“African Americans built this nation. You built this nation. You know, you’re just starting to get real credit for that. We all built it. But you were such a massive part of it, bigger than you were given credit for. Does that make sense?”

That’s what his lord and savior Dukie Donald said. That is not a paraphrase and it is not a meme. That is the White House transcript from October 4, 2019, the Young Black Leadership Summit, Candace Owens in the room, the President of the United States telling a ballroom full of Black conservatives that our people built this country and that we are only now getting credit for it. Now let’s get back to this man making these historical claims.

Jeff Mead, two million plus followers on TikTok, been running a whole series on Abdul El Sayed since El Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, decided the way to get El Sayed was to get us. El Sayed said we built this country. Mead’s response was a number. In 1860, he says, only 10 to 12 percent of the GNP came from slave labor, the highest documented year was 16 percent, so the vast majority of how this country was built was not slave labor, so when you hear somebody say this country was built on the backs of slaves, no it wasn’t, and El Sayed is just pandering for the Black vote.

What y’all seen right there is an example of when you think deeply about shallow s**t, you start making ahistorical claims. So let me do what I do. Historical context first, then the present, then the two things that can be true, then the receipts on the pandering charge, because that one is going to boomerang on him so hard it’s going to knock the hat off his head.

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The Number Is a Twentieth Century Instrument Retrofitted Onto a Nineteenth Century Crime

Start with the word he leaned on. GNP. Gross National Product. Mead told his audience to think of it like GDP today. Fine. Here is what he did not tell them: nobody in 1860 was computing a GNP. The concept did not exist. Simon Kuznets built the first national income accounts for the United States Senate in 1934, in the middle of the Depression, because the federal government needed a single number to describe an economy it was trying to rescue. Everything anybody says about the GNP of 1860 is a modern reconstruction, most of it tracing back to the economic historian Robert Gallman, who spent decades in the 1960s and 1970s back filling estimates from census returns and farm output records so that economists could argue about the antebellum economy in twentieth century units.

That matters because the specific numbers Mead recited line up with one paper. Paul Rhode, an economist at the University of Michigan, published “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product Did the Enslaved Produce?” in Explorations in Economic History in 2024. Rhode’s bottom line is that the enslaved produced roughly the same share of GNP as their share of the population. That population share was 16.8 percent in 1800, falling to 12.6 percent in 1860 as European immigration poured into the North. So the “highest documented” year Mead is bragging about is not some anomaly at the peak of King Cotton. It is 1800, when the enslaved were a bigger slice of the country. The number tracks the headcount. The number was always going to track the headcount, because the number was built out of the headcount.

Sit with what Rhode’s finding actually says, because Mead read it upside down. Four million people who were paid nothing, owned nothing, could not sell their labor to the highest bidder, could not move to the city, could not go to school, could not patent a cotton gin, could not buy the land they cleared, produced output at the same rate as the free population of the wealthiest republic on earth. That is not evidence that slavery was marginal. That is evidence of the most extractive labor system in the hemisphere running at full population efficiency while its workers were held as property.

Then there is the thing the flow number cannot see at all. GNP is a flow. It measures what got produced in a year. “Built” is a stock word. It asks what got accumulated, what got financed, what got founded. Look at the stock. By 1860 the roughly four million enslaved people in the United States were carried on the books at somewhere between three and four billion dollars. Roger Ransom, Richard Sutch, and Steven Deyle have all run the arithmetic, and the conclusion is the same each time: enslaved human beings were the largest single financial asset in the country, worth more than all the railroads and all the factories in the United States combined. The average slaveholder held close to two thirds of his wealth in people, not land. The richest counties per capita in the nation in 1860 were not in Massachusetts. They were in the Mississippi and Louisiana cotton belt. When Mead says the vast majority of how this country was built was not slave labor, he is describing one year’s output and calling it a foundation.

Jennifer Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery shows that the modern habit of thinking about Black people as quantities, as a percentage, as a headcount, as a fraction of an output table, did not arrive after slavery to evaluate it. It arrived with slavery to run it. The ship manifests, the insurance schedules, the bills of lading, the appraisals that listed a woman and her “increase,” those were the first national accounts. They counted us before they counted the cotton. So when a Black man stands in front of two million people and uses a percentage as a verdict on whether his own ancestors count, he is not doing economics. He is doing the ledger’s job for it, for free, which is a kind of poetry if you think about it, because free is exactly the rate the ledger always preferred.

King Cotton Was Not a Metaphor, It Was a Senate Speech

Now the archive, because the archive is where this man gets embarrassed by dead white men.

James Henry Hammond, senator from South Carolina, stood on the floor of the United States Senate on March 4, 1858, and told the North that if the South stopped shipping cotton for three years, England would topple and carry the whole civilized world down with her. His line was “Cotton is king.” He was not describing 5 percent of anything. He was describing leverage. Two years later E. N. Elliott put together a whole volume of the pro slavery intelligentsia under the title Cotton Is King, and Pro Slavery Arguments, building on David Christy’s 1855 tract of the same name. This is the book I held up. This is the book those Confederate flag toting folks that want to keep us on the plantation wrote about themselves. They were not saying slavery was a minor input. They were saying slavery was the load bearing wall of the Atlantic economy, and they were saying it to justify seceding from the country Mead thinks they barely helped build.

Brian Schoen’s The Fragile Fabric of Union (2009) traces exactly how that confidence worked. The Deep South believed the cotton trade was essential to the European economy because for most of the antebellum period it was, and that belief is what gave the planter class the nerve to walk out of the Union and expect Britain and France to come running. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) puts the global frame on it: by 1860 raw cotton was 61 percent of the value of everything the United States exported, and it was picked by enslaved hands. Cotton was the raw material that fed the mills of Lancashire and Lowell, and the mills of Lancashire and Lowell were the Industrial Revolution. That is the “central rise of modern global capitalism” argument, and you do not have to accept every number in the New History of Capitalism to accept that the men who ran the cotton economy said, in print, on the record, that they were the reason the modern world had a textile industry.

Now here is where I am going to be more honest than Mead was, because Research over MeSearch means the other side gets its best day in court. Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode have spent years arguing that the New History of Capitalism overreached. Edward Baptist’s claim in The Half Has Never Been Told that cotton accounted for almost half of American economic activity in 1836 was bad accounting, double counting inputs as outputs, and it has been roundly criticized. Cotton exports themselves were under 5 percent of GDP for most of the antebellum period. Corn, grown mostly by free labor, was worth more than cotton in most years. Gavin Wright, in a 2022 Journal of Economic Perspectives piece, argues that slavery was not necessary for cotton production and that the slave South was, if anything, a drag on the region’s long term development. Mark Stelzner and Sven Beckert answered with a 2024 paper in the Economic History Review using a different method that credits enslaved workers with a larger contribution to output and especially to growth. This is a live fight among serious people. I am not going to pretend it isn’t.

Two things can be true. It can be true that Baptist’s half of the economy figure was wrong, and it can be true that Mead’s use of the corrected figure is a lie. The reason is that “how much of one year’s output” was never the question El Sayed was answering. The question was who built the country, and the country is not a year’s output. The country is a Constitution with a three fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause, and a twenty year protection for the international slave trade written into Article I. The country is a Capitol dome and a White House raised by enslaved workers hired out by their owners for five dollars a month, a fact Congress finally put on a plaque in Emancipation Hall in 2012. The country is a slave market at the foot of Wall Street, established by the city of New York in 1711, decades before there was a stock exchange to stand on the same corner. The country is Northern banks financing Southern plantations, Northern insurers writing policies on human cargo, Northern shipyards building the vessels, and Northern textile mills turning the cotton into the cloth that made New England rich. Cut the cotton out of that picture and you do not get 88 percent of a country. You get a different country, and the men who wrote Cotton Is King knew it, which is why they went to war over it.

Every Accusation Is a Confession: The Pandering Boomerang

So Abdul El Sayed is pandering towards the Black vote because he accurately said that we built this country. Let’s run the same standard on Mead’s own president and see what falls out.

When Donald Trump told the Young Black Leadership Summit in 2019 that African Americans built this nation, was he being real, or was he pandering? Because if he was being real, then Mead just called Trump a liar and a panderer on the same facts. Like, that’s the whole clip. That’s the accusation. If he was pandering, then why did Mead’s lord and savior create a plan called the Platinum Plan, rolled out in Atlanta on September 25, 2020, half a trillion dollars in promised capital access to Black communities, named like a rap album? Because, you know, Black folks like bling bling, huh? Why did he pardon Lil Wayne and Kodak Black on his way out the door in January 2021, and then pardon NBA YoungBoy in May 2025? Was that policy, or was that pandering? You don’t care about pandering, bro. You care about who is doing it. That is the tell. Mock quote him for a second: “iMa bE tHe PrInCiPlEd OnE aBoUt PaNdErInG” while his guy is handing out platinum plans and rapper pardons like Halloween candy.

Then there is the part Mead really does not want to hold. The president who said we built this nation in 2019 signed an executive order on March 27, 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” assigned J. D. Vance to scrub “improper ideology” out of the Smithsonian, and by August of that year was posting on Truth Social that the museums are “OUT OF CONTROL” because “everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was.” In September 2025 the administration ordered the National Park Service to pull slavery interpretation from multiple parks, including the photograph of Peter’s scourged back. In July 2026 the White House Domestic Policy Council dropped a 162 page report calling the National Museum of American History “radical” for how it presents slavery, conquest, and exclusion, with the National Museum of African American History and Culture already in the review queue since August 2025. Crazy how the museum that had a Smithsonian panel overstating slavery’s share of the national product is the same museum the White House is now auditing for saying slavery was bad at all. The number Mead is using to shrink us is being deployed in Washington to erase us. Same playbook, two floors of the same building.

Whitey on the Moon beat, because y’all know I got one. The country is spending nine figures on America250 birthday programming, a Garden of American Heroes, and a lawyer led review of every slavery exhibit in the national museums, in the same fiscal year Mead is out here telling us we were a rounding error. If we were a rounding error, why does it cost this much to stop the museum from mentioning us?

The Schoolhouse Was Ours Before the Curriculum Was Theirs

Here is the part of “who built this country” that never makes the GNP table, because the GNP table does not have a row for who built the public school.

Apply Anderson here. James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860 to 1935 documents that universal public education in the former Confederacy was not handed down by Northern philanthropists or Southern reformers. It was initiated by ex slaves. Freedpeople opened schools in churches and cabins before the Freedmen’s Bureau arrived, taxed themselves to pay teachers, and when Black men sat in the Reconstruction state legislatures from 1868 forward, they wrote universal, tax supported public schooling into the new Southern state constitutions for the first time in the region’s history. Du Bois said it plainly in Black Reconstruction in 1935: the public school system of the South is the creation of Black Reconstruction. White children in Mississippi got a free public education because Black legislators voted for one. Then Anderson tracks the second half of the story, how the Hampton and Tuskegee industrial model got funded by Northern money precisely to steer that Black demand for schooling into a curriculum that would not threaten the Southern labor order. Even the counter revolution had to build on top of what we built.

Craig Steven Wilder’s Ebony and Ivy runs the same argument up the ladder. Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Penn, Georgetown: chartered, endowed, and in several cases physically constructed with slave trade money and enslaved labor. In 1838 the Maryland Jesuits sold 272 people south to keep Georgetown solvent. That is not a metaphor about “built.” That is a bill of sale with a university on the other end of it.

Now the present, and the reason this section has a Texas address. In 2015 a ninth grader in Pearland named Coby Burren texted his mother a photo from his McGraw Hill world geography textbook. The caption said the Atlantic slave trade brought millions of “workers” from Africa to Southern plantations. His mother, Roni Dean Burren, put it on Facebook, and McGraw Hill had to reprint. In 2023 Florida adopted standards instructing teachers that enslaved people developed skills that could be applied “for their personal benefit.” Mead’s twelve percent is the same move in a different font. The 2015 caption called us workers so the arithmetic would balance. The 2023 standard called bondage a job training program so the story would be uplifting. Mead calls us a small share of GNP so the country can be innocent. All three are the same sentence: they were here, they were minor, and the building would have gone up without them. The kids in Pearland and Tallahassee are the ones who pay for that sentence, because they are being taught a country in which the people who founded their public school system were a line item.

The Number Never Had a Row for the Womb

Intersectionality is the default, not the bonus round, and this one lands on Black women harder than anywhere else, because the ledger had a special column for them.

Daina Ramey Berry’s The Price for Their Pound of Flesh follows the appraisal of enslaved people from before birth to after death. Enslaved women were valued for labor and for “future increase,” which is why a woman of childbearing age could be appraised above a man of the same age and strength. That valuation was not customary. It was statutory. Virginia’s 1662 law of partus sequitur ventrem made a child’s status follow the mother, which turned every Black woman’s body into a self replenishing asset class. Berry then follows the bodies past death into what she calls “ghost value,” the cadaver trade that supplied medical schools with Black corpses to dissect. The University of Virginia, the Medical College of Georgia, the whole early American medical profession learned anatomy on our dead. So when Mead tells you the enslaved were 12 percent of output, ask him which output. Cotton picked is in the table. Children born is not. Wombs appraised are not. Bodies sold to the anatomy theater are not. The GNP of 1860 does not have a row for reproduction because reproduction was booked as capital gains, not production, and the ledger always knew the difference even when the commentator doesn’t.

Spillers named this the difference between body and flesh: the ledger dealt in flesh, in the “zero degree of social conceptualization,” so that a woman could be a mother in the quarters and a breeding line in the account book on the same afternoon. Berry’s contribution is to show what enslaved people did with that. Against the appraiser’s price, they held what she calls “soul value,” a self valuation that no auction could set, the thing that made a woman refuse to be counted as her increase.

Then the material outcome in the present, because that is the standard. Black women in this country were the last group whose labor was formally excluded from the wage protections of 1935, because domestic and agricultural workers were carved out of Social Security and the Wagner Act to keep the Southern labor order intact. The same accounting logic that discounted the womb in 1860 discounted the kitchen in 1935 and discounts the home health aide today. Every time somebody tells you our share of the economy is small, check whether the number was built to see our work in the first place.

Counterweight: The Washerwomen Knew Their Price

I do not end in the ledger. I end with the people who learned to read it.

Apply Hunter here. Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom follows Black women in Atlanta after emancipation, and in the summer of 1881, sixteen years after Appomattox, roughly three thousand Black washerwomen in Atlanta walked off the job. They organized as the Washing Society, set a uniform price of a dollar per dozen pounds of laundry, went door to door recruiting, and held out through arrests, fines, and a city council threat to license them out of business. They shut down the laundry of a major Southern city during the run up to the International Cotton Exposition, which is the joke history keeps writing for us: the city was hosting a festival for King Cotton, and the women who washed King Cotton’s shirts had the whole exposition sweating. Those women had been appraised their entire lives. The minute the appraisal ended they priced themselves, collectively, in writing, and made the city negotiate. That is what “we built this country” means when you say it right. Not a claim on a percentage. A claim on the skill of people who had been doing the arithmetic for everybody else for two hundred and fifty years and were ready to do it for themselves.

See, Morgan reminds us that the number was never neutral, that counting Black people was the technology of the trade before it was the language of the rebuttal. And Hunter teaches us that the same people the number was built to discount understood value better than the men who held the pen, because they had been the value. Between those two you have the whole answer to Jeff Mead. He brought a percentage to a history fight. The history is older than his percentage, and so are we.

So we see, according to historians and scholars and even Dukie Donald up in the White House right now, our people built this country. Education Is Elevation.

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The GNP did not exist in 1860. It is a 1934 instrument (Kuznets) retrofitted onto the antebellum economy through modern reconstructions (Gallman). Using it as a verdict on “who built the country” is measuring a foundation with a stopwatch.

* The numbers Mead cited line up with Paul Rhode’s 2024 finding that the enslaved produced roughly their share of the population, 16.8 percent in 1800 and 12.6 percent in 1860. Four million unpaid, unfree people matching the output rate of the free population is not evidence of marginality. It is evidence of extraction.

* GNP is a flow. “Built” is a stock. In 1860 enslaved people were carried on the books at three to four billion dollars, more than all the railroads and factories in the country combined, the single largest financial asset in the United States.

* The pro slavery South said cotton was king in a Senate speech (Hammond, 1858) and a book (Cotton Is King, 1860), and seceded on that confidence. By 1860 cotton was 61 percent of U.S. exports. The people who ran the system did not think it was a 12 percent sideshow.

* Every accusation is a confession. Trump said African Americans built this nation in 2019, then launched the Platinum Plan, pardoned rappers, and is now auditing the Smithsonian for saying slavery was bad. Mead’s pandering charge lands on his own man first.

RELATED READINGS AND CITED WORK

* Remarks by President Trump at the Young Black Leadership Summit, White House, October 4, 2019 (archived transcript).

* James Henry Hammond, “Cotton Is King” speech, U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858.

* E. N. Elliott, ed., Cotton Is King, and Pro Slavery Arguments (1860); David Christy, Cotton Is King (1855).

* Virginia General Assembly, Act XII (1662), partus sequitur ventrem.

* U.S. Constitution, Art. I, Sec. 2, cl. 3; Art. I, Sec. 9, cl. 1; Art. IV, Sec. 2, cl. 3.

* Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” March 27, 2025.

* White House Domestic Policy Council, Saving America’s Story (Smithsonian report), July 2026.

* U.S. Census, 1860 (population 31.4 million; enslaved 3,953,760).

* Jennifer L. Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke, 2021).

* Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Harvard, 2018).

* W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), ch. 1, “The Black Worker.”

* Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

* Paul W. Rhode, “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product Did the Enslaved Produce?” Explorations in Economic History 91 (2024).

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Brother Malcolm Told Us Where the Courtroom Was

Before I get into what happened in Switzerland I need to pay a debt, because this trip does not exist without a man who never got to make it.

On April 3, 1964, in Cleveland, Malcolm X stood up at Cory Methodist Church and told a room full of Black folks that they had been fighting in the wrong courtroom. Civil rights, he said, keeps the whole struggle inside the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. You are asking the man who is violating you to also be the judge. Human rights, though, is a different jurisdiction. Human rights are the rights you were born with, and the moment you frame the case that way you can carry it to the United Nations and put the United States in the dock in front of the whole world. That is the argument of “The Ballot or the Bullet” that people skip past when they only quote the title.

Then he did what he said. On June 28, 1964, he founded the Organization of Afro American Unity, modeled on the Organization of African Unity, with the explicit purpose of internationalizing the struggle. Three weeks later, on July 17, 1964, he was in Cairo at the OAU summit handing African heads of state a memorandum asking them to bring the condition of 22 million Black Americans before the United Nations. He spent the last year of his life flying between Africa and Harlem building that case. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965, before he could file it.

I’m a former national championship winning policy debate coach and hall of fame college policy debater, that spent years running Afro pessimist critiques of civil society in rounds. I know the arguments about why the UN is a colonial instrument, why the state cannot be reformed into recognizing Black humanity, why appealing to the international order is appealing to the same order that built the plantation. I still believe a lot of that as description. Malcolm believed a lot of that too. Then he went to Cairo anyway, because he understood something that took me a flight to Geneva to feel in my body: the value of the human rights forum is not that it will save you. The value is that it forces the state to be seen refusing to save you, on a record it does not control, in front of people it cannot intimidate.

That is the work I went to Switzerland to continue. Not because I think Geneva is Wakanda. Because Malcolm told us where the courtroom was, and in November 2025 the United States refused to show up to it, and somebody had to be in the room to write that down.

Why I Was There

Let me zoom in for a minute, y’all. I did not go to the United Nations for me. I went because two people invited me to come capture what they were doing, and what they were doing was putting the reproductive health of Black women, pregnant people, and multiply marginalized folks in this country into the international record while our own government was actively trying to erase it.

Pearl Ricks, who uses they and them pronouns, is the executive director of the Reproductive Justice Action Collective in New Orleans and a cofounder of the Choice Congregation Church. Pearl is an artist and, in their own words, a full human being who refuses to forget that while doing advocacy and care work. Kiana Lewis is a full spectrum community doula with over 25 years of birth work, born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, seventeen years in Texas, and now between the two. She founded the Holy Ho Institute, a reproductive justice sanctuary in Dallas, she serves as interim executive director of the historic Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri, and she is cochair of the National Network of Abortion Funds. She entered this work, as she said on my stream, as a Black queer birth worker.

Neither of them is a diplomat. Neither of them has a law degree. Pearl told me in Geneva that they had to leave college because it was giving depression and broke. That is important, because the United Nations has a word for who they are, and the word is civil society. I looked it up, because I know how my audience is. According to the UN, civil society is the third sector of society, distinct from both government and business, the realm of organized voluntary activity by citizens. Which means the doula in Dallas and the organizer in New Orleans are not guests in that building. Structurally, they are one of the three legs the whole thing stands on.

What the Universal Periodic Review Actually Is

Huey P. Newton once said that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. So before we get into the phenomenon, let me define it, because most people in the U.S. have never heard of it and that is not an accident.

The Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, is a process of the UN Human Rights Council in which every single member state, all 193, has its human rights record reviewed by the other member states on a cycle of roughly four and a half years. Every country. The rich ones. The powerful ones. The ones that position themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights. That is the entire point of the word universal. No country is supposed to be above scrutiny.

Here is how it works, in Kiana’s words on my stream, because she explained it better than the website does. The government being reviewed submits a national report on what it is doing to protect human rights. Other governments examine the record and make recommendations, which can cover racial discrimination, reproductive rights, policing, incarceration, LGBTQ rights, health care, housing, voting rights. The country under review can accept, note, or respond to each recommendation, and ideally it acts on them before the next cycle. The process is not a world court. It cannot force anybody to change a law. What it does is put violations into an international record, allow governments to question one another, and allow civil society to introduce evidence that the official government narrative leaves out. In Kiana’s phrasing: hey, I know this is what our government told you, but this is what our experience is on the ground.

That civil society evidence has a name. It is called a stakeholder submission, or in the language of the people who do this work, a shadow report. Pearl put it plainly: anything a government does not want to talk about, it is going to omit. Anything a government wants to change the facts on, the shadow report gives us the opportunity to tell the truth about. Pearl and Kiana, with the Reproductive Justice Action Collective, Birthmark Doulas, Ipas, and a coalition of other organizations, spent the better part of a year interviewing people, talking to legislators, and reviewing policy to produce a submission titled Diminishing Reproductive and Bodily Autonomy in the United States. It documents restrictions on freedom of movement, abortion access, and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, whether that outcome is a miscarriage, an abortion, or a stillbirth. Pearl noted something that mattered to them: in a global venue they were able to degender the language, to talk about pregnant people and bodies capable of pregnancy, and to bring a reproductive justice lens that refuses to put trans people, intersex people, or immigrants on the chopping block to protect somebody else.

Now here is the phenomenon. The fourth cycle review of the United States was scheduled for November 7, 2025. Civil society organizations had already filed 155 submissions documenting arbitrary detention, abuse of immigrants, regression on sexual and reproductive rights, systemic racial discrimination. The government’s national report was due in August. On August 28, 2025, the chief of the UPR branch announced that the United States had withdrawn from its own review. On November 7, the chair of the Human Rights Council opened the session, the U.S. delegation’s seats were empty, the interactive dialogue could not proceed, and the Council adopted by consensus a decision expressing regret and urging the U.S. to resume cooperation.

No UN member state had ever failed to be reviewed since the process began in 2008. Israel boycotted its own review in 2013 and came back the same year. The United States, which participated actively in its first three reviews, including in 2020 after it had already left the Human Rights Council once, is now the only country on Earth to simply not show up.

Kiana described what that felt like. A group of them had gone to Geneva for the presession in the fall of 2025 because they had an inkling the government might not participate, and they were there to testify anyway. In the middle of a session, in the middle of a testimony, a note came through that the United States would not be participating. She said it felt disrespectful, and not to the UN. It felt disrespectful to the people whose lives were in the reports. To the people being criminalized, denied health care, living in state violence. She remembers sitting with a delegate, she thinks Norway or Chile, and telling them: even if the United States decides not to show up, you cannot not still name the atrocities. You cannot leave the citizens of the United States alone with this administration. It is not safe.

I’m a educator. I come from the academic space. When I hear the word review, I understand what a peer review is. I understand what it means when you pull out of one. It means you do not want your claims checked. It means you would rather have your work uncited than refereed. That is not a technicality to me. That really means something.

The Same Year, Three Times

Here is where the historian in me needs to slow the room down, because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a neutral document that fell out of the sky.

It was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, the day after my birthday, in the ashes of the Second World War, after the world had watched what happens when a government decides certain human beings are less worthy of dignity. The declaration begins from a principle: all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Your citizenship does not create your dignity. Your income does not. Your race does not. Your gender does not. Kiana read the list on my stream and I put the articles on the screen: freedom from slavery and servitude, equality before the law, privacy, protection from arbitrary arrest and detention, freedom of movement, freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government, the right to work, the right to education, an adequate standard of living, health and wellbeing.

Now hold that date. 1948. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared itself into existence. On May 26, 1948, the National Party won the South African election on a platform called apartheid, and when the UN voted on the declaration that December, South Africa was one of the eight abstentions. The same body that wrote down universal dignity for the first time was, in the same twelve months, presiding over the legitimation of two racial states, one of which would spend the next forty six years building a legal order the declaration explicitly forbids.

So when I say the United Nations has not always already been the best adjudicator of human relations, that is not me being cute. That is the archive. Du Bois was in San Francisco in 1945 as an NAACP consultant to the founding conference, and he came home and wrote Color and Democracy to say the new organization had been built to protect the colonial powers from the colonized, not the other way around. In October 1947 he filed the NAACP’s An Appeal to the World with the UN, a 94 page petition documenting the condition of Black Americans as a human rights matter. Eleanor Roosevelt, who sat on the NAACP board and chaired the UN Human Rights Commission, refused to let it be introduced, because the Soviet Union wanted to discuss it and the State Department didn’t. In December 1951, William Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress walked into the UN in Paris with We Charge Genocide, a petition documenting lynchings, police killings, and legal murder under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The State Department confiscated his passport on his way home.

In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson documents what happened next: under Cold War pressure, with the Truman administration treating any international critique of American racism as Soviet propaganda, the NAACP walked away from the human rights frame and settled for civil rights. Not because human rights was the wrong frame. Because the state made the human rights frame too expensive. The organization that filed An Appeal to the World in 1947 would, by 1955, be defending itself against accusations of communism for having done so. The file was not lost. The file was closed.

This means Malcolm’s 1964 pivot was not an innovation. It was a reopening. And the empty chair in Geneva in 2025 is the same state, seventy eight years later, still trying to keep the file shut. The only difference is that in 1947 they pressured the petitioners. In 2025 they just refused to come to court.

Whitey at the UN: The Treaties We Wrote and Would Not Sign

Kiana said something on the stream that I need everybody to sit with. There is a difference between something being a human right and your government agreeing to be legally accountable for it. The declaration is a declaration. The accountability comes from treaties, and a treaty only binds you if you ratify it.

I promised I would highlight a few. So here is the list, and I corrected one thing from the stream, which is that most of these the U.S. did sign and then never took the second step.

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified human rights treaty in history. Every UN member state is a party to it except one. The United States signed it in 1995 and has never ratified it.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the core international women’s rights treaty, was signed by Jimmy Carter in 1980. It has sat in the Senate for forty six years. The U.S. is one of a handful of countries on Earth that has not ratified it, alongside Iran, Sudan, and Somalia.

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the treaty that turns the declaration’s language about health, housing, food, and education into obligations, was signed in 1977 and never ratified. The United States is the only developed country that has not.

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities was signed in 2009. The Senate voted on it in December 2012 with Bob Dole sitting in the chamber in a wheelchair asking them to pass it, and it fell five votes short.

Kiana framed the consequence exactly right. In some countries there is a certain level of health care that community is simply supposed to have. Here, it is tied to your job, your income, your ability to pay for a procedure. That is not an accident of policy. It is the direct result of the United States never agreeing that health is a right of its citizens, even though it helped write the sentence that says so.

Then there is the vote that took me out. In 2021 the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee voted on a resolution reaffirming the right to food. One hundred eighty countries voted yes. Two voted no: the United States and Israel. The U.S. delegate said on the record that the United States does not recognize a right to food. In 2010, when the General Assembly recognized water and sanitation as a human right, the U.S. abstained. Now put that next to the data centers going up across Black and rural communities in this country, drawing down the water tables and the grid, and ask yourself why a government would need to be on record that clean water is not a right. Whitey on the Moon, and the astronaut says the rent ain’t a human right either.

What Delegates’ Faces Look Like When You Say Lynching

There is something from Geneva that is going to stay with me for the rest of my life.

Pearl was talking to a delegate, and I am not going to say from where, and Pearl mentioned that they are lynching Black people again. This delegate said, I used to live in America. And they were caught off guard. We were telling them that Black bodies are being found hanging, that we have Flock cameras and Axon cameras on every corner and somehow nobody can see who did it, and this diplomat who had lived in the United States looked at us like: they are doing what again?

That look is the whole reason for the trip. Pearl said it on the stream: just like our incoming news is censored, so is our outgoing news. Blackness is the largest cultural export America has, and America is not exporting what happens because of anti Blackness. The delegates in that building know Beyoncé. They do not know that in 2025 the United States government dropped a note and walked away from telling them what is happening to Beyoncé’s people.

Pearl talked about contemporary lynchings, which they defined carefully: death by another means, still a lynching, including a police department refusing to help a family determine who caused the harm. Refusing to investigate is its own form of brutality. Pearl talked about the intersections, about migrant and undocumented people whose reproduction is being criminalized alongside ours, about stillbirths and miscarriages treated as crimes. And Pearl said the thing that made the room go quiet: when the United States decides what is acceptable treatment for other nations, it is telling you who it does not consider human. If they are denying your basic human rights, the only explanation is that you have been dehumanized. Adultifying Black children. Calling a teenager the Hulk. Calling a whole population roaches. The denial of rights is the paperwork. The dehumanization is the policy.

Venezuela, and the Word Human Rights in a Bomber’s Mouth

I was sitting in that building listening to people describe indefinite ICE detention and criminalized movement, and I kept thinking about how much of this country’s military history has been justified in the language of the very rights it was refusing to be reviewed on.

On January 3, 2026, the United States bombed Caracas and captured the sitting president of Venezuela and his wife, flew them to a warship, and then to a courtroom in New York. The president of the United States said the U.S. would run Venezuela until a transition it approved of. The secretary general’s office called it a dangerous precedent. Most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America condemned it. NATO members mostly cheered. I am not here to defend Maduro. I am here to point at the language. For months the case for that operation was built on democracy, on freeing the Venezuelan people, on human rights. The same government that would not sit in a chair in Geneva to be asked about its own detention centers was, seven weeks later, kidnapping a head of state in the name of the rights it refused to be reviewed on.

That is not hypocrisy in the casual sense. That is a two roles frame. What they say human rights is for: a standard that applies to everyone. What human rights structurally does in their hands: a license that applies only outward, never in. And when you understand that, the empty chair and the raid are not contradictions. They are the same policy.

What American Hegemony Is

Let me define this term, because it gets thrown around like an insult when it is actually a description.

Hegemony, in Antonio Gramsci’s sense, is domination that does not need to announce itself as domination, because it has become common sense. The hegemon does not just have the biggest army. The hegemon writes the rules of the game, staffs the referees, and then gets to be the one country the referee never calls a foul on. After 1945, the United States built exactly that. It hosted the UN. It wrote the dollar into the world’s plumbing at Bretton Woods. It took a permanent seat and a veto on the Security Council. It drafted the declaration with Eleanor Roosevelt’s name on the committee, and then it used the phrase human rights as a foreign policy weapon against the Soviet Union while making sure, as Anderson and Von Eschen both document, that the phrase could never be turned around and pointed at Mississippi.

Von Eschen calls what happened to the Black anticolonial movement in the 1950s a domestication: an international Black politics that in 1945 saw Jim Crow and European colonialism as one system was, within a decade, pressured into treating them as separate problems. Paul Robeson’s passport, Du Bois’s indictment, Patterson’s passport. Hegemony is when you do not have to ban the argument. You just have to make the people who make it unemployable.

So American hegemony is not simply that America is strong. It is that America built the human rights system as a mirror that faces outward, and the Universal Periodic Review was one of the very few places where the mirror got turned around. Withdrawing from it is not a retreat from hegemony. It is hegemony dropping the pretense. The referee has announced that he will keep calling fouls on everybody else and will no longer be reviewing his own tape.

The Hypocrisy of Democracy, Which Is Not a Bug

Frederick Douglass asked in 1852 what the Fourth of July is to the slave, and Du Bois in Black Reconstruction named the answer: American democracy has always run on what he called the American Assumption, the belief that the system is free and open to all while it was structurally built on the exclusion of most. Aziz Rana, in The Two Faces of American Freedom, makes the argument sharper. The freedom of the settler citizen was never a partial democracy waiting to be completed. It was a freedom whose material content depended on the subordination of Indigenous people, enslaved people, and later immigrants and colonial subjects. The two faces are not a contradiction the founders failed to notice. They are one machine.

Pearl’s point about ICE is Rana’s point. Kiana said it flatly: Black Americans should recognize the danger of allowing the government to create categories of people whose rights become conditional. The UPR withdrawal is the government announcing that its own compliance with rights is also conditional, on nothing but its mood. A democracy that reviews everybody’s elections but its own, that lectures Saudi Arabia about women’s movement while shackling a woman in Louisiana while she miscarries, that spends decades of curriculum dollars teaching children why abducting people into camps was the crime of the century and then runs a youth detention facility in San Benito, Texas, where girls arrive not pregnant and become pregnant, is not failing at democracy. It is doing what Rana says it was built to do. The word democracy is the outward face. The category of people whose rights are conditional is the inward one.

The Curriculum Was Always an Export Product

When the Justice Department filed its brief in Brown v. Board of Education in 1952, it made an argument that had nothing to do with Black children. Segregation, the brief said, was damaging the reputation of the United States abroad and handing the Soviet Union propaganda. Dudziak’s Cold War Civil Rights traces this pattern through the whole era: Little Rock was a crisis for Eisenhower because of the photographs in the foreign press, the State Department sent jazz musicians on tour to prove the country was free, and the federal government’s investment in racial progress rose and fell with how bad the story looked in Geneva, in Accra, in Delhi. Black education was funded, when it was funded, as an image.

So when I sat in the UN and heard delegates from other countries recommending, through the UPR process, that the United States provide full spectrum, accurate, up to date, and culturally relevant education for its children, and when Pearl told me you can look this up in the UPR Info database and filter by who recommended it, I understood that the world has been trying to grade this curriculum for seventy years and the U.S. has just stopped turning in the paper.

Here is what American exceptionalism does as a taught doctrine. It teaches that the human rights violations happened somewhere else. I said it on the stream: how much money was spent building curriculum to teach us what Hitler did, that abducting people and forcing them into camps and discriminating against them by category was evil and must never happen again. That lesson was built to point outward. It was never built to make a child in Houston look at a detention facility in Dilley and recognize the shape. Exceptionalism is a pedagogy of the outward mirror, and the UPR withdrawal is the state making sure nobody adds an inward one.

In Cutting School she names the economy that runs underneath: segrenomics, the practice of extracting profit from keeping Black and poor children in separate and lesser schools while calling it choice, reform, or innovation. The material impact of exceptionalism is not just what a child believes about America. It is what gets defunded so the story can stay clean. The same year the United States withdrew from its human rights review, it was dismantling the Department of Education’s research and civil rights capacity, cancelling the contracts that measure achievement gaps, and executing an order against what it called radical indoctrination in K through 12, which in practice means any curriculum that adds the inward mirror. You cannot audit what you refuse to count, and a country that refuses to count is a country that has decided the count would be a foreign policy embarrassment.

Now the intersectional material impact, because Rooks and Dudziak both show whose bodies carry the image. Pearl left college because it was giving depression and broke. Kiana said she is not studying these issues from a distance; she sits with the bodies who live inside policies somebody else wrote. The Black women and queer folks doing this work at the UN are largely people the education system did not credential, and they are the ones doing the archival labor the credentialed system has abandoned. That is the adult education lesson I hold as somebody with a degree in it: the most rigorous human rights documentation on the United States this cycle was produced by a doula, an organizer, and a coalition of community organizations, submitted in a language they had to teach themselves, for a review the country’s own scholars mostly did not know was happening. The classroom failed them, and they built the archive anyway. Kiana’s word for it was witness. Pearl’s was griot. The UN’s word is civil society. All three mean the same thing: the record is being kept by the people the record was supposed to erase.

The Girls in San Benito Were Never Meant to Be in the Report

In September 1994 the United Nations held its International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo. That same year, twelve Black women meeting in Chicago, calling themselves Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, coined the term reproductive justice by fusing reproductive rights with social justice, and they built it explicitly on the human rights framework then being assembled for Cairo. Loretta Ross was one of them. She would go on to run the National Center for Human Rights Education and to cofound SisterSong. In Reproductive Justice: An Introduction she and Solinger define the framework as three rights held together: the right not to have a child, the right to have a child, and the right to parent the children you have in safe and sustainable communities. Health care, housing, policing, water, and immigration are not adjacent to reproductive justice. They are its content.

Now put that framework on the girls in San Benito, Texas.

In July 2025 the acting director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement directed that every pregnant unaccompanied minor in federal custody be placed in a single shelter in San Benito, hours from specialized obstetric care, in a state with a total abortion ban and no exception for rape or incest. Former officials described it as a deliberate effort to deny abortion access by concentrating pregnant children in a state where there is none. Girls as young as 13. About half the pregnancies, according to reporting, the result of rape. In April 2026, Representative Maxine Dexter, one of six physicians in Congress, visited the facility, was blocked from speaking to girls who had asked to speak with her, and was told a facility that had held seventeen children weeks earlier now held seven, with no answer to where the others went beyond “it’s case by case.” Her letter to HHS carried the question in its plainest form: where are the kids?

Pearl said it on the stream and I will not soften it. Kids in youth detention who were not pregnant when they arrived and are pregnant now. Who got them pregnant? And when a child in federal custody gives birth, who does the United States give parental rights to? Pearl said it made them think of breeding under chattel slavery, where whoever gives birth does not own the line, the one who controls them does. That is partus sequitur ventrem, the 1662 Virginia statute that made the child follow the condition of the mother, and it is not a metaphor in this instance. It is a custody question the government will not answer.

The reproductive justice framework was built so that the right to parent your child in a safe community would sit beside the right not to have one, because Black women knew that population control had always been aimed at them from both directions: forced sterilization when they wanted children, forced birth when they did not. San Benito is both directions at once, applied to migrant girls, in a state that Ross’s own framework would name as an unsafe community by design. And here is Crenshaw’s point, which Kiana made without citing her: a Black immigrant does not stop being Black when immigration policy hits them. A queer person in Palestine does not experience sexuality separately from occupation. The systems meet on the body, and the body cannot file them separately.

The ACLU and its partners documented what meeting looks like. In an October 2025 letter to ICE and Senate committees, they described more than a dozen women interviewed over nine months: a woman shackled at her arms and legs while actively miscarrying on the way to an emergency room, a woman shackled at ankles, hands, and waist during cross country transport while pregnant, women begging for prenatal vitamins and being denied, women left bleeding in a room without water. Shackled and chained while miscarrying, denied prenatal care. I read that paragraph on the stream because I did not want these to sound like nebulous examples.

Pearl’s line is the intersectional thesis of this whole essay: my liberation will never be achieved by ignoring the oppression of the people who stand beside me, whether we share intersections or not. Pearl said trans men need reproductive health care. Kiana said amen. I said Audre Lorde: there is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives. And I want to be specific to my people, because I get the comment every time: Conscious Lee, why you talking about trans women, what about Black people. Black trans women are Black, trans, and women at the same time, not one at a time. Black Haitians and Black Nigerians are getting swept up in the same raids people are cheering as a Latino problem. The Memphis raid at the end of August, 121 people taken out of a nightclub in the Berclair neighborhood in white vans while the neighborhood shouted shame, was in an immigrant corridor, and if you think the agency running it has ever drawn a line around Black folks, you have not read a single page of this country’s police history. ICE is the police. CPS is the police. The police have never been our friend, and a police agency with a bigger budget than any in American history is not going to start with you.

They Told Us Who the Terrorists Are

Pearl brought up something I want everybody to research after they finish reading this. On September 25, 2025, the president signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, on countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence. The memo lists indicators that a person or group may commit domestic terrorism. Among them: anti Americanism, anti capitalism, anti Christianity, extremism on migration, race, and gender, and hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. The Justice Department issued implementation guidance in December 2025. The FBI repeated the list in its March 2026 budget request. The IRS created a command center to examine nonprofits.

Read that list again as a Black person. Anti Christianity, from a country that weaponized Christianity to justify our enslavement. Extremism on race, from the people who put Moya Bailey on a watchlist. Extremism on gender, which is the government’s word for knowing that intersex and trans people have always existed. Hostility toward traditional American views on family, from the state running San Benito.

And then, in the same summer, the IRS announced in a Texas court filing that churches may endorse political candidates from the pulpit without losing tax exempt status, a reversal of seventy years under the Johnson Amendment. Pearl told a viewer to connect those dots. So let me: nonprofits that document human rights violations are being investigated as potential terrorists, while churches that endorse the administration are being freed to campaign with tax free money. That is the Genocide Convention’s language of intent turned into a domestic filing system. Kiana asked the audience to look up the five categories of genocidal acts and compare them to what is happening in this country. I am not going to do that comparison for you. I am going to tell you the list exists, that the United States helped write it in 1948 and did not ratify it until 1988, forty years later, with reservations that gutted it, and that the last people who carried that word to the UN about this country had their passports taken.

The Garden, Not the Flower

Pearl gave me the image I am going to close on, and it is the counterweight to everything above.

I am trying to save a garden, Pearl said. Save one flower, the garden still dies. That flower can stand strong for decades, but the garden itself will still be dead. I cannot be the one flower I am focused on, because I believe in the chorus around me. I know Q sees me as a flower and is going to look out for me. I know Conscious sees me as a flower and is going to look out for me. I need to do the same thing for the people who do not have a voice.

Ella Baker called this spadework, the unglamorous, patient, local labor of building people who can build people. Kiana said none of us are living in isolation, and that she does not have to move away from her Blackness to care about somebody else. If I believe Black people possess human rights simply because we are human, then I believe that about everybody. Our human rights cannot mean I protect my body and not yours, my children and not yours. We can militarize your neighborhood, but we good over here. That is not what that means.

What became obvious to me in Geneva is that the building was full of descendants of colonial subjects demanding, and in some cases begging, that the governments claiming us as citizens be held to the humanity they claim to uphold. I did not know until I got there that decolonization is in the UN’s own framework. Resolution 1514, adopted December 14, 1960, declared that all peoples have the right to self determination and that colonialism is a denial of fundamental human rights. Eighty nine countries voted for it. Nine abstained. The United States was one of them. Of course it was.

So here is the ask I left with. The U.S. is disinterested in this process right now. Some of the delegations we met want to persuade it back. Some think it will do what it wants and maybe show up next cycle. Pearl’s suggestion is the smartest thing I heard the whole trip: link participation in the UPR to the midterms. If you organize, if you knock doors, if you run campaigns, make it an expectation. Make them jump through the hoops we jump through for WIC. Kiana’s ask is simpler and older: tell your stories. That is how we archive. That is how we hold history. That is how we heal. With books being pulled off shelves, we have to be our own archivists.

Malcolm went to Cairo to file a case he never got to finish. Two Black healers went to Geneva sixty one years later and filed the next chapter of it while the defendant refused to enter the courtroom. In all these examples, when it comes to universal human rights, you have to always ask and beg the question: who gets to determine what it means to be human, and who is always left behind or excluded from the way we understand humanity in these human groups, man.

Education Is Elevation.

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8 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The Universal Periodic Review is the one place every country gets graded, and the United States is the only country ever to skip its own review. The withdrawal was announced August 28, 2025; the chair opened the November 7 session to empty seats; the Human Rights Council adopted a decision of regret by consensus.

* Civil society is not a courtesy category. It is one of the three legs the UN stands on. A doula in Dallas and an organizer in New Orleans have standing to file a shadow report that becomes part of the permanent international record, whether or not the government shows up to answer it.

* Black folks taking America to the UN is a tradition, not a novelty. Du Bois in 1945 and 1947, Patterson’s We Charge Genocide in 1951, Malcolm’s OAU memorandum in 1964, and Geneva in 2025 are one lineage. Carol Anderson documents how the state pressured the NAACP to close the human rights file in the early 1950s. The empty chair is the same state keeping it closed.

* A declaration is not a treaty. The U.S. signed the Convention on the Rights of the Child, CEDAW, the economic and social rights covenant, and the disability convention, and ratified none. That is why health care here is tied to your job and not your humanity.

* The U.S. voted no on the right to food in 2021 and abstained on the right to water in 2010. Read that next to the data center buildout and the San Benito facility. Rights the state refuses to recognize are rights it plans to violate.

* ICE is the police. Kiana’s line. It carries the largest budget any police entity in American history has had, its mechanisms are surveillance, raids, detention, and family separation, and no police agency in this country has ever been built that did not eventually reach Black people, including Black immigrants.

* Reproductive justice was born as a human rights framework, at a UN conference, by Black women, in 1994. Pearl and Kiana did not carry an American lens to Geneva. They carried a framework home.

* The garden, not the flower. Save one flower and the garden still dies. Pearl’s image is the whole solidarity argument: my liberation cannot be achieved by ignoring the person beside me, whether or not we share intersections.

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RELATED READINGS (Bibliography)

Anderson, Carol. Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944 to 1955. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Civil Rights Congress. We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People. Edited by William L. Patterson. 1951.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241 to 1299.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace. Harcourt, Brace, 1945.

Du Bois, W. E. B., ed. An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress. NAACP, 1947.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880. Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Dudziak, Mary L. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton University Press, 2000.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. International Publishers, 1971.

Lorde, Audre. “Learning from the 60s.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.

Malcolm X. “The Ballot or the Bullet” (April 3, 1964) and “Appeal to African Heads of State” (July 17, 1964). In Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, edited by George Breitman. Grove Press, 1965.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Rana, Aziz. The Two Faces of American Freedom. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Rooks, Noliwe. Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education. The New Press, 2017.

Ross, Loretta J., and Rickie Solinger. Reproductive Justice: An Introduction. University of California Press, 2017.

Ransby, Barbara. Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937 to 1957. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892 to 1900. Edited by Jacqueline Jones Royster. Bedford, 1997.

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I’m going to be telling y’all about the intricacies of policymaking and how politics is nothing but who gets what, when, where, and how.

That definition is not mine. A political scientist named Harold Lasswell put it in the title of a book in 1936, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, and ninety years later it is still the most honest sentence anybody has ever written about government. Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say politics is about values. It doesn’t say politics is about the flag or the family or the Founders. It says politics is a distribution problem. Somebody is getting something, somebody is deciding when, somebody is deciding how, and the only question that matters for you and your people is which side of that ledger your name is on.

So when you tell me you don’t do politics, you’re telling me you don’t care about who gets what, when, where, and how. You’re telling me you don’t care if your neighbor good. Do you care if your neighbor good? Is your neighbor good? Do you care?

Right now, we’re about to have a conversation about the THC ban in Texas, and I want to start where they always start, with morals, ethics, and public health, because that’s the wrapping paper. A lot of our laws in this country is justified by saying it is about how it can keep us safe, how it is about protecting our unalienable rights, that being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and saying that the only way you can have your unalienable rights taken away from you is if you infringe upon somebody else’s rights. That’s the Jefferson deal, that’s the civics class version. Then what they’re trying to convince us now is that eating an edible is taking away the unalienable rights of somebody.

The question you should ask yourself is, for whom?

Because in any other instance, if I’m able to pay somebody to get them to do something, it’s called a bribery. In America, it’s called lobbying.

The Receipts: Follow the Money From the Distributor to the Dais

Let me lay the paper on the table, because my motto is facts over feelings, Research over MeSearch.

The hemp derived THC market in Texas grew out of a loophole in the 2019 state law that mirrored the 2018 federal Farm Bill, and by the time the legislature came back in 2025 that loophole had turned into roughly 8,300 retail outlets by the sponsors’ own count, and by the Department of State Health Services’ count today, about 14,000 licensed consumable hemp retailers statewide. Gummies, drinks, vapes, pre rolls, Delta 8, Delta 9, THCA flower, all of it sold in gas stations and smoke shops in every county in Texas. Two specific industries watched that happen and did not like what they saw.

Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick made Senate Bill 3, a near total ban on consumable hemp derived THC, one of his top priorities for the 2025 session, called the products dangerous, said they were putting Texas children at risk, and courted Republicans in both chambers to pass it. A flyer circulating that spring from the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas backed a full ban and cited, in its own words, the need to preserve a level playing field for Texas beer distributors. Read that again. Not a level playing field for Texans. For beer distributors.

Then the money. Texas campaign finance records show John Nau, the beer distribution executive behind Silver Eagle Distributors, one of the largest Anheuser Busch distributors in the country, gave $250,000 to Patrick’s campaign on April 12, 2024. The Beer Alliance of Texas PAC gave $25,000 to Texans for Dan Patrick on December 2, 2024. That is at least $275,000 from a major beer distributor and a beer industry political committee in the run up to the session where Patrick tried to eliminate the beer industry’s fastest growing competitor. Other reviews of his filings put the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical total higher. Texas Democrats and Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic nominee running against Patrick this November, have been saying the quiet part in press releases all summer.

Now here is where the political literacy comes in, because the transcript version of this story and the paper version of this story diverge on one detail and you need to know the difference so nobody can use it against you. SB 3 passed both chambers. Patrick then spent weeks publicly pressuring Governor Greg Abbott to sign it. Abbott vetoed it at the last minute, on June 22, 2025, just before the deadline that would have let it become law without his signature, and called it likely unconstitutional. That was a major setback for Patrick. But the ban still happened. Abbott issued Executive Order GA 56 in September 2025 directing the health department and the alcohol commission to crack down using authority they already had. Senate Bill 2024 banned cannabinoid vapes that same month. A total THC testing rule that counts THCA took effect March 31, 2026 and cleared smokable flower off the shelves. Then the Texas Supreme Court in May 2026 let the Department of State Health Services reclassify every hemp derived THC except low dose Delta 9 as a Schedule I controlled substance, and that scheduling notice took effect July 31, 2026. A federal judge in Galveston denied the industry’s emergency request on August 10. So on July 30, a small business had a building full of Delta 8, Delta 10, THCP, and THCA flower that was legal inventory, and on July 31 that same building was a felony.

So no, the bill did not “pass” in 2026. Something worse happened. The bill failed, the people won on paper, and then the outcome got delivered anyway through an executive order, an agency rule, and a court. That is the lesson. When you talk about protecting democracy, defending democracy, you have to ask yourself, what are you defending and what are you protecting? We democratically, and I say we loosely, but in Texas we democratically elected Dan Patrick. Dan Patrick is supposed to be going in line that allows for us to democratically vote on certain things. He purposely circumvented the policymaking process at the expense of Texas constituents for big tobacco and big alcohol, man. He don’t care for working class people.

What the Market Actually Said

Capitalist contradictions. These folks taught us that capitalism says the consumers dictate the market. Capitalism says that free market competition is what is good. So let me tell you what the consumers said.

On July 28, 2026 the headlines ran everywhere, and the tabloids ran it loudest, that for the first time more Americans use marijuana daily or nearly daily than drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes at that frequency. The source under the headline is not a tabloid. It is the federal government’s own National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released by SAMHSA in July, and the numbers for 2025 are 21.4 million daily or near daily marijuana users, 19.9 million daily cigarette smokers, and 17.2 million daily or near daily drinkers. Alcohol is still used by more people overall, 129 million past month drinkers against 43.8 million past month marijuana users, so two things can be true. But the daily customer, the customer that pays the bills, has moved. A Carnegie Mellon researcher named Jonathan Caulkins found the crossover with alcohol first in the 2022 data, and found that per capita daily use had gone up fifteen fold since 1992.

If you have consumers that are now starting to buy and consume more THC than tobacco and alcohol, I believe the market has made its choice. When the industry can go and use its money to go against constituents, what are we talking about then in terms of the free market?

Here is the part that should make every libertarian in Texas sick. A lot of people don’t know what socialism and communism is, and they make these very bastardized ideas of what they think it is, and all they’re doing is actually describing capitalism and the current thing we’re in now. They believe that socialism allows for the government to dictate what industries and what businesses is able to have an advantage within the market. Oh s**t, capitalism is doing the same thing in America? A state agency picking which intoxicant you’re allowed to buy, at the request of the incumbent intoxicant’s distributors, is not the free market. It is the state as a bouncer for the beer truck.

And then the “will of the people” argument, since Patrick loves to invoke it. When I said on camera that over 70% of Texans want legal marijuana, I was rounding up from real numbers and I’m going to give you the real numbers because Research over MeSearch means correcting yourself in public. The University of Houston Hobby School’s 2025 survey of 1,200 Texans found 62% support legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, 69% support decriminalizing possession, and 79% support medical marijuana, and that medical number includes 75% of Republicans. The UT Texas Politics Project poll from spring 2025 found 84% of registered voters want possession legal under some circumstances and only 15% want it illegal under every circumstance. In the March 2026 Democratic primary, a nonbinding proposition on legalization passed 80 to 20. That 70% I said is the floor for decriminalization and the ceiling is higher.

Now, in the interest of two things being true, that same Hobby School poll found 55% of Texans supported banning the unregulated hemp derived products specifically, and Patrick posted that number the day it came out. He was right that people are uneasy about gas station gummies with no dosing standard. What he did with that unease is the tell. The people said regulate it. He said ban it, and hand the customers back to the distributors who paid for his campaign. Guess which one preserves a level playing field for beer.

The Lieutenant Governor Has More Power Than the Governor, and He Used It

Now, in Education Is Elevation, my goal within this whole production doing a long form is to give what I’m going to call political literacy. I want you to be able to read and write situations pertaining to politics a little bit better when you’re done with dealing with my Black ass. That’s what I say.

So here’s a literacy lesson most Texans never got. The lieutenant governor of Texas has more power in the legislature than the actual governor do. He presides over the Senate, he appoints every committee chair, he decides which bills get a hearing and which bills die in a drawer, and he controls the calendar. The governor can veto and the governor can call special sessions, but the lieutenant governor decides what the Senate even talks about. That is why Dan Patrick could make a THC ban a must pass priority and get it through the Senate, and that is why, when the governor vetoed it, Patrick didn’t have to go home. He could keep working the machinery until the outcome arrived through the back door.

And this is the same Dan Patrick who this summer said that James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton, doesn’t look manly enough to win in Texas. Morning Joe laughed at him on national television. My point in bringing up the way this man is presenting himself is not to clown a 76 year old man’s wardrobe. It’s this: what give him the jurisdiction as lieutenant governor to say how another man presents and if he manly enough? The Texas GOP has spent months calling Talarico low T, calling him a soy boy, putting AI videos of him in a dress on the internet, and Texas Monthly ran a whole piece trying to reverse engineer what a “real Texas man” even is from their insults. Meanwhile the man policing masculinity is the same man who took the beer money and criminalized 14,000 businesses. The masculinity discourse is the smoke. The ledger is the fire.

Who Gets Pulled Over

Now let’s do the part the beer distributors never have to think about. So when it comes to the prison industrial complex here in the great state of Texas, we know Texas runs the largest state prison system in the country by population, we know we host one of the largest concentrations of federal facilities in the country, and we know that there are different contracts that our government has with different services that is not only with private prisons but it’s with public prisons. They still play them games with policy and with contracts.

We have data that says THC legalization brought down the sales of alcohol and tobacco. How did it impact the incarceration rates? That’s the question. So now if I’m riding down the street and you see somebody hit a little vape pen, based off suspicion, you’re able to get pulled over now. Who is more likely to be pulled over on suspicion? The white folks that voted for Dan Patrick who could also eat edibles, or the Black folks that did not vote or did vote?

We don’t have to guess. The ACLU’s 2020 national report found Black people were 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession despite similar use rates, and Texas counties were some of the worst in the country. Texas already gives you up to 180 days and $2,000 for two ounces or less. Now Delta 8, Delta 10, THCP, and THCA flower are Schedule I, and depending on the product and the amount, possession runs from jail time and fines up to a state jail felony. Overnight.

Here’s the moral arithmetic they want you to accept. In this state, it take three DWIs to get a felony. Each DWI you get, you risk killing somebody, because you get drunk and you drive. Every edible you eat, it’s not putting nobody’s life at risk. But this Texas lieutenant governor is saying that the livelihood of everyday Texans on the street that’s driving next to drunk drivers is less detrimental than somebody eating an edible or smoking some weed. And the industry that produces the drunk driver is the one that paid for the ban.

The Morals and Ethics Section, Since They Brought It Up

Let’s go back to the morals and ethics, because Texas Republicans keep telling us that this is about protecting children and that the law is the law.

Ken Paxton’s office, while he was Attorney General of Texas, brokered a plea deal for a Waco lawyer named Adam Hoffman who had been charged with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first degree felony that carries up to life. After a hung jury in 2025, Paxton’s prosecutors offered a deal that reduced the charges to misdemeanors, proposed one day in jail, and was written so that the admission never specified the victim’s age, which is the exact drafting choice that kept Hoffman off the sex offender registry. A judge pushed it to 30 days, then to 60 after public protest, and Hoffman walked after 30 on good behavior. Snopes and PolitiFact both rated the core claim true. Paxton’s office says the child didn’t want to testify again, and that is a real thing prosecutors weigh. But it was his office’s pen that drafted a plea with no age in it.

So does breaking the law matter or not? And if it matters, does it only matter when you believe a brown immigrant is doing it? Because the same party will criminalize your neighbor, and criminalize the “quote unquote immigrants,” because they say they care about the goddamn law, and then they’ll let the top lawyer in the state write a child abuser a misdemeanor and put him at the top of the ballot for U.S. Senate.

Ain’t no way you telling me you care about kids when you passing out these horrible laws aimed at trans women, who are a fraction of one percent of the population, and telling me it’s about girls’ sports, but then you’re not able to think about it when it comes to these lackadaisical outcomes on a man who abused an eight year old. Pop quiz, Texas. How much are y’all really invested in girls’ sports, and how much do you sensationalize your hatred toward trans people to say you care about women’s sports?

Now, because I’ve been being critical, I want to check myself on air the way I checked myself on camera. I think it is ableist to call Greg Abbott “Governor Hot Wheels,” because you are able to criticize how racist and homophobic this man’s policies are without sensationalizing him being in a wheelchair, and it’s other folks in wheelchairs that are not a piece of s**t. I also said some things on camera about how Ken Paxton looks, and I got cockeyed family members I love to death, so I’ll take the ableism note on that too. But Ken Paxton a bad person, though. The policy record does the work. I don’t need his face to do it.

I Don’t Identify as a Democrat

Want to be clear? Me advocating for Vikki Goodwin, for James Talarico, for Gina Hinojosa, and for everybody down the ballot, I don’t identify as a Democrat. I identify as an independent. I identify really as somebody that wants the political, social, and economic independence of Black people, and when I think there are particular issues that I can align myself with that gets me closer to that independence for Black people, I align.

For instance, I think Black folks getting health care is good. I think Black liberation also needs to be explicit about our health care and how much access we have to health care. I don’t think no Democrat or Republican corners the market on how Black people should orient themselves toward health care. I know we need it though. So in Texas, if this Republican or this Democrat can give me the policy specifically for Black folks to get better health care in Texas, I’m getting their health care for Texas, man. And when I disagree with the person that I align myself with on another policy, I’m popping their ass and disagreeing with it. We agree on health care, I think we should have Medicare for All. But we disagree on what you say about, what you say? You say Israel said what about Palestine? You ain’t f*****g with that. You see what I’m saying?

This is where I want to bring in Michael Dawson, because Dawson is the political scientist who actually measured what I just described. In Behind the Mule, Dawson found that Black Americans evaluate policy through what he called linked fate, the belief that what happens to Black people as a group shapes what happens to you as an individual, and that we run a “Black utility heuristic,” meaning we use the group’s welfare as a shortcut for our own. That is “do you care if your neighbor good” with a regression table under it. Then in Black Visions, Dawson mapped the actual ideologies inside Black politics, radical egalitarianism, disillusioned liberalism, Black nationalism, Black Marxism, Black feminism, Black conservatism, and showed that none of them is the Democratic Party. The party is a vehicle. The ideology is the driver.

Apply Dawson here. When I say I’m an independent who will vote a Democratic ticket in November, I am not confused and I am not a sellout. I am running the Black utility heuristic on a THC ban that will felonize my cousins, on a health care system that leaves Black Texans uninsured at the highest rates in the country, on a school system that sends Black kids to alternative campuses for a vape pen. The party that gets my vote is the party whose distribution of who gets what lands closer to my neighbor being good. That is not partisanship. That is literacy.

Class Analysis for the Trailer Park and the Hood

It’s the part right here I want to just say this explicitly. I’m leaning forward to say it to all the people watching this. This is the part where you screen record. And this is for my non Black, non left leaning people in Texas, man.

You may have been a lifelong Republican voter. I understand that. You may have been a lifelong conservative. I understand that. However, in this time of day in 2026, you’re not dealing with your grandpa’s Republican Party no more.

That 62% for legalization and that 69% for decriminalization includes lifelong Democrats and lifelong Republicans and lifelong conservatives, because 53% of Texas Republicans told the Hobby School they support recreational legalization and 75% support medical. Dana Loesch, the former NRA spokeswoman, called Patrick’s ban “stupid” on social media and said it was the gun ban argument with a different variable. A hardline conservative lawmaker who voted no said it contradicted the Texas mantra of being pro business, pro farmer, and pro veteran. The blowback came from inside the house.

How many Texas rural Republicans, rednecks that’s in the middle of nowhere Texas, want their farm agriculture land and their business to be in jeopardy because of a data center? Right now I’m making a class analysis, looking up and down and showing you, whether you are poor, whether you are redneck, whether you a Black person, whether you’re from a trailer park, whether you’re from the suburbs, the way that the top is doing us in Texas, they don’t give a damn about us down here. What we seeing is that your papa that been working that land, and they got that land from their grandpa, and their grandpa worked that land, that land being passed to you with clean water and clean air, it won’t matter if Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick can sell you out to data centers. They can sell you out to tobacco and sell you out to alcohol. Politics, who gets what, when, where, and how.

And on the maps. When Donald Trump called down here in the summer of 2025 and said the midterm is about to happen and I need five congressional seats for y’all to take, Texas jumped. The Justice Department’s Harmeet Dhillon sent Abbott and Paxton a letter in July 2025 demanding they dismantle four “coalition districts” where Black and Latino voters together form a majority, and Abbott put redistricting on the special session agenda within days, saying on television it was to make sure the maps “don’t impose coalition districts.” A federal panel, with a Trump appointed judge writing the majority, found “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 map” and pointed out that the DOJ letter targeted only majority nonwhite districts and never mentioned a single majority white Democratic district. The Supreme Court let the map stand for 2026 anyway. The state’s own defense in court was, and I’m quoting the state’s brief quoting Hakeem Jeffries, that when Donald Trump says jump, Republicans ask how high, so it couldn’t be about race, it was only about power. Think about that as a legal argument. Our excuse for the racial effect is that we obey the president without question. They got y’all involved in the culture war and they went against federalism. Y’all say y’all against big government, big government called down to Texas, small local government told you to act right, and you complied. You kissed the ring.

Then there’s the word “Anglo”. When I said on camera that Texas legislators talked about sustaining Anglo Texan political power, I want to be precise about the receipt, because precision is a weapon. “Anglo” is not a slur I’m putting in their mouths. It is the official demographic category the State of Texas has used for decades in its own redistricting data and its own court filings, Anglo, Black, Hispanic, and the plaintiffs’ motion in the current case says outright that under this map Latino and Black Texans are deprived of the right to vote on equal terms with Anglo Texans. The state answered that the map was drawn “race blind.” A state that keeps an Anglo column in its own spreadsheets is not race blind. It is race counting, and it is counting toward a result.

Just like a bunch of Democrats believe that Black folks gonna vote for them in overwhelming numbers no matter what, a bunch of Republicans believe the same thing about white folks. It flipped the other way too. It’s a bunch of Republicans that automatically believe that white Texans will vote for them regardless, even if they politically, socially, economically do some s**t that is more beneficial to an industry than it is to you.

Historical Context: Texas Has Been Here Before, and It Always Ends on a Black Man’s Sentence

Let me give you the deep history, because Texas didn’t invent this in 2025.

The first city in the United States to ban marijuana was El Paso, Texas, in 1915, and the ordinance was sold explicitly as a way to police Mexican laborers crossing the bridge from Juárez. Texas made it a state crime in 1919. Harry Anslinger’s federal Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 nationalized the Mexican panic, and it took a Texas arrest to bring that law down. Timothy Leary was stopped at the Laredo border in December 1965 with a small amount of marijuana in his car, and in Leary v. United States, decided May 19, 1969, the Supreme Court unanimously struck the Tax Act because its registration scheme forced you to incriminate yourself. Congress replaced it with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 and Schedule I, which is the same Schedule I the Texas health department just dropped Delta 8 into.

Now here is the Texas receipt that should be in every school. In 1968, Lee Otis Johnson, a Houston SNCC organizer who had led protests at Texas Southern University, was convicted of giving one marijuana cigarette to an undercover officer. One joint. He was sentenced to 30 years. “Free Lee Otis” became a rallying cry across the state, a heckler shouted it at Governor Preston Smith at the University of Houston in 1970 and Smith famously thought the students were shouting “frijoles.” A federal court threw out the conviction in 1972 because pretrial publicity had poisoned the jury, and the very next year, 1973, the Texas Legislature reduced simple possession from a felony that could carry life to a misdemeanor. Texas only reformed its marijuana law after it had to look at what a 30 year sentence for one joint looked like on a Black organizer’s body.

Take that 1973 reform and hold it next to July 31, 2026. Fifty three years later the state moved the felony line back, not through a vote of the legislature, but through an agency rule requested by the beer lobby. Who gets what, when, where, and how.

Then hold the whole thing next to the alcohol industry’s own Texas history, because the three tier system that makes John Nau rich was written in 1935, the year Texas repealed prohibition, and it guarantees by statute that beer must pass through a licensed distributor before it reaches you. The distributor is a creature of the law. Its entire margin is a legal privilege. And local option elections, where Texas counties and precincts vote wet or dry, are still on the books today, which means Texas already trusts local voters to decide alcohol policy. But when Austin, San Marcos, Denton, Elgin, and Killeen voted to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana, Attorney General Ken Paxton sued them in January 2024 to overturn the results. Local control for beer. Preemption for weed.

And underneath all of it is the oldest Texas technology there is. The 1902 poll tax and the white primary, which the Supreme Court had to strike down twice, in Nixon v. Herndon in 1927 and again in Smith v. Allwright in 1944, a case brought out of Houston by a Black dentist named Lonnie Smith with Thurgood Marshall arguing. Texas has always been extremely creative about who gets to be a “we” when “we” vote. The Anglo column in the redistricting spreadsheet is that same creativity with a laptop.

The Pop Quiz Texas Keeps Failing: Political Literacy Was Always a Black Institution

Right now, every ad I see and the message in that ad, sadly, it reflects the bottom tier public education that we have here in Texas. And we have a bunch of double speak. If you have any type of political knowledge in this state, you know that Republicans run this state and have for three decades. It is disingenuous to try to say anything going on in Texas is because of the do nothing Democrats.

But the education section is not about who runs the state. It’s about who gets what, when, where, and how in the schoolhouse, because the THC ban has a school version and it already exists.

House Bill 114 took effect September 1, 2023. It requires Texas public schools to remove any student caught with an e cigarette within 300 feet of campus and place them in a Disciplinary Alternative Education Program, the separate campus that used to be reserved for assault and weapons. Marijuana and THC possession near school is a mandatory DAEP placement too. In the first three months, Houston area districts sent hundreds of kids to DAEP, and by May 2024 it was more than 1,300 across the region’s largest districts, 638 in Cy Fair alone. The average placement was 14 days out of a real classroom. Districts that reported by race showed Black and Hispanic students far outpacing everyone else in referrals, and a retired Texas State professor who spent her career on alternative education, Brenda Scheuermann, said what the research already says: DAEP placement raises a child’s odds of touching the juvenile justice system. HISD reclassified the violation to avoid the mandate. Fort Bend built a prevention program instead. The state built a pipeline.

So here is the school version of the THC ban. The adult gets a felony for a Delta 8 cart. The child gets two weeks in the building where the state keeps the kids it has given up on, for a nicotine vape. Same law, same lobby, same “protect the children” wrapping paper, and the children it protects are never the children it removes.

Now let me bring in Gholdy Muhammad, because I said political literacy is the goal of this whole production, and Muhammad is the education scholar who has already shown that political literacy was a Black invention. In Cultivating Genius, Muhammad goes back to the Black literary societies of the 1800s, the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia in 1828, the Phoenix Society in New York in 1833, groups of free and formerly enslaved Black people who met to read newspapers aloud, debate resolutions, write petitions, and train each other to argue in public. Elizabeth McHenry documented these societies in Forgotten Readers and showed that for them reading was never a private skill. It was a civic weapon. Muhammad turned that archive into a pedagogy she calls historically responsive literacy, with four pursuits, identity, skills, intellect, and criticality, and criticality is the one that matters here: the capacity to read power, to name who is doing what to whom, and to write back.

Apply Muhammad here. Political literacy is not “learn how a bill becomes a law.” That’s the Schoolhouse Rock version, and the THC ban just proved a bill can fail and the law can still arrive. Political literacy is knowing that the lieutenant governor controls the Senate calendar, that a state agency can schedule a substance without a vote, that a $250,000 check has a date on it and the date matters, and that the same state that mandates DAEP for a vape pen ranks near the bottom of the country on the outcomes that actually feed a kid. The literary societies would have read Dan Patrick’s campaign finance report out loud at the meeting. That’s the curriculum. That’s what Education Is Elevation is for.

And it connects to voting the way it always has. When I was a professor at the University of Oklahoma, the teachers walked out in April 2018, and Governor Mary Fallin compared them to a teenage kid that wants a better car. That same summer, June 26, 2018, Oklahoma voted on State Question 788, medical marijuana. Some school groups had opposed it, worried about kids’ access. It passed with 57% on a primary night turnout that shattered expectations, and Fallin’s own party had to implement it. My point is that voter turnout increased because folks actually like weed, and what we know for Republicans, no matter what state you’re in, high turnout is not good for Republicans. It’s not. If you want to flip Texas, if you want to make it purple, make it pink, you think it’s blue, right now in between now and November you have the ability to put one policy in front of everybody’s face and show how it hit them.

Pulled Over in Prairie View: The Stop Has a Sex and a Zip Code

And I start bringing this to an end like this.

We now live in an age of hyper surveillance. On May 9, 2025, a deputy in the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, south of Fort Worth, ran a search through Flock Safety’s nationwide license plate reader network. The reason typed in the log was, verbatim, “had an abortion, search for female.” That single query swept 83,000 cameras across 6,809 police networks in every state that shares with Flock, including Washington and Illinois where abortion is legal, with no warrant. When 404 Media broke it, the sheriff and Flock both said it was a welfare check for a missing person and called the reporting clickbait. Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation got the court records. The same day as the search, deputies had opened a “death investigation” into the fetus and were consulting the district attorney about whether they could charge her. She had taken abortion medication at home two weeks earlier. The man who reported her was her partner, who was later charged with domestic violence against her. He had saved the FedEx envelope and the instructions as evidence.

Then Wisconsin. Police in Brown County used Flock to reconstruct a man’s repeated drives across the Menominee River into Michigan, where marijuana is legal, wrote in the criminal complaint that Michigan is “a known source state for marijuana,” and used his lawful travel as probable cause to search his car when he got home. So if a Texas official can use these cameras because he believes a Texas resident went to another state and did something that’s illegal in Texas, you don’t think they’re going to follow you? You went to Colorado and got some gummies and brought your ass back to Texas? At this point they’re showing us their imagination for enforcement. It has no bounds.

Michele Goodwin wrote the book on this before the cameras did. In Policing the Womb, Goodwin documents how the criminalization of pregnancy in America, drug testing of new mothers, fetal endangerment prosecutions, the whole apparatus, was built and tested on Black women first, poor Black women in the crack years, and then expanded outward to everyone once the tools existed. Her argument is that the pregnant body became the state’s laboratory for surveillance, and that the “protect the child” language was the alibi every time. Apply Goodwin here. The Flock search for the woman who had an abortion and the Flock search for the man who bought weed in Michigan are not two stories. They are one tool, and the tool was built the way Goodwin said it would be, on a woman’s body, under the banner of protecting life, and then handed to the narcotics unit.

Now put the THC ban back on the table and look at who is standing on the road when the lights come on. Andrea Ritchie’s Invisible No More is the archive of what the pretext stop does to Black women specifically, and the Texas chapter of that archive has a name. Sandra Bland, pulled over in Prairie View, Waller County, on July 10, 2015, for failing to signal a lane change on her way to a new job at Prairie View A&M, dead in the Waller County jail three days later. The stop was a pretext. It always is. A felony THC schedule multiplies the pretexts. Every “I smelled it” becomes a search, every search becomes a charge, and the charge lands on Black women in ways the beer distributor never has to price in: the mother who loses her kids to CPS over a THC test that Texas hospitals run on Black patients more often than white patients, the woman who loses her housing because a state jail felony is a lease killer, the hemp shop clerk, disproportionately a woman, disproportionately Black or Latina, whose job was legal on July 30 and gone on July 31. The Bexar County Democrats put the number at 14,000 small business owners and more than 50,000 employees. Nobody has published that workforce by race and sex, which means the state has chosen not to count the people it just criminalized. And what you refuse to count, you never have to answer for.

Two things can be true. Unregulated Delta 8 with no potency label is a real public health question, and I’d take that argument seriously from anybody who wasn’t cashing a beer check. But a state that will scan 83,000 cameras for one woman and will not count the race and sex of 50,000 workers it just put out of a job has told you exactly what it values. Who gets what, when, where, and how.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The bill failed and the ban happened anyway. SB 3 passed both chambers in 2025, Abbott vetoed it on June 22, 2025, and the outcome still arrived through Executive Order GA 56, a March 31, 2026 total THC rule, a May 2026 Texas Supreme Court decision, and a July 31, 2026 scheduling notice that made Delta 8, Delta 10, THCP, and THCA flower Schedule I. Political literacy means knowing a law can lose the vote and win the room.

* The money has a date on it. $250,000 from Silver Eagle’s John Nau on April 12, 2024, and $25,000 from the Beer Alliance of Texas PAC on December 2, 2024, both landed in Dan Patrick’s committee before the session where he made a ban on beer’s fastest growing competitor a must pass priority, while a beer distributor flyer asked for a “level playing field for Texas beer distributors.”

* The market already voted. Federal SAMHSA data for 2025 shows 21.4 million daily or near daily marijuana users against 19.9 million daily cigarette smokers and 17.2 million daily drinkers. A state agency choosing the winner between intoxicants at the incumbent’s request is the thing conservatives claim to hate about socialism.

* The enforcement has a zip code and a sex. Black people are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession at similar use rates, Flock cameras have already been used in Texas to hunt a woman who had an abortion and in Wisconsin to build probable cause from a legal trip to Michigan, and HB 114 already sends Texas children, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, to alternative campuses for a vape pen.

* Class is on the ballot. 62% of Texans, including 53% of Republicans, support recreational legalization, and the ban hit rural, suburban, Black, Latino, and white Texans alike. If turnout rises on a policy everyone can feel in their pocket, the only party that loses is the one that took the check.

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I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession. I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I have no foundation, no corporate sponsor, and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the integrity of this community alone. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building: a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: no shares, no likes, no thoughts. Just a subscription. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue. The choice is yours.

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RELATED READINGS (Bibliography)

Political thought and the distribution question

* Lasswell, Harold D. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. McGraw Hill, 1936.

* Dawson, Michael C. Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African American Politics. Princeton University Press, 1994.

* Dawson, Michael C. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African American Political Ideologies. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

* Dawson, Michael C. Blacks In and Out of the Left. Harvard University Press, 2013.

* Spence, Lester K. Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Punctum Books, 2015.

* Taylor, Keeanga Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Education and Black literacy tradition

* Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. Scholastic, 2020.

* McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke University Press, 2002.

* Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. The New Press, 2016.

* Ma, Haijing, and Ranier Perez. “School personnel’s experiences with implementing Texas House Bill 114 on vaping: A qualitative study.” Health Education Journal, 2025.

Surveillance, reproduction, and policing Black women

* Goodwin, Michele. Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

* Ritchie, Andrea J. Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color. Beacon Press, 2017.

* Roberts, Dorothy. Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families. Basic Books, 2022.

* Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation.” October 2025.

* 404 Media. “A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion.” May 2025; and “Cops Used Flock to Track a Man Across State Lines to Create Pretext to Search His Car for Weed.” Summer 2026.

* Bonnie, Richard J., and Charles H. Whitebread II. The Marihuana Conviction: A History of Marihuana Prohibition in the United States. University Press of Virginia, 1974.

* Campos, Isaac. Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico’s War on Drugs. University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

* Leary v. United States, 395 U.S. 6 (1969).

* Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. The New Press, 2010.

* ACLU. A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform. 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

We are looking right at a cultural phenomenon that refuses to name itself, and that avoidance is precisely where the pathology lives. When you trace how dominant power structures operate across generations, you realize that the refusal to confront historical reality is not an accidental oversight; it is an active, engineered cognitive defense mechanism. Scholars across disciplines have spent decades attempting to articulate this peculiar brand of social sickness, giving it rigorous terminology to match its devastating systemic impact. When you examine the mechanics of whiteness as a structural arrangement, you find a continuous loop of denial, projection, and self-delusion that manages to masquerade as objective normalcy.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Epistemic Exploitation and the Burden of Proof

One of the most insidious mechanisms of this white psychopathology is what scholars call epistemic exploitation. This takes place when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face. Epistemic exploitation reproduces structures of exploitation by remaining wedded to the perspective of privilege and placing the onus of responsibility on those experiencing oppression to account for or prove their oppression, thereby typically depicting their oppression as personal or cultural failure.

As such, it burdens the oppressed with engaging in psychologically and emotionally demanding labor that tends to remain uncompensated and unrecognized. By disingenuously presenting itself as a vital instrument to the virtuous endeavor of scientific progress, epistemic exploitation succeeds at reproducing systems of oppression by on one hand keeping the oppressed systematically busy with accounting for their oppression and on the other keeping the oppressed relieved of the burden to account for their privilege.

It only takes one academic article promoting the logic of colonialism to immediately burden those still affected by the reverberations of this structure of subjugation and dehumanization with the task of disproving this argument, allowing those benefiting from white supremacy and privilege to continue taking their privilege for granted. It is indeed by incessantly and deliberately staging a debate without history that white hallucinations maintain their efficacy and strength in reinscribing white normativity and supremacy. Epistemic exploitation flourishes under conditions where one sees the world without seeing its structure or its history.

Dick Gregory once said white folks will hire a nanny to change a baby’s diaper and then walk behind a dog to pick up the dog s**t. Paul Mooney once said white people don’t want to be criticized for what their ancestors did, but they sure as hell want to hold on to the profit that their ancestors left. It is my favorite meme of all time, by the way. Today’s lesson is about white psychopathology. See, scholars subscribe to this as not a clinical diagnosis for individuals, but as a critical framework for us to be able to build up our linguistic ability to read and write situations upon you feel me? You know, Dr. Kehinde Andrews describes whiteness as a discursive psychosis. He argues that society’s delusions and hallucinations used to avoid facing racism are best described as a collective psychosis because we got to be able to define the phenomenon and make it act in a designated manner. That is what Huey P. Newton taught me.

The core argument is that this flavor of psychopathology is a socially constructed system of power that operates through the collective psychological dysfunctions man. You know I like words with a whole bunch of syllables. This includes delusion, narcissism, and psychosis that are socially sanctioned and cause for widespread harm. The literature argues that this pathology is not blackness. It is the system of whiteness itself because it is always trying to get us lost in the sauce. It defines the problem of racism as an individual prejudice rather than us getting into the institutions and systems. I used to argue that this was a psychological disorder that is embedded within the social fabric of this country especially when it comes to the structures. They do not want you to talk about it.

Dr. Dante D. King argues that whiteness is a socially sanctioned psychopathy that is sustained by denial, projection, and disassociation. He positions racism not as a mere social construct, but as a disease, an illness, a psychosis, a psychopathology that is woven in this country’s cultural pathology. Think about it. The same people who said that we were inherently dirty, disgusting, filthy also had women breastfeeding their children and being in their home feeding them food. That is a psychopathology that needs to be unpackaged. And we see it right now. We are rampant with people that said our administration, Education Is Elevation.

Historical Roots of the Collective Delusion

To truly understand how this pathology manifests in our current social climate, we have to trace the historical architecture of racial capitalism and chattel slavery. The foundational paradox of white supremacy required a profound and enduring cognitive dissonance. Enslaved Africans were legally classified as chattel, treated strictly as labor units, and subjected to horrific, systemic physical violence, yet they were simultaneously entrusted with the most intimate domestic spaces of white families. Enslaved wet nurses breastfed white infants, and enslaved domestic workers cooked meals, cleaned homes, and raised children while being deemed entirely subhuman by the legal and social codes of the plantation economy.

This deep contradiction is not merely historical hypocrisy; it is the genesis of a collective psychopathology that persists today. The cognitive acrobatics required to simultaneously exploit, dehumanize, and rely entirely upon Black bodies for survival and comfort bred a deep cultural psychosis across generations. Generations of white society inherited a socialized denial mechanism, projecting their own internal moral decay onto the populations they subjugated. When Paul Mooney observed that white people refuse accountability for historical atrocities while fiercely protecting inherited economic advantages, he was identifying the core preservation tactic of this pathology. It is a system designed to protect stolen wealth behind a wall of manufactured innocence.

Pedagogical Fractures: Critical Implications for Education

Whiteness studies in education reveal that traditional curricula function primarily as protective shields for dominant cultural neuroses. When educational institutions sanitize history, ban critical race theory, and punish discussions of systemic racism, they are actively participating in the societal delusion Dr. Kehinde Andrews and Dr. Dante D. King diagnose. Classrooms become theaters of disassociation where students are taught to view racism as individual interpersonal meanness rather than an engineered structural reality.

For Black educators navigating this landscape, the challenge is twofold. We must dismantle the gaslighting embedded in standard textbooks while surviving hostile institutional environments that penalize truth telling. Education Is Elevation requires us to break the silence, moving beyond the superficial diversity workshops that treat equity as a branding exercise. We must equip students with the linguistic and analytical tools to diagnose institutional pathologies rather than internalizing the systemic dysfunctions thrust upon them.

Intersectional Collateral: Material Realities of Racialized Power

The psychological dysfunctions of whiteness are never abstract; they translate directly into devastating material impacts across intersecting vectors of race, gender, and class. When white psychopathology operates as a socially sanctioned system of power, its primary objective is resource hoarding and the maintenance of racial hierarchies. This manifests directly in housing segregation, educational funding disparities, healthcare inequities, and the deliberate dismantling of social safety nets whenever Black and brown communities begin to achieve generational stability.

Consider the racial wealth gap, which functions as the material legacy of historical plunder. The refusal to acknowledge systemic theft ensures that contemporary economic policies continue to favor white asset accumulation while penalizing Black labor. Furthermore, this pathology weaponizes state apparatuses, such as policing and child welfare systems, to police Black families under the guise of protection, mirroring the exact domestic surveillance and control mechanisms of the antebellum era. The material impact is a continuous cycle of extraction where Black communities are forced to constantly rebuild from manufactured crises while structural whiteness insulates itself from accountability.

Education As Elevation: The Classroom as a Site of Diagnosis and Resistance

The classroom is ground zero for this psychopathology. Education shapes culture. Institutional policies and practices shape culture. In today’s sociopolitical climate where concepts like Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, and intersectionality dominate public discourse, we must offer a critical lens to examine how the American legal system has codified White supremacy, anti-non-Whiteness, and anti-Blackness.

Dr. Cheryl E. Matias argues that discussing race and racism often conjures up emotions of guilt, shame, anger, defensiveness, denial, sadness, dissonance, and discomfort. Instead of suppressing those feelings, coined emotionalities of whiteness, they are, nonetheless, important to identify, understand, and deconstruct if one ever hopes to fully commit to racial equity. The work delves deeper into these white emotionalities and other latent ones by providing theoretical and psychoanalytic analyses to determine where these emotions stem, how they operate, and how they perpetuate racial inequities in education and society.

When we teach psychopathology, we must decenter whiteness. This challenges those invested in liberal innocence and incremental reform to confront an uncomfortable reality that the greatest barrier to justice in America is not ignorance, but a civilization structured to protect itself from knowing. This book, this work, is not written to comfort. It is written to name the disease, expose its mechanisms, and ask whether humanity is willing to survive it.

Intersectional Material Impacts: The Cost of the Psychosis

The psychopathology of whiteness does not just live in the mind. It lives in the body. One of the most original contributions of this framework is its integration of neurobiology and epigenetics, arguing that racial violence has not only shaped institutions but has rewired nervous systems across generations, producing inherited hypervigilance in Black communities and inherited dissociation and entitlement in white populations. In this sense, racism is not only structural or cultural. It is embodied.

The capitalist logic grafted into epistemic exploitation furthers its effect. By outsourcing the costs of epistemic labor to the oppressed or marginalized and concentrating the profits in the hands of the privileged or oppressors, the former are prevented and the latter are excused from dismantling the system of exploitation and oppression as a whole. Similar to the material drain of natural resources that is essential to extractive capitalism, there is an emotional drain of energy that exhausts the oppressed and marginalized to the extent that it makes them question whether their testimony is ultimately without grounds.

This material impact is visible in every institution. From healthcare to housing, from employment to education, the effects of this collective psychosis are measurable in life expectancy, wealth gaps, and educational outcomes. The pathology is not just a matter of individual prejudice. It is a system that extracts and exploits.

5 Key Takeaways

* Whiteness is analyzed by contemporary scholars not as a clinical individual diagnosis, but as a structural and discursive psychosis that maintains systemic power through socially sanctioned delusions.

* The historical contradiction of viewing Black people as subhuman while simultaneously relying on them for intimate domestic labor highlights an enduring cultural psychopathology.

* Mainstream frameworks often keep us lost in the sauce by reducing systemic racism to individual prejudice rather than addressing institutional structures.

* Educational systems frequently act as preservation sites for this pathology by enforcing historical denial, sanitizing curricula, and punishing structural critiques.

* The material consequences of this collective psychosis directly drive racial wealth gaps, housing inequities, and predatory state surveillance systems.

Support Independent Black Scholarship

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession—I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I have no foundation, no corporate sponsor, and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the integrity of this community alone. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building—a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: no shares, no likes, no thoughts—just a subscription. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue; the choice is yours.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Bibliography

* Andrews, Kehinde. The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World. Nation Books, 2021.

* King, Dante D. The 400-Year Holocaust: White Supremacy and the Cultural Pathology of Whiteness. Dante King, 2020.

* Gregory, Dick, and Lipsyte, Robert. Nigger: An Autobiography. E.P. Dutton, 1964.

* Newton, Huey P. Revolutionary Suicide. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

* Hartman, Saidiya V. 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.

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I want to start with the sentence I said on that stage, because it is the whole argument and I said it almost by accident.

I said there are certain communities that is always already viewed as being classless.

Sit with that. Not poor. Not working class. Not lumpen. Classless. Outside the ledger entirely. Because a class analysis is a counting exercise before it is anything else, and if your state never counted us, then every program built on that count arrives at a house it does not have the address for. That is not a critique of the left. That is a critique of the arithmetic the left inherited and never audited.

Here is how I got there. I was on stage with a sister whose family is Nicaraguan, born and raised in Florida, and the whole time growing up she heard the word socialism land in her community like a slur and a wound at the same time. She named Venezuela. She named Cuba. She named Nicaragua. And then she said the thing that made the room get quiet: it was a bloody, bloody civil war, it was brother against brother, and it cracked our families open.

Then she said the part that a whole lot of y’all online need tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. She said when y’all playing y’all little fantasy, utopian games about socialism, there is real people. She said what y’all learned in theory, we lived.

Now, before I go one inch further, let me clear something up, because the framing of this conversation keeps getting geography wrong and precision is not a vibe, precision is a discipline. Nicaragua is in Central America. Cuba is in the Caribbean. Venezuela is in South America. When we say “the left in Latin America” we are collapsing three different colonial histories, three different racial regimes, and three different relationships to the United States into one word, and the collapsing is itself part of the problem I am about to describe. So I am going to say the Americas. Hemispheric. Because the border between what happened in Bluefields and what happened in South Central is thinner than your passport suggests.

And that is the second half of what I said on that stage. I told her: between us two, we got two communities that has been impacted by American imperialism. Iran Contra is the hinge. The United States government decided that Black people’s livelihood in this country was worth less than defeating a leftist government in Central America. That is not a metaphor. That is a budget line and a court docket, and I am going to walk you through both.

But I am not going to let the American receipts do all the work, because that would be too easy and it would let a whole lot of people off the hook. The harder question, the one that actually makes this piece worth your time, is this one. What happened to Black people inside the revolution?

Not before it. Not after the empire crushed it. Inside it.

Because here is what nobody wants to say out loud. Nicaragua has a Black population. It has had one for centuries. English speaking, Moravian, Caribbean facing, and concentrated on a coast that the Spanish speaking Pacific side of the country did not govern until 1894. And when the revolution came in 1979 with a program to redistribute land and teach the whole country to read, the Black and Indigenous coast experienced that program as an arrival, not a liberation. Not because they loved Somoza. Because a state that had annexed them in 1894 was now showing up in 1980 with a plan they had not been asked about.

Two things can be true. The revolution was real and the exclusion was real. Hold both. If you can only hold one you are not doing analysis, you are doing fandom.

BEFORE THERE WAS A REVOLUTION THERE WAS A FILIBUSTER

Let me give you the historical context, because most people come into the Nicaragua conversation at 1979 and that is like coming into a movie at the third act and arguing about the ending.

In 1855 a lawyer and newspaperman from Tennessee named William Walker sailed to Nicaragua with about sixty men. By 1856 he had made himself president of the country. The Franklin Pierce administration recognized his government. And on the twenty second of September, 1856, William Walker issued a decree reinstating slavery in Nicaragua.

Read that again. Slavery had been abolished across the Federal Republic of Central America in 1824, thirty two years earlier, four decades before the Thirteenth Amendment. An American went down there and brought it back. Not as an accident, as policy, because his project required a slaveholding Central America integrated into the American South.

So the first significant American intervention in Nicaragua was a slavery restoration project. That is not a footnote. That is the foundation. Every conversation about socialism in that country sits on top of a memory of a white American who showed up with an army and reinstalled the auction block. When the sister on that stage talked about political trauma, this is how deep the sediment goes.

Then came the Marines. The United States occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, with a brief interruption, and out of that occupation came Augusto César Sandino, who fought the occupation from 1927 until the Marines left. Out of that same occupation came the Guardia Nacional, a national police force trained and equipped by the United States and handed to a man named Anastasio Somoza García. On the twenty first of February, 1934, Sandino was assassinated after leaving a dinner. Somoza took the country and his family held it for more than four decades.

So when the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional took Managua on the nineteenth of July, 1979, they were not overthrowing a homegrown tyrant. They were overthrowing a dynasty that the United States built, trained, armed, and named. Just admit that part. You cannot understand why a generation of people in that country called themselves socialists without understanding that the alternative had an American return address on it.

BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER HAD A GEOGRAPHY

She said brother against brother. She said it cracked our families open. She is right and I want to give that sentence a map, because in the Nicaraguan case the crack ran along the coast.

The Sandinista government arrived on the Caribbean Coast with a nationalization program, a literacy program, and a theory of national unity. The coastal organizations, chiefly MISURASATA, which brought together Miskitu, Sumu, and Rama with the Sandinista front in its very acronym, wanted land and self government. The government read those demands as separatism. By 1981 leaders were being arrested. By December of 1981, in the aftermath of the operation the government called Navidad Roja, Red Christmas, the state decided to empty the Río Coco.

Between the first of January and the twentieth of February, 1982, roughly eight thousand five hundred people were marched or trucked out of forty two villages along that river to five settlements about sixty kilometers south, a resettlement zone the government named Tasba Pri, which means Free Land in Miskitu. Roughly half the region’s population crossed into Honduras instead. Homes were destroyed. Livestock was lost. The Inter American Commission on Human Rights documented all of it, including the killings at Leimus and San Carlos, in a country report that remains on the record.

Now here is where it gets uncomfortable for everybody. A significant number of Miskitu people took up arms with the contras. The same contras funded by the same Reagan administration that was, at that exact moment, presiding over the conditions that produced the crack economy in Black American neighborhoods. So the Indigenous people fleeing a socialist state’s forced relocation ended up in a coalition with an American proxy army, and the Black people in Los Angeles ended up on the receiving end of that same army’s financing network. American empire made both of those things happen and neither community chose the other as an enemy.

That is what she meant by respect. That is what she meant when she said people have historical legacies and we got to know how to navigate those things.

And the resolution matters, so I am going to give it to you. After the 1984 elections and two years of consultation, the National Assembly approved Law 28, the Autonomy Statute, on the seventh of September, 1987, published on the thirtieth of October. It created two autonomous regions on the Caribbean Coast, recognized communal land ownership, recognized Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama, Creole English, and Garífuna as official regional languages, and established elected regional councils. At the time it was among the most advanced legal frameworks for Indigenous and Afrodescendant rights anywhere in the hemisphere.

The revolution did that. Under war conditions, under embargo, under the pressure of a shooting insurgency, that government sat down and wrote a statute that gave up centralized power. Hold that alongside Tasba Pri. Both are true. That is the whole discipline.

THE CARTILLA CAME IN SPANISH AND THE COAST WAITED ITS TURN

In March of 1980, eight months after taking power, the Sandinista government launched the Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización. Around sixty thousand young brigadistas, plus tens of thousands of adults, left the cities and lived in the countryside for five months teaching people to read. Women were roughly sixty percent of the brigadistas and about half the learners. The national illiteracy rate fell from a little over fifty percent to under thirteen percent. Roughly four hundred thousand new readers. UNESCO gave Nicaragua the Nadezhda Krupskaya prize in September of 1980, and the archive of the campaign now sits on the Memory of the World register.

I am not going to be cute about that. That is one of the most extraordinary educational mobilizations of the twentieth century and there is no honest way to describe it as anything less. Arnove documented it in real time and his account still holds up.

Now the second fact. That crusade was conducted in Spanish. It ended on the twenty third of August, 1980. The literacy campaign for the Caribbean Coast, in Creole English, Miskitu, and Sumu, began on the thirtieth of September, 1980, and ran into the spring of 1981, with a target of somewhere between twelve thousand and sixteen thousand five hundred people.

Four hundred thousand first. Twelve thousand second. In the language they actually think in, second.

I am not saying nobody cared. Somebody clearly cared, because the second campaign happened at all, and that is more than most states have ever done for a minority language population. A magazine in the United States covering the crusade at the time ran a piece on the coast under the title English: An Oppressed Language, and noted that Black and Indigenous Nicaraguans were receiving instruction in their own languages for the first time in their history. That is real. Credit where it is due.

But sequence is a curriculum. Sequence teaches. When a child on the coast learns that the nation’s greatest educational achievement happened in a language her grandmother does not speak, and that her grandmother’s turn came after, and smaller, she has learned exactly where she sits in the national imagination and no textbook had to say it out loud.

Apply Wynter here. Her lifelong argument is that Western knowledge organizes itself around a particular genre of the human, a specific overrepresented figure of Man that gets to stand in for humanity as such, and that our curricula do not merely reflect that figure, they manufacture it. Her intervention on textbooks, Do Not Call Us Negros, was aimed at exactly the well meaning multicultural curriculum, the one written by people who thought they had solved it, and her charge was that adding chapters does not fix a structure whose central category was built without you.

That is what a cartilla in Spanish is. It is not malice. It is a genre of the citizen. The revolutionary Nicaraguan was imagined as a Spanish speaker on the Pacific side, and every generous thing the state then did flowed outward from that imagined person, arriving on the coast late and translated.

Now bring it home, because this is not a foreign country problem.

The United States ran the same sequence. Lau v. Nichols in 1974 established that giving non English speaking students the same books and the same teachers as everybody else was not equality, because a curriculum delivered in a language a child cannot access is not a curriculum, it is a wall with a schedule. And we spent the following fifty years dismantling the remedy, through English only ballot initiatives, through the collapse of bilingual education funding, through the current wave of state laws restricting how race, gender, and history can be taught at all.

Florida, where the sister I was talking with was born and raised, is the live case. This is the state that rejected the Advanced Placement African American Studies pilot course in January of 2023. This is the state whose 2023 African American history standards included a middle school benchmark instructing that enslaved people developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit. This is the state whose Stop WOKE Act was enjoined in part by a federal judge who called it positively dystopian.

Sequence is a curriculum. Nicaragua taught four hundred thousand people to read and put the coast second. Florida teaches millions of children and puts the truth about their ancestors somewhere between optional and illegal. One of those was a revolution under wartime pressure making a resource decision. One of those is the wealthiest country on earth making a choice. Only one of them has an excuse and it is not the one in the Everglades.

On the seventeenth of October, 1986, Congress approved one hundred million dollars for the contras, and Reagan signed it the next day. Seventy million of that was military. That is not covert. That is a line item, printed, voted, published. Two days before that, the same government did not have money for the schools in the neighborhoods that were about to absorb the cocaine. Ask yourself what one hundred million dollars in 1986 would have done for the elementary schools of South Central Los Angeles, and then ask yourself who decided.

AUTONOMY IS NOT A UTOPIA, IT IS A STATUTE WITH A NUMBER ON IT

Now let me close the loop on what I said on that stage, because I was hard on my own people and I meant it, but I do not want to leave you with only the demolition.

I said stop playing your little Marxist games. I said I am cool with Marx. I said the problem is the make believe Dungeons and Dragons utopianism that does not think about how there has to be blood spilled for these capitalists to give up anything. And I said there are communities always already viewed as classless.

Every one of those still stands. But Kelley gives me the correction I need for my own argument, and I would be a hypocrite to leave it out.

Kelley’s whole point in Freedom Dreams is that the Black radical tradition has never been able to afford a politics without imagination, because the conditions were never survivable on realism alone. People who are told the world cannot change are being told by the world that benefits from that belief. So the critique cannot be that people dream. The critique is what the dream is made of and who is standing in it.

And here is the thing that makes the Nicaraguan case worth all these words. The coast did not answer the revolution with a utopia. They answered it with a statute. Law 28 has a number, a publication date in La Gaceta, a list of official languages, an article recognizing communal land, and an elected council with seats you can count. That is what a dream looks like after it goes through a legislature. That is Freire’s word, praxis, doing the thing it actually means rather than the thing it means in a group chat.

So when I tell online leftists to get off the Dungeons and Dragons, I am not telling them to stop imagining. I am telling them that the Miskitu and the Creoles of Bluefields imagined harder than they do, under a war, and then went and got it written down with a number on it, and it still is not enough, and that is what real work costs.

And that is why the sister on that stage said what she said about how to talk to our folks. She said ask them, do you want clean water, do you want clean air, do you want your trash picked up on time, do you want your kids safe and healthy, do you want your home affordable, do you want to stay in the place that you call home. Then talk about those policies.

That is not anti theory. That is theory that has been to somebody’s house. That is the difference between a program and a personality.

Because two things can be true. American imperialism has done everything she and I described, and the crack in our neighborhoods and the crack in her family’s history come out of the same office in Washington. And also, the states that called themselves the alternative built categories that Black people fell out of, and then told Black people that noticing was a distraction. Neither one of those cancels the other. Both of them cost real people real years.

So here is where I land. If you are on the left and you cannot tell me what happens to Black people inside your program, then you do not have a program, you have an aesthetic. If your redistribution runs on a census that never counted us, you are not redistributing to us. If your literacy campaign arrives in a language we do not think in, we learned something from that campaign, but it was not reading.

See, Hooker reminds us that the state’s category is the door, and that a people with no category has no door, only a wall with a nice mural on it. And Gonzalez teaches us that the ones standing longest at that wall are Black women, holding the household, the land, and the campaign, and getting counted in none of the three.

Not every Nika thinks the same way. Not every Nika has the same experience.

And I will let her have the last word, exactly as she said it, because she earned it:

“So all is to say, y’all, that we need to have real change in our communities. Our communities needs to have their material needs met. And that includes going ahead, having affordable housing, making sure that our air is clean, making sure that our water is clean. I live here in Florida, making sure that the Everglades remains the Everglades and not another place for alligator Alcatraz. So we need each other. We need to talk to each other. We need to understand each other. And there is a way to do that and build bridges.”

Education Is Elevation.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* A class analysis is a counting exercise first. If the state has no category for you, no redistribution program can reach you. Hooker’s finding that Latin American multicultural reform granted Indigenous peoples territorial and collective rights while offering Afrodescendants recognition without land is the mechanism behind the phrase always already classless.

* The first major American intervention in Nicaragua was a slavery restoration project. William Walker made himself president in 1856 and decreed the reinstatement of slavery on the twenty second of September of that year, thirty two years after Central America had abolished it. Every later conversation about American intentions in that country sits on top of that memory.

* Sequence is a curriculum. The 1980 Literacy Crusade cut illiteracy from over fifty percent to under thirteen percent and created roughly four hundred thousand new readers, in Spanish. The Creole English, Miskitu, and Sumu campaign began the following month and targeted between twelve and sixteen thousand people. Both facts are true and the order of them taught the coast exactly where it stood.

* Two things can be true at once, and holding both is the discipline. The Sandinista state emptied forty two Río Coco villages and relocated roughly eight thousand five hundred people to Tasba Pri in early 1982. The same state passed Law 28 in 1987, one of the strongest Indigenous and Afrodescendant autonomy frameworks in the hemisphere. Neither fact cancels the other.

* The empire and the sentencing machine shared a calendar. Reagan signed the one hundred million dollar contra package on the eighteenth of October, 1986, and the Anti Drug Abuse Act with its hundred to one crack ratio nine days later. The CIA’s own inspector general later documented that the agency knew of contra linked drug trafficking and withheld it from the Justice Department because the war took priority.

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TODAY

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession. I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I have no foundation, no corporate sponsor, and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the integrity of this community alone. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building: a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: no shares, no likes, no thoughts, just a subscription. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue; the choice is yours.

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS

* Hooker, Juliet. Race and the Politics of Solidarity. Oxford University Press, 2009. See especially the chapter on multiculturalism and solidarity in Nicaragua.

* Hooker, Juliet. “Indigenous Inclusion/Black Exclusion: Race, Ethnicity and Multicultural Citizenship in Latin America.” Journal of Latin American Studies, 2005.

* Hooker, Juliet. Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. Oxford University Press, 2017.

* Hooker, Juliet, ed. Black and Indigenous Resistance in the Americas: From Multiculturalism to Racist Backlash. Lexington Books, 2020.

* Gordon, Edmund T. Disparate Diasporas: Identity and Politics in an African Nicaraguan Community. University of Texas Press, 1998.

* Hale, Charles R. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894 to 1987. Stanford University Press, 1994.

* Goett, Jennifer. Black Autonomy: Race, Gender, and Afro Nicaraguan Activism. Stanford University Press, 2016.

* Inter American Commission on Human Rights. Report on the Situation of Human Rights of a Segment of the Nicaraguan Population of Miskito Origin. OAS, 1983.

* Law 28, Estatuto de Autonomía de las Regiones de la Costa Caribe de Nicaragua. Approved 7 September 1987, published in La Gaceta 30 October 1987.

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Switzerland’s Neutrality Was a Front for Colonial Violence and I Have the Receipts

Switzerland is famous for neutrality, chocolate, banks, but behind that peaceful facade lies the hidden truth. Switzerland never had no colonies, but yet it’s deeply entangled in colonization. Since the 16th century, that’s the 1500s for all that don’t know, Swiss citizens were everywhere in the colonial system, with over 250 Swiss companies and individuals participating in the chancellery slave trade, deporting more than 170,000 enslaved Africans. As somebody with a degree in African-American studies, walking through the beautiful city of Geneva, Switzerland, I was constantly reminded of Dr. Walter Rodney’s book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a 1972 historical and political book by Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney who masterfully argued Europe actively impoverished the African continent through centuries of slavery and colonial exploitation thats well cited with much documentation.

A country known for the Swiss chocolate stamp produces no cocoa plants. Swiss merchants grew rich on colonial commodities like cocoa, coffee, cotton, built the nation’s chocolate industry and banking sector, while Swiss mercenaries fought brutal campaigns, y’all.

So when I’m hearing about universal human rights or civil society, I’m thinking, what did that mean for neutrality in terms of colonial violence and how one could be implicated? I got a lot of homeboys, a lot of family members locked up for being accessories to crime because the judge said you were in proximity when the crime was being committed, therefore you are guilty. And when it comes to Switzerland’s neutrality, I think you’re a spectator at the lynching. So how did the neutrality enable this? As a historian noted, Switzerland had no colonies, which is exactly why it profited. While European powers spent a bunch of capital maintaining the empire, Switzerland stayed neutral, gaining access to all sides without cost, and its neutrality made it the hub.

There have been times that Switzerland was sheltering anti colonial activists, but more often, they was providing financial dealings that profited from the exploitation of them folks.Though the Swiss government has long claimed it was never a colonial power, museums now tell a different story. One of anti indigeneity and anti blackness. That’s profiting. I call it finessing in my hood. That still shaped the legacy of global inequality, revealing that Switzerland wasn’t neutral. It was selectively complicit. Selectively complicit. And that’s what I think has been in the back of my mind. So when I see a bunch of descendants of colonial subjects coming to Europe, the pinnacle of colonialism, talking about, hey, we should just be treated better, it hit a little different. But I also know in my country, they’re trying to erase history and make sure that their atrocities is not caught in the archives. So I think that’s the value of me being here. Education Is Elevation. I can’t wait to tell y’all and reflect with y’all how much I’ve learned by being in Geneva. And I’m going to end this video on this view right here, man.

Historical Context: The Architecture of Swiss Complicity

The narrative of Swiss innocence has been carefully constructed, but the archival record tells a different story. From the 16th century onward, Swiss citizens embedded themselves within every facet of the colonial enterprise despite the nation never officially holding overseas territories. The transatlantic slave trade, which peaked in the 18th century, involved over 250 Swiss companies, private individuals, and even communes in the transportation and exploitation of enslaved Africans. Swiss nationals participated in deporting approximately 172,000 people, representing a significant portion of the estimated 11 to 12 million Africans transported to the Americas and Caribbean to work on plantations and in mines.

The Swiss trading houses became essential intermediaries in the colonial commodity network. They traded colonial goods including silk, spices, tobacco, tea, and critically, cotton and cocoa, which would become foundational to the Swiss chocolate industry and banking sector. Swiss banks, including entities that evolved into major financial institutions, owned substantial stakes in companies like the French Compagnie des Indes, which held a monopoly over the West African slave trade, financing and doing business with slave traders. Switzerland’s lack of raw materials paradoxically drove its merchants to become leading commodity traders by the 19th century, positioning the country as a hub for colonial extraction.

Swiss mercenaries served as minions, assets, tools, beneficiaries of colonial violence from the end of the 16th century, participating in European armies that undertook colonial conquests, crushed resistance movements, and maintained colonial order. Between 1815 and World War I, approximately 8,000 Swiss soldiers joined the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia, while an estimated 40,000 Swiss served in the French Foreign Legion between 1830 and 1960, fighting in North Africa and Vietnam. These soldiers were often impoverished young men from rural Switzerland, fleeing economic hardship in a country that was one of the poorest in Europe until the late 1880s. The Swiss government, ironically, even provided aid to those willing to emigrate to the Americas, facilitating the demographic pressures that drove young men into colonial militaries.

Swiss missionaries accompanied the colonial expansion, opening schools and hospitals while introducing cash crops like cocoa to West Africa. The Basel Mission in Ghana introduced cacao cultivation in 1858, leading to Ghana becoming the world’s largest cocoa producer by World War I. While missionaries sometimes trained future anti colonial leaders, including Eduardo Mondlane, founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front, their work undeniably prepared the terrain for deeper colonial exploitation. The entanglement was multifaceted, involving not just economic extraction but the very production of racial knowledge. Scientists at the universities of Zurich and Geneva formulated race theories that gained international credence and helped legitimise the colonial system, participating in what the National Museum Zurich now acknowledges as “scientific racism.”

Civil Society for Whom??

The UN will tell you civil society is the bridge between the global and the local, that multilateralism thrives with the active participation of civil society actors, that these organizations transform international commitments into actions that improve lives. It's all about coalition, partnership, dialogue, about citizens coming together to achieve change on particular issues, about building a more inclusive, responsive, and effective United Nations where every voice matters, especially those that challenge the system to be better. According to Afropessimism, civil society ain't even a space that includes Black folks as subjects, it's the very structure that depends on Black exclusion and death for its existence. The promises of equal access to justice and accountability are formal guarantees on paper, but the UN system was designed to block measures that would actually deliver transformative change. Some would argue this reduces the UN to mere aspirations and symbolic gestures toward racial equity that lack political will and investment from member states.

So when I hear the United Nations talking about civil society, they’re talking about that third sector between government and business. Civil society is the public space where people can voluntarily associate to advance their interests and ideas, where trade unions, women's groups, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations come together to monitor policies, provide expertise, and hold governments accountable. Most of us present are/were former colonized subjects of the countries who created this amazing council for Universal Human Rights.

Frank Wilderson will tell you that civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced and contested, but the invitation to participate in that hegemony's gestures of influence and leadership is not extended to the Black subject, we live in the world but exist outside of civil society, structurally impossible, a paradox because the Black subject is vital to civil society's political economy, kick starting capital at its genesis and rescuing it from over accumulation crisis at its end, Black death is its condition of possibility . While the UN sees civil society as a space of mediation where different groups can come together to address grievances and pursue justice, Afropessimism says civil society is predicated on a foundational partition between Blackness and non-Blackness, a monument to fundamental antagonism instead of a space of resolution. Afropessimist scholars argue Civil Society is the world where violence against Black people is not a form of discrimination but a necessary violence to forward civil society, a health tonic for everyone who is not Black. So when the UN talks about civil society participation and human rights for all, I can't help but think about what that actually means for descendants of enslaved Africans who built the wealth that made these institutions possible in the first place, because civil society according to Afropessimism is not a space where Black suffering can be articulated or mediated, it's the very apparatus that makes that suffering illegible and irreparable, forever asking us to mourn within a symbolic order that was never designed to account for our grief .

Selective Complicity: The Neutrality Paradox

Switzerland’s neutrality was not a moral position, but a strategic one that enabled selective participation in colonial violence and exploitation. The doctrine of neutrality, which Switzerland officially adopted after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, allowed Swiss citizens and companies to access all sides of colonial conflict without the expenses that European powers incurred maintaining formal empires. While Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Portugal invested heavily on military missions, direct extraction, and maintaining colonial order, Switzerland could finesse and profits in the economic benefits of colonialism while remaining officially distanced from the violence that produced those benefits.

This selective complicity meant that Switzerland could shelter anti colonial activists, provide diplomatic mediation, and present itself as a moral beacon for international humanitarian law, hosting organizations like the International Committee of the Red Cross and the League of Nations, while simultaneously profiting from the very systems of exploitation that created the need for such humanitarian responses. The contradiction between Swiss claims to moral authority and the reality of its colonial entanglements is only now being systematically addressed through museum exhibitions and academic research.

The colonial legacy persists through ongoing global wealth inequality and environmental issues, according to the National Museum Zurich’s exhibition. The Swiss commodities trading sector, which now includes major firms trading oil, copper, zinc, sugar, coffee, and grain, has grown massively over the past decade, with concerns that light Swiss regulation allows companies to operate in ways they could not elsewhere. The Swiss National Bank maintained influence in South Africa until the 1990s, and Swiss chocolate firms were identified by NGOs as prominent among those dragging their feet on protocols to eliminate child labor in cocoa harvesting in West Africa.

The Archive of Resistance and Erasure

The school wall in Bern displayed a mural for decades that demeaned black and indigenous students, showing white superiority and degrading students of color who had to pass it daily. This is not history, this is the architecture of the present. The mural’s removal in 2023 and its transfer to the Bern Historical Museum represents a significant victory for activists who recognized that education cannot be accessed equally in an environment where students are devalued because of their skin color or ethnicity. But the battle continues, because in my country they are trying to erase history and make sure that their atrocities are not caught in the archives.

The museum exhibition on the mural explores the breadth of debate surrounding it, documenting criticism from individual teachers and parents as far back as the 1980s, school internal discussions in the 1990s, and the public outcry that finally came in 2019. The mural’s eventual removal was met with fierce opposition from defenders of the artwork and the status quo, but equally strong approval from supporters. This is not about erasing history. This is about placing history in its proper context, as the National Museum Zurich has done with its first ever comprehensive, multi-perspectival overview of Switzerland’s colonial past. The exhibition includes contributions from artists like Sasha Huber, Denise Bertschi, Chris Pappan, Mathias C. Pfund, Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige, and Dom Smaz, incorporating exchanges with the public and various experts and actors.

The Swiss narrative of multiculturalism as a positive liberal value often functions de-politically, emphasizing folkloric or culinary diversity while leaving structural racism and historical inequalities unaddressed. Over 40% of the Swiss population has a migratory background today, and in cities like Geneva, this proportion exceeds 65%. Yet integration often becomes a process of “performing whiteness,” adopting linguistic, cultural, and behavioral norms coded as Swiss in order to gain conditional acceptance. This performance rarely results in full belonging, instead reinforcing whiteness as the unmarked and invisible standard of citizenship and nationhood.

The cracks in Swiss multiculturalism appear most visibly in the rise of Islamophobia, including the 2009 minaret ban and the 2021 face veil prohibition. These political campaigns, often framed in terms of secularism, security, or gender equality, function as racializing tools that construct Muslims as culturally incompatible and fundamentally outside the bounds of Swiss identity. Islam in these contexts is not just a religion but a racialised category, and such measures legitimise exclusion while reinforcing a national self image grounded in whiteness, homogeneity, and moral superiority.

The Material Impact: Whose Bank, Whose Chocolate, Whose Bones?

Swiss banks owned as much as a third of the Compagnie des Indes, the French company that held a monopoly over the West African slave trade. The trading houses in Basel and Winterthur, including Christophe Burckhardt & Cie and the Volkart brothers, manufactured cotton cloth used as currency in the slave trade and traded coffee, cotton, and cocoa from colonial plantations. These economic entanglements built the foundation of Swiss prosperity while creating the global wealth inequality that persists today.

The Swiss chocolate industry developed directly from access to colonial cocoa, with major firms dragging their feet on implementing protocols to eliminate child labor in West African harvesting. Swiss NGOs have established that the country’s chocolate firms are prominent among those failing to implement meaningful change. The commodity trading sector, dealing in oil, copper, zinc, sugar, coffee, and grain, has grown massively in the last decade, with concerns that light Swiss regulation allows companies to operate in ways they could not elsewhere.

The material legacy is not just in wealth extraction but in ongoing systems of discrimination. The 600 Jenisch children taken from their parents between 1926 and 1972 represent the continuity of colonial logics applied to minority populations within Switzerland itself. The exhibition on prejudice and racism, adapted from the Musée de l’Homme Paris to Swiss conditions, shows that mechanisms of racism exist in today’s society and institutions, often invisible, leading to unequal treatment of minorities. Discrimination and racism are social challenges that must be addressed through education and community engagement.

Swiss mercenaries which is just a fancy word for hired hitmen and hired human traffickers in this context served in colonial armies for economic advancement, escaping poverty in a Switzerland that offered little opportunity. They fought brutal campaigns in Indonesia, North Africa, and Vietnam, maintaining colonial order and crushing resistance movements. This pattern of Europeans serving as instruments of colonial violence while their homelands remained officially neutral is a forgotten chapter in the history of global extraction.

Key Takeaways: The Truth They Don’t Want You to Know

* Switzerland’s neutrality was a strategic economic position that allowed its citizens and companies to profit from colonial exploitation without the expenses of maintaining a formal empire. Over 250 Swiss companies and individuals participated in the transatlantic slave trade, deporting approximately 172,000 enslaved Africans.

* Swiss banks and trading houses financed and did business with slave traders, owning substantial stakes in companies that held monopolies over the West African slave trade. Swiss banks owned as much as a third of the Compagnie des Indes.

* Swiss missionaries, scientists, and mercenaries actively participated in colonial expansion, racial science, and military repression. Universities in Zurich and Geneva formulated race theories that helped legitimise colonial systems.

* Swiss multiculturalism functions as surface celebration of diversity while leaving structural racism and historical inequalities unaddressed. Over 40% of the Swiss population has a migratory background, yet integration often requires “performing whiteness” for conditional acceptance.

* Museums in Switzerland are now documenting colonial entanglements and their legacies, including the debate over colonial monuments, street names, and the presence of racist imagery in public spaces. The National Museum Zurich’s exhibition is the first comprehensive overview of Switzerland’s colonial past.

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Cited Work and Related Readings

Purtschert, Patricia, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds. Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972.

National Museum Zurich. “colonial – Switzerland’s Global Entanglements” Exhibition. 2024-2026.

Fässler, Hans. “Switzerland played key role in the slave trade.” Swissinfo.ch, 2003.

Krauer, Philipp. Research on Swiss mercenaries in the Dutch Colonial Army. ETH Zurich.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation.” CR: The New Centennial Review, 2003.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Fässler, Hans. Reise in Schwarz Weiss: Schweizer Ortstermine in Sachen Sklaverei. Rotpunktverlag, 2005.

Swiss National Museum. colonial. Switzerland’s Global Entanglements. Exhibition and catalogue, Zurich 2024, Château de Prangins 2026.

Krauer, Philipp. Swiss Mercenaries in the Dutch East Indies: A Transimperial History of Military Labour, 1848 to 1914. Leiden University Press.

Schär, Bernhard C. Work on Swiss transimperial entanglement and extra imperial actors.

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Now, bell hooks was a sharp, consistent critic of liberalism, and she was that critic for forty years, across nearly forty books, from Ain’t I a Woman in 1981 all the way to the last essays she published in Berea, Kentucky, before she died in December of 2021. She argued that its core principles was inadequate to achieving genuine liberation because she understood they failed to address the intersecting systems of what she named white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and when she was feeling especially precise about it she said imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because she wanted the foreign policy in the sentence too.

Most of y’all encountered that phrase on a tote bag. Most of y’all encountered that phrase as a caption. Most of y’all have never sat with the fact that she built it as a diagnostic instrument, not a slogan, and that the whole point of stacking those four words together was that you cannot pull one out and treat it separately, because the moment you treat racism as a separate problem from capitalism you get a solution that hires Black managers, and the moment you treat patriarchy as a separate problem from white supremacy you get a feminism that pays a Black woman eleven dollars an hour to watch the children while the movement goes to the conference.

So let’s do this right. Let’s put her four arguments on the table, and then let’s put a receipt under each one, because the tenth of nothing is still nothing, and theory without an archive is just vibes with footnotes.

Tomorrow, August 22, 2026, is the thirtieth anniversary of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Public Law 104 193. A Democratic president signed it. A Republican Congress wrote it. It was sold as compassion. It has a thirty year record now. And that record is the single best piece of evidence for everything bell hooks was saying while people were calling her too radical, too angry, and not constructive enough.

Let’s get into it.

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Argument One: Liberal Democracy as Mystification

Hooks argued that liberal democracy operates as an ideological smokescreen that obscures the reality of systemic oppression. Rather than a system of liberty and justice for all, she contended that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has a standing preference in favor of certain races, certain classes, and certain genders, and that this preference is maintained by structural violence, which is a fancy way of saying people die on schedule and nobody gets charged.

For hooks, liberalism is a reformist political framework focused on legal rights, equal opportunity, and inclusion within existing arrangements. The goal is getting a seat at the table. We’re talking voting, desegregation, equal pay, all that. The flaw, according to bell hooks, is that it mistakes legal inclusion for liberation. It does not challenge the fundamental structure of capitalism or any other system at all. It just wants those systems to move slightly fairer.

Here is where the archive backs her up so hard it hurts.

In 1935, this country passed the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act in the same window. That is the founding architecture of the American social safety net and the American labor movement, and it is correctly remembered as one of the most significant expansions of economic security in the history of the republic. It is also correctly remembered, if you actually read it, as a piece of legislation that excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers from old age insurance, from unemployment insurance, and from the right to organize.

Now, who was the agricultural workers. Who was the domestic workers. Ira Katznelson, in When Affirmative Action Was White, does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says roughly sixty five percent of Black workers nationally fell into those two excluded categories, and in the South the share ran higher than that. There is no race in the statute. There is no slur in the statute. The statute is race neutral on its face and it is a racial policy in its effect, and the reason it was written that way is that Southern Democrats controlled the committees and told Roosevelt what the price of their votes was.

That is mystification. That is exactly what hooks meant. The bill says universal. The bill does universal for some. The word “universal” then goes on to do political work for the next ninety years, because every time a Black person says the safety net was not built for us, somebody pulls up the 1935 statute and says look, it applies to everybody.

Apply Melamed here. Melamed’s argument in Represent and Destroy is that formally antiracist and formally inclusive frameworks do not simply fail to stop racial capitalism. They become the thing that makes racial capitalism legible as fair. The 1935 statute is the first great American demonstration. The bill says universal. The economy needs somebody outside the bill picking the crop and cleaning the kitchen. And once the word universal is on the page, the explanation for why that somebody stays poor gets assigned, in advance, to their family, their habits, and their morals, rather than to the committee chairman who wrote the exemption in exchange for his vote.

That is the move underneath all four of hooks’s arguments. Once the state can point to a universal statute, a desegregation ruling, or a diversity officer, it has purchased the right to describe every remaining disparity as a private failure of the people still on the bottom. The inclusion is not a broken promise. The inclusion is the receipt.

That is why hooks would not accept “we’re making progress” as an answer, and that is why she got called difficult.

Argument Two: Liberal Individualism as the Lost in the Sauce Machine

Number two, the OG bell contended that liberal individualism was a flaw. She specifically criticized the ideology of competitive, antagonistic liberal individualism as something I would call lost in the sauce, and I’ll go a step farther and say a lot of y’all are lost in it right now. Hooks argued that it created a shallow common oppression narrative that ignores the differences and the intricacies, and that power and privilege allow a lot of y’all to mystify.

See, OG bell was arguing that this selfish prioritization of the individual undermines the collective solidarity that’s needed for radical change. As a matter of fact, some of y’all heard it. I don’t care what’s happening structurally with my tax dollars, as long as my grandma get her insulin. You feel me? You have to be able to understand how the individual suffering falls into the collective always already, and because they’re able to use your tax dollars to blow them up over there, your granny probably will never get the insulin. You see what I’m saying? You got to have the collective consciousness.

Let me put a whole legal chain under that, because this is the part where people think I’m being dramatic.

Between 1968 and 1971, poor Black women and their lawyers ran one of the most successful litigation campaigns in American history, and almost nobody knows their names.

King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968). Alabama had a substitute father rule. If a caseworker decided a man was in the house, the children lost benefits, and the caseworker got to decide. Mrs. Sylvester Smith sued. The Supreme Court struck the rule down unanimously.

Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969). States were imposing one year residency requirements to keep poor people from moving in. Struck down.

Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970). You cannot terminate somebody’s benefits without a hearing first. Due process attaches to welfare. That case is now in every administrative law casebook in the country.

Individual rights. Individual dignity. Real wins. I am not dismissing a single one of them.

Now watch what happened in the same window.

Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970). Maryland capped the total grant per family regardless of family size, so the sixth child got nothing. The Court upheld it. Rational basis. Economic and social welfare legislation gets the lowest level of scrutiny.

Wyman v. James, 400 U.S. 309 (1971). A caseworker can come into your home. It is not a search under the Fourth Amendment, the Court said, because you can always refuse and just lose your benefits.

You see the shape of it? The rights framework won you the hearing and lost you the money. It won you procedure and lost you substance. The state could not throw you off the rolls without a letter, but the state could set the grant so low that the letter did not matter, and the state could walk through your bedroom while you were on it.

That is what hooks meant when she said liberalism mistakes legal inclusion for liberation. The individual got a right. The class got a ceiling. And because we had been trained to celebrate the individual win, a whole lot of people read that decade as progress and never looked at the ledger.

Just admit it. Two things can be true. Goldberg v. Kelly is a genuine victory and the material position of poor Black mothers got worse across the exact same period. Holding both of those is not cynicism. That is literacy.

Argument Three: Reform That Served White Women First

Number three, bell hooks argued that liberal feminism was inadequate. She understood that it was too focused on reform and that it primarily benefited and privileged white women. She saw it as acceptance within a structure rather than a demand for fundamental change. I would say a lot of y’all want to conserve your individual comfort at the expense of the collective because you worked so hard to get there. See, that’s how capitalism has hoodwinked and bamboozled you into being a self centered, selfish b*****d in many instances, because as long as you got yours, right?

Now, hooks made this argument most famously in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984, where she took apart Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique not by calling Friedan a bad person but by asking a structural question: who did Friedan imagine when she wrote about the problem that has no name. The answer is a college educated housewife who was bored in a house that somebody else was cleaning. Hooks pointed out that the woman doing the cleaning was in the book only as furniture, and that a movement whose central demand is access to the workplace has already assumed a woman who is not in the workplace, which is not most Black women in this country and never has been.

And then the Combahee River Collective put it in writing in April of 1977, and this is the part I need y’all to sit with, because this is one of the great thefts in modern political language.

The Combahee River Collective Statement is where the phrase “identity politics” enters the world. Those were Black feminists, most of them socialists, several of them lesbian, in Boston, and what they meant by identity politics was the opposite of what the phrase means in your feed today. They meant that the people standing at the intersection of every system have the sharpest analysis of all of them, and therefore organizing from that position produces a politics that liberates everybody, because if Black women were free it would require the destruction of all the systems.

That is a maximalist, structural, anticapitalist claim. That is a claim about tearing the whole thing down.

Now it means a hashtag. Now it means a corporate affinity group. Now it means a cable news segment where somebody complains that the left cares too much about identity. Crazy how the phrase went from “the destruction of all systems of oppression” to “a panel at a conference,” and crazy how the people who did that conversion never had to explain themselves.

And notice what hooks is doing there, because it is sharper than a complaint about who got left out. She is saying liberal feminism inherited the measuring stick without ever questioning it. The standard was a heteronormative, property owning, nuclear household, and the demand was simply to be let out of the house it assumed everybody already had. Combahee refused the standard itself, which is the difference between asking for a seat and asking why the table is shaped like that.

Apply Melamed again. That is neoliberal multiculturalism doing exactly what it does. It takes a demand for redistribution, keeps the vocabulary, discards the economics, and hands you back a representation politics that costs the state nothing and pays a consultant something.

Argument Four: The Gaze With a Price Tag on It

Argument number four, and this one got teeth on it, man.

Let me be precise here, because precision is the whole job. In Black Looks, published in 1992, hooks writes two different essays that people constantly collapse into one. “The Oppositional Gaze” is about resistance. It is about Black women spectators who refuse to identify with the image being sold to them and who look back at the screen critically, and that gaze is ours, that gaze is a weapon. The other essay is “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” and that is the one about the market.

“Eating the Other” is the argument I’m making. That specific dynamic happens when capitalism and media team up to look at Black womanhood. It’s not the old school racist gaze of pure hatred or segregation. It is a transactional, market friendly surveillance that offers a cruel bargain: we will let you succeed, but only if we can use your pain as profit, your struggle as content, your frustration as engagement, and never, never, ever can you blame the system.

For hooks, neoliberalism is capitalism on steroids. It’s an economic and cultural system where market logic takes over every aspect of human life. I’m talking privatization, deregulation, and turning everything, including identity, pain, love, and education, into a commodity to be bought, sold, and branded to better the empire.

You know I’m a former debater, so that was the criticism. Now let’s do the alternative, because hooks always had one, and the people who call her a nihilist never got past chapter two.

Hooks’s alternative is a genuinely liberatory politic that requires a revolution of values, rooted in antiracist, anticapitalist, and feminist principles, not merely a reformation of liberal systems. Her politics has been described as socialist, as revolutionary, demanding a fundamental restructuring of society that makes us practice a radical form of love.

And I want to name something, because two things can be true. In May of 2014, on a panel at The New School, hooks used language about Beyoncé that traveled across the internet for a decade and that a lot of people, including a lot of Black women, found harsh and dismissive. Then in May of 2016, hooks wrote “Moving Beyond Pain” about Lemonade, and in that piece she is doing something more careful: she is praising the assertion of Black female subjectivity and simultaneously refusing to accept that a visual album sold inside a capitalist media apparatus can be the site of liberation. You can think she was wrong about the artist. You can think she was right about the apparatus. What you cannot do is pretend she softened her critique of the market when the product got beautiful, because she never did, not once, for anybody, including herself.

Radical Love Ain’t a Feeling, It’s a Budget

I promised you hooks had an alternative, so let’s land there, because I refuse to leave y’all in the diagnosis.

In the year 2000, bell hooks published two books. One was All About Love: New Visions. The other was Where We Stand: Class Matters. Same author, same year, same press house moment.

All About Love became a phenomenon. It has sold in the millions, it gets quoted at weddings, it lives on nightstands and in captions, and it is the reason a whole generation knows her name.

Where We Stand: Class Matters is the book where she says the thing directly. That book argues that class has been the great silence of American life, that the Black middle class has often bought its own comfort with distance from the Black poor, and that no amount of love language means anything if it is not attached to a redistribution of resources.

Y’all bought one of them.

And this is not a gotcha, because the two books are the same argument. That is the point people miss. In All About Love, hooks defines love, following Peck, as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing another’s spiritual growth. Will. Extension. Action. Not feeling. She is explicit that love is not an emotion you have, it is a practice you fund. And if love is a practice you fund, then a budget is a moral document, a block grant is a love letter or it isn’t, and a caretaker exemption that stops at thirteen is a statement about who this country is willing to extend itself for.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in her Black feminist work on mothering and survival, makes the point that Black feminist practice has always understood care as infrastructure rather than sentiment, that the aunties, the othermothers, the church mothers, and the block were a distribution system, and that the reason this country can starve the formal safety net is that it has always quietly relied on Black women’s unwaged labor to catch what falls through.

Apply Gumbs and you get the counterweight the diagnosis needs. The critique is that liberalism gives you the seat and keeps the deed. The alternative is not despair and it is not a better seat. The alternative is that the practice of care has to be organized, funded, and defended as a material demand, the way Tillmon demanded it in 1972 and the way Fannie Lou Hamer demanded it when she bought land in Sunflower County instead of asking for a grant.

Radical love ain’t a feeling. Radical love is a budget, a deed, a co op, a clinic, a bus route, and a line item.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Legal inclusion and material liberation are two different products, and this country has only ever been willing to sell you one of them. The 1935 Social Security Act was universal on its face and excluded roughly sixty five percent of Black workers through the agricultural and domestic categories. No race in the statute. Race all through the result. That is the template, and it has been reused every time since.

2. The rights revolution in welfare law won procedure and lost substance in the same five years. King v. Smith, Shapiro v. Thompson, and Goldberg v. Kelly gave poor Black women hearings, mobility, and due process. Dandridge v. Williams and Wyman v. James gave the state the power to cap the grant and search the home. Celebrate the first set all you want. Just do not confuse it with the second set.

3. “Identity politics” was a socialist, redistributive demand before it was a punchline. The Combahee River Collective coined it in April 1977 to argue that organizing from the position of Black women would require the destruction of all systems of oppression. It got stripped of its economics, kept its vocabulary, and came back as a corporate affinity group. That conversion is the clearest single example of what hooks was describing.

4. Thirty years of TANF is a controlled experiment, and the results are published. In 1996, sixty eight of every one hundred families with children in poverty received cash assistance. In 2023, twenty one did. California is at sixty five. Texas and Arkansas are at two. States sit on about ten billion in unspent funds while spending under one fourth of the money on actual cash assistance.

5. The 2026 rules put a number on who this country considers a child. The Medicaid interim final rule exempts a caretaker of a dependent child thirteen years of age and under. SNAP dropped its dependent child threshold from under eighteen to under fourteen. A fourteen year old cannot legally work, drive, or consent to their own care, but is old enough for the federal government to decide their mother is no longer a caregiver.

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Related Readings (Bibliography)

Primary: bell hooks

* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.

* hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. South End Press, 1984.

* hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.

* hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. South End Press, 1990.

* hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992. See especially “The Oppositional Gaze” and “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.”

* hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

* hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. Henry Holt, 1995.

* hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.

* hooks, bell. Where We Stand: Class Matters. Routledge, 2000.

* hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. Routledge, 2003.

* hooks, bell. “Moving Beyond Pain.” bell hooks Institute, May 2016.

Theory and Political Economy

* Melamed, Jodi. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

* Singh, Nikhil Pal. Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Harvard University Press, 2004.

* Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

* Spence, Lester K. Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics. Punctum Books, 2015.

* Bell, Derrick. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books, 1992.

* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997.

Welfare, Reproduction, and the Safety Net

* Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Pantheon, 1997.

* Nadasen, Premilla. Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States. Routledge, 2005.

* Nadasen, Premilla. Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement. Beacon Press, 2015.

* Hancock, Ange Marie. The Politics of Disgust: The Public Identity of the Welfare Queen. NYU Press, 2004.

* Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White. W. W. Norton, 2005.

* Quadagno, Jill. The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined the War on Poverty. Oxford University Press, 1994.

* Kornbluh, Felicia. The Battle for Welfare Rights. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

* Levin, Josh. The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Little, Brown, 2019.

* Tillmon, Johnnie. “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue.” Ms., Spring 1972.

* Edelman, Peter. “The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done.” The Atlantic, March 1997.

* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” April 1977.

Education

* Givens, Jarvis R. Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Harvard University Press, 2021.

* Woodson, Carter G. The Mis Education of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

* Erickson, Ansley T. Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

* Walker, Vanessa Siddle. Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

* Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

* Fairclough, Adam. A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South. Harvard University Press, 2007.

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Thank you Mandy Ohman, OnyxRose💛🤍💜🖤🏳️‍⚧️, Mary Elizabeth, KATIE FULLER, PhD, Aimee Chamernik, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Every time I put out a video about indigeneity, my comment section fill up with the same energy. All of my aboriginals. All of my we was the real Indian. All of y’all still commenting on that video of me waxing buddy. I see y’all, and I am not here to dunk on you today, because underneath that comment is a real wound and a real question, and the wound is legitimate even when the answer y’all reaching for is not.

The question underneath is this. If everybody else got a homeland, a language, a cosmology, and a set of grandparents who can tell you which village the family come from, then what do the descendants of enslaved Africans got? What is ours? Where did it come from? Who can say it belong to us?

On Wednesday, August 19th, I sat down with Dr. Catherine A. John, who is a professor and the chair of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island, who used to teach at the University of Oklahoma, who let a 21 year old George Lee come into her hip hop class and teach, and who has just published a book with Duke University Press called Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice. It drops August 25th. Rashid Campbell was on the livestream, better known as Perfect Prophet, my debate partner, the first African American to ever win top speaker at the National Debate Tournament. The cover artist Ire Asojo was on the call too. And the last chapter of that book, chapter 4, is called “Enter the Dragons of Debate: Rashid Campbell and George Lee’s 2014 Run.”

So yeah, I got a horse in this race. Let me be transparent about that up front and then let me do what I always do, which is bring the receipts and let the argument stand on its own legs.

Because Dr. John is not answering that comment section question the way most people answer it. Most people answer it with a claim. We was here first. We the real Indians. Dr. John answers it with a mechanism, and a mechanism is worth more than a claim, every single time.

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SAME SHIPS, DIFFERENT STOPS

Dr. John opened with a number, and I want y’all to sit with the number before we get to the theory, because the number is the foundation and most of us walking around with the foundation wrong.

Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto ships in the transatlantic trade between the early 1500s and 1866, about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the Americas. Brazil received somewhere around 4.8 to 4.9 million of them. The Caribbean received somewhere in the range of 4.1 to 4.7 million. Mainland North America, which is to say the place that became these United States, received roughly 388,000 directly. That is less than 4 percent. The Caribbean and South America together took about 95 percent of everybody who arrived.

Read that again. Less than 4 percent.

Now here is the part where Dr. John quoted her elder, Professor Erna Brodber of Woodside, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, and Erna Brodber gave us the line that reorganizes the whole thing. Same ships, different stops.

A vessel leave the coast of what we now call Sierra Leone. It stop in Charleston. It go back. It stop in Galveston. It go back. It stop in Port au Prince. It go back. It stop in Kingston. It go back. It stop in Trinidad. Same hold. Same crew. Same ledger. Different port of sale.

Most of us was raised on a version of Black history where the story starts in Virginia in 1619 and stays there, and everything that happened in Kingston or Salvador or Cap Haïtien is somebody else’s business, some kind of foreign Black story that we watch on a documentary. Dr. John’s whole career, going back to her first book Clear Word and Third Sight, has been an argument against that parochialism. What she calls civilizational similarities sitting underneath cultural differences. The patty in Kingston and the hot water cornbread in Bryan, Texas are not the same food, and they are not unrelated food either. That is the marasa trois again. Neither one, neither two, the third thing.

Crazy how the smallest stop on the route became the loudest voice in the diaspora, and then used that volume to forget the other stops existed.

THE RETENTION FIGHT AND WHY SCHOLARS WALKED AWAY FROM THE WORD

Dr. John said something on that live stream that a lot of y’all scrolled right past. She said scholars don’t like to use the word retentions anymore, because they saying it is much more than just a few retentions.

Let me tell you what she was gesturing at, because this is a hundred year old fight and it is not settled and it is the exact fight that produced the department Northwestern just gutted.

In 1941, Melville Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past. Herskovits was a white Jewish anthropologist trained under Boas at Columbia who did fieldwork in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti, Trinidad, and Brazil, and his thesis was that the myth to be destroyed was the idea that enslavement burned everything African out of Black people in the Americas. He went looking for what he called survivals and retentions. Music, kinship, religion, motor habits, speech patterns.

E. Franklin Frazier, the most prominent Black sociologist alive at the time, went at him. Frazier had just published The Negro Family in the United States, and Frazier’s position was that the Middle Passage and the plantation had in fact been that total, that the Black family and Black culture in America was made in America under American conditions, and that the search for Dahomey in Harlem was a distraction from the political economy of the present. Gunnar Myrdal was skeptical of Herskovits too. Ralph Bunche quoted Myrdal saying Herskovits sees everything in the light of African inheritance. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, on the other hand, praised the effort, which is its own kind of irony given that Herskovits privately dismissed both Woodson and Du Bois as propagandists because their scholarship had a social reform orientation.

Sit with that one. The white anthropologist who built his career proving that Black culture was African called the two Black men who founded the study of Black history propagandists.

Every accusation is a confession.

Then in 1948, with a three year grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Herskovits gathered the Africa related courses Northwestern had been offering since the 1930s into the first interdisciplinary Program of African Studies in the United States. In 1954 the Herskovits Library of African Studies opened, and it is to this day the largest separate Africana collection in the world, over 260,000 bound volumes, 15,000 books in around 300 African languages. In 1957 he founded the African Studies Association and served as its first president. In 1961 Northwestern named him to the first chair of African Studies in the country.

Hold that. We coming back to it.

So why did the field walk away from the word retention? Because retention is an accounting word. Retention implies a fixed original quantity, a percentage lost in transit, and a remainder you can count on the receiving end. Retention treats culture like cargo. It also, and this is the part that matters, positions the scholar as the auditor who tells Black people what percentage of Africa they still own.

Dr. John’s move is to change the verb. Not what did we retain. What did we do. Afroindigenize is a verb before it is a noun. Her formulation on the live stream was that we took what we had inside ourselves, wherever that came from, and used it as the fuel to transform whatever we needed to transform.

That is not an inventory. That is a technology.

THE QUIET WAS NEVER EMPTY

I want to end where the stream started, with the artist, because Ire Asojo said something that is doing more theoretical work than most people caught.

Ire made that cover through copper plate etching, which is iterative by nature, you work through version after version to arrive at an image, and then collaged it with paper made from different fiber and bark that she hand dyed. Dr. John asked her to evoke calm and mystery. Then she added joy.

Ire said joy is not always something that comes naturally in her work, and that when she thought about the passages of the book, she kept noticing how often joy sits in relationship to oppressive systems, so she went looking for the subtle forms of joy that a person can experience daily. Quiet forms of joy. Her imagery pulls from trees, roots, water, and dirt, because the connection between the body and the land is both metaphorical and physical, and because that relationship has been estranged through violence, which raises the question of how reclamation happens through that estrangement rather than around it.

Kevin Quashie wrote a whole book called The Sovereignty of Quiet arguing that Black expressive culture has been read almost exclusively through resistance, so that everything a Black person does gets converted into a public political statement, and that this reading, however sympathetic, leaves no room for an interior life. Quashie’s quiet is not silence and it is not passivity. Quiet is the inner life that is not performing for anybody, including for the people who are rooting for you.

Apply Quashie to the elders of Woodside and it clicks. They did not withhold the mermaid stories as an act of resistance. They withheld them because those stories were not for public display. There is a difference between a secret and a private thing, and the entire discipline of anthropology was built on refusing to learn it.

Apply Quashie to Aretha in that church in 1972 and it clicks again. Nobody in that room was making a statement. They were being restored.

And apply Quashie to the book cover. A mermaid, some roots, some trees, calm, mystery, and a joy so subtle you have to stop scrolling to catch it. That is the argument in image form. The severance was real and the interior was never empty.

Dr. John said the line of the whole stream and I made her say it twice. Our ancestors would never have survived if they saw themselves the way the society wanted them to see themselves.

Three fifths of a human on paper. Muhammad Ali said second class means you driving a Cadillac and first class means you driving a Rolls Royce, and we was way below that. There is no way you survive that if you internalize it as an accurate description of who you are. So they didn’t. They built somewhere else to stand and they put the deed in the music.

And then, as Dr. John put it, when the art comes out, it is expressing the horror and the pain and the beauty at the same time, and people feel that, and they want a piece of it, and they cannot understand how people who had nothing made that. Some of them look at us and say they don’t know what they have.

We know what we have. We have always known what we have. That is exactly why we don’t tell you everything.

See, Clark reminds us that the third term is where the knowledge lives, that neither pure Africa nor pure America will explain us and the pairing itself is the point. Ferguson teaches us that an institution that can fold you in can fold you up, and that the affirmation was always revocable. And Oyěwùmí makes us admit that the category we call mother was doing structural work our inherited vocabulary was never built to see.

Book drops August 25th. Amazon has it, Duke University Press has it, the link is in this post. Go get it, read the chapter, and then we are bringing Dr. John back on for a Socratic conversation about what came up in it, because that is how we do it over here. We support Black authors in Education Is Elevation.

Shout out to y’all for tuning in. Education Is Elevation. I done got hungry. Trying to see if the wife gonna go for a little lunch or something, you know. And I see y’all.

Research over MeSearch.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Less than 4 percent. Of the roughly 10.7 million Africans who survived the Middle Passage, only about 388,000 landed directly in mainland North America. Brazil took around 4.8 million. The Caribbean took around 4.1 to 4.7 million. If your Black history starts and stops at the US border, you are working with 4 percent of the evidence and calling it the whole file.

* Same ships, different stops. Erna Brodber’s phrase is the correct unit of analysis. One vessel hit Charleston, Galveston, Port au Prince, Kingston, and Trinidad on the same circuit. Cultural differences across the diaspora sit on top of what Catherine John calls civilizational similarities, which is why the third thing produced by any two diasporic communities tells you more than either one alone.

* Afroindigenize is a verb. The old question was how much Africa did we retain, which treats culture like cargo and makes the scholar the auditor. The better question is what did we do with what was left, which treats culture like a technology. Cut off from the root does not mean cut off from the capacity to grow one.

* Culture was never decoration, it was infrastructure. Zora Neale Hurston’s functional definition, recovered by John, is that culture means whatever moves the spirit in a way that keeps you alive. The blues, the shout, the sanctified church, hip hop, and two Black debaters rapping in round 8 of the NDT are all the same machine doing the same job.

* They are closing the departments in the same season the book is dropping. UT Austin folded African and African Diaspora Studies into a generic unit. Kentucky suspended Louisville’s Pan African Studies doctorate. Iowa moved to close African American Studies effective July 1, 2026. Northwestern staffed the oldest African studies program in America down to zero this month. The curriculum was never dependent on the department, and that is both the comfort and the indictment.

THE ASK

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

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BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS

The book itself

John, Catherine A. Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026. Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People series. Released August 25, 2026. Cover art by Ire Asojo.

John, Catherine A. Clear Word and Third Sight: Folk Groundings and Diasporic Consciousness in African Caribbean Writing. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

The central frame

Clark, Vèvè A. “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness.” In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, edited by Hortense J. Spillers, 41 to 61. New York: Routledge, 1991. Reprinted in part in Theatre Survey 50, no. 1 (2009).

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987).

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003).

The archive and the retention debate

Herskovits, Melville J. The Myth of the Negro Past. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941.

Frazier, E. Franklin. The Negro Family in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939.

Gershenhorn, Jerry. Melville J. Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Gomez, Michael A. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Stuckey, Sterling. Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Eltis, David, and David Richardson. Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. See also slavevoyages.org for the underlying estimates.

Jamaica, Woodside, and blackspace

Brodber, Erna. Woodside, Pear Tree Grove P.O. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2004.

Brodber, Erna. The Continent of Black Consciousness: On the History of the African Diaspora from Slavery to the Present Day. London: New Beacon, 2003.

Brodber, Erna. Myal. London: New Beacon, 1988.

Stewart, Dianne M. Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Culture as survival technology

Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1935.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938.

Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation, June 23, 1926.

Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012.

The severance and its theorists

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008).

The Black and Native question

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.

Gender, motherhood, and the material ledger

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. What Gender Is Motherhood? Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Stewart, Dianne M. Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage. New York: Seal Press, 2020.

Walker, Alice. “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Ms. magazine, March 1975.

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The Weight of Unfairness: Understanding ADHD Justice Sensitivity Through a Critical Lens

ADHD is correlated with justice sensitivity. We have a hard time getting over something being unjust. We feel things strongly. We have a hard time with emotional regulation. We also absorb information like a fire hose, news, data, you name it. Studies have found that ADHD individuals, especially those who have an intuitive type, are much more likely to be justice sensitive than those without ADHD. In fact, researchers found that people who have ADHD feel such a strong need to restore justice that they will take action to do so even if they hurt themselves in the long run. There may be several possible reasons for this.

As somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD and now I have kids that also have ADHD, I can definitely tell y’all there is something innate about this justice sensitivity because if we feel like you playing with us or playing somebody around us or insulting the antennas of somebody where it’s done in a way it’s unjust, finally, there is a personal experience. Growing up in a world not made for ADHD brains creates many repeated injustices that create a particular sensitivity. Every time you’re misunderstood, it kicks the area of injustice which makes it much more sensitive to any of the injustice that you encounter because you always already do soup because.

Simply put, I’m exploring the intersection of ADHD justice sensitivity with historical context, educational implications, and material impacts, arguing that this trait is not merely a psychological quirk but a deeply rooted response to systemic oppression that deserves serious scholarly attention and practical accommodation.

Historical Context: The Long Shadow of Injustice

To understand the profound justice sensitivity experienced by those with ADHD, we must situate it within a broader historical framework of systemic injustice and the struggle for recognition. The ADHD brain’s heightened response to unfairness does not emerge in a vacuum but interacts with and is shaped by historical patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and resistance.

Historically, the concept of neurodivergence has been pathologized and weaponized against marginalized communities, particularly Black and brown people. The framing of certain behaviors as deviant, disruptive, or deficient has served as a tool of social control, justifying exclusionary practices in education, employment, and community life. This is not a new phenomenon. The history of race, disability, and justice in the United States reveals that what is deemed “normal” or “acceptable” behavior has consistently been defined along racial and class lines.

Consider the ways in which Black children have been disproportionately labeled as having behavioral disorders while their white counterparts receive ADHD diagnoses and accommodations. This disparity reflects a deeper historical pattern where the behaviors of Black children are read as threatening or defiant rather than as symptoms of a neurodevelopmental condition requiring support. The justice sensitivity of the ADHD brain thus becomes not just a reaction to immediate unfairness but a recognition of a historical inheritance of being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and marginalized.

The repeated injustices that those with ADHD face growing up in a world not made for their brains are compounded for those who also navigate racism, classism, and other forms of oppression. Every time you are misunderstood, whether by a teacher who sees your forgetfulness as laziness or a boss who reads your impulsivity as incompetence, you are encountering a system that was not designed for you. This is not simply a personal frustration but a reflection of historical patterns of exclusion and the ongoing struggle for dignity and recognition.

Classrooms as Battlegrounds

For those with ADHD, the classroom is often the first site of repeated injustices, a place where the mismatch between neurodivergent brains and neurotypical expectations becomes painfully clear. Research has consistently shown that students with ADHD experience their classrooms as less just than their peers do. This perception is not merely subjective but reflects real differences in how they are treated, disciplined, and supported.

Students with ADHD are more likely to be disciplined, suspended, and expelled than their neurotypical peers. They are less likely to receive appropriate accommodations, even when legally mandated. Their behaviors are more likely to be interpreted as willful defiance rather than as manifestations of a disability. This creates a cycle of injustice that begins early and compounds over time. When a student is consistently misunderstood, punished for behaviors they cannot control, and denied the support they need, they develop a heightened sensitivity to injustice that is entirely justified by their lived experience.

The educational system’s failure to accommodate ADHD students is not merely an oversight but reflects a deeper ideological commitment to standardization and conformity. Schools are designed for the mythical average student, the one who can sit still, pay attention, and follow rules without question. Those who cannot meet these expectations are labeled as problems to be fixed rather than as individuals with different needs and strengths.

For Black students with ADHD, this injustice is compounded by racism. Research documents how Black students are less likely to be accurately identified with ADHD and more likely to be disciplined for the same behaviors that would earn their white peers a diagnosis and support. This disparity reflects the intersection of ableism and racism, where Black neurodivergent students are doubly marginalized and doubly misunderstood.

The implications for education are profound. If we are serious about educational equity, we must confront the ways in which our educational systems pathologize difference and punish those who do not conform. This requires not just better training for teachers or more inclusive policies but a fundamental rethinking of what we mean by education, success, and belonging. We must recognize that the justice sensitivity of ADHD students is not a pathology to be treated but a reasonable response to an unjust system.

The Intersectional Material Weight of Misunderstanding

Justice sensitivity is not an abstract concept but has concrete, material consequences for those with ADHD, particularly those who navigate multiple marginalized identities. The emotional and cognitive energy expended on processing injustice takes a real toll, affecting mental health, physical well-being, and material outcomes.

Studies have found that the link between ADHD symptoms and mental health challenges is partially mediated by justice sensitivity and rejection sensitivity. In other words, it is not just the symptoms of ADHD themselves that cause distress but the repeated experiences of being misunderstood, rejected, and treated unfairly. This can lead to anxiety, depression, and a sense of hopelessness that compounds the challenges of living with ADHD.

The material impacts extend beyond mental health. People with ADHD are more likely to experience financial instability, unemployment, and housing insecurity. This is not because of any inherent deficiency but because they are navigating systems that were not designed for them. The emotional labor of constantly advocating for oneself, explaining one’s needs, and fighting against misunderstanding is exhausting and takes time and energy that could be spent on more productive pursuits.

For Black people with ADHD, these material impacts are even more severe. They are navigating not just ableism but racism, facing discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare that is compounded by their neurodivergence. They are more likely to be criminalized for their behaviors and to encounter the criminal justice system, where their ADHD traits are read as defiance or threat rather than as symptoms requiring support.

The material weight of misunderstanding is heavy. It is the weight of being told you are lazy when you are struggling to focus. It is the weight of being accused of not caring when you are trying your hardest. It is the weight of being punished for behaviors you cannot control and then being blamed for the punishment. This weight accumulates over time, creating a cumulative burden that shapes life outcomes in profound ways.

Key Takeaways

* Justice sensitivity is a recognized feature of ADHD, with research consistently finding that individuals with ADHD experience higher levels of victim justice sensitivity than those without the condition, a response rooted in lived experience and systemic misunderstanding.

* Repeated experiences of injustice in educational and social settings create a heightened sensitivity to unfairness, with every new instance of being misunderstood reinforcing the neural pathways associated with detecting injustice.

* The classroom is a primary site of injustice for ADHD students, who are more likely to be disciplined, suspended, and expelled while being less likely to receive appropriate accommodations and support.

* Intersecting identities compound the injustice, as Black and brown students with ADHD face the double burden of racism and ableism, being less likely to be accurately diagnosed and more likely to be criminalized for their behaviors.

* Addressing justice sensitivity requires systemic change, not just individual coping strategies, and means fundamentally rethinking educational and social systems to accommodate neurodivergent needs.

Related Readings

* Bondü, R., & Esser, G. (2015). Justice and rejection sensitivity in children and adolescents with ADHD symptoms. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 24(2), 185-198.

* Schäfer, T., et al. (2012). The kind nature behind the unsocial semblance: ADHD and justice sensitivity. Journal of Attention Disorders.

* CHADD. (2024). ADHD, Health, Education, and Wealth: A Racial Justice Approach. CHADD Black History Month.

* Portillo, N. L. (2026). Experiences of Marginalization at the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, and Disability in Higher Education. Montclair State University Digital Commons.

* Liberty University. (2026). Lessons From the Least: Healing-Centered Discipline Reform for Neurodivergent Youth. Research Week.

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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.

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The way we talk about data and technology as being an open frontier is still justifying abstraction of Native humanity and Native land the same way it did when it was an actual idea of a land frontier. And in most instances, there is no such thing. It is always a myth.

The frontier was never a description of empty land. The frontier was a legal finding. In 1823, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice Marshall imported the doctrine of discovery into American property law and held that Native nations held only a right of occupancy, while ultimate title vested in the discovering sovereign. That is a court deciding, on paper, that people standing on land are not in the way of ownership because they were never owners. Terra nullius is not a geographic observation. Terra nullius is a filing status.

So when somebody tells you today that a piece of land is available, ask them what document made it available. Watch how the same trick runs in 2026, in four different agencies, in four different states, in the same calendar year.

Exhibit one. In the Black Hills, at Pe’ Sla, a high meadow that Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people describe as the heart of everything that is, a company moved to drill for graphite. Graphite is a critical mineral. Critical minerals go into the batteries and the chips and the cooling infrastructure that make the AI buildout physically possible. In 2016 the United States put more than two thousand acres of that area into trust for four tribes. In 2024 the federal government agreed to protect a two mile radius around a portion of it. And in February 2026 the Forest Service allowed exploration anyway, using a categorical exclusion, which is the administrative device that says a project is too small to require environmental review or public comment.

A categorical exclusion is terra nullius with a form number.

In late April 2026 the drilling started, and Oglala Lakota youth locked their bodies to the equipment, and the Oglala Lakota Nation Youth Council said, this is not a protest, it is the protection of our spiritual center. In May a federal district court in South Dakota ordered the company to stop, because the Forest Service had unlawfully excluded the project from environmental review and from tribal input. They won. And the reason they had to win in court instead of never being in that position is that almost all hardrock mining on public land in this country is still governed by the General Mining Act of 1872. Eighteen seventy two. Ulysses S. Grant was president. Under that statute a person can stake a claim on public land for a small fee and begin work.

Exhibit two. In Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, near McAlester, an Australian company called IREN has been advancing Project Emerald, a proposed 1.2 gigawatt campus on roughly two thousand acres along Highway 69 south of Kiowa, with a figure of fifty billion dollars attached to it. In April 2026 a county review committee formally recommended tax increment finance districts tied to it. Taylor’s point about that area is the one that matters most: the land in question sits where municipal protections do not reach, so it defaults to state regulation, and the state regulation is thin to nonexistent. Her organization found that the rural water district the project would draw from was not even notified in advance.

Exhibit three. Statewide, data centers in Oklahoma do not need a water permit. The director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board said it directly, that if a data center wants to purchase water, it can do that, and it does not get a permit. There is no official count of how many are operating in the state. A development advisory firm lists fifty five facilities. None of them have applied for a water permit, because they buy from municipal or rural systems as a customer, which means the state’s own tracking of its own water has a hole in it exactly the size of the industry that is arriving. This is in a state coming off years of drought, where wheat farmers just took the worst harvest in decades.

Exhibit four. The five year ad valorem exemption for manufacturers, which Oklahoma voters approved in 1985, before the commercial internet existed, now covers data centers. A definition written for factories in the Reagan administration became the door.

Four agencies. Four states of the paperwork. Same finding every time: this land is available, because our file says so.

Apply Voyles here.

Traci Brynne Voyles studied uranium mining in Navajo country and gave us the word wastelanding. Her argument is not simply that certain places get polluted more than others. Her argument is that a place has to be rendered as waste in the mind and in the record before it can be treated as waste in practice. The wasteland is produced. It is produced through law, through survey, through economic description, through the quiet consensus that nothing of value is there and nobody of value lives there. Pollution follows the category. The category comes first.

Which means the fight over a data center is never actually a fight about a building. It is a fight about a description. And the description is written years before the concrete gets poured.

They Over Police You Into a Discount

They justify taking over a community for a data center by devaluing the community, and they might do that based off of showing you arrest data. And you know how we going to do it? We going to over police the community to justify over criminalizing the community. And then we can say, hey, listen, developers, this piece of s**t land right here ain’t worth much, it’s a bunch of degenerates, take that s**t.

That is wastelanding described by somebody who watched it happen to his own people, without the citation, before the citation. That is the whole apparatus in five sentences. Arrest data is not a measurement of a community. Arrest data is a product of a deployment decision. Where you send officers determines where you find offenses, and the record of offenses then becomes the appraisal, and the appraisal becomes the sale.

So look at what the record says about Oklahoma. Black people make up roughly eight percent of Oklahoma’s population and Black women make up roughly twenty percent of the state’s incarcerated women. Native people make up roughly nine percent of the state population and Native women make up roughly thirteen percent of the women’s prison population, imprisoned at about three times the rate of white women, the highest imprisonment rate of any group of women in the state. Roughly two thirds of the women in Oklahoma prisons are mothers.

When I was living in Oklahoma I was part of campaigns to bond women out for Mother’s Day and to get incarcerated mothers presents for their kids at Christmas. The women were Black and Native, and some poor white women too, shout out to y’all, you was in there. But the overrepresentation was Black and Native, in a state where we ain’t even the population.

That is the ledger the developer reads. And nobody has to write a memo saying so. The devaluation is already sitting in a public database.

Then comes the surveillance layer, which Taylor connected to the same fight, and this is where a lot of folks lose the thread. There is a campaign in Oklahoma City to deflock the city. Flock is a company that deploys automated license plate reader cameras as a policing tool, which in practice is continuous surveillance of an entire population’s movement. Norman rejected a Flock contract after residents pushed back on privacy grounds. Moore has it. Oklahoma City has it.

Look at the demographic map of those three places and then ask the obvious question. Norman skews whiter. The places that kept the cameras get darker. Why do they get to have more surveillance? Y’all catch that.

Simone Browne is the scholar for this. Browne traces surveillance in the United States back through slave passes, lantern laws, and the branded body, and argues that Blackness has functioned as a kind of prototype, that the technologies get developed and refined on the people society has already decided are legitimate to watch, and then those technologies get generalized outward to everybody. Apply Browne here and the data center stops being adjacent to the surveillance question and becomes its infrastructure. They are building surveillance and perfecting surveillance based off of surveilling particular communities, communities that are already policed, already disenfranchised, already getting messed over politically and socially and economically.

And here is where Taylor’s friend Ash gets quoted, and it is the cleanest formulation in the whole transcript. When something is free, you are the product.

Two things can be true. The data center takes your water and your power and your land, and the data center sells your movement back to you as a public safety service. It is extractive in multiple ways. It is not just pollution, it is extraction, and then it is sold back to you in the form of data.

Taylor’s organization has a name for the full circuit. They call it the death cycle of AI.

Settler Colonial Legal Trickery

In July 2020 the Supreme Court decided McGirt v. Oklahoma. Justice Gorsuch, writing for a five to four majority, held that Congress never properly disestablished the Muscogee reservation, and the reasoning extended to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole reservations as well. Roughly half the land area of the state of Oklahoma was confirmed to still be Indian country. The state predicted the apocalypse. The governor claimed tens of thousands of cases would go unprosecuted.

Two years later, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a five to four majority written by Justice Kavanaugh held that states retain concurrent criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by non Indians against Indians in Indian country. McGirt was not overturned. McGirt was narrowed. Gorsuch dissented in terms that are worth reading in full sometime.

Here is what I need you to see about that pair of cases. McGirt confirmed the boundary. Castro-Huerta reopened the state’s hand inside the boundary. And neither case gave anybody back an acre.

In early August 2026, the Cherokee Nation, the largest tribal nation by enrollment in the United States, announced a ban on hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust land, following a months long task force study that found sixty four percent of surveyed citizens opposed. Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said the Nation’s primary responsibility is protecting citizens from these threats, and added that the Nation will not support hyperscale projects anywhere on the reservation without proper consultation.

That is a real win. Take the win.

Now here’s the settler colonial trickery. The Cherokee Nation reservation covers about seven thousand square miles, roughly 4.4 million acres. The Nation’s own real estate office reports oversight of about 46,000 acres of restricted land, more than 62,000 acres of trust land, and more than 5,100 acres of tribal fee land. Add it up. The ban has full legal force over something in the neighborhood of one hundred thirteen thousand acres out of four point four million.

That is under THREE percent.

The Nation said it plainly in its own report: it has limited influence over development on non tribal land inside the reservation, and full authority on trust and tribally owned land. And there are already at least two data centers under development inside that reservation.

Why? Allotment. That is why. The Dawes machinery cut the land base into a checkerboard more than a century ago, and every parcel that passed out of Native hands stayed out. So when McGirt confirmed that the reservation was never disestablished, what got confirmed was jurisdiction over a boundary, not ownership inside it. The sovereignty is real. The footprint is Swiss cheese, and the holes were cut in 1887.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The frontier is a filing status, not a place. From Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823 to a Forest Service categorical exclusion in February 2026, land does not become available by being empty, it becomes available when a document declares that whoever is standing on it does not count as an owner. Ask who wrote the document.

* A moratorium is a ceasefire and a ban is a decision. Oklahoma City passed an emergency moratorium on April 21, 2026 and gutted it with exemptions on May 19 by a seven to two vote after industry supporters packed the chambers. The Seminole Nation voted 24 to 0 for an indefinite ban and has not moved. Pauses get lifted. Decisions have to be reversed in public.

* Devaluation comes before dispossession, and policing is how it gets documented. Over policing produces arrest data, arrest data becomes the community’s reputation, and the reputation becomes the appraisal a developer quotes. Oklahoma incarcerates Native women at roughly three times the rate of white women, and Black women make up about twenty percent of the state’s incarcerated women from about eight percent of the population.

* McGirt confirmed a boundary, not a land base. The Cherokee Nation’s August 2026 hyperscale ban has full force over roughly 113,000 acres of a 4.4 million acre reservation, because allotment cut the land into a checkerboard in 1887 and every parcel that left Native hands stayed gone. Sovereignty without title is jurisdiction over other people’s property.

* Oklahoma’s school funding is on the ballot August 25 and it is a data center question. State Question 844 would end the constitutional requirement that the state reimburse schools and counties for the five year manufacturing property tax exemption that data centers now claim. The state paid about $88.6 million in reimbursements last fiscal year, Pryor Public Schools alone received $24 million, and Mayes County received about $35.6 million in 2026.

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 around Blackness.

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)

Settler colonialism, land, and extraction

* Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

* Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 2006.

* Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

* Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline. Verso, 2019.

* Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Indigenous Climate Change Studies: Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” English Language Notes, 2017.

* Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.

* Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization, 2012.

* LaDuke, Winona. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. South End Press, 1999.

* Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. University of California Press, 2005.

* Chang, David A. The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832 to 1929. UNC Press, 2010.

* Krauthamer, Barbara. Black Slaves, Indian Masters. UNC Press, 2013.

* Roberts, Alaina E. I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

* Grinde, Donald, and Quintard Taylor, on Black and Native relations in Indian Territory.

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