centers in this country is one of the most underreported environmental justice crises of our generation.And I need y’all to understand why those folks in Festus were so adamant, because this isn’t about being anti-technology. This is about understanding what these facilities actually do to the communities that have to live next to them.The Numbers Don’t LieHere’s the fact that should stop every single one of us in our tracks: all data centers worldwide, combined, now consume 32% more electricity than the entire nation of Great Britain. Let that marinate. We’re talking about server farms — buildings full of machines — using more power than a country of nearly 70 million people. And that matters because power generation is already the single largest source of CO2 emissions on the planet. Every time that energy demand climbs, so do the emissions. So do the health consequences. So does the suffering in the communities closest to the plants generating that power.And it gets worse. A single Google data center — one facility — consumes approximately half a million gallons of water per day. Per day. In a country where Flint, Michigan went years without clean water. In a country where Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapsed. In a country where Black communities from the rural South to the urban Midwest have been fighting for decades just to get water that won’t poison them. Big Tech is draining aquifers to cool servers so somebody can ask ChatGPT to write a poem.The cooling systems alone in these data centers account for over 40% of their total electricity usage. So not only are they consuming massive amounts of power, a near-majority of that power is just keeping the machines from overheating. That’s the part nobody in Silicon Valley wants to put in the press release. They’ll tell you about the jobs. They’ll tell you about the tax revenue. They won’t tell you about the 40% energy overhead just to manage the heat their own infrastructure produces.Environmental Racism Has a New AddressNow here’s where I need y’all to really lock in, because this isn’t just an environmental story. This is a race story. It’s always been a race story.The pattern of where data centers get built follows the exact same cartography of disinvestment and disposability that has defined Black life in America since Reconstruction. Robert Bullard — the father of environmental justice — documented this architecture of harm back in 1990 in Dumping in Dixie. He showed how hazardous waste facilities, landfills, chemical plants, and polluting industries were systematically sited in Black communities. Not by accident. By design. Because those communities had been politically weakened by decades of disenfranchisement, economically hollowed out by redlining and capital flight, and socially rendered invisible by a media ecosystem that didn’t care what happened south of the highway.That was the playbook then. The playbook hasn’t changed. The product has. Instead of a petrochemical plant, it’s a data center. Instead of toxic sludge, it’s diesel exhaust from backup generators and the constant hum of industrial cooling systems. But the targeting logic is identical: find the community with the least political power, the fewest resources to fight back, and the lowest likelihood of making the evening news.Look at what happened in Prince William County, Virginia — one of the largest data center corridors in the world. The communities adjacent to those facilities have documented persistent noise pollution, diesel emissions from backup generators, and strain on local water and electrical infrastructure. When residents pushed back, they ran into the same wall communities of color always run into: the economic development narrative. The jobs argument. The tax base argument. The same arguments that were used to justify putting a highway through the middle of Black Bottom in Detroit, or a garbage incinerator next to public housing in Chester, Pennsylvania.And let’s talk about those backup generators, because this is the health piece that is getting buried. Diesel exhaust from data center backup generators contains fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — that embeds itself in your lungs and enters your bloodstream. We’re talking about documented pathways to heart disease, lung disease, stroke, and premature death. The American Lung Association has been clear on this. The EPA has been clear on this. The science is not in dispute. What’s in dispute is whether anyone in power cares enough to act on it when the people breathing that air are Black and brown.The Historical PlaybookIf you understand the history of environmental racism in this country, none of this surprises you. It follows a lineage that is as American as the Constitution itself.In 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina — a predominantly Black community — fought against the state’s decision to dump 6,000 truckloads of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls in their backyard. That protest, which saw over 500 arrests including Dr. Benjamin Chavis and Congressman Walter Fauntroy, is widely recognized as the birth of the environmental justice movement. The community lost that particular fight — the landfill was built — but the resistance catalyzed a national reckoning that led directly to the landmark 1987 United Church of Christ study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which proved empirically what Black folks already knew: race was the single most significant predictor of where hazardous waste facilities were located. Not income. Not land value. Race.President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 in 1994, directing federal agencies to address environmental justice in minority and low-income populations. But executive orders are only as durable as the administration that issues them. The enforcement mechanisms have been gutted, restored, and gutted again depending on which party holds the White House. Meanwhile, the facilities keep getting built. The permits keep getting approved. The pattern keeps reproducing itself with new technology and the same old geography.The data center boom is just the latest iteration of what Dorceta Taylor calls “the environmental justice framework” — the systematic distribution of environmental hazards along racial and socioeconomic lines. Taylor documented in Toxic Communities how zoning laws, land use decisions, and permitting processes function as mechanisms of racial sorting, ensuring that the communities least equipped to resist are the ones most likely to bear the burden.The Water Crisis Within the CrisisI want to come back to the water piece because I don’t think people fully grasp the scale of what’s happening.When a data center consumes half a million gallons of water a day, that water is being drawn from the same municipal systems and aquifers that serve residential communities. In regions already experiencing drought or water stress — and climate change is making that an expanding category every year — data center water consumption directly competes with household water needs. This isn’t theoretical. This is happening right now in places like Mesa, Arizona, where residents have raised alarms about data center water permits being approved while the state faces historic drought conditions along the Colorado River Basin.And here’s the structural piece that ties it all together: the communities most vulnerable to water scarcity are, once again, disproportionately communities of color. The water infrastructure crisis in this country — from Flint to Jackson to the Navajo Nation — maps onto the same racial geography as everything else we’ve been talking about. So when a data center moves into a water-stressed region and starts consuming hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, it’s not an equal-opportunity extraction. It deepens existing inequities that were already shaped by decades of racialized disinvestment.Communities Fighting BackBut here’s what I want to leave y’all with, because the story of environmental racism in America has never been just a story of victimization. It has always, simultaneously, been a story of resistance.Festus, Missouri is one example. But it’s not the only one. Across the country, communities are organizing against data center expansion using every tool available — from municipal elections to zoning board challenges to state-level legislative advocacy.In Virginia, grassroots coalitions have pushed for stricter noise ordinances and emissions standards for data center facilities. In Georgia, community organizers have demanded environmental impact assessments before new data center permits are approved. In Oregon, environmental groups have challenged the water permits granted to large tech companies. These fights are happening in real time, and they are being led, disproportionately, by the same communities that have always been on the front lines of environmental justice: Black communities, Indigenous communities, working-class communities that understand what it means to have your health and your resources sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s profit.The playbook that Festus used — direct electoral accountability — is one of the most powerful tools available. When elected officials understand that approving a facility the community doesn’t want will cost them their seat, the calculus changes. That’s democracy doing what democracy is supposed to do. And it shouldn’t take an extraordinary act of civic mobilization to make that happen, but in this country, for communities of color, it always has.Policy That MattersThere are real policy interventions that could change the trajectory of this crisis. The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice needs to be empowered — not just funded, but empowered with enforceable regulatory authority — to review data center siting decisions through an equity lens. The National Environmental Policy Act should require comprehensive environmental impact statements for any data center above a certain energy or water consumption threshold. State legislatures need to pass legislation mandating that data center developers conduct community health impact assessments and make those assessments public before a single permit is approved.At the federal level, the Justice40 initiative — which commits to delivering 40% of the benefits of certain federal investments to disadvantaged communities — should be expanded to include data center infrastructure oversight. If the government is going to incentivize the construction of these facilities through tax breaks and infrastructure spending, then the communities bearing the environmental and health costs need to be at the table, not as an afterthought, but as the first voice heard.And the tech companies themselves need to be held to account. The same corporations posting net-zero pledges and ESG reports are the ones building facilities that consume more electricity than entire nations. Facts over feelings — if your sustainability report says one thing and your energy consumption says another, the community has a right to call that what it is.The Bigger FrameThis is what I mean when I say education is elevation. Understanding the data center crisis isn’t just about understanding technology or environmental science. It’s about understanding how power operates in this country. It’s about understanding that the same logic that put a chemical plant in Cancer Alley puts a server farm in a water-stressed Black community in the South. It’s about understanding that the systems we’re told are neutral — zoning laws, permitting processes, economic development incentives — are, in fact, operating exactly as they were designed to operate: to distribute risk downward and profit upward along racial lines.The people of Festus understood that. They didn’t need a policy briefing or an academic lecture. They understood it because they live it. And they acted. That’s the model. That’s what fighting back looks like at the local level. From micro to macro, that’s how we get accountability with these folks.Research over MeSearch. Facts over feelings. Feel me?EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER 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.This article — tracing the line from Warren County to Festus, from Cancer Alley to Data Center Alley, from Robert Bullard’s research to the backup generator running next to someone’s home right now — is the kind of work that doesn’t get funded by the same corporations building those data centers. It gets funded by you. Every paid subscription keeps this work independent, rigorous, and accountable to the community, not to advertisers or algorithms.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 Key Takeaways1. Data centers are an environmental justice crisis hiding in plain sight. These facilities consume more electricity than entire nations, drain hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day, and emit diesel exhaust from backup generators that causes heart disease, lung disease, and stroke — and they are disproportionately sited near communities of color.2. The siting of data centers follows the exact same racial geography as every other environmental hazard in American history. From toxic waste dumps to petrochemical corridors, the pattern documented by Robert Bullard in 1990 holds: race is the primary predictor of who lives next to industrial harm. Data centers are the latest product in a centuries-old playbook.3. Festus, Missouri proved that local electoral accountability works. When every council member who voted for a data center the community opposed was voted out of office, it demonstrated the most direct and replicable form of community power — making elected officials pay a political price for ignoring the people they serve.4. The regulatory framework is decades behind the technology. Data centers operate in a gray zone — consuming energy and water at industrial scale while being regulated as commercial buildings. Without mandatory environmental and health impact assessments, communities have no formal mechanism to evaluate what’s being imposed on them.5. Environmental justice has always been, and remains, a racial justice issue. From Warren County in 1982 to Data Center Alley in 2026, the distribution of environmental harm in America is inseparable from the distribution of racial power. Understanding that connection is the first step toward changing it.Bibliography / Related ReadingsBullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 1990. The foundational text of environmental justice scholarship. Bullard documents the systematic siting of hazardous waste facilities in Black communities across the American South, establishing that race — not income — is the primary predictor of environmental hazard proximity.Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. NYU Press, 2014. Taylor expands the environmental justice framework to examine how zoning laws, land use decisions, and permitting processes function as mechanisms of racial sorting, producing disproportionate environmental burden for communities of color.Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017. Essential for understanding how federal, state, and local government policies — including zoning — created and maintained residential segregation. Provides the legal and historical context for understanding why data centers are sited where they are.United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. 1987. The landmark report that provided the first national empirical evidence that race was the strongest predictor of hazardous waste facility siting in the United States. A foundational document of the environmental justice movement.Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodney’s analysis of the extractive relationship between Europe and Africa provides the framework for understanding the global dimension of data center expansion — how technological infrastructure reproduces colonial patterns of resource extraction.Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism — the idea that capitalism has always been organized through racial hierarchy — is essential for understanding why the data center economy distributes its benefits and burdens along racial lines.Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1961. Fanon’s analysis of how colonial infrastructure is repurposed under neocolonial conditions provides theoretical grounding for understanding data center expansion in the Global South as a continuation of extractive logics.Sze, Julie. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. MIT Press, 2007. Sze examines how environmental racism operates in urban contexts — relevant for understanding how data center siting in metropolitan areas follows the same political dynamics that have concentrated environmental harm in communities of color.Pulido, Laura. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12-40. Pulido’s influential article argues that environmental racism must be understood not just through intentional siting decisions but through the structural dynamics of white privilege and urban development — a framework directly applicable to data center corridors.International Energy Agency. “Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks.” IEA Energy System Reports (updated annually). The authoritative source for data on global data center energy consumption, providing the empirical foundation for claims about electricity usage relative to national consumption levels.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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Margie, Millie Jones-Cowles, Allie, Jennifer Jones, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.I need y’all to sit with something for a minute. Really sit with it. Because what I’m about to lay out is not just history. It’s a blueprint. It’s a pattern that connects the destruction of Greenwood in 1921 to the murder of Terrence Crutcher in 2016 to the bombs dropping on Iran right now. And if you can’t see the thread, I need you to stay with me, because by the end of this, you will.I recently had a conversation with Attorney DeMario Solomon-Simmons — a national civil rights attorney who has been representing survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre for almost 30 years. His wife is a descendant. He’s Muscogee Creek. He played football at the University of Oklahoma, got three degrees from OU just like I did. And let me tell y’all — when this brother speaks, he’s not giving opinions. He’s giving receipts. The kind of receipts that hold up in federal court.And the first receipt he dropped changed how I understood the entire story.Before There Was a Massacre, There Was a Freedom Mind StateSee, most people want to start the Tulsa Race Massacre story at Dick Rowland and the elevator. That ain’t it though. You can’t understand why Greenwood was destroyed if you don’t understand why Greenwood existed. And the story of why Greenwood existed goes back almost a hundred years before the massacre even happened.Before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it was Indian Territory. We’re talking about the 1830s, when the United States forcibly removed the five southeastern tribes — Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Muscogee Creek — and marched them along what we know as the Trail of Tears. But here’s what a lot of people don’t realize: a significant portion of those on the Trail of Tears were Black. They were enslaved by those nations, and they looked like you and me. Attorney Solomon-Simmons’ own ancestor, Cal Tom, was on that trail.When the Civil War ended and enslavement ended within those nations, something extraordinary happened. Black people in Indian Territory were living free and independent for fifty years before Oklahoma even became a state. Fifty years. While Black folks in Mississippi and Alabama and across the South were looking for a place to be free — going to Mexico, going to Canada, going back to Africa, going to the Caribbean — the promised land was right there in Indian Territory. Because there were already free Black people there. Already Black towns. Already infrastructure.Oklahoma had the most all-Black towns in the history of this country. Boley. Tatum. Redbird. Summit. And all of those Black towns fed into the big city. Greenwood was the metropolis. Attorney Solomon-Simmons put it like this: in New York, they call Manhattan “the city.” Well, Greenwood was the city for all those Black towns.And here’s where the pattern starts.Tulsa Was the Oil Capital of the World. Let That Marinate.At the time, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world. I said it. The oil capital of the world. And a lot of that oil money, a lot of that land, was possessed by Black people. So now you’ve got this collision: a freedom mind state Black community, more Black millionaires per capita than any other place in the history of this nation, more Black professionals per capita than anywhere in the country — and then statehood arrives in 1907 and brings white supremacy with it.The very first law of the state of Oklahoma? Senate Bill 1. Segregated railroad cars and phone booths. The first law. Not infrastructure. Not commerce. Segregation. Jim Crow became the founding principle of the state.So you’ve got free, independent, wealthy Black folks who’ve been building for half a century, and now you’ve got a state apparatus designed to subjugate them. That tension — between Black freedom and white supremacist governance — is what produced the massacre.Y’all starting to hear the pattern?The Dick Rowland Story Was the Spark. The Land Was the Motive.In 1921, a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland got on an elevator with a white elevator operator named Sarah Page. We don’t actually know what happened. But the allegation was that he tried to assault her. They arrested him, took him downtown, and a white mob formed calling to lynch him.And this is where the story of Greenwood becomes the story of love. Because about a hundred of the richest, most powerful Black men in the community — not just in Tulsa, but in the nation — many of them World War I veterans, strapped up with their military training and their weapons, and went downtown to protect Dick Rowland’s life.He wasn’t rich. He didn’t own businesses or land. He was a shoeshine boy. But he was one of theirs. That’s community love. That’s one of the five Think Greenwood Principles. It didn’t matter that Dick Rowland didn’t have wealth. What mattered was that no Black man was going to be lynched on their watch.A hundred brothers went downtown and faced a mob of 1,500 to 2,000 whites. They went to the sheriff and said they were there to help protect Rowland. The sheriff told them to leave. They stayed. And as they were walking away from the courthouse, an old white man in the mob said to what we believe was O.B. Mann, a World War I veteran: “Nigga, what you going to do with that gun?” And O.B. Mann said: “I’m going to use it if I have to.”That white man tried to take the gun. The gun went off. And all hell broke loose.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.36 Hours. 25,000 Attackers. And the City Gave Them a License to Kill.The Black men retreated back across the train tracks into Greenwood and set up defensive perimeters. And this is the part of the story that doesn’t get told enough. These brothers fought. Many of them had World War I military training, and they held off the mob for over twelve hours. The first twelve hours? Greenwood was winning.But here’s where the state enters the picture. The mob of about 2,000 whites was deputized by the city of Tulsa. They weren’t just given permission. They were armed by the city. Walter White — not the TV character, the NAACP executive who happened to be in Tulsa investigating a separate lynching — this brother looked like a white man. So he went and got himself deputized with the mob to document what was happening. He later wrote about it in The Nation magazine. He said when he was deputized, a white man turned to him and said: “Now I can kill any nigga I want and the law is behind me.”The receipt.The National Guard was called in. They brought machine guns. And around five o’clock the next morning, a whistle blew, and 20,000 to 25,000 whites poured into Greenwood. That number is not mine. That’s from the National Guard’s own after-action reports. They got on top of buildings and on top of the standpipe and mowed down the defenses with machine guns. Then they came into Greenwood and they looted. They burned. They raped. They killed.When the smoke cleared: 1,550 homes and businesses burned to the ground. Over 8,000 people displaced. 3,000 people never heard from again. The survivors — about 8,000 — were placed in what they called at the time internment camps. You couldn’t leave unless a white person signed you out and put a green sticker on you saying they were responsible for you. And if you weren’t working for a private white employer, you were forced to clean up the destruction they created. For free.In other words, they effectively re-enslaved them.The Language Was the Second WeaponAnd they called it a “Tulsa Race Riot.”Why? Because these Black people were sophisticated. They understood business. Many of them had insurance policies. But those insurance policies had riot clauses that would invalidate the coverage. So by calling a government-backed massacre a “riot,” they ensured that Black people couldn’t collect a single dime. The language wasn’t just inaccurate. It was a legal weapon designed to prevent financial recovery.Attorney Solomon-Simmons has spent almost thirty years fighting to change that language from “riot” to “massacre.” Because what I just described to y’all was not a riot. It was a planned, state-sanctioned campaign of terror, destruction, and dispossession. The historical record confirms they wanted the land of Greenwood to expand the industrial base of downtown Tulsa because the oil industry was booming. Dick Rowland was the spark. The land was always the motive.Feel me?The Beneficiaries Are Still Operating TodaySo who benefited? The city of Tulsa and private business owners who took the land and developed further industry for the oil companies. The insurance companies that refused to pay property claims — companies like Chubb, AIG, and Hartford, many of which are still in existence today. They received premiums for years and when it came time to pay, they didn’t pay.Banks benefited too. When your bank book burned up in the massacre and you went to the bank to claim your deposits, they told you they didn’t know if it was really your money. Solomon-Simmons’ team did over 250 hours of research and found the banks that swooped up all the institutions from that era. Two major banks that are still operating today: BOK and Chase.These are the beneficiaries of the massacre. And they are still profiting.And the land? Greenwood was four square miles. Almost forty city blocks. It was bigger than Harlem, New York. When you go to Greenwood in 2026, you see one block of the original buildings that were rebuilt right after the massacre. And everything around it — the high-rises, the ballpark, the banks, the hotels, the office buildings — none of it is owned by descendants of Greenwood. None of it is owned by African Americans. Zero.From Dr. A.C. Jackson to Terrence Crutcher: Hands Up, Still MurderedDr. A.C. Jackson was considered the best Black surgeon in the nation at the time of the massacre. He came out of his home with his hands up. A white judge, Judge Oliphant, who was a friend of Dr. Jackson’s, tried to save him. He told the mob: “Do not harm this man. Do you know who this is? This is Dr. A.C. Jackson.” And they said: “We don’t give a damn who this nigga is.” They shot him twice in the stomach. The greatest Black surgeon in the nation bled out over five hours in an internment camp.Now fast forward to September 16, 2016. Terrence Crutcher, a student at Tulsa Community College, was coming home when he was encountered on the side of the road by Officer Betty Jo Shelby. He’s on video walking away from her. His hands are up. He has no weapon. She shot him in the chest. And then she and the other officers on scene — including her husband, who was in the helicopter above calling Terrence “a bad dude” — consoled each other while Terrence bled out on the ground without medical assistance.Here’s what I didn’t know until my conversation with Attorney Solomon-Simmons: Terrence Crutcher was a descendant of the Tulsa Race Massacre. His great-grandmother was Rebecca Brown Crutcher. His twin sister is Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, who now runs the Crutcher Foundation and the Black Wall Street Legacy Fest.Dr. A.C. Jackson. Hands up. Murdered. 1921.Terrence Crutcher. Hands up. Murdered. 2016.Same city. Same pattern. A hundred years apart.Let that marinate.The Legal Fight Is Still Happening Right NowBetty Jo Shelby was found not guilty at her criminal trial in 2017. Then she got a job in Rogers County. Then she went on a national speaking tour teaching officers how to survive being accused of shooting a citizen. She commodified Black death and built a whole career out of it. The community had to organize just to shut that down.The Crutcher family filed a civil lawsuit. The case was dismissed in 2023 when the district court granted qualified immunity — that legal shield that protects rogue officers from accountability when they violate constitutional rights. But Attorney Solomon-Simmons and his team appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. They argued the case in Denver in May 2025. And on March 30, 2026 — just over a week ago — the 10th Circuit agreed with them. They overturned the qualified immunity. They affirmed what should have been obvious: you cannot shoot someone with their hands in the air. That’s been the law of the land since Tennessee v. Garner in 1985.The case now goes back to district court. If the city doesn’t settle, it goes to trial. Attorney Solomon-Simmons says co-counsel includes Karen Portlock at Gibson Dunn — one of the biggest law firms in the world — and Attorney Ben Crump.This fight is not over.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Domestic and the International Are the Same BlueprintI want y’all to hold something else. Because while we were having this conversation about Greenwood, America was bombing Iran. And the parallels are not accidental.In the 1920s, the American government destabilized a region within its own borders to make it so the inhabitants could no longer control the natural resources. The oil industry was booming, and they wanted that land. In 2026, America is doing the same thing internationally — trying to control a region because it believes the natural resources should be dictated by American, British, and Israeli interests. Trump even said it. They want the oil.Attorney Solomon-Simmons made this connection directly. He said when you start talking about bombing and wiping out a civilization, that means something specific to someone from Greenwood. Because his people were bombed. They tried to wipe out his civilization. And just like in Tulsa, where they used a fake narrative about Dick Rowland assaulting a white woman when the real motive was land, America internationally uses narratives about security and terrorism when the real motive is resources.At the end of the day, it’s all about resources. It’s all about power. Domestically and internationally, the question is always the same: who gets to own the land? Who gets to dictate the land? And the answer, historically, has always been determined by who has the capacity for violence and the legal infrastructure to justify it.This is what I mean when I talk about how whiteness, specifically descendants of Europeans, operates on the belief that they have dominion over natural resources. Meaning: if we don’t have control over the resources, we believe the world will go into complete chaos. So this justifies us creating chaos to get the resources that we say not having will create chaos. Read that again. That’s the logic. That’s the circular justification. And it’s the same logic in Greenwood in 1921 and in Iran in 2026.Stop Saying We Can’t Work Together. Stop Saying We’re Our Own Worst Enemy.Attorney Solomon-Simmons said something in our conversation that I need everybody to internalize. He said there are three lies that Black people have swallowed from white supremacy that we need to stop repeating immediately.One: that we don’t work together and aren’t unified. That is a falsehood. By empirical studies, Black people actually have more unity than any other ethnic group in this nation based upon our shared history. Greenwood itself is the proof. A hundred of the richest Black men in the community risked their lives for a shoeshine boy because he was one of theirs. That’s unity. Stop saying we don’t have it.Two: that we are our own worst enemy. How can you be your own worst enemy when you have a 500-year enemy of white supremacy that is killing, destroying, and doing everything it can to undermine you? Individual achievement will never overcome structural violence. We have to change the structures. You never want to talk about the bucket the crabs are in. You just want to blame the crabs for fighting in the bucket.Three: that we’re not our ancestors. When people say “I’m not my ancestors,” Solomon-Simmons’ response is perfect. He says: “You’re right. You’re not your ancestors. Because your ancestors went through so much more and they were able to overcome. They went through the Nadir. They went through Jim Crow. They went through enslavement. They went through redlining and lynchings and were still strong enough for your Black butt to be here today.”When you say you’re not your ancestors, you’re telling on yourself. You’re saying you don’t know your history and you don’t respect your history. Our ancestors endured obstacles and opposition far beyond what we face, and they got us here. Honor that.Greenwood Was Not Just a Place. It Was a State of Mind.Attorney Solomon-Simmons’ book, Redeemer Nation: The 100-Year-Old Battle for the Soul of America, is coming out May 12th. And in it, he makes a point that I think is critical for where we are right now. He says America does not have a soul. America has never had a soul, because it was built on the exploitation of African labor and the genocide of Native Americans. The book is about how we get to a place where we can actually have one. And that can only happen through reparatory justice.He also talks about the five Think Greenwood Principles: community love, freedom mind state, ownership, wealth circulation, and willful resilience. And he’s clear — when he says ownership, he’s not just talking about tangible assets. He’s talking about owning our own mind, owning our own history, owning our own culture. Owning our own everything.Greenwood was not just a physical location. It was a state of mind. And that state of mind is what we need to rebuild.Through his nonprofit, Justice for Greenwood, there are concrete ways to engage. The We Are Greenwood (WAG) program is doing genealogy and oral histories — over 250 descendants verified, over 100 oral histories completed. The Legacy Protection Program (LPP) provides free estate planning, free probate services, and free nuisance litigation for verified descendants in northeast Oklahoma. The Greenwood 11,000 campaign — named for the approximately 11,000 residents of Greenwood at the time of the massacre — is mobilizing people to download toolkits, complete workbooks with their families, hold discussion groups, and engage in participatory action.Paying reparations is not radical. Refusing to pay what you owe is radical.Facts over feelings.Research over MeSearch.EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.Think about what you just read. The insurance companies that called a massacre a “riot” to avoid paying Black families are still operating today. The banks that kept Black deposits after the bank books burned are still in business. The descendants are still fighting for justice in 2026. This is the kind of history that is being actively erased from classrooms right now — and the only thing standing between erasure and education is independent work like this.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Greenwood’s Destruction Was About Land and Oil, Not Dick Rowland. The narrative of Dick Rowland assaulting a white woman was the pretext, not the cause. The historical record confirms that white Tulsa wanted Greenwood’s land to expand the downtown industrial base during an oil boom. The same resource-extraction logic operates today in American foreign policy.2. The Language “Race Riot” Was a Legal Weapon, Not Just a Misnomer. Calling the massacre a “riot” was a deliberate strategy to activate riot clauses in insurance policies, ensuring Black families could never collect on their claims. Naming matters — it’s not just about historical accuracy; it’s about who gets compensated and who doesn’t.3. The Corporate Beneficiaries of the Massacre Are Still Operating. Insurance companies that refused to pay claims, banks that kept Black deposits after bank books burned, and businesses that developed on stolen Greenwood land continue to operate and profit in 2026. Structural violence doesn’t end with the violence — it compounds through generations of accumulated advantage.4. The Line from 1921 to 2016 Is Direct and Documented. Terrence Crutcher — a descendant of the Tulsa Race Massacre — was murdered by police with his hands up in the same city where Dr. A.C. Jackson was murdered with his hands up 95 years earlier. Qualified immunity is the modern legal mechanism that provides the same impunity that deputization provided in 1921.5. Greenwood Was Not Just a Place — It Was a State of Mind That Must Be Rebuilt. The five Think Greenwood Principles — community love, freedom mind state, ownership, wealth circulation, and willful resilience — represent an ideology of Black self-determination that predated and survived the massacre. Rebuilding Greenwood means rebuilding that consciousness, not just physical structures.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGSSolomon-Simmons, DeMario. Redeemer Nation: The 100-Year-Old Battle for the Soul of America. (2026)Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Louisiana State University Press (1982). Messer, Chris M., et al. The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Politics of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan (2021). Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday (2017). White, Walter. “The Eruption of Tulsa.” The Nation, June 29, 1921. Hirsch, James S. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy. Houghton Mifflin (2002). Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. St. Martin’s Press (2001). Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission. (2001). Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule.’” PBS: The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press (2010). Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.When I tell y’all that the conservative contradictions are writing themselves at this point, I need you to understand I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m reading receipts. And this week, we got a whole dossier.Let me set the stage. We’re sitting down on The Chop Up Show — me, Toya G, and Domo aka Political Plug — and within the first ten minutes we’re touching Kristi Noem’s husband getting caught cross-dressing with an immigrant sex worker, the largest protest in American history, Pam Bondi getting fired, Donald Trump publicly embarrassing Caroline Levitt, a basketball player weaponizing Christianity to dehumanize queer people, and a legendary R&B singer laughing on camera about the statutory logistics of sleeping with a teenager. And somehow, all of these things are connected. That’s the part I need y’all to sit with.Research over MeSearch. Always.The Conservative Contradiction MachineLet’s start where the contradictions are loudest. Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, got caught in a scandal involving cross-dressing — the very behavior that the conservative movement has spent the last several years criminalizing through legislation targeting drag queens and transgender individuals. We’re talking about actual laws that were passed. Legislation that criminalized the very act that the DHS Secretary’s husband was engaging in privately with an immigrant sex worker.Now here’s the play. I believe the Trump administration already knew this was coming down the pipeline. That’s why Noem was being repositioned before the story broke. But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop at the personal scandal — it’s structural. The Supreme Court just ruled that conversion camps are protected under freedom of speech. So my question becomes: does Kristi Noem’s husband now have to attend the conversion camps that his wife’s political allies championed? Probably not. And that selective moral outrage is the whole game.What we’re witnessing is not inconsistency. It’s architecture. The cisgender conservative white man believes he has the right to do everything he wants while criminalizing those same behaviors in others. That’s not a contradiction — that’s a feature of the system.And it’s not just Noem. Pam Bondi — Trump’s attorney general — was fired. If you recall, Trump fired Jeff Sessions in 2018 because Sessions wouldn’t obstruct the Mueller probe. Same pattern, different pawn. Then Trump publicly humiliated Caroline Levitt, his own press secretary, joking about his 97% negative press coverage being her fault. Three prominent white women in the Trump administration, and all three treated as disposable.Let’s not forget: 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump — the only majority of women to do so. And he showed them exactly what that loyalty purchases: a front-row seat to your own disposability. You praise a king, you get treated like a pawn.No Kings Day 3.0 and the Underutilization of ProtestEight million people showed up for No Kings Day 3.0 — the largest protest in United States history. And the first thing I heard from folks was: what’s the point?I want to challenge that. I’ve been rethinking the utility of protests, and here’s where I’ve landed. Protests are big-ass meetings. They’re not just about standing next to each other singing and chanting the same phrases. They should be networking opportunities. Communication hubs. Strategic planning sessions. Especially when we know the internet has been infiltrated and surveilled.The problem isn’t that protests don’t work. The problem is that we don’t have the organizational infrastructure to capitalize on what happens when millions of people are physically together. We’re underutilizing the capacity of collective presence. The question is always going to be: whose directions are we following? What structures are we legitimizing? Those are questions about moral conscience, ethical compass, and strategic viability — and they require a level of intentionality that most protest movements haven’t achieved yet.Jaden Ivey and the Anatomy of Christian PsychosisNow let’s talk about Jaden Ivey, because this situation is a case study in everything I’ve been warning about at the intersection of religion, nationalism, and the recruitment of Black athletes.The Chicago Bulls released Ivey for conduct detrimental to the team. The specifics: he went on 40-minute Instagram rants steeped in anti-queer rhetoric. He categorized teammates as “righteous” and “unrighteous.” He told team doctors that Jesus healed his knee injury — an injury the MRI confirmed was still present. He destroyed locker room culture with persistent, condemnatory preaching that the Bulls organization formally described as “weirdness in the workplace.”Now, here’s where it gets nuanced, and this is the part I want y’all to think deeply about because we’re thinking deeply about shallow s**t on this one.Everything Ivey was criticized for — the witnessing, the bearing testimony, the sacred declaration, the chastising of the unrighteous — these are actual tenets of evangelical Christianity. Bearing witness is what Christians are called to do. The Bible talks about the fire burning at the altar and never going out. Many Christians interpret themselves as the altar — mobile vessels carrying the fire and the fear of Christ to share with the world. Sacred declaration — speaking life and not death, the whole notion that life and death are in the power of the tongue — that is foundational doctrine. Even the righteous-versus-unrighteous classification has biblical license. The text gives believers authority to chastise and bring people into the faith.So here’s the question I posed to the crew: is this religious psychosis, or is this a man living his faith? And the distinction matters.Religious psychosis involves hallucinations and fixed false beliefs with religious themes — believing one is a deity, a prophet, or possessed. It’s not a specific diagnosis, but a recognized form of psychosis. Now, I do think Ivey is displaying attributes consistent with religious psychosis. But here’s the critical move: I’m not diagnosing him. Psychosis and diagnosis are not the same thing. You can identify the attributes of a phenomenon without pretending you’re a clinician.And here’s where Domo brought the fire. He said something I want everyone to sit with: one of the biggest issues with religion is that it gives people excuses to be bad people. They wrap their “fucked-up-ness” in the guise of holiness. Because there are Christians who can hold their beliefs without condemning another person’s lifestyle or identity. That type of Christian exists. Which means the bigotry is not unique to Christianity — it’s that bigoted people find Christianity a convenient vehicle for their bigotry.What’s extremely dangerous about Ivey’s jersey sales skyrocketing after his expulsion is what it reveals: we’ve entered an era where bigots view the rejection of bigotry as oppression. Folks are framing pushback against hate as persecution. And Ivey’s situation folds perfectly into the white Christian nationalist playbook. He can now claim he was persecuted by the NBA, which feeds directly into Trump’s “anti-Christian bias” narrative. This is how Christian nationalism recruits Black folks — specifically Black athletes — into a movement that was never designed to protect them.Freedom of Speech Is Not What You Think It IsA lot of people conflated this with freedom of speech, and I had to set the record straight live on the show. So let me lay it out:First, you can have freedom of speech without that speech entailing the condemnation of an entire group of people. Second, freedom of speech protects you from the federal government — not from private entities. The NBA is a private organization. Third, I dare any of y’all to walk into your job tomorrow and declare an entire group of people unrighteous. You’ll be in HR before lunch, if not fired on the spot. Fourth, a lot of people are being loud, proud, and wrong when they try to play pseudo-intellectual with First Amendment arguments.And as Domo put it: rights don’t exist in a vacuum. Your rights are bounded by their interaction with other people’s humanity. When your speech creates an environment that produces material outcomes detrimental to another group, people have the right to push back. Hate speech turns into real-life material violence. It starts in the language and then it turns into people doing things. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Bernie Mac told you: there gon’ be some consequences and some repercussions.Brandy, Wanya Morris, and the Predator PlaybookNow let me transition to the part of the conversation that requires a trigger warning, because we’re getting into grooming, age of consent, power imbalance, and the infrastructure that allows grown men to secretly date teenage superstars in plain sight.Brandy confirmed in her 2026 memoir Phases that she dated Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men beginning around 1994-1995, when she was 15-16 years old and he was 22. Before I even get into the analysis, let me ground this with definitions, because I don’t play the game where we’re debating things without agreeing on what words mean.Grooming: a deliberate process where an older or more powerful person builds trust, emotional dependency, or secrecy with a younger or less powerful person to exploit them, often sexually.Age of consent: the legally defined age at which a person can consent to sexual activity, varying by state, typically 16 to 18.Informed consent: agreement that is freely given by someone with the maturity, knowledge, and autonomy to understand what they’re agreeing to and its consequences.A 16-year-old navigating fame under the guidance of a 22-year-old mentor is, by definition, operating within limited capacity for informed consent.Now, in a 2014 Breakfast Club interview, Wanya Morris was asked directly about the relationship’s legality. When the interviewer noted Brandy was young, Morris said, “She wasn’t that young.” When pressed that Brandy said she was 15, he corrected to 16 or 17. When asked if the relationship was legal in the state they were in, he joked — joked — “We did it in the states where it was legal.” He said they had a “nomad relationship.” And his Boyz II Men bandmate Shawn sat there wide-mouthed laughing through the whole exchange.Let me tell you what that interview revealed about this man’s character. At the height of his career — “I’ll Make Love to You,” all the sex music, could have had any woman in the country — he decided to pursue a 16-year-old. And his defense was jurisdictional shopping. That tells you everything. When someone treats statutory age-of-consent laws as loopholes to navigate rather than boundaries designed to protect children, you’re not looking at a love story. You’re looking at a predator who did the research.As I told the crew: we’ve all done research to figure out loopholes and workarounds for things we knew weren’t above board. There was a level of consciousness about both the act and the potential consequences. The same logic applies here. You don’t accidentally research which states have lower ages of consent. That level of intentional contemplation about the act and its consequences, followed by proceeding anyway, is what separates a mistake from predation.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Mentor-to-Lover PipelineBrandy wrote in her memoir: “What began as admiration had transformed into something else. It seems to me that he weaponized my admiration, shaped my friendship into dependence, my respect into desire.”That right there is the grooming playbook articulated by the survivor herself.The mentor-to-lover pipeline is especially dangerous for child entertainers because of the adultification baked into the industry. These kids aren’t living regular teenage lives. They’re not being socialized normally. They’re isolated from their peers and surrounded by adults. When you’re 16, you’re looking for your equals — your clique, your people. But celebrity strips that away. So you pivot to non-familial relationships with the adults around you. And when one of those adults is young, attractive, successful, and willing to “put you on” — the manipulation is almost baked into the infrastructure.Domo broke it down perfectly: you think he’s giving you game, but he’s grooming you. You think he’s putting you on, but he’s shaping you to hang on his every word. He’s telling you how the game goes, how to move, how to think — and he’s programming you with the emotional and sexual expectations of the 22 and 25-year-old women he should be dealing with. That’s grooming par excellence.And celebrity worship is the lubricant that makes it all frictionless. We are too trusting of celebrities because they are celebrities. We are too quick to suspend our logic to justify the people we’re fans of. And when it comes to children in Hollywood, that’s where the greatest danger lives — because celebrity becomes a shield for predatory behavior.The Epstein ParallelI drew a direct line on the show, and I’m drawing it here: the Epstein files revealed a network of powerful men who exploited their access, wealth, and fame to prey on minors while an entire ecosystem of assistants, managers, and media looked the other way. What structural similarities exist between that ecosystem and the 1990s music industry that allowed grown men to secretly date 16-year-old superstars in plain sight?Every argument Wanya Morris made on The Breakfast Club — the jurisdictional maneuvering, the age minimization, the “she wasn’t that young” deflection — those are the same arguments that defenders of Epstein-adjacent figures deploy. The ability for people to defend what Wanya did to Brandy is the same hubris that makes it hard to hold anyone in those files accountable. And it wasn’t just Wanya. Aaliyah was also being passed around as a child by overgrown men who felt entitled to possess her beauty. The industry infrastructure facilitated all of it.The “Fast Girl” Narrative and Adultification BiasBrandy wrote: “I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable, obsessive fan. I was a child, and he was an adult.”The “fast girl” narrative has been weaponized against Black girls specifically to justify the sexual behavior of adult men. And the scope is staggering. Girls are labeled “fast” for wearing shorts, having nail polish, understanding their own bodies, posting pictures, walking with a natural hip movement, being interested in fashion, or simply existing as developing human beings.Here’s where the double standard gets lethal: boys are encouraged — sometimes by their own parents — to pursue, to date, to prove their masculinity. But if a girl initiates or reciprocates any of the same behaviors, she’s automatically “fast.” We’re raising hypersexual young boys and then policing the very girls they’re pointed toward. And the fastest way to silence a victim is to say she brought it on herself.Research from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality in 2017 documented what scholars call adultification bias — the finding that Black girls are perceived as needing less nurturing, less protection, and more accountability than white girls of the same age. That’s not opinion. That’s data. And it maps directly onto how Brandy’s experience was processed by the culture — minimized, laughed about, normalized.What This Moment DemandsIf you got a problem with either conversation — the Jaden Ivey situation or the Brandy-Wanya accountability discussion — and you think there are “more important things to talk about,” I think you’re speaking from a position of privilege. People who experience homo-negative violence don’t have the luxury of saying this doesn’t matter. People who experience the gender violence embedded in these age-gap dynamics don’t have the privilege of dismissal.We are the generation shaping the next generation. We’re not the kids anymore. And a lot of these conversations matter to us precisely because they didn’t matter when they should have mattered for us. We had to grow up and realize that the traditions we inherited produced a lot of harm. That the things people were okay with in the ‘80s and ‘90s — things we witnessed — are things we refuse to adopt and pass forward.F**k celebrity worship. If you don’t get anything else from this piece, get that.And as Alicia Marie reminded us in the live chat: while the adultification of young girls is a critical issue, it is even more so the refusal to hold the patriarchy accountable for their own thoughts, their own decisions, their own actions — which equal and equate to abuse. Being perceived as “fast” does not equal sexual entitlement for the person doing the perceiving. The question is always what she had going on instead of what he had going on. And no, it’s not all men — but it’s always men. Until we redirect the gaze from what the victim was wearing to what the perpetrator was choosing, we are maintaining rape culture, not dismantling it.We have to talk about how young girls get a chance to see themselves and understand themselves. And we have to talk about how young boys are programmed to participate in the negative ways they see feminized beings, if not women in particular. These are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation.Research over MeSearch. Always.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI’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.This week alone, we broke down the legal architecture of age-of-consent loopholes, the Georgetown research on adultification bias, the First Amendment distinctions between government and private entities, and the structural parallels between 1990s industry predation and the Epstein ecosystem. That’s the kind of work that takes hours of preparation and years of study. If this work fills a gap in your understanding — if it arms you with language and evidence you didn’t have before — I’m asking you to invest in its continuation. Subscribe. Share. And if you’re already here, upgrade to paid. This is how we build the thing that replaces the thing they took away.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Conservative contradictions are structural, not accidental. The same political movement that criminalized cross-dressing and championed conversion camps now quietly absorbs the scandal of Kristi Noem’s husband engaging in those very behaviors. Meanwhile, three prominent white women in the Trump administration — Noem, Bondi, and Levitt — have been publicly discarded by the man 53% of white women voted for. Selective moral outrage is not hypocrisy; it’s the operating system.2. Jaden Ivey’s expulsion exposes the Christian nationalism recruitment pipeline for Black athletes. Every behavior Ivey was criticized for — bearing witness, sacred declaration, classifying people as righteous or unrighteous — has roots in evangelical doctrine. But when those practices are deployed to dehumanize queer people, they serve the same function as white Christian nationalism’s broader project. His expulsion becomes a “persecution” narrative that feeds directly into Trump’s “anti-Christian bias” rhetoric, revealing how Christian nationalism recruits Black bodies to advance a white supremacist political agenda.3. The rejection of bigotry is not oppression. Freedom of speech protects citizens from government censorship — not from consequences imposed by private entities, employers, or communities. The NBA, like any workplace, has the right to enforce standards of conduct. When bigots frame accountability as persecution, they are constructing a victimhood that empowers further harm. Hate speech produces material violence. Pushing back against it is not censorship; it’s self-preservation.4. Wanya Morris’s Breakfast Club interview is a masterclass in how predators narrate their own behavior. The jurisdictional maneuvering (”we did it in the states where it was legal”), the age minimization (”she wasn’t that young”), and the casual laughter from his bandmates all reveal a system where powerful men can publicly confess to predatory behavior and have it processed as entertainment. The mentor-to-lover pipeline that Brandy describes — admiration weaponized into dependence, respect groomed into desire — is the same infrastructure that protected figures in the Epstein files.5. The “fast girl” narrative is a weapon of adultification bias that protects predators by blaming children. Georgetown Law’s 2017 research confirmed that Black girls are perceived as needing less nurturing, less protection, and more accountability than white girls. That bias turns every natural adolescent behavior — fashion interest, body awareness, social media presence — into a justification for adult male predation. Brandy’s memoir declaration — “I was a child and he was an adult” — is the corrective the culture desperately needs. The question should never be what she had going on. It should always be what he chose to do.BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. 2017. [Available at law.georgetown.edu]* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.* Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020.* Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.* Gorski, Philip and Samuel Perry. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2022.* Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González. “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood.” Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017.* Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. The New Press, 2016.* Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al. Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. African American Policy Forum, 2015.* American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5). 2013. [Relevant sections on psychotic disorders and religious/cultural considerations.]* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. Vintage, 1983. [Historical analysis of the intersection of sexual exploitation and racial oppression.]* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.* Brandy Norwood. Phases. [Memoir, 2026.]* The Mann Act (White-Slave Traffic Act). 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424. 1910, amended. [Federal law on transportation of minors across state lines for sexual purposes.]* Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946). [Foundational case on First Amendment application to private entities.]* Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 587 U.S. ___ (2019). [Recent ruling clarifying First Amendment constraints apply to government, not private organizations.] 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Native Americans are presented to us as a conquered people, but we never talk about how the United States federal government has broken over 500 treaties — and no war was fought. Let that sit with you. No declaration of war. No battlefield. Just paper, pens, and power. The weapon wasn’t a rifle. It was a contract. And the violence wasn’t in a single moment — it was stretched across centuries, administered through bureaucracy, and dressed up as progress.1948 was one hell of a year in history, wasn’t it? That’s when one of the most devastating photographs in American history was taken — and most of y’all have never seen it. It’s the story of George Gillette, the chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. In that photo, Gillette is covering his face, weeping, while Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug signs a contract — not an agreement, a contract — that would forcibly transfer over 155,000 acres of the most fertile, productive tribal land to the United States federal government for the construction of the Garrison Dam. A damn dam.And I need y’all to understand why that image hits different when you know the full story. Because it’s not just a man crying. It’s a man being forced to watch the legal destruction of his people’s homeland in real time, knowing he had no power to stop it. That’s the part they leave out of the history books. That’s the part that makes this Research over MeSearch.The Land Before the TheftBefore we unpack the theft, let’s talk about what was taken. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognized nearly 12 million acres belonging to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations — territory spanning across what we now call North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Twelve million acres. By the time the federal government formally created the Fort Berthold Reservation in 1870, that territory had already been slashed dramatically. But what remained was still rich. Still alive. Still theirs.The Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara — had survived smallpox epidemics in the 18th and 19th centuries that nearly wiped them out entirely. These epidemics, brought by European settlers, devastated their population so severely that the three nations consolidated for survival, eventually settling together at Fort Berthold along the Missouri River. And they rebuilt. They recovered. They created a self-sustaining economy based on agriculture, ranching, and the abundant resources of the Missouri River bottomlands. They had farms. They had cattle. They had a hospital. They had tribal headquarters. They had a way of life.And then the Army Corps of Engineers showed up.The Pick-Sloan Plan: Infrastructure as Colonial WeaponHere’s where you have to understand the machinery behind the theft. In 1944, Congress authorized the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program — a massive infrastructure project designed to control the Missouri River through a series of dams. The plan was the brainchild of Colonel Lewis A. Pick of the Army Corps of Engineers and William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation. The stated goals were flood control, navigation, irrigation, and hydroelectric power.But here’s what the history books don’t emphasize enough — the Missouri River States Committee that selected the dam sites had zero Native American members. None. The locations were chosen based on topography, minimal impact to major cities and towns, and cost-to-benefit ratios. And because there were no Indigenous voices at the table, the impact to reservations simply wasn’t a “large consideration.” That’s not my language — that’s the historical record.The Garrison Dam was one of five massive main-stem dams built along the upper Missouri River. And here’s the kicker — the original Sloan plan actually assessed the situation and recommended leaving tribal holdings alone. But when the plans merged into Pick-Sloan, that recommendation was ignored. White support of Native opposition to the dam declined radically once Congress accepted the combined plan. As somebody that knows a lot about history in this country, urban development and government projects have always been about how can we preserve white institutions and comfort and efficiency at the expense of people of color. Every. Single. Time.Historian Vine Deloria Jr. — one of the most important Native American scholars in history — called the Pick-Sloan Program “the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.” Read that again. The single most destructive act. Not the Trail of Tears. Not the Indian Removal Act. This. And most Americans have never heard of it.They Started Building Before They Even AskedThis is the part that should make your blood boil. The Army Corps of Engineers began construction on the Garrison Dam in 1946 — two years before the tribes even signed the contract. Two years. When the Corps arrived at Fort Berthold to start construction, the Three Affiliated Tribes had no idea they were coming. Nobody told them. Nobody consulted them. The Bureau of Indian Affairs made no objections while the project was debated in Congress, and none of the tribes were consulted during the legislative process.And you from the hood or you know how it works in terms of urban development. Hey, we don’t give you the option to sell it under value or it’s eminent domain — you don’t get a damn thing. You don’t get nothing at all. That’s the reason why George Gillette is crying in that photograph, because he didn’t have a real option. He had to sell over the land to get something because it was better than nothing. But the entire time, it was coercion and not consent.The tribes knew that if they failed to agree to the outlined terms, they would receive even less compensation in the future — or nothing at all. The construction was already happening. The dam was already being built. This wasn’t a negotiation. This was a mugging with paperwork.On May 20, 1948, George Gillette, fighting back tears, watched Secretary Krug sign the contract. In his own words, Gillette said: “The truth is, as everyone knows, our Treaty of Fort Laramie and our constitution are being torn to shreds by this contract.” He said, “We will sign this contract with a heavy heart. With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation. Right now the future doesn’t look too good to us.”He was right.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.What Was LostThe flooding of Fort Berthold was catastrophic. The Garrison Dam created Lake Sakakawea — the second-largest man-made lake in the United States — and it drowned the heart of the reservation. Let me give you the receipts on what was destroyed:156,000 acres of the most fertile farmland on the reservation — gone. Tribal headquarters — gone. The hospital — gone. Approximately 90% of the tribal population was forced to relocate to higher ground — barren, dry, wind-swept land with poor soil and no timber for protection from North Dakota winters. 325 families displaced. 80% of tribal members forced to move. An entire self-sustaining economy, decimated overnight.And here’s what makes this even more sinister — the compensation the tribes received was well below market value and significantly less than what non-Indian landowners received for comparable land. The initial offer was $5.1 million. It was eventually increased to $12.6 million, but that was still $9 million less than what the tribes calculated as fair compensation. And the final settlement legislation denied them the right to use the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing, or any other purposes. It also rejected their requests for irrigation development and royalty rights on subsurface minerals. They took the land, flooded it, and then told the original owners they couldn’t even use the shoreline of the lake that destroyed their home.The dam now generates over $40 million worth of hydroelectric power every single year. The tribes saw almost none of it. It took until 1992 — forty-four years later — for Congress to finally provide additional compensation of $142 million to the Three Affiliated Tribes. Forty-four years of poverty, displacement, and health devastation before the government acknowledged what it had done.The Health Crisis Nobody Talks AboutBefore the Garrison Dam was built, there wasn’t a single known case of diabetes on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Obesity was almost unheard of. Let that sink in. These were people who farmed, ranched, hunted, and lived off the land their ancestors had cultivated for a millennium.After the dam? The loss of agricultural land decimated their food sources. Natural foods were replaced with processed government commodities. Drinking water now came from wells with high-alkaline content. The construction project triggered long-term unemployment, intense poverty, and a decades-long descent into obesity, hypertension, diabetes, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Today, the population suffers diabetes at more than double the national average. This is what happens when you destroy a people’s ability to feed themselves and then hand them commodity cheese and call it assistance.This is how coloniality works. We’re going to force you on a reservation and take the majority of your land. And then when you own that reservation because white folks are losing their houses, we’re going to make you lose your land and your house to make sure they don’t lose theirs and build a dam because we can’t have this Missouri River threatening the descendants of settler colonizers while you, the colonized subjects, lose everything. Give me that.This Wasn’t Just Fort BertholdAnd here’s what blows my mind — the Garrison Dam wasn’t an isolated incident. Under the Pick-Sloan Plan, the Army Corps of Engineers built five main-stem dams that destroyed more than 550 square miles of tribal land across North Dakota and South Dakota. The projects devastated multiple reservations — Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Yankton. The Oahe Dam alone flooded over 200,000 acres on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations. In total, more than 900 Native American families were displaced. Over 1.6 million acres of fertile bottomland were flooded — and a massive percentage of that was Indigenous land.The Pick-Sloan Plan reduced the total land base of five Sioux reservations by 6% and forced one-third of their population to relocate. And here’s the pattern — the best land on every reservation was flooded, and residents were moved to barren, dry uplands. Every time. The fertile land was taken, the people were pushed to the margins, and the benefits — the cheap power, the flood protection, the recreation lakes — flowed downstream to non-Native communities.That ain’t development. That’s dispossession with an engineering degree.Stop Thinking Deeply About Shallow S**tPeople want to act like treaty violations and land theft are ancient history. Something that happened “back then.” But the Garrison Dam was completed in 1953. My parents were alive. Your grandparents were alive. This ain’t ancient — this is modern American policy. And the health consequences, the poverty, the displacement? Those are happening right now. Today. Unemployment on Fort Berthold remains around 42%. Communities that were once connected by the river are now separated by a lake they never asked for, with a single bridge connecting them.And this is what I need y’all to understand about the difference between how we’re taught history and how history actually operates. It’s presented to you as if these people consensually agreed. Look what they signed. Look what they agreed to. But they signed under force. Under coercion. Under the threat of getting nothing if they didn’t take something. That’s not consent. That’s extortion.The Garrison Dam is a case study in how the United States federal government uses infrastructure as a weapon of colonial dispossession. Highways through Black neighborhoods. Dams on Native reservations. Urban renewal that’s really urban removal. The machinery changes, but the logic doesn’t — sacrifice communities of color to preserve white comfort, white property, and white profit.And until we teach this in every classroom, until we name it for what it is, we’re not doing education. We’re doing propaganda.EXPLICIT TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBERThis article took hours of research, cross-referencing primary sources, legal records, and historical archives to produce. And I did it without a single corporate sponsor telling me what I can and can’t say.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.If this article taught you something your school never did — if it made you think differently about the photograph of George Gillette, about dam construction, about what “eminent domain” really means for colonized people — then I’m asking you to put your money where your education is. A paid subscription isn’t charity. It’s an investment in the kind of independent, fearless, receipts-based education that no corporation will fund and no government wants you to have.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS* Parker, Angela K. Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold. University of Nebraska Press, 2023.* Lawson, Michael L. Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980. University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.* Deloria, Vine Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.* Wilkinson, Charles. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.* Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.* “For the Taking: The Garrison Dam and the Tribal Taking Area.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, February 2010.* “Dam Floods Hospital, One-Quarter of Reservation.” National Library of Medicine, Native Voices Timeline, 1948 Entry. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/489.html* Ferrell, John R. Big Dam Era: A Legislative and Institutional History of the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, 1993.* VanDevelder, Paul. Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation. Little, Brown and Company, 2004. 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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Rosie Riverter, Education is a lamp, Patricia, Evan, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Y’all ever notice how every election cycle, somebody grabs a microphone and tells you to “save democracy”? Save it from what? Save it for whom? And more importantly—has democracy ever been something Black people were included in enough to save?Let that marinate.Because when I sat down with Political Plug (Domo) and Toya G on The Chop Up Show to have a real conversation about democracy—not the bumper sticker version, not the “vote blue no matter who” version, the actual historical, philosophical, epistemological version—what we found was a system that, from its very first breath in 508 BC Athens, was designed to exclude the majority of human beings from participation. Women. Slaves. Foreigners. The people who actually built the society were locked out of deciding how it functioned.And here we are in 2026. Who’s still getting locked out? Descendants of slaves. Immigrants. Women fighting for bodily autonomy. The same categories. The same exclusions. Two and a half thousand years later. That’s not a glitch in the system, y’all. That’s the system working exactly as intended.The Greek Myth: Democracy’s Origin Story Is a Story of ExclusionLet’s start where they always want us to start: Athens. The Athenian politician Kleisthenes is widely credited as the “father of Athenian democracy” around 508 BC. But Domo brought up something essential—before Kleisthenes, you had Solon, who introduced the reforms that made Athenian democracy possible. And here’s the part they leave out of the textbooks: according to Herodotus, Solon traveled to Egypt, specifically to the Saite dynasty, and observed how multiple tribes existed under a unified structure where different groups contributed to collective decision-making. He took that concept back to Athens and started removing hereditary barriers to political participation.Read that again. The so-called “father” of Western democracy borrowed the concept from Africa. Then the Greeks took credit for it, called the people they learned from “barbarians,” and built a system that only allowed roughly 30,000 adult male citizens to participate—excluding women, slaves, and foreigners, who comprised the majority of the population.From the very beginning, democracy was a system of collective governance for some, built on the exclusion and exploitation of the many. That’s not me editorializing. That’s the historical record. Facts over feelings.The Debate We Had to Have: Is Democracy the Problem, or Are the People Running It?This is where The Chop Up Show got heated—and I mean heated in the best way possible because Domo made a compelling argument that I want y’all to sit with: the problem isn’t democracy as a concept. The problem is the ideology of the people who deploy it.His position was this: the idea that people should have a say in governance is not inherently flawed. What’s flawed is when racists, white nationalists, and patriarchal power structures get to decide who counts as “people.” He pointed to ancient Igbo societies in West Africa, where decentralized power structures included village assemblies, councils of elders, and—crucially—women’s councils that regulated markets and resolved disputes. These were sophisticated forms of collective governance that predated Athens and, in many ways, were more democratic than what the Greeks built.And I hear that. I respect that. But here’s where I pushed back.You cannot separate the tool from the hand that built it. When Kleisthenes or Solon or whoever we want to credit with formalizing Athenian democracy constructed this system, they explicitly excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. That wasn’t an accident. That wasn’t a limitation they planned to fix later. That was the design. The very civilizations that practiced collective governance—the ones Solon learned from in Egypt—were subsequently labeled “uncivilized” by the same Greeks who borrowed their ideas. Democracy, as a term and as a practice formalized by Athens, was always already defined in opposition to the governance models of non-European peoples.Think about that. The Athens that built “democracy” simultaneously built a civilization hierarchy that positioned democratic nations as morally and politically advanced, granting them the rhetorical right to intervene in, guide, and impose systems on what they called “less developed” states. That’s not a footnote. That’s the blueprint for every imperialist project that followed.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Epistemology Problem: Who Gets to Define What Democracy Means?Now here’s where the conversation got philosophical, and this is the part that’s going to make some people uncomfortable. Domo made an epistemological argument that I think deserves serious engagement. He said: if we acknowledge that the concept of collective governance existed before the term “democracy” was coined, then the Greeks don’t own the concept—they own the term. And if we’re committed to decolonizing our thinking, we should be willing to understand these principles outside the epistemology of whiteness.That’s a strong argument. And as someone who studied epistemological violence under scholars like George Yancy, Arnold Farr, Charles Mills, and Linda Alcoff, I take that seriously. The idea that Western thought has monopolized how we understand governance—and that this monopoly serves the interests of white supremacy—is not controversial in critical theory. It’s foundational.But here’s my counter, and I stand on this: the epistemology of democracy IS patriarchal. Not just American democracy. The concept as formalized, named, and exported is inseparable from the patriarchal, slaveholding, xenophobic context that produced it. You can’t transplant a term that carries 2,500 years of exclusionary baggage and pretend the baggage doesn’t come with it. African communalism is not democracy. It’s something distinct, something in many ways superior, and collapsing the two does the work of Western thought by erasing that distinction.As I told the audience: African communalism and Athenian democracy represent two distinct approaches to governance. The former emphasizes consensus, holistic community well-being, and relational existence—“I am because we are.” The latter focuses on direct majoritarian rule by a minority of male citizens. Conflating them is an act of epistemological violence in itself.Slavery and Democracy: Co-Constitutive From Day OneHere’s where I’m going to say what a lot of people don’t want to hear: slavery is not a bug in democracy. It’s a feature. In Athens, the entire economic foundation that allowed male citizens to participate in the agora—debating where to put the sewage, deciding how to educate children, voting on policy—was built on slave labor. The leisure to practice democracy depended on someone else doing the work.Fast-forward to America. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime.” That exception isn’t a loophole. It’s a continuation. The convict lease system, mass incarceration, felon disenfranchisement—these are the mechanisms through which democracy and slavery continue to function as co-constitutive systems. If you go through the prison-industrial complex—the neo-slavery that the Constitution explicitly permits—you come out the other side disqualified from voting. Your democracy is suspended. Any residue of slavery on you complicates your ability to participate in the system.Toya G put it plainly: in order to have civilized society, in order to have a democracy, you always already have to have some population of people being exploited in order to have the organization and development of those societies. That’s not cynicism. That’s the historical record examined without the rose-colored glasses.I challenged the audience: show me one iteration of democracy in world history that is not co-constitutive with slavery. I’m still waiting.Democracy as a Geopolitical Weapon: From CRT Panic to Regime ChangeDomo made one of the sharpest observations of the night, and I want to make sure y’all catch it. He compared the weaponization of democracy to the weaponization of terms like “woke” and “critical race theory.” Remember how people who actually study CRT watched in horror as the term was co-opted by bad-faith actors who had no idea what they were talking about? That’s exactly what happens with democracy.The democratization efforts of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, even Joe Biden—these weren’t about spreading self-governance. They were about opening markets, securing neoliberal control, and facilitating the kind of neocolonialism that allows Western powers to dictate the internal politics of other nations. The language of democracy was the cover story. The reality was resource extraction and geopolitical domination.And here’s the part that should make you sit up straight: the same civilizing mission that justified European imperialism—the “duty” to bring governance to “savage peoples”—is the direct descendant of Athens calling African communalism “uncivilized.” The line is unbroken. From 508 BC to the Iraq War to AFRICOM. Education is elevation, y’all. Once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.Can American Democracy Be Reformed? The Honest Answer.We closed The Chop Up Show with the hardest question: can American democracy be reformed?Toya G said no. She said we missed the window. She pointed to Project 2025, to the unraveling of voting protections, to Democrats capitulating on ICE funding—the very party supposed to “save democracy” caving to authoritarian demands to avoid political blame. She said corruption is too high. And she’s not wrong.Domo said no—but for a different reason. American democracy can’t be reformed because its foundation is white supremacy. As long as the society that deploys democracy is entrenched in whiteness, no reform will produce genuine liberation. But he argued that if we reconceptualize governance—if we return to the pre-Greek, African models of collective decision-making—there’s something worth building. Not reforming the existing house. Building a new one.And I land here: democracy is a broke-down house that’s been standing since 508 BC. It’s given some people shelter. It’s given others splinters. But the foundation is cracked, the walls are crumbling, and every time Black people try to build something better—Tulsa, Rosewood, the MOVE family in Philadelphia—that house sends someone to burn ours down. The cling to European ideas of governmentality, this insistence that this mode of government is the best we have and can always be made better—that’s the ideology I’m exposing. We have innovated everything else. Why is this one sacred?Malcolm X said it: you can change the government peacefully if you want to. You don’t have to be violent. You can change it by using the ballot. But if you don’t use the ballot, you gotta use the bullet. That ain’t a threat. That’s a diagnosis. When democracy is for sale, when it’s being stripped limb from limb, when the people who control it have no interest in the models of governance that actually originated with us—at some point, you have to stop asking whether the system can be saved and start asking what replaces it.EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION ASKThis article exists because I refuse to let the real history of democracy get buried under talking points and campaign slogans. From Solon borrowing governance concepts from Egypt to the Igbo women’s councils that Athens never acknowledged to the 13th Amendment’s slavery exception that still functions today—this is the kind of reporting that requires research, time, and independence from the institutions that benefit from your ignorance.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.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Athenian democracy (508 BC) was built on the exclusion of women, slaves, and foreigners from the start—and according to Herodotus, Solon borrowed core governance concepts from Egypt’s Saite dynasty before the Greeks formalized and took credit for “democracy.”* African communalism—including Igbo village assemblies and women’s councils—predated and in many ways exceeded Athenian democracy in inclusivity, yet was labeled “uncivilized” by the same civilization that borrowed from it.* Slavery is co-constitutive with democracy, not incidental to it: from Athens’ slave economy enabling citizen participation to America’s 13th Amendment exception to the prison-industrial complex’s felon disenfranchisement, exploited populations have always underwritten democratic societies.* Democracy has functioned as a geopolitical weapon—from the Greek “civilizing mission” to U.S. “democratization efforts” under multiple administrations—to justify imperialism, open markets, and impose Western governance on societies that already had functional collective systems.* American democracy cannot be reformed within its current framework because its foundation is white supremacy, but the principles of collective governance that predate Athens offer a roadmap for building something new—if Black communities are empowered to self-determine outside the structures designed to exclude them.BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS* Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing, 1998.* Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Vintage Books, 1967.* Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.* Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Metropolitan Books, 2004.* Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.* Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press, 1998.* Malcolm X. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Speech delivered April 3, 1964, Cleveland, Ohio.* Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann, 1969.* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.* Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Recovering Igbo Traditions: A Case for Indigenous Women’s Organizations in Development.” In Women, Culture, and Development, edited by Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover. Oxford University Press, 1995.* Ober, Josiah. Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton University Press, 2008.* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.* Wiredu, Kwasi. “Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics.” In A Companion to African Philosophy, edited by Kwasi Wiredu. Blackwell, 2004.* Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.* Alexander, Michelle 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

Thank you Tope Eletu, Sherell, Sherri Nourse, Heather A Murphy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Education is Elevation and I know a lot of us are lost in the sauce of capitalism. I know a lot of us are so deep in how this system has commodified our human relationships that we can’t even see the water we’re swimming in. But I need y’all to sit with me on this one, because the question I’m posing today isn’t hypothetical. It’s not academic. It’s the most material, most practical, most urgent question facing every single person reading this right now.Is socialism the answer?Now, before you have that knee-jerk reaction — before the programming kicks in and you start typing “but Venezuela” or “who’s gonna work the factory?” — I need you to breathe. I need you to sit in the discomfort. Because that discomfort? That’s the system working exactly as designed. That emotional response you’re about to have? Capitalism put that there. And if you stick with me through this piece, I’m going to show you exactly how.The Monstrous Critique: What Capitalism Actually IsLet me start here, because I think before we can even talk about an alternative, we need to be honest about what we’re living in right now.Socialism is not the government just doing things. It’s not just free healthcare and free childcare. Socialism is an entire restructuring of life around human needs. Right now — and I need you to really hear this — life is structured around profit. Around money. When you say “I need a house,” you don’t actually go get a house. You say, “I need enough money for a house.” When you say “I need a car,” you don’t go get a car. You say, “I need enough money for a car.” Capitalism bars your access to the things you need to survive, and to get access, you have to slave. You slave for the factory, you slave for the corporation, or you slave for yourself as a small business owner, sacrificing meals and health and time to attract enough currency to justify your existence.For others to have more, you must have less. That is exactly how this system works.And here’s what people don’t understand: what I’m describing when I talk about socialism is how human beings lived for 95% of our existence. This idea of one person hoarding everything while the rest of us fight over scraps? That’s a brand new thing. Because in the past, when humanity first emerged, if we did not share what we had, we all died. Survival was cooperative. That wasn’t idealism. That was biology. That was the default state of humanity — surviving collectively.From Farming to Fascism: The Historical Architecture of ExploitationThen we started farming. And we started having surplus. And to protect that surplus, you needed patriarchy. You needed violence. You needed separation. This is where we see the nuclear family born — not out of love, but out of property protection. This is where we see the subjugation of women to the household. And that household? One of the first prisons.Sylvia Federici documents this brilliantly in Caliban and the Witch. We learn in school that the witch hunts were religious hysteria. That’s the sanitized version. The truth is that the witch hunts were the centralization of power. Women held communal power in their communities — power that didn’t arise from money. It arose from fertility, from veneration, from spirituality, from a connection to land and culture. There were common lands where people farmed, lived, gathered. The church sat on common land. During the witch hunts, they took those common lands. And the women who were called “witches” were the influential community leaders whose power threatened the emerging capitalist order.This is where we see domestic labor — reproductive labor like raising a child — treated as non-work. You could take care of a baby all day and under capitalism they’ll treat you like you never put in an hour of work. Because under this system, your purpose as a human being is to reproduce labor. You become a machine. Everything the system does is designed to extract from you. Even having fun. Even joy itself is commodified and used to extract from you.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Socialism Defined: A Transition, Not a FantasySo what is socialism? Let me be precise, because precision matters.Socialism is a transition. It’s a transition toward communism, which is a kind of endpoint — a society where there is no race, no class, no money, no state. Just human beings living among each other as we once did. And to get there, we need socialism because there is so much extraction embedded at every point of this system that you have to dismantle it piece by piece.The way you dismantle it is by first identifying the contradictions. A contradiction works like this: the slave owner needs me to build his house, but I have no house. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we can’t pay our bills. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we don’t have medicine. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we’re undereducated and can barely read. These contradictions are not bugs in the system. They are the system.Karl Marx talked about this using the terms “lower communism” and “fuller communism.” Communism is both a process and an endpoint at the same time. The same way a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. We have to get to a point where we’re not worried about money, about race, about the thousand divisions capitalism manufactures to keep us from seeing each other clearly. And to do that, people need to not be worried about survival first.Under capitalism, for you to get food in America, you either have to slave at CVS, slave in a prison, slave for the system, or steal it. Under socialism, for you to get food, all you’d have to do is be alive. That is the difference. Socialism is allocating the resources we already have — taking the factories that capitalism built through exploitation and turning them into production systems that serve human needs. As simple as that.Alienation: How Capitalism Captured Your MindFrantz Fanon was an author, a psychologist, and a revolutionary who studied colonized peoples in Algeria during the civil war. He realized something profound: the colonized wanted to become the colonizer. They had their own language but wanted to speak the colonizer’s language. They had their own culture but wanted to adopt the colonizer’s culture. And yet, on the other hand, the colonizer would never accept them. So as a colonized person, you exist in a limbo. This is why we have these desires. This is why we carry a hatred for communism and socialism that we can’t even explain rationally — because the system cannot survive without that hatred.Karl Marx calls this alienation. He outlines it in Das Kapital. Capitalism alienates you from four things: the people around you, your labor, what you make, and eventually yourself. This alienation makes us feel like we’re in constant danger, like we’re not safe, like we need the system. And the system plays daddy — it comes along and says, “It’s gonna be okay. Just let me do the exploitation and you’ll get your bag of chips and your DoorDash.”I saw this playing out in real time during a live conversation. People in the comments were asking, “Who’s gonna work the factory?” and “Who will you sell the products to?” and “Who’s gonna learn how to operate everything?” Every single one of those questions is framed through the perspective of alienation. They can’t imagine a factory existing to provide products for people. They can only imagine a factory existing to generate transactions. That’s how deep the programming goes.But think about this: is anyone getting paid to read this article right now? No. You’re here because you chose to be. People go to school for hours studying subjects that capitalism says have no market value — that’s proof that human beings are motivated by more than profit. The very people who mock “worthless degrees” are conceding that people pursue knowledge for its own sake. You’ve already disproved your own argument.Late-Stage Capitalism: The System Is CrumblingThe German economist Werner Sombart coined the phrase “late-stage capitalism.” It describes the current, often absurd phase of the modern economy, characterized by extreme income inequality, massive corporate influence over government, and the commodification of daily life. If you’re in denial that this definition describes exactly where we are right now, you’re confused about which country you live in.Look around you. People have three, four jobs in a household and can’t afford to live. My friend spent $10,000 on his son’s Little League baseball at a public school. Just for a kid to go have fun outside, they extract from you. Just for you to get food, medicine, to drive down the road — they extract from you. Every single moment, they are extracting from you.Every seven to ten years, we see a stock market crash. 2008 was the housing crisis. 2020 was COVID. And they could have operated the economy in a way where COVID didn’t completely destroy it. Instead, they operated in a way where they could shut your business down and buy it. They destroy the economy for people like you and me so the ultra-rich can buy everything we have until we’re all debt slaves. This is what they want with techno feudalism. Elon Musk wants to own Texas and have you buying things with Tesla coins. The American dollar is crumbling, and they know it. The end is coming because they don’t pay you enough, they won’t invest in the infrastructure to keep society running, and they don’t care if the world ends as long as they can fly away and preserve their power.And then you see fascism. Fascism is capitalism defending itself. It’s an animal backed into a corner, scratching and clawing. The industrial factory owners put Hitler in power because communists and socialists were demanding better pay and more rights. To preserve their power, the capitalist class will always turn to fascism. You don’t even have to reach for historical examples — everybody watching American politics right now understands we’re dealing with fascism, and it exists solely to protect the capitalist interests of corporations. Every war America has fought since World War II has been in the interest of corporations. You’re not fighting for American freedom if you’re blowing up Iranian schools or going into Iraq to steal oil.Commerce Is Not Capitalism: The Lie You Keep RepeatingHere’s the homework I’m assigning y’all, and I need you to take this seriously.A lot of people conflate commerce with capitalism. Commerce is defined as the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale. That’s it. Commerce predates capitalism by hundreds and hundreds of years. The Aztec empires traded. The Inca empires traded. The Silk Road existed centuries before anyone conceived of capitalism. You don’t need slavery, rape, murder, pedophilia, or a military-industrial complex to buy and sell things.According to Britannica and the Harvard Gazette, capitalism began to emerge between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe, particularly in England, through the transition from feudalism via market practices and agrarian changes. That means capitalism is not even 500 years old. Human beings have been here for approximately 300,000 years. The claim that the whole world has always practiced capitalism is empirically false. It’s historically wrong.And here’s the contradiction that should keep you up at night: capitalism tells you it breeds innovation and that we should always be advancing everything. But when it comes to the economic system itself? Suddenly we’re stuck at what Europeans came up with in the 1500s. You believe we should innovate everything — technology, medicine, transportation — but not the system of governance that organizes all of it? That’s not logical. That’s programming.Capitalism was born out of the enclosure movement, where common lands were privatized and worked by tenants for market production. It was born out of slavery, out of colonialism, out of the most abhorrent violence imaginable. It was born out of unsustainability — European feudalism was collapsing, resources were depleted, and colonialism was a desperate, violent expansion to steal what they couldn’t produce. And the democracy we practice now? That didn’t come from Greece. It came from the Six Nations, the Iroquois Confederacy. The native nations already had democratic governance. We stole it, exploited it, and erased it so we could tell our own origin story.Socialism vs. Capitalism vs. Communism: What Black Academics Have to SayNow let me take a moment to address this directly, because this is a conversation that Black scholars have been having for over a century — and it’s one that mainstream discourse consistently ignores.Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argued that Marxism alone was insufficient to explain the experience of Black people under capitalism because capitalism itself was always already racial. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to demonstrate that capitalism didn’t just exploit labor — it required the invention of racial hierarchy to function. For Robinson, communism as Marx described it was a necessary intervention, but it needed to be filtered through the Black radical tradition that predated Marx — through the maroon communities, the slave revolts, the quilombos of Brazil.W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, documented how the formerly enslaved carried out what he called a “general strike” — the largest labor action in American history — and attempted to build cooperative, socialist institutions during Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that it was not the failure of socialism that ended Reconstruction but the violent reassertion of white capitalist power through the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. Later in life, Du Bois became an open socialist and eventually joined the Communist Party, arguing that capitalism and white supremacy were structurally inseparable.Angela Davis has consistently argued that the prison-industrial complex is the logical extension of plantation capitalism — that mass incarceration is not a failure of the system but a feature of it, designed to warehouse surplus labor and generate profit from captive Black bodies. For Davis, abolition is inherently a socialist project because you cannot dismantle the prison without dismantling the profit motive that sustains it.Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated that African economies were systematically dismantled by European capitalism, not because they were “backward” but because their destruction was necessary for European capital accumulation. Rodney argued that socialism was the only viable path to genuine African development precisely because capitalism’s relationship to Africa was always extractive by design.And Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist and intellectual, argued in her foundational essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” that Black women occupied a position of “super-exploitation” under capitalism — exploited by race, class, and gender simultaneously. Jones was a committed communist who understood that no amount of reform within capitalism could address the interlocking systems of oppression that defined Black women’s lives.The throughline among these thinkers is consistent: capitalism was not built to include Black people. It was built on our exclusion, our exploitation, and our dehumanization. Communism and socialism, while imperfect in their historical applications, represent the only theoretical frameworks that demand the total reorganization of economic life around collective human needs rather than private profit. The question for Black communities is not whether capitalism has “worked” — the racial wealth gap alone answers that — but whether we have the courage to imagine and build something entirely different.There Is No Ethical Consumption Under CapitalismAnd for the people who love to say, “How can you be against capitalism if you’re wearing capitalism?” — I need you to think about what you’re actually saying. That’s like asking a slave how they can critique the plantation while eating the master’s food. We don’t exist outside the system. That’s the whole point of the critique. A lot of us criticize capitalism precisely because it forces us to survive within it.You make the iPhone. You make the shirt. The worker creates the product. Capitalism just exploits the labor that creates it. The things you think wouldn’t exist without capitalism — technology, art, infrastructure — all of it existed before capitalism. The pyramids were built before capitalism. The Indus Valley civilization had sewers, grid roads, temples, and what we’d call fast food restaurants. Pottery, art, music, language — all of it predates the 1500s. Things are not made because of capitalism. Things are made because of people. And people have always created, always innovated, always built — because that’s what human beings do.If something can be built, it can be destroyed. And capitalism was built. Not out of necessity. Out of greed, unsustainability, and violence. And if it was built, it can be replaced with something better.The Call to Action: Unplug, Organize, BuildSo where do we go from here?First, reject their reality. Unplug from the matrix. The first step is understanding that the world as it’s been presented to you is not the world as it actually is.Second, get into your community. Real life. Capitalism alienates you from real life, so you have to go out of your way to read books, to learn trades and skills that are valuable to your community. If you know electricity and your neighbor’s lights are messed up, go help. If you’re a mechanic and you hear grandma’s car struggling every morning, go fix it. This is the first step.Third, educate yourself and others. Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the system trains you to be passive about your oppression — and not just passive, but active in oppressing others by training you to accept information without question. Instead of learning through conversation and challenge, you’re taught to shut up and memorize. That’s the first step in training docility. So read. Question. Challenge. That’s how we get free.And fourth — and this is the one that really matters — organize. The Bolsheviks didn’t have a majority of their country. They had 30%. All we need is the people who see the truth to come together, get organized, strategize, and build. Because as my man the Chain Slayer said: to leave you powerless, they will leave you knowledgeless. And knowledge is power.Capitalism has a lot of y’all lost in the sauce, and you don’t realize how much it impacts how you value learning and what you value learning. The Heritage Foundation that created Project 2025 employs people with degrees in Women’s and Gender Studies — the very discipline they tell you is worthless. They build think tanks to defund and discredit the same ideologies they use to consolidate their own power. They know the value of this knowledge. They just don’t want you to have it.So I’ll leave y’all with this: capitalism has a lot of us lost in the sauce. It impacts how we value learning, how we value knowledge, and how we value each other. The racial wealth gap has only widened over the past 70 years. No matter how many Black billionaires or Black millionaires you can count, the system wants you to sensationalize these individualistic examples to distract from how the collective is suffering. Any Black man with a billion dollars — his billion is making a hundred billion for a white man. That’s math, not emotion.I don’t care if you disagree with me. I don’t care if you say f**k me. Whether you hate me or love me, I believe education is elevation. And that discomfort you feel? That’s not weakness. That’s growth. That’s how you start to push yourself into action and build on your understanding.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Socialism is not “the government doing things” — it’s a complete restructuring of society around human needs rather than profit. Under capitalism, your access to housing, food, medicine, and education is gated behind money. Under socialism, access to those things requires only being alive. That’s not a utopian fantasy — it’s how humans organized survival for 95% of our existence.* Capitalism is not even 500 years old, and commerce predates it by millennia. People conflate buying and selling with capitalism, but markets existed long before the enclosure movement privatized common lands in 16th-century England. The Silk Road, the Aztec trading networks, the Indus Valley’s urban economies — all of this predates capitalism. You don’t need exploitation to have exchange.* Late-stage capitalism is not a theory — it’s a description of right now. Coined by German economist Werner Sombart, the term describes extreme income inequality, corporate capture of government, and the commodification of daily life. When people work 80 hours a week and still can’t eat, the system’s own promises have been broken. The cyclical crashes — 2008, 2020 — aren’t accidents. They’re features designed to consolidate wealth upward.* Fascism is capitalism defending itself, not an alternative to it. Every historical instance of fascism — from the German industrialists backing Hitler to the current corporate capture of American politics — represents capital choosing authoritarian violence over sharing power with workers. Understanding this connection is essential to understanding why “reform” within capitalism consistently fails.* The emotional resistance you feel to this analysis is itself a product of capitalist conditioning. Marx’s concept of alienation, Fanon’s analysis of the colonized mind, Freire’s critique of banking education — all describe how the system programs your responses before you even encounter the argument. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re wrong. It’s a sign the programming is being challenged.EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASKI’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.Think about what we just broke down together — the history of capitalism from the enclosure movement to techno feudalism, the way alienation programs your emotional responses, the scholars like Cedric Robinson and Angela Davis who’ve mapped the architecture of racial capitalism for decades.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS* Marx, Karl. Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867)* Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844* Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)* Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (1961)* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)* Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)* Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America (1935)* Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)* Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” (1949)* Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (1997)* Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023) 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.A man sat on a nationally syndicated radio station in 2014 and told the world—laughing, mind you—that he was sexually involved with a 16-year-old girl when he was 22 years old. His bandmates were right there next to him, giggling. The host was entertained. The audience was amused. Nobody flinched. The man was Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men, and the girl was Brandy Norwood—the same Brandy who was America’s sweetheart, whose debut album was still warm on the shelves, whose entire career was being built under the supervision of the very man who was sleeping with her in secret.His exact words: “We did the thing when she was like 16, 17.” Then, when someone asked whether she was too young, he said: “She was old enough to get it.”A whole 16-year-old girl. A child. And a room full of grown men decided that was comedy.This week, Brandy released her memoir, Phases, and she confirmed what the whispers always said. The relationship was real. It started when she was 16 and he was 22. He was her mentor. He called himself her boyfriend in private and denied it to the world. She lost her virginity to him. She hid the relationship from her parents. She carried the shame for thirty years while he controlled the narrative on Instagram Lives and podcast couches.What I want to do in this piece is something that most of the coverage is not doing. I don’t want to rehash the gossip. I want to give you the framework—the legal architecture, the clinical definitions, the historical pattern, and the structural parallels—that make this story not just a celebrity scandal but a case study in how the exploitation of Black girls was industrialized, normalized, and protected by every institution that was supposed to prevent it. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, as always. Research over me searching. Let’s get into it.What Brandy Actually WroteIn Phases, Brandy described meeting Wanya Morris through industry connections around 1994, shortly after she began opening for Boyz II Men on their national tour. She was a teenager stepping into a world of grown folks’ money, grown folks’ schedules, and grown folks’ access. Wanya was six years older and already one of the biggest R&B stars on the planet. He positioned himself as a mentor—someone who could guide her through the industry, help her navigate fame, protect her from the machinery that chews up young artists.Brandy wrote that by 1995, when she was 16, the relationship had crossed from mentorship into a secret sexual relationship. Wanya would call himself her boyfriend in private but maintained a public fiction that nothing romantic was happening. The plan, she said, was to reveal the relationship once she turned 18. In the meantime, everything was hidden—from her parents, from the press, from the public.She described the experience with a clarity that only comes from decades of processing. She wrote that he weaponized her admiration for him. She said he saw a 15-year-old girl with rising fame and admiration for his talent and, in her words, “deliberately took advantage.” She described the relationship as involving a significant power imbalance and said she was “too young to recognize she was being used.”And then she wrote something that should be printed on billboards in every entertainment district in America: “I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. And he was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”That is not gossip. That is testimony.What Wanya Said—and How It Contradicts EverythingIn 2021, Wanya Morris went on Instagram Live to get ahead of the narrative. He told his followers that Brandy was his “little protege,” that her mother had asked him to guide her through the industry, and that nothing romantic happened until she was of legal age. He said it with the kind of confidence that only comes from believing the other person will never speak.His exact words: “There’s no lie going on here. You can ask Brandy and she will tell you the same story.”Brandy told her story. It directly contradicts every word that came out of his mouth. She said the relationship started at 16. He said it started at 18. She said it was secret, coercive, and shaped by a power imbalance. He said it was organic and mutual. She said she was hiding from her parents. He said her parents allowed him to “guide Brandy.”That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s not a “difference of perspective.” That is a man who spent years constructing a public narrative designed to pre-empt and discredit the testimony of the girl he exploited. And it worked—until she wrote a book.The Grooming Framework—By the BookI need to give you the clinical definition here because too many people are treating this like it’s a matter of opinion. It is not.Grooming is defined in clinical psychology as a deliberate process by which an older or more powerful person cultivates trust, emotional dependency, and secrecy with a younger or less powerful person in order to exploit them—often sexually. The process typically moves through identifiable stages: targeting a vulnerable individual, gaining trust through mentorship or protection, filling an emotional need, isolating the target from other support systems, sexualizing the relationship, and maintaining control through secrecy and shame.Now read Wanya’s own description of the relationship back through that framework. He said he was introduced to Brandy through industry connections. He described himself as her mentor. He said her parents entrusted her career development to him. He said they grew close over time. And then—by his own admission on a public podcast—they became sexually involved when she was 16.That is not a love story that went through normal stages. That is the grooming playbook executed step by step, in order, on camera, with the perpetrator narrating it himself and not even recognizing what he was describing. When you go from “I was guiding this young woman through her career” to “we were intimate when she was 16,” you are not describing mentorship that blossomed into romance. You are describing exploitation that used mentorship as its delivery mechanism.And every single person in that studio who laughed—every member of Boyz II Men who sat there and smiled while he said “she was old enough to get it”—participated in the normalization that makes the next Brandy possible.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Coerced Consent and Consent vs. CoercionThis is where I need everybody to slow down, because this is the part that most people get wrong and the part that matters most.There is a difference between consent and the absence of force. The fact that nobody held a gun to Brandy’s head does not mean she consented. Consent—informed, meaningful consent—requires three elements: maturity to understand what is being agreed to, knowledge of the consequences, and autonomy to freely accept or refuse without coercion. A 16-year-old navigating sudden fame under the guidance of a 22-year-old mentor who controls her access to the industry is, by definition, operating with a compromised capacity for all three.Coercion does not require physical force. Coercion can be structural. When the person you are sleeping with is also the person who introduced you to the industry, who has relationships with every producer and label executive you need, who your own parents have entrusted with your career—the power differential itself becomes the coercive mechanism. You don’t have to threaten someone when the architecture of their entire professional future runs through your approval. The imbalance does the work.Brandy wrote that she “genuinely believed it was true love.” That belief is not evidence of consent. It is evidence that the grooming worked. The entire purpose of grooming is to manufacture the appearance of consent—to make the victim believe they are choosing freely when the conditions of that choice have been engineered by the person exploiting them. When a 16-year-old says “I was in love,” that does not retroactively validate the behavior of the 22-year-old adult who cultivated that feeling while occupying a position of authority over her career and emotional development.Brandy also wrote that she believed having sex with Wanya would “cement their bond”—that she convinced herself it was her choice, only to later realize she never really had one. This is the hallmark of coerced consent: the victim internalizes the groomer’s framing so completely that they experience the exploitation as their own decision. The coercion is invisible to the person being coerced because the entire environment has been shaped to make compliance feel like desire.And let me be precise about the legal dimension here. Neuroscience has established that the prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and evaluating long-term consequences—does not fully mature until approximately age 25. At 16, a person’s brain is not equipped to evaluate the long-term emotional, psychological, and social consequences of a secret sexual relationship with an adult authority figure. This is not opinion. This is neuroanatomy. This is why age of consent laws exist in every jurisdiction in the country—not because teenagers lack all judgment, but because the law recognizes the developmental asymmetry between adolescents and adults, especially adults who hold power over them.So when people say “she knew what she was doing,” I need you to understand: knowing what you are doing and having the developmental capacity to meaningfully consent to it are two entirely different things. A 16-year-old can understand the physical mechanics of a sexual relationship and still lack the cognitive architecture to evaluate the power dynamics, emotional consequences, and long-term damage of a secret relationship with a mentor who is six years older and infinitely more powerful in the only world that matters to her. Consent without capacity is not consent. It is compliance with extra steps.The Legal Loophole ConfessionThis should have been the headline on every news outlet in America. On that podcast, when pressed about whether the relationship was legal given Brandy’s age, Wanya Morris laughed and said: “We didn’t do it in the states where it was illegal.”I need you to sit with that. A grown man described flying a teenager around the country and calculating which jurisdictions would allow him to have sex with her—and he said it as a joke. The room laughed. Nobody stopped the tape.The age of consent in the United States varies by state: 30 states set it at 16, seven states at 17, and 13 states at 18. What Wanya described—moving a minor between states while navigating this patchwork of laws—is jurisdictional arbitrage. It is the same strategy documented in the Epstein files, where minors were transported between Florida, New York, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and international destinations to exploit gaps in consent law and prosecution.Under 18 U.S.C. § 1591 and the Mann Act provisions of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2423, transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sexual activity is a federal crime. When the victim is under 18, the law does not require proof of force, fraud, or coercion. The minor’s age alone establishes the crime. This is a strict liability framework—the same framework that was used to prosecute the Epstein network.When a 22-year-old man treats the statutory age of consent as a legal loophole rather than a boundary designed to protect children, he is not being romantic. He is not being adventurous. He is doing precisely what federal trafficking law was written to prevent. And he told on himself on a podcast.The Epstein Parallel Is Structural, Not MetaphoricalThe Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on November 19, 2025. By January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice had released over 3 million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images. UN human rights experts described the contents as evidence of a “possible global criminal enterprise” involving systematic sexual abuse, trafficking, and the commodification of women and girls. The UN statement specifically noted that these crimes occurred against a backdrop of racism, extreme misogyny, and dehumanization.I am not saying Wanya Morris is Jeffrey Epstein. Brandy’s case did not involve trafficking or a criminal network. But what the Epstein revelations taught us—and this is the part that everybody wants to skip past—is that exploitation operates on a spectrum. On one end, you have organized criminal networks flying children on private jets. On the other end, you have a 22-year-old R&B star flying a 16-year-old mentee between states, joking about which jurisdictions permit him to have sex with her, while the entire industry looks the other way. The mechanism is the same: access, fame, power imbalance, secrecy, legal maneuvering, and a culture of complicity that punishes the victim for speaking and rewards the perpetrator for silence.The structural similarities are not accidental. They are the product of the same system—one in which powerful men exploit their access to young women and girls while institutions that are supposed to protect those girls instead protect the revenue streams those girls generate.Rest in Peace, AaliyahI cannot write this article without talking about Aaliyah. In August 1994—the same year Brandy began touring with Boyz II Men—R. Kelly secretly married 15-year-old Aaliyah Haughton. Kelly was 27. He was her mentor and producer. He had produced her debut album, which was titled, with a cruelty that only makes sense in retrospect, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.”A fake ID was obtained to list Aaliyah’s age as 18 on the marriage certificate. Kelly’s former tour manager later testified that Kelly knew her real age, that the relationship began when she was in her early teens, and that the marriage was arranged after Kelly feared she was pregnant. Federal prosecutors eventually charged Kelly with paying a bribe to obtain the fraudulent identification document.Two teenage Black girls. Two adult male mentors. Two secret relationships. The same industry. The same decade. The same silence. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at 22 years old. She never got to write her memoir. She never got to reclaim her story. The industry that failed to protect her spent decades framing her as a teen seductress rather than recognizing her as a victim.Brandy got to write the book. Aaliyah did not. That alone should tell you how high the stakes are when we talk about believing survivors on their timeline.The Pushback—and Why Every Objection Collapses“He was young too.” He was 22. She was 16. At 22, you have graduated college, you are paying taxes, you can legally drink, sign contracts, and serve on a jury. At 16, you cannot vote, you cannot sign a contract, and in 20 states you cannot legally consent to sex with a 22-year-old. The developmental gap between a 16-year-old brain and a 22-year-old brain is documented by every neurological study on adolescent development published in the last three decades. This is not a gray area.“It was a different time.” Statutory rape laws existed in the 1990s. The age of consent was codified in every state. These laws were enforced—against non-celebrity defendants—regularly. What was different about the 1990s is not the law. It was the enforcement gap. Celebrity and wealth created a de facto exemption from accountability. That is not an argument for tolerance. That is an indictment of complicity.“Why is she bringing this up now?” Because survivors get to choose their own timeline. Because Brandy carried this for 30 years while Wanya controlled the narrative. Because the question was never “why is she talking now?”—the question is “why did we let him lie for this long?”And for the people who want to protect Wanya’s legacy—what about hers? What about Brandy’s family watching him joke about this on podcasts? What about her children hearing “she was old enough to get it” from a man their mother trusted as a teenager? When you center the perpetrator’s comfort over the survivor’s truth, you are telling every exploited girl in America that her story matters less than his reputation. And that is exactly how the cycle perpetuates.What This Demands of UsNext time you share an Epstein file and perform outrage—next time you quote-tweet a document dump and say “protect the kids”—I need you to remember that the exploitation of children did not require a private island. It did not require a billionaire’s black book. It happened on tour buses and in hotel rooms and between studio sessions, in an industry that turned children into products and then blamed those children when grown men consumed them.The 1990s music industry had a child exploitation problem that we glamorized as romance, buried under VH1 specials, and allowed powerful men to narrate from their own perspective for three decades. Brandy just took the pen back. The least we can do is read what she wrote. The least we can do is believe her. The least we can do is stop laughing.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 Key Takeaways1. Grooming is a structural process, not an opinion.When a 22-year-old mentor initiates a secret sexual relationship with a 16-year-old protege, the textbook definition has been met. Wanya Morris’s own description of the relationship—mentorship, trust-building, secrecy, then sexual contact—maps onto every clinical stage of the grooming process regardless of anyone’s feelings about the individuals involved.2. Consent without capacity is not consent.The absence of force does not equal the presence of consent. A 16-year-old operating under the professional authority and emotional influence of a 22-year-old mentor lacks the developmental capacity and structural autonomy to meaningfully consent to a secret sexual relationship. Coercion can be structural—built into the power imbalance itself—without a single threat being spoken.3. Legal loopholes are not moral defenses.Wanya’s joke about avoiding states where the relationship was illegal reveals a predatory calculus that treats age of consent laws as obstacles to navigate rather than protections for children. This is the same jurisdictional arbitrage that federal trafficking statutes were designed to prosecute, and it mirrors the geographic maneuvering documented in the Epstein files.4. The 1990s music industry had a systemic child exploitation problem.Brandy’s story exists alongside Aaliyah’s experience with R. Kelly and a broader documented pattern of adult male artists pursuing teenage female artists under the cover of mentorship and career development. This is structural, not incidental. The industry created the conditions, the culture provided the cover, and the silence ensured it could repeat.5. Survivors own their timeline.Brandy carried this story for 30 years while Wanya controlled the public narrative. Her memoir reclaims it on her terms. The appropriate question is never “why is she speaking now?” It is “why did we let him lie unchallenged for three decades?”Explicit Ask to Become a Paid SubscriberI’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education and 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.Bibliography & Related ReadingsPrimary SourcesNorwood, Brandy. Phases: A Memoir. Hanover Square Press, 2026.Surviving R. Kelly. Directed by Dream Hampton. Lifetime, 2019–2023.DeRogatis, Jim. Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Abrams Press, 2019.Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. No. 119-XX (2025). Released documents: justice.gov/epstein.Legal & Policy Sources18 U.S.C. § 1591 – Sex Trafficking of Children by Force, Fraud, or Coercion.18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2423 – Mann Act provisions on Transportation of Minors for Illegal Sexual Activity.Andreozzi + Foote. “15-Year-Olds Are Children: The Law, the Epstein Files, and the Lie of ‘Barely Legal.’” January 2026.United Nations OHCHR. “Flawed ‘Epstein Files’ Disclosures Undermine Accountability for Grave Crimes.” Press Release, February 17, 2026.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.I need y’all to hear me on this one.I don’t say things to be provocative. I say things because the data demands it. Right now, Senator Cory Booker is out here on a nationwide book tour, sitting on Meet the Press telling Kristen Welker he’s “definitely not ruling out” a presidential run in 2028. I’m not here to bash him and yes we disagree on alot, however I hope this video and piece written by me is something he and his team can sit on. Process and digest.Let’s start where everybody wants to start. The speech.On March 31, 2025, Cory Booker took to the Senate floor and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sit. He didn’t use the restroom. His staff removed his chair so he wouldn’t be tempted to sit down. And when he was done, Democrats gave him a standing ovation, Chuck Schumer shed a tear, and the internet lost its collective mind. It was a cool moment, though I remained critical. He broke the record previously held by Strom Thurmond—the segregationist senator from South Carolina who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes trying to stop Black people like Booker from ever sitting in the United States Senate.Now, the symbolism of a Black senator breaking the record of a white supremacist senator? I see the power in that. I’m not going to negate the historical symbolism of what he did. On my PawPaw grave here’s where I need y’all to think deeper than the optics.What did the speech actually accomplish?Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. Zero policy changes. Let me say that again for the people in the back who confuse applause with legislation: zero. Stated simply, Conscious Lee will not substitute my cultural pride for political accountability. Yes we can celebrate that cultural moment in history while also not separating it from political accountability and critique. As a Public Educater and Edutaining Content Creator, I’m critiqued best in this very framework nonetheless I’m no policy maker.See, I know political theater when I see it. And just like Strom Thurmond’s historical act didn’t stop the Civil Rights Act from passing the very next day by a vote of 60–15, Booker’s speech didn’t stop a single thing either. Matthew Whitaker—a man with no significant foreign policy experience who served briefly as Trump’s acting attorney general—was confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO by a vote of 52–45 the same evening Booker stopped talking. The Senate literally waited for him to sit down and then proceeded with business as usual. Feel me?Pay attention and read closely. Here’s what nobody wants to talk about. What Booker did after the speech.The ReceiptsReceipt number one. The very next month after his marathon performance, Booker voted to confirm David Perdue—Trump’s pick for U.S. Ambassador to China—joining 15 other Democrats in handing Trump a 67–29 victory. This is during an active trade war that Trump started with his reckless 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. You just stood on your feet for 25 hours telling America how dangerous this administration is, and then you handed them a confirmation vote on a critical diplomatic post in the middle of an economic confrontation? Make that make sense.Receipt number two. In May 2025, Cory Booker was the only Democrat—the only one—to vote to confirm Charles Kushner as the United States Ambassador to France. Who is Charles Kushner? He’s Jared Kushner’s father, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, a convicted felon who pled guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and—this is the part that should disqualify any senator’s vote—witness tampering. The man hired a sex worker to seduce his own brother-in-law, had it filmed, and sent the tape to his sister as retaliation for cooperating with federal investigators. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Trump pardoned him in 2020. And Cory Booker—Mr. 25-Hour Moral Stand—was the lone Democrat to say, “Yeah, that’s fine with me.”Why? According to the New Jersey Globe, Booker and Kushner have a relationship going back decades. Charles Kushner provided financial support for Booker’s first mayoral run in Newark back in 2002. So when the moment came to choose between principle and patronage, Booker chose patronage. Every single time.Receipt number three. Booker himself stood on the Senate floor later in 2025 and said—and I’m paraphrasing here—”This is a problem with Democrats in America right now. We’re willing to be complicit with Donald Trump. We are standing at a moment where our president is eviscerating the Constitution, and we’re willing to go along with it.” He said that. On the record. About his own party. But Senator, you are the party. You are the complicity you’re describing. Because when the votes came, you went along with it too.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Historical Context You NeedLet me give you the history that most people won’t, because this pattern didn’t start with Booker.Strom Thurmond’s 1957 filibuster is instructive not because of its length but because of its futility and its function. Thurmond stood for 24 hours and 18 minutes reading state election laws, the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington’s Farewell Address—not because he believed he could stop the Civil Rights Act, but because the performance of resistance served his political brand. Even his fellow Southern Democrats—men like Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge, committed segregationists—were furious with Thurmond. Russell called it “personal political aggrandizement.” Talmadge called it grandstanding. They had agreed as a caucus not to filibuster the bill, and Thurmond broke ranks for the spectacle. The bill passed the next day.Now I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between Thurmond’s cause and Booker’s. Thurmond was fighting to stop Black people from voting. Booker was ostensibly fighting to protect democratic institutions. But the structural function of both speeches is identical: a marathon performance that stopped nothing, changed nothing, and primarily elevated the speaker’s national profile. Thurmond used his filibuster to become a national figure in Southern politics. Booker used his speech to launch a book tour and fuel 2028 presidential speculation. The pattern is the pattern.And this is where the deeper history gets uncomfortable. The Democratic Party has a long tradition of what I call performative resistance—gestures designed to signal opposition without actually disrupting the machinery of power. When Hakeem Jeffries and Booker sat on those stairs together for their viral moment, I said at the time: that’s what me and my content creator friends do. We sit down and have conversations and hope they reverberate through the culture because we don’t have levers of power. But Booker does. He’s a United States Senator. He has committee assignments, voting power, the ability to place holds on nominations, and the procedural tools to actually obstruct. He chose the performance instead.This is the difference between Frederick Douglass and the Black faces in high places that Malcolm X warned us about. Douglass didn’t just speak—he organized, he built institutions, he demanded structural change. Malcolm drew the distinction clearly: there’s a difference between the house Negro and the field Negro, between the entertainer and the leader. The entertainer performs resistance. The leader produces it. And if we’re being honest—facts over feelings—Booker’s record is that of a performer, not a producer.He’s Voted Nice Before—But This Moment Demands MoreNow, let me be fair. I want to be fair because that’s what we do at Education is Elevation. We don’t deal in caricature. We deal in complexity. We leave the pathology and antiblack tropes for them other folks.Cory Booker has cast votes I respect. He was the first senator in history to testify against a fellow senator during Jeff Sessions’ 2017 attorney general confirmation hearing. He co-sponsored the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2013. He has spoken powerfully about criminal justice reform, and he’s introduced legislation around environmental justice that reflects genuine concern for marginalized communities. He showed moral courage during the Kavanaugh hearings. I see that. I acknowledge that.In Bryan, Texas we have the saying about “dry ass hating” which means exactly how it sounds. I’m not dry ass hating.But here’s what I need the culture, my neighbors and kinfolks to understand: a voting record built in calmer waters does not predict performance in a storm. How that pipe functions when’s its easy flow will not tell negate how pressure bust pipes. Bro is just not piped up to be President. And right now, we are in a Category 5 hurricane. We have an administration that has, by Booker’s own admission on the Senate floor, “inflicted harm after harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the foundations of our democracy.” We have DOGE dismantling federal agencies. We have ICE operating with expanded impunity. We have tariff wars destabilizing working families. We have an assault on public education, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security happening in real time.And in this climate… this specific, unprecedented, constitutional crisis climate—Cory Booker has shown us who he is. He speaks for 25 hours and then votes to confirm the nominees of the very administration he just railed against. He writes a book called Stand while sitting down on the votes that matter. He talks about being part of “a new generation of leadership” while practicing the oldest form of political careerism there is: building a brand on the backs of people’s pain without delivering material results.The current moment doesn’t need someone who can rise to a podium. It needs someone who can rise to the moment. And Cory Booker, based on his own record, has illustrated that he cannot rise to the moment for the American people—only for himself.The “I Am Spartacus” ProblemRemember the Kavanaugh hearings? Booker had his dramatic “I am Spartacus” moment where he claimed to be risking expulsion from the Senate by releasing confidential documents. The White House had actually already cleared those documents for release. It was theater. Effective theater, maybe—but theater. And the White House knew it then, which is exactly why their spokesperson responded to the 25-hour speech by saying Booker was “looking for another ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.”When your opponents can predict your playbook because your playbook is always the same—performative resistance followed by institutional compliance—you are not a threat to power. You are a relief valve for it. You give people the emotional catharsis of resistance without the material consequences of it. And that is not leadership. That is content creation with a Senate salary.What His Own State Is SayingLet me bring this home. New Jersey—Booker’s own state—shifted significantly toward Republicans in 2024. Kamala Harris won the state by less than six points after Biden won it by sixteen. Booker’s approval ratings have been a subject of concern among New Jersey Democrats for years. His 2026 reelection is not the guaranteed victory it once would have been. And according to my New Jersey sources and multiple reports, there is genuine frustration among constituents who feel that Booker has prioritized national ambitions over the needs of the state that elected him.This is a man who has raised $10 million—with a major fundraising bump directly after the 25-hour speech—for a campaign account and affiliated joint fundraising committee. He released a book the same month he went on Meet the Press to not rule out a presidential run. The timeline isn’t subtle, y’all. The speech was the launch pad. The book is the campaign literature. And the presidential campaign is the destination that every single one of these moves has been designed to reach.The question isn’t whether Cory Booker wants to be president. He’s told us he does. The question is whether his record justifies that ambition. And based on the receipts—zero bills passed, confirmation votes for Trump nominees including a convicted felon, a speech that stopped nothing, and a book tour that started immediately after—the answer is no.The Standard We Should DemandI want to have a respectful conversation about this. I hope this article has showcased that I have the ability to be respectful and analytical while still being direct. I’m not here to assassinate anyone’s character. I’m here to evaluate a public servant’s record against their stated ambitions.Because if we’re serious about 2028—if we’re serious about building a Democratic Party that can actually defeat Trumpism and not just perform opposition to it—then we need candidates whose records match their rhetoric. We need leaders who don’t vote to confirm convicted felons to ambassadorial posts because of two-decade-old political debts. We need senators who understand that a 25-hour speech means nothing if you hand the opposition a confirmation vote 24 hours later.Thinking deeply about shallow s**t is what we do here. And the shallow s**t in this case is the 25-hour speech. It looks deep. It feels powerful. It moved people to tears. But when you dig beneath the surface—when you pull the receipts and lay the voting record next to the rhetoric—what you find is a politician who is exceptionally skilled at performing the aesthetics of resistance while maintaining the practice of compliance.That’s not a president. That’s a brand.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. The 25-hour speech produced zero legislative results. No bills passed. No votes stopped. Matthew Whitaker was confirmed as NATO Ambassador the same evening Booker stopped speaking. The speech was a physical feat, not a legislative one.2. Booker’s voting record contradicts his rhetoric. After publicly opposing the Trump administration for 25 hours, Booker voted to confirm David Perdue as Ambassador to China and was the sole Democrat to confirm convicted felon Charles Kushner as Ambassador to France—a man who financially supported Booker’s first campaign.3. The historical pattern of marathon Senate speeches is clear. From Thurmond in 1957 to Cruz in 2013 to Booker in 2025, lengthy Senate speeches have almost never changed legislative outcomes. They change narratives and build personal brands. Thurmond’s own allies called his filibuster “personal political aggrandizement”—a criticism that applies equally today.4. Booker’s post-speech trajectory reveals his priorities. A book release, a national tour, $10 million in fundraising, and a public refusal to rule out a 2028 presidential run all followed the speech. The speech was a launchpad for personal ambition, not a catalyst for collective action.5. The current moment demands legislators who produce results, not performances. With DOGE dismantling agencies, tariff wars destabilizing the economy, and constitutional norms under unprecedented assault, the Democratic Party needs leaders whose voting records match their stated opposition—not senators who speak for 25 hours and then hand the administration confirmation votes.Explicit Ask To Become Paid SubscriberI’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.The article you just read—pulling Senate voting records, historical analysis of the filibuster tradition from Thurmond to Booker, cross-referencing confirmation votes with public statements, and contextualizing all of it within the history of performative resistance in American politics—this is the kind of independent, receipts-based on investigative education that doesn’t exist on cable news. They’ll show you the 25-hour speech. They’ll let Booker promote his book unchallenged. They won’t pull the Kushner vote, the Perdue confirmation, or the Whitaker timeline and lay it all out for you in one place. That’s what your paid subscription makes possible. That’s what Education is Elevation is building. If this work matters to you, become a paid subscriber today. We’re building the media we deserve—together.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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Mandy Ohman, PJ Schuster, Andrews, Martha, Molly Z, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.Huey P. Newton said that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. Today the phenomenon is this: how does small-town politics spill over into the global? Or, if you flip it, how does global politics trickle down and root itself inside the local? Because I’m going to tell you something — when I go back to Bryan, Texas, the town I was raised in, I don’t feel like I’m going home. I feel like I’m walking back into plantation politics.And I mean that structurally. Not metaphorically. Structurally.I recently sat down with my homie Ethan Brisby — a brother from Bryan who went to Morehouse College, got his master’s in land and property development from Texas A&M, and has spent the last fifteen years building an organization called SHIFT Enterprise Academy. SHIFT stands for Save your money, Help your family, Imagine your goals, Follow directions, and Think accurately. It’s a mindset framework, an ecosystem, and a material response to the oppressive conditions Black people face in small-town America — and increasingly, across the African continent. What Ethan is doing is real work. Ground-level, community-rooted, globally conscious work. And our conversation cracked open something I’ve been sitting with for a long time about what small-town Texas politics really is, where it comes from, and why it never seems to change.Let me give you the receipts.The Name on the City Is a Slaveholder’s NameLet’s start with the very name of the city. Bryan, Texas is named after William Joel Bryan — the nephew of Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas.” William Joel Bryan was born in Missouri in 1815, moved to Texas with his family, and grew up on Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County, where his family managed the plantation, cattle, and property holdings of Stephen F. Austin himself. After Austin died in 1836, William Joel Bryan inherited massive land holdings across the region. By the 1860 census, Bryan owned real property valued at $176,000, personal property worth over $62,000, and held thirty-eight enslaved people. His Durazno Plantation raised cotton, cattle, and sugar using the labor of enslaved Africans. Four of his seven children went on to fight for the Confederate Army.In 1859, William Joel Bryan granted right-of-way through his inherited land in Brazos County to the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, and the projected townsite was named in his honor. In 1860, he deeded 640 acres for the original Bryan townsite to railroad officials for $3,200 — land that enslaved people had cultivated and maintained. The city of Bryan was literally formed by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War ended in 1865. That is not ancient history. That is the foundation beneath the streets.So when I say I’m walking back into plantation politics when I go home, I need you to understand the literalness of that statement. The city is named after a slaveholder. The land the city sits on was inherited through the machinery of Anglo-colonial land theft and chattel slavery. And the neighborhoods where Black people live today — what folks call “the Bottoms,” what sits along the east side — those are the same areas where formerly enslaved people were relegated after emancipation.Freedman Town and the Geography of Anti-BlacknessAfter the Civil War, one of the earliest Black communities in Brazos County was Freedman Town. Records indicate lots were being sold to African Americans in what was called Hall’s Addition as early as 1867. The Bryan School for Colored Youth was established on that site in 1885 and was later destroyed in a fire. Washington Elementary was built in its place, then burned again in 1971 — the same year, finally, that Black students were integrated into Bryan’s public school system. Think about that. 1971.And this is the part that triggered me in my conversation with Ethan: the way that political consciousness gets suppressed in small-town Texas. It is not the same as the East Coast or the West Coast. When you start talking about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, challenging the legitimacy of government structures — the response from your own community is often: “Man, don’t do that.” Not because they disagree, but because the good old boy system has people psychologically conditioned to believe that defiance is dangerous and compliance is divine.The Normalization of Suffering and the Divine TrapThis is what I call the divine trap. In small-town Texas, particularly in Black communities, there is a deep cultural tendency to make suffering sacred. “The toughest battles go to the strongest soldiers.” “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” Now, I’m not attacking faith. I’m a spiritual person. But I am saying this: when you take the various structural ways that a system has caused your reality — the over-policing, the underfunded schools, the disinvestment, the geographic containment — and you make that divine, you have just absolved the structure of accountability.God didn’t put you on the east side of Bryan. Stephen F. Austin’s land grants did. William Joel Bryan’s railroad deal did. Post-Civil War Freedman Town designations did. Jim Crow zoning did. And the Klan’s resurgence in early twentieth-century Bryan — which the historical record documents as limiting the overall upward mobility of the African American community through segregation and terror — that did it too.Ethan mapped this same dynamic onto the colonization of Africa. He broke it down in sequence: first came the explorers, who were welcomed. Then the missionaries, who introduced spiritual frameworks that softened resistance — turn the other cheek, your heaven is in the afterlife. Then the mercenaries, who took the land by force. And finally the merchants, who control the markets to this day. That sequence — explorer, missionary, mercenary, merchant — is not just the story of continental colonization. That is the playbook. And small-town Texas has been running the same play since the 1820s when Jared Groce arrived from Alabama with ninety enslaved people and set up a cotton plantation on the Brazos River, in Stephen F. Austin’s colony.Machine Politics and the Good Old Boy SystemEthan said something that crystallized it for me: small-town politics is the epitome of machine politics. When you can redraw a district line today and already know who is going to win next year, that is a machine. That is not democracy. That is engineered outcomes. And machine politics runs on what Ethan called the good old boy system — people, places, and things that pull strings you never see.In Bryan-College Station, this machinery operates in plain sight if you know where to look. Every drug under the sun can be found on the Texas A&M campus. We all know this. And yet the east side and west side of Bryan — where the Black people live — get policed at a categorically different intensity than the university. They justify the over-policing of Black neighborhoods through the rhetoric of drugs and crime, while the same substances flow freely through a predominantly white institution five miles away. So how is correlation equals causation for the Black community but not for the affluent white people at Texas A&M University? That is not just structural inequality. That is anti-Blackness baked into the infrastructure.Ghislaine Maxwell, Federal Prison Camp Bryan, and the ContradictionAnd then there is this. I’m on the east side of Bryan, visiting family. I’ve been making videos about the Epstein files, about Ghislaine Maxwell, about the entire trafficking apparatus. And I look across the street from my auntie’s house and there is a federal prison. Federal Prison Camp Bryan — a minimum-security facility that sits right there in the hood, in Bryan, Texas.Ghislaine Maxwell is incarcerated there. Serving a twenty-year sentence for conspiring to sex traffic minors. And she is getting preferential treatment. The facility houses mostly non-violent white-collar offenders. Maxwell got transferred there from a low-security prison in Florida after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for two full days. Bureau of Prisons policy says sex offenders should not be housed at minimum-security facilities — but she got a waiver. She was praised in her own emails for the cleanliness and orderliness of the facility. Other inmates were warned by prison staff to use discretion talking about Maxwell. One inmate who spoke to the media was pulled out of a puppy-training program and transferred to a federal detention center in Houston.Meanwhile, I’ve got family members from that very neighborhood who got locked up for moving narcotics and are sitting in rougher federal institutions than a woman who trafficked children. Think about the moral architecture of that. Think about the fact that Greg Abbott brings the hammer down on communities like east side Bryan while Ghislaine Maxwell gets an emotional support dog at a facility that locals used to call “Club Fed.”This is what plantation politics looks like in 2026. The geography hasn’t changed. The hierarchy hasn’t changed. The relationship between who gets punished and who gets protected hasn’t changed.Epigenetics, Programming, and the SHIFT ResponseI’ve been working on a video about epigenetics — about how suffering, trauma, and modes of emotion get passed down through DNA. Dr. George Yancy’s work on the elevator effect, on how anti-Black racism operates at the level of bodily encounter, has been central to how I think about this. And when I connect that to small-town Texas, I think a lot of our epigenetics are still captured within the plantation. The way Black people in Bryan relate to each other, measure each other’s success, police each other’s defiance — it is still structured by proximity to whiteness.This is why what Ethan is doing with SHIFT matters. His response to the intellectual alienation of going back home — after attending Morehouse, after getting his master’s at A&M, after seeing the world differently — was not to lecture. It was to build. SHIFT started in 2010 as a college access program. By 2014, it pivoted to homeownership and first-time homebuyers. In 2021, after a radio appearance in eastern Uganda went viral and his phone rang with over thirty missed calls, Ethan launched SHIFT East Africa — running five cohorts of fifteen students across eight countries, training over 112 alumni, and funding pitch competition winners with $500 of his own money to start businesses.And here is what hit me hardest about Ethan’s story: he could have stopped at the vibes. He could have been the small-town kid from Bryan who went to Morehouse, showed up in Africa, dropped his number on the radio, and bathed in the feeling of impact. But he didn’t. He said he couldn’t just give them language. He had to give them something material. That distinction — between emotional satisfaction and material impact — is everything.The Emotional Economy and Whose Feelings Have ValueThis made me think about what I’m going to call the emotional economy. Not just emotional intelligence, though that matters. I’m talking about the political economy of feelings. Whose emotions get to be mobilized into policy? Whose anger creates action? Whose anger gets criminalized?When white colonists were angry at King George, “give me liberty or give me death” became a founding principle. That was an emotional argument that built a nation. When white men feel economic anxiety, politicians respond with policy — tariffs, tax cuts, border walls. But when Black people express anger at structural conditions, that anger gets coded as criminality, defiance, danger. When women express emotion, patriarchy says they cannot lead. But whose emotional decisions have led us into more wars?The Afro-pessimists talk about the libidinal economy — the economy of feelings and desire. I think what I’m adding is that in the attention economy, in social media, in the entire structure of how we process information, there is a hierarchy to whose emotions get to count. White male anger generates legislation. Black anger generates incarceration. Trans visibility generates erasure. Women’s emotion generates dismissal. And in small-town Texas, this emotional hierarchy is enforced through every institution — from the church to the courthouse to the police department.From Doers to Beings: The Capitalism of Black BodiesThere’s a distinction I’ve been sitting with between being a doer and being a being. Capitalism reduces Black people to doers — your value is what you can produce, what you can perform, what your body can generate for someone else’s profit. If you can’t do anything, you don’t have value. But being — being a full person, being allowed to show emotion, being seen as an individual with interiority — that is a luxury reserved for those whose humanity is already assumed.This is what makes plantation politics so persistent. On the plantation, your value was your labor. In the modern economy, your value is your productivity. In the emotional economy, your feelings don’t count unless they serve someone else’s agenda. And in small-town Texas, the programming runs so deep that people don’t even see it operating on them. They think the machine is just the way things are.But it’s not the way things have to be. And that’s what Ethan’s mantra — build, create, evolve — is about. The way we get trapped in machine politics is that we’re not willing to create anything new. We don’t think we’re creators. We think whatever was handed to us is what we rock with. But when you make the commitment to build something new, you have to be creative. And as you create, you evolve.That’s all life is. Evolution. The studies say one thing, but your evolution can say another.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Research Over MeSearch: What the Historical Record ShowsHere is what the historical record tells us about the soil beneath Bryan, Texas:Stephen F. Austin wrote in 1824 that “the principal product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton, and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.” Jared Groce arrived from Alabama in 1822 with ninety enslaved people and established a cotton plantation on the Brazos River. By the first census of Austin’s colony in 1825, there were 443 enslaved people in a total population of 1,800. By 1860, enslaved people constituted over 70 percent of the population in Brazoria County — the heaviest concentration of enslaved people west of the Mississippi. In Brazos County, the lands along the Brazos River and the Navasota River had been claimed and assigned titles by 1824. By 1860, the average price of a prime male field hand was $1,200, while good Texas cotton land could be bought for six dollars an acre. The institution of slavery in Texas was not incidental. It was foundational.Brazos County proclaimed April “Confederate History and Heritage Month” as recently as 2016, with 161 Confederate battle flags marking graves at Bryan Cemetery. The lone African American commissioner was absent and unable to sign the carefully worded proclamation that said the county “acknowledges that slavery was one of the causes of the war.”One of the causes. The audacity.How to Support SHIFT Enterprise AcademyEthan Brisby and his team are doing the real work — from Bryan, Texas to East Africa and back. You can support their mission by visiting www.shiftenterpriseacademy.com, joining their mailing list, purchasing Ethan’s books (Five Proven Strategies on How to Pay for College and The Roaring 30s), and staying locked in for upcoming training sessions in college strategy, home buying for smart buyers, and capacity building for small business developers.PAID SUBSCRIBER ASKI need to be direct with you.This article exists because I sat down with a brother from my hometown and we chopped it up about the structures nobody wants to name. About machine politics. About plantation geography. About a convicted child sex trafficker getting preferential treatment at a federal prison camp sitting in the middle of a Black neighborhood in Bryan, Texas. About the emotional economy that decides whose pain gets a policy response and whose pain gets a prison sentence.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.When you become a paid subscriber, you are not just reading articles. You are funding the kind of investigative, historically grounded, structurally literate journalism that the mainstream won’t touch. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS1. Bryan, Texas is named after a slaveholder — and that’s not a historical footnote, it’s an operating system. William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin, owned thirty-eight enslaved people and granted the land for the town. The Black neighborhoods that exist today sit on the same geography where enslaved and later freed Black people were contained. Plantation politics isn’t a metaphor in Bryan — it’s a map.2. Machine politics and the good old boy system are not relics of the past — they are the active infrastructure of small-town governance. When you can redraw a district line and already know the outcome, that is not democracy. That is engineered power. And in Bryan, this machinery intersects with racialized over-policing, differential investment, and the suppression of political consciousness.3. The normalization of suffering through divine framing is a tool of political control. When communities are conditioned to see their structural oppression as God’s plan, the system that created those conditions is absolved of accountability. This mirrors the colonial playbook: explorers, missionaries, mercenaries, merchants — in that order.4. Ghislaine Maxwell’s preferential treatment at Federal Prison Camp Bryan exposes the racial architecture of the justice system. A convicted child sex trafficker resides in a minimum-security facility in a Black neighborhood where residents’ own family members serve harder time for lesser offenses. The contradiction is the point.5. Material impact must follow emotional connection — and SHIFT Enterprise Academy models what that looks like. Ethan Brisby’s fifteen-year journey from Bryan, Texas to Morehouse to East Africa demonstrates that consciousness without material action is incomplete. Build, create, evolve is not just a slogan — it’s the counter-program to plantation politics.BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGSCampbell, Randolph B. An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.Torget, Andrew J. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Kelley, Sean M. Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.Barr, Alwyn. Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528–1995. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.Lundberg, John R. The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822–1895. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2024.Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017.Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.Wilderson, Frank B. III. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2020. 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

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Let me ask y’all something, and I want you to sit with this for a second. Is Jaden Ivey being persecuted for his faith? Or is there a difference between using your love for Jesus Christ and using it to justify hate for somebody else? Because I need us to be very clear about that distinction right now. The Chicago Bulls waived Ivey on March 30, 2026, for conduct detrimental to the team after he went on Instagram and called the NBA’s celebration of Pride Month “unrighteousness.” And immediately, the internet lit up with people screaming persecution. Christians are under attack. They’re silencing believers. And I’m sitting here like—no, we’re not doing this. Not today. Not with this history.Because here’s what I need y’all to understand: this is not about one basketball player having an opinion about the Bible. This is about the machinery of white Christian nationalism actively recruiting Black people to be its foot soldiers, and a 24-year-old man who either doesn’t know the history or doesn’t care. Either way, we have a problem. And I’m going to walk y’all through the receipts.It Is Not Religious Persecution. Full Stop.Number one, I’m going to answer the question for y’all in the back. It is not religious persecution. You cannot use your religion or faith to justify calling another group unrighteous or saying their mere presence goes against the righteousness of God. That is oppression. Period. Ivey said his conduct was detrimental to the team, and he asked why they didn’t just say they disagreed with his stance on LGBTQ people. I’ll tell you why. Because it was detrimental to the team. Instead of talking about the Bulls’ performance on the court, we’re talking about his antics, his ignorance, the way he’s trying to justify oppression in the name of Jesus.Number two, most of the time selective moral outrage comes from ignorance. Do you know that in 2016, the NBA and the WNBA became the first professional sports leagues to march in the New York City Pride Parade? That was headline news. Commissioner Adam Silver was on the float. The WNBA had already established the first league-wide Pride campaign in 2014. Jaden Ivey was born in 2002. That means the NBA has been celebrating Pride since he was approximately 13 or 14 years old. He was drafted in 2022. He signed contracts. He cashed checks. He played in a league that had been celebrating Pride for years before he ever put on a jersey. This is not a surprise. This is a choice to ignore the environment you voluntarily entered.The History They Don’t Want You to KnowNow let me give y’all the history, because this is where the consciousness comes in. Christian nationalism is not new. It is not a fringe movement. It is one of the oldest political ideologies in the Western hemisphere, and its roots are soaked in blood. In 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery gave European Christians papal authority to colonize, convert, and enslave non-Christian peoples. That single document became the legal and theological foundation for the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the construction of the racial hierarchy that still governs this country today.The New England Puritans carried this ideology to North America. They saw themselves as God’s chosen people, North America as their Promised Land, and Indigenous peoples as the Canaanites who needed to be conquered. Manifest Destiny wasn’t just a political slogan—it was a theological claim. The idea that white Christians had a divine right to rule this continent is not a distortion of Christian nationalism. It is the definition of it.By the 1930s, anti-New Deal business interests were linking American capitalism to Christianity. In 1956, Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as the national motto during the Cold War—not because of devotion, but to distinguish America from communist atheism. Christianity became a tool of geopolitics. Then in the 1960s, the Supreme Court banned school prayer, and in 1971, Green v. Connally threatened the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian schools. That is what birthed the modern Religious Right. Not prayer. Not abortion. Segregation. The defense of white Christian institutions that refused to integrate. That is the origin story they will never tell you.Trump’s Relationship with Christian NationalismAnd now let’s talk about the present, because Christian nationalism is no longer just a cultural phenomenon. It is federal policy. On February 6, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” It established a federal task force under the Attorney General to investigate alleged anti-Christian persecution in government agencies. The next day, he signed a second order creating the White House Faith Office, led by televangelist Paula White-Cain. On May 1, 2025, he launched a Religious Liberty Commission.Let’s pause and process that. Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist and key architect of Project 2025, was appointed to run the Office of Management and Budget—the agency that oversees the implementation of presidential policy across the entire federal government. The architect of the blueprint is now the builder of the house. Project 2025 is over 900 pages long. It calls for a biblical definition of marriage and family, the rollback of LGBTQ protections, the elimination of the Department of Education, and the defunding of what it calls “woke progressivism.” Mariko Hirose of Americans United for Separation of Church and State called it “a road map for Christian nationalism.”And when journalists pointed out that all of this violates the separation of church and state, Trump said—and I quote because I cannot make this up—during a Rose Garden event celebrating National Prayer Day: “They say separation between church and state. I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.” The President of the United States said let’s forget about the First Amendment. On camera. In the Rose Garden. And somehow Jaden Ivey thinks he’s the one being persecuted? Come on, man.Antiblackness and White Supremacy: Baked Into the FoundationHere’s the part that should make every Black person reading this stop and think for a second. Antiblackness is not a side effect of Christian nationalism. It is a foundational ingredient. The Confederacy wrote God into its constitution explicitly—the U.S. Constitution does not mention God. The Confederate project was a Christian nationalist project, and its central institution was the enslavement of Black people.Southern theologians constructed entire theological frameworks to justify slavery. They used the “Curse of Ham” from Genesis 9, claiming Black people were cursed by God and destined for servitude. The text says nothing about skin color. The curse was on Canaan, not all of Ham’s descendants. It was a fabrication—a lie built on a misreading and upheld by white supremacist power. They created a Slave Bible that literally removed every liberation story from Scripture—including the Exodus—and kept only the passages about obedience. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how this works, nothing will.The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 because Northern Baptists refused to accept slaveholders as missionaries. The Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery in 1844. The Presbyterians split in 1861. These denominations were literally born from the defense of chattel slavery using the Bible. And after slavery ended, the same theology propped up Jim Crow. White pastors preached that racial mixing violated God’s natural order. The Klan burned crosses—that wasn’t a random choice of symbol. Christianity was the scaffolding for American apartheid.Today, PRRI research shows that 66% of white evangelical Protestants—the demographic most aligned with Christian nationalism—believe discrimination against Christians is as serious as discrimination against other groups. Meanwhile, Black people face documented disparities in housing, healthcare, education, criminal justice, and wealth. Christian nationalism has always needed a racial hierarchy. It needs Black people at the bottom or, increasingly, Black people willing to participate in their own subjugation. When a Jaden Ivey parrots Christian nationalist talking points, he’s not exercising faith. He’s being recruited.It Always Blows My MindIt always blows my mind when people that look like me try to use the Bible to justify denying the humanity of somebody else. Like we ain’t experienced that. Like that ain’t our history. The same book that was used to tell our ancestors to obey their masters. The same book that was edited—literally edited—to remove the stories of liberation. And now we’re using it to target someone else? The amnesia is the emergency.Number five on my list of receipts: Christian nationalism is thriving and we should all be concerned. What you see is all the ways that the Christian nationalists—the white folks, the white supremacists—use the Bible to justify the denial of a whole bunch of things. Like Black education. They’re going to use what’s happening with Jaden Ivey to say look at this, Christians are being persecuted because we believe we have the right to say messed up things about entire identities because it goes against our beliefs. Because their beliefs have to conform to your identity.And to the Christians of all colors who are watching this: the entire government in America is run by Christians. Every branch of government. Every entity and industry in this country is dominated by Christians. That means not only is nobody oppressing you or persecuting you for your religious belief—it means the claim is delusional. And that takes me to a very important point. Jaden Ivey is either engaging in selective moral outrage out of ignorance, or this man might be experiencing a mental health crisis. His coach, Billy Donovan, acknowledged as much, saying he’s not a doctor but that mental health is a real issue. Ivey himself has spoken about dealing with depression. I say this not to mock him but to be honest: the behavior was spiraling, and the people around him need to make sure he’s okay.Chex Mix ChristianityA lot of y’all treat the Bible like a bag of Chex Mix. You love the pretzels but you don’t like the croutons, so you throw those out. Where is the outrage when folks are mixing their polyester with their silk? That’s in Leviticus. Where is the outrage when y’all got that swine on your mind? That’s in the Bible too. But none of these folks are on Instagram condemning the bacon cheeseburger. They’re only interested in the parts that let them target someone else.Christian nationalism sounds great until you realize it means Christian supremacy. It’s bad because the people who want to make you live by Christian values don’t follow those Christian values themselves. The people who use your religion corruptly to try and persuade the masses to do what they want—that’s why it’s bad. One of the cornerstones of this experiment called America was religious freedom. The idea that you wouldn’t be persecuted for practicing your religion. It’s the first line of the First Amendment. All your different books that you follow—you’re allowed to do that in America without the other one establishing laws over you. That’s the whole point.Consciousness Precedes TransformationSo where does that leave us? It leaves us with a choice. You can be recruited into a movement that was built on the subjugation of your ancestors, or you can educate yourself about why that movement exists and who it actually serves. The Slave Bible is in a museum. The executive orders are on the White House website. Project 2025 is available to read in its entirety. The receipts are everywhere. The only question is whether you’re willing to look at them.This is why I do what I do. Research over me searching. Facts over feelings. And the fact is, Christian nationalism has never been about Christ. It has been about power. It has been about control. And it has always—always—depended on Black people not knowing their own history. That’s why they’re banning books. That’s why they’re defunding public education. That’s why Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education. Because an educated populace cannot be recruited. An informed community cannot be fooled and a conscious people cannot be weaponized against themselves. Education is elevation. Explicit Ask to become Paid Subscriber Everything you just read—the history of the Slave Bible, the receipts on Trump’s executive orders, the connection between the Doctrine of Discovery and today’s Christian nationalist policy agenda, the data on who actually runs every branch of government—this is the kind of research, documentation, and teaching that is being systematically erased from public education. This is the work that nobody else is doing at this scale, with this level of specificity, and with this commitment to telling the truth about what’s really happening.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.5 Key Takeaways1. This Is Not Religious Persecution — It Is Selective Moral OutrageJaden Ivey was not persecuted for his faith. He was held accountable by his employer for conduct detrimental to the team. The NBA and WNBA have been celebrating Pride since 2014 and 2016 respectively. He entered a league with established values around inclusion and then publicly condemned those values. That is not martyrdom. That is a contractual and professional consequence.2. Christian Nationalism Is Federal Policy Right NowBetween Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” executive order, the White House Faith Office, and the Religious Liberty Commission—all launched in 2025—Christian nationalism has moved from the margins to the machinery of government. Project 2025 is the blueprint, and its architects are now in charge of implementation.3. Antiblackness Is Structural to the Christian Nationalist ProjectFrom the Doctrine of Discovery to the Slave Bible to the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in defense of slaveholding, white Christian nationalism has always required a racial hierarchy. When Black people are recruited into this movement, they are being asked to serve a system that was designed to subjugate them.4. The Bible Has Been Weaponized Before — And Black People Were the TargetThe same selective, proof-texting method being used to condemn LGBTQ people today was used to justify chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. The methodology has not changed. The target has shifted. But the people wielding the weapon remain the same.5. Consciousness Precedes TransformationUnderstanding the history of Christian nationalism is not an academic exercise. It is a survival skill. When you know that the Confederacy wrote God into its constitution, when you know that they made a Slave Bible, when you know that the modern Religious Right was organized around segregation—not prayer—you can see the pattern. And once you see it, you can’t be recruited into it.Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.1. Gorski, Philip S. and Perry, Samuel L. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2022. A data-driven examination of how white Christian nationalism operates as a political ideology, its correlation with racial resentment, and its role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.2. Jones, Robert P. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. Simon & Schuster, 2023. Traces white Christian nationalism to the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493, connecting papal authority, colonial ideology, and contemporary racial politics.3. Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright Publishing, 2020. Documents how white evangelical culture weaponized masculinity and militarism, creating the foundation for today’s Christian nationalist movement.4. Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. Zondervan, 2019. A history of the American church’s active participation in racial injustice from slavery through the civil rights era and beyond.5. Whitehead, Andrew L. and Perry, Samuel L. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020. Defines Christian nationalism through survey data and examines its relationship to attitudes on race, gender, immigration, and authoritarianism.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

There’s a clip from the 1950s that every single American needs to see. A white woman in Levittown, Pennsylvania, looking dead into a camera, saying the quiet part loud: “I just could not live beside them. I don’t feel that they should be oppressed. But I moved here. One of the main reasons was because it was a white community. And that’s the only place I intend to live.”Let that marinate for a second. She didn’t say she hated Black people. She didn’t use a slur. She said she didn’t think they should be oppressed — and then in the very same breath explained that she chose her home specifically to avoid living near them. That’s not extremism the way most people picture it. That’s mainstream American ideology. That’s the moderate. That’s the liberal. That’s the person Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about in his Letter from Birmingham Jail — the white moderate who prefers order over justice, who agrees with the goal but not the method, who says “I support your rights, just not next door to me.”And y’all, that wasn’t some fringe figure. That was the average Levittown resident. Feel me? She was the demographic.Now let me give you the context that your school probably skipped over, because this matters.Levittown: The Blueprint for American SuburbiaLevittown, Pennsylvania wasn’t just a neighborhood. It was one of the first and largest planned suburban communities in the United States, developed by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons beginning in the late 1940s and expanding through the 1950s. Levitt built thousands of affordable, mass-produced homes for returning World War II veterans and their families, and the development became the model that suburbs across the entire country would follow for the next half century.But here’s the receipt they don’t put in the brochure: Levitt’s company had an explicit policy. No homes would be sold to Black families. This wasn’t informal, wasn’t a wink-and-nod arrangement. It was written into the contracts. Levitt himself said publicly that he could solve a housing problem or he could solve a racial problem, but he couldn’t combine the two. In other words, the prosperity of white American families was built on the contractual exclusion of Black ones. That’s not opinion. That’s the historical record.In 1957, when William and Daisy Myers became the first Black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, they were met with mobs. Hundreds of white residents gathered outside their home. Crosses were burned. Rocks were thrown through windows. Confederate flags were raised. The police stood by and watched. And the woman in that clip — the calm, composed one who just couldn’t live beside them — she was the moderate version.The “Class Not Race” LieA lot of folks today will tell you it’s more about class and less about race. I hear this constantly. It’s one of the most persistent deflections in American discourse. But Levittown dismantles that argument in real time. The Myers family had the economic means to purchase a home in that community. William Myers was a college-educated veteran with a professional career. By every metric of class status that white America claimed to value, the Myers family qualified.It didn’t matter. Not one bit. Because when that woman said “I just could not live beside them,” she wasn’t talking about income brackets. She wasn’t evaluating credit scores. She was talking about Blackness itself. The disqualification was ontological — it was about being, not about having. You could have the job, the education, the military service, the down payment. You could check every single box. And they still didn’t believe you was worthy enough.That’s ideology. That’s not a policy failure. That’s a belief system operating exactly as intended. And we need to be precise about that distinction because it changes everything about how we understand the present.The Wealth Transfer You’re Not Supposed to TraceNow here’s where the thinking deeply about shallow stuff comes in. The suburbs of today were created back then, in the 1950s and 1960s. Every cul-de-sac, every homeowners association, every property tax-funded school district — those structures trace back to this moment. And the wealth that was generated through homeownership in those communities? That wealth didn’t just sit still. It compounded. It transferred. It moved from generation to generation to generation.The GI Bill — one of the most celebrated pieces of social legislation in American history — was administered in a way that systematically excluded Black veterans from its full benefits. White veterans got low-interest home loans, bought homes in places like Levittown, built equity, passed that equity to their children, who used it to fund college educations, start businesses, and buy their own homes. Black veterans were denied those same loans, steered into redlined neighborhoods where property values were suppressed, and locked out of the single greatest wealth-building mechanism in twentieth-century America.The Federal Housing Administration didn’t just allow this. The FHA’s own underwriting manual explicitly warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to lower property values in neighborhoods with Black residents. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew maps — literal maps — color-coding neighborhoods by perceived risk, and the “riskiest” designation, marked in red, correlated almost perfectly with where Black people lived. That’s where the term “redlining” comes from.So when somebody tells you “that was a long time ago,” ask them to do the math. My grandmother was born in the 1950s. Her mother was born in the 1930s. We’re not talking about ancient history. We’re talking about the people who raised the people who run the system right now. Two generations. That’s it.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Ideology Outlasts PolicyThis is the part I need y’all to really sit with. When we talk about white flight, gentrification, or redlining, it’s crucial to acknowledge that it wasn’t just policy — it was ideology. Policies can be repealed. Laws can be rewritten. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 technically made housing discrimination illegal. But ideology? Ideology lives in the culture. It lives in school funding formulas tied to property taxes. It lives in zoning laws that mandate single-family homes to keep density — and by extension, certain populations — out. It lives in HOA covenants and real estate steering and the algorithmic bias baked into modern mortgage lending.The woman in that Levittown clip didn’t need a policy to tell her to exclude Black people. She had an ideology. And that ideology didn’t die with the Civil Rights Act. It adapted. It learned new language. It stopped saying “I just could not live beside them” out loud and started saying “I just want to live in a good school district.” It stopped saying “this is a white community” and started saying “this is a safe neighborhood.” The function is identical. The vocabulary evolved.Research from scholars like Richard Rothstein, whose work The Color of Law meticulously documents how government policy created and enforced residential segregation, confirms what Black communities have always known: this was deliberate, this was systematic, and this was bipartisan. Rothstein demonstrates that residential segregation in America was not the result of private choices or market forces. It was engineered by federal, state, and local governments through explicit racial policy. And the effects compound daily.Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit extends this analysis into the post-civil rights era, documenting how the very policies designed to expand Black homeownership in the 1960s and 1970s were captured by predatory lenders and real estate speculators who extracted wealth from Black communities while the government looked the other way. The exploitation didn’t end with the Fair Housing Act. It shape-shifted.The Throughline to NowToday, the Black-white homeownership gap is larger than it was in 1960. Read that again. After the Civil Rights Movement, after the Fair Housing Act, after decades of supposed progress, Black homeownership rates have actually declined relative to white homeownership rates. According to the National Association of Realtors, the Black homeownership rate sat at approximately 44 percent as of recent data, compared to roughly 73 percent for white households. The gap is nearly 30 percentage points. That’s not an accident. That’s a system performing exactly as it was designed.And the wealth implications are staggering. The median white family holds roughly eight times the wealth of the median Black family. Homeownership is the primary vehicle for wealth accumulation in this country, and Black Americans were systematically locked out of it at the exact moment when it mattered most — when the suburbs were being built, when equity was compounding, when generational transfers were being set in motion.So when people say “just work harder,” when they say “pull yourself up,” when they say “it’s about class not race” — they’re either ignorant of this history or they’re invested in you not knowing it. Either way, the function is the same: it protects the status quo by making structural inequality look like individual failure.The Sound of the Modern ModerateLet me bring it back to that woman one more time. “I don’t feel that they should be oppressed. But I moved here because it was a white community.” That sentence structure — the acknowledgment followed by the but — is the grammar of American racial liberalism. It’s the syntax of complicity dressed up as compassion.You hear it today in every debate about affordable housing. You hear it in the resistance to zoning reform. You hear it when parents fight against school integration proposals. You hear it when neighborhoods organize against public transit expansions that would connect lower-income communities to suburban job centers. “I’m not racist, but...” “I support equality, but...” “I believe in diversity, but not in my backyard.”That woman in 1957 is not a relic. She is a prototype. And until we confront the ideology — not just the policy, but the belief system that animated the policy in the first place — we will keep reproducing the same outcomes in new packaging.Consider Becoming A Paid SubscriberI’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.Every paid subscription directly funds the research, production, and distribution of work like this article — work that traces the ideological roots of segregation from Levittown to your zip code. If this history matters to you, if you believe education is elevation, become a paid subscriber today. This is how we build the infrastructure for the truth.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.5 KEY TAKEAWAYS* Levittown was a prototype, not an anomaly. The exclusionary model that Levitt built — affordable homes for white families, contractual exclusion of Black families — became the template for suburban development across the country. Understanding Levittown means understanding the ideological DNA of American suburbia itself.* The “class not race” argument collapses under historical scrutiny. The Myers family met every economic standard for homeownership in Levittown and were still met with mob violence. Residential segregation was never fundamentally about income — it was about an ideology that defined Black presence as inherently incompatible with white prosperity.* Ideology outlasts and outpaces policy reform. The Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal in 1968, but the belief systems that animated segregation adapted into zoning laws, school funding formulas, real estate steering, and algorithmic lending bias. Repealing a law doesn’t dismantle a worldview.* Generational wealth is generational policy. The wealth gap between Black and white families is not the product of individual choices — it’s the compound interest on decades of federally subsidized white homeownership and federally enforced Black exclusion. Two generations separate us from legal segregation. The math doesn’t lie.* The moderate voice is the most dangerous voice. The Levittown woman who said “I don’t think they should be oppressed, but I can’t live by them” is the archetype for contemporary racial liberalism — the person who supports equality in theory while actively maintaining exclusion in practice. Confronting this pattern is essential to any honest reckoning with American inequality.BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS* Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017.* Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.* Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton, 2005.* Kushner, David. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights. Walker & Company, 2009.* Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton University Press, 2005.* Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury, 2016. 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