Education is Elevation

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Freedom Colonies, the Other Million, and the State That Keeps Telling Us What We Saw

Education Is Elevation, y’all. This conversation went live on October 7, 2026, and I was not about to sit in front of a camera on October 7 and act like I didn’t know what day it was, so before Stacey Allen and I got into Texas freedom colonies, we started where the day told us to start. Three years ago the world changed, and the people in power, a lot of them with deep Zionist and Israeli ties, have been dictating the narrative of who gets to be the victim and who gets cast as the perpetrator for a very long time, going all the way back to Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, an atheist, deciding in the late 1800s that he wanted a homeland for the Jewish people. You cannot go back to Bible times talking about a project that started in the late 1800s.

Most of y’all have been trained to watch that region through one lens. Muslim Arabs, in the American imagination, are either crazy poor terrorists or rich oil tycoons sitting on gold, and terrorism over there always comes with a justification attached. Crazy how the year 2023 was already, before October 7 ever happened, the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, so declared by the United Nations by that August, when the count had already passed the entire previous year’s toll. Then October 7 happened and the story got rewritten so that everything before it disappeared, and Israel became, again, the habitual victim, and everything after it became justified.

Here is the part I need y’all to sit with, because it’s the thread that ties this whole essay together. When a Black person gets murdered on camera, they tell us we are not competent enough to understand what we have seen. We saw Mike Brown. We saw it. in 4k, we saw it. They still tell us, “hey, we’re going to do an investigation and tell you what you saw.” That same insult to my intelligence is what I watched the Western world do for three years: you saw thirteen year olds and five year olds blown up, but you didn’t really see it, so we’re going to do an investigation and tell you there was a tunnel under them tents, a tunnel under that hospital. I seen footage of an IDF soldier handing his phone to another soldier, saying watch this, during prayer time, and throwing a grenade into a mosque. You hear them chanting, then you hear the bomb, then you don’t hear the chanting no more. That ain’t theory. I ain’t got to read about that. I seen it in 4K.

I remember being thirteen, fourteen, fifteen in the hood and police officers not seeing me as a thirteen year old, and if they did, they saw a super predator, somebody the gangs and the drugs had already claimed. Hillary Clinton gave that gaze a name. So when I watch Palestinian children get treated as future combatants, it resonates in my body before it resonates in my books. Huey P. Newton told us to think globally. October 7 took my theoretical understanding of the global world and made it physical.

Stacey brought the receipts from the other direction. She read Ta Nehisi Coates’ The Message, where he ties what he saw in Palestine back to the American South, and she named what too many of us skip: people across the world learned how to do apartheid by studying the South. Then the historian James Q. Whitman spelled it out in Hitler’s American Model, documenting how Nazi lawyers studied American race law, Jim Crow included, while drafting their own. We give too much credit to Hitler as the architect. America was the textbook. America just keeps casting itself as the benevolent, neutral, objective actor who had some bad things happen in the past and should only be judged by how it aspires to be.

That is the October 7 lesson, and it is also the Texas lesson. Somebody with power keeps doing an investigation and telling us what we saw. In Gaza it is a tunnel. In Texas it is a map.

Is Texas Even the South?

Somebody is always going to come in the comments and say Texas ain’t the South. Texas is cowboys. Texas is the West. Texas is cattle drives and Lubbock and El Paso. Stacey answered it better than I could have, so let me hand it to her: in her opinion, anywhere there was slavery in Texas is East Texas.

Just admit that line does more work than a whole semester of seventh grade Texas history. Then go to Imani Perry, because her book South to America is built on one stubborn claim, that the South is not the nation’s embarrassing exception but the place where the nation’s real character is stored, and that the rest of the country has a habit of pretending the South is somewhere else so it doesn’t have to look at itself. Apply Perry here. Texas does to its own East exactly what America does to the South. It sells the Wild West on the postcard so it doesn’t have to print the plantation. This means everybody who insists Texas ain’t Southern is not making a geography claim. They are making an alibi.

If you acknowledge that Juneteenth is home in Texas, you have to acknowledge why. General Gordon Granger of the Union chose the Southern stronghold of Texas to announce, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, that the enslaved were free. You don’t send the Union Army to Galveston to read emancipation out loud to cowboys. You send it to a slave state that held on longest.

Texas is the South meeting the Wild West meeting the Plains meeting the Bayou. I’m with that. Then look at what the “Remember the Alamo” story is built to hide. In 1829 Mexico abolished slavery under President Vicente Guerrero, and Anglo settlers in Texas got an exemption and kept calling the people they enslaved “servants.” As long as y’all kept y’all slaves in the East, Mexico let it slide. Then the settlers started pushing further west toward Austin and San Antonio with a complete disregard for Mexican law, and that is where the conflict comes from.

Here is the receipt the textbook never prints. In August 1831, Juan Davis Bradburn, the commander of the Mexican garrison at Anahuac on Galveston Bay, gave asylum to men who had escaped slavery in Louisiana and refused to return them, because under Mexican law they had reached free soil. The enslaver hired a young lawyer named William Barret Travis to get them back. Travis sent a hoax warning that a hundred armed men were coming from Louisiana to take the runaways by force. Bradburn arrested him. Settlers marched on Anahuac to free Travis. That same Travis is the man they put on the wall at the Alamo. Historians argue over whether Anahuac counts as the start of the Revolution, but nobody can argue it away: one of the earliest armed confrontations between Anglo Texans and the Mexican state was about a Mexican officer refusing to send Black people back into slavery.

I would have seen Stephen F. Austin, the so called Father of Texas, in a completely different light in seventh grade if somebody had told me that. The same Mexican government he thought was cool when it was handing out land and incentives became tyranny the second it said, hey, you’re doing too much and you’re bastardizing our law. Austin’s Old 300 came with their property, and property meant people. Stacey shared her own family’s story on air, from the Gibson side: some of her ancestors were among the enslaved people brought to Texas in that era, made to walk from Mississippi to Texas in neck chains. They made sure that story got passed down. We see those images in textbooks and can’t contextualize them into real people. Stacey’s family can.

So when they teach your child that the Texas Revolution was about freedom, ask the question Part 1 asked: freedom from what, and from whom. The Republic of Texas wrote slavery into its 1836 Constitution. Every accusation is a confession.

557 Ways to Say We Can Work Together

Let me give y’all the working definition, the clean version I fumbled live. Freedom colonies are historic, intentional communities founded by formerly enslaved Black people in Texas between 1865 and 1930, through Reconstruction and Jim Crow. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, founded in 2014 by Dr. Andrea Roberts, has recorded 557 known place names and mapped more than 350 of them. Most sit in the eastern half of the state. Dr. Roberts started that work at Texas A&M and is now at the University of Virginia, and her book Never Sell the Land: Freedom Colonies, Black Storytelling, and Keeping Home is listed from the University of Texas Press for 2027.

Now hear me. Every time somebody tells you Black people can’t progress because we can’t work together, that we’re going to fight each other, kill each other, not get along, hold that next to the number 557. Five hundred fifty seven times, people coming out of enslavement with little to no formal education built functioning, autonomous places. Not every one was a town with a municipal government, which is exactly why Stacey prefers the word colony; a lot of them are marked by three anchors instead: a church, a school, and a cemetery. Black people coming out of slavery prioritized a place to worship, a place to learn, and a place to bury their dead with dignity. That is not a people who can’t work together. That is a people who were organizing before the ink dried.

White supremacy got us believing in dependency, got us believing the only way Black folks can coexist is with a peacekeeper, and that peacekeeper is supposed to be white. Most of the law follows that same logic, which is why groups of Black people get criminalized just for being groups. Too many of us in one place is a threat. The freedom colonies are the archive that proves the threat was never violence. The threat was autonomy.

These were not just a Texas thing. Freedmen’s settlements went up across the South. If you watched Sinners, the twins point toward Mound Bayou, the all Black town in the Mississippi Delta founded in 1887, as the place where the good Black folks went. Oklahoma had its incorporated Black towns too, Boley the most famous among them, and when I did a Greenwood homecoming in Tulsa I started connecting those dots. Black Wall Street was never a one time miracle. It was one node in a network. I would argue Black autonomy and Black independence belong in the canon of the Black radical tradition, right next to the organizing and the theory, because building a town out of the land nobody wanted is theory with a deed attached.

Then Stacey taught me a word I needed: homecoming. Not the HBCU kind. Every year around this time I get sad I didn’t go to an HBCU, because they turn it all the way up. This kind is older. Rural churches still hold homecomings and graveyard cleanings, and the descendants come back, people whose grandparents lived there, people whose family members are buried in the cemetery next to the church, which often used to be the school too. Stacey called it family reunion plus, because it is not just one bloodline coming home. It is a whole community coming back to a shared history. Her husband and children recently went home to Shankleville, the colony founded by Jim and Winnie Shankle, the love story Part 1 told in full, and the homecoming is still running.

Millican Was Not a Riot

I’m in the middle of making a family reunion video right now, and the research put me in Millican, Texas, about fifteen miles south of the Texas A&M campus, in the southern edge of Brazos County. My family had land there. My family is out of the Wixon Valley and Millican area, and the way I said it on air, we used to have about 200 acres and now we have 87. When I started talking to my own family members about what happened in Millican, a lot of them had never heard it.

Here is what happened. In 1868 Millican was the big town in the area, the end of the railroad line before the Civil War, with a large share of freedmen and freedwomen living there, many of them having come looking for relatives after emancipation. From July 15 to 17, 1868, white mob violence killed or drove away as many as 300 Black people in what some scholars call the worst racial violence in Texas during Reconstruction. At the center was Pastor George Brooks, a Methodist minister and a veteran of the United States Colored Troops, who had been registering freedmen to vote and encouraging Black residents to run for office. When the Klan came, Brooks organized community defense, set perimeters to protect the women and children, even put out scouts. He was murded. The Galveston wire in 1868 called it a riot led by a “negro preacher.” Professor Amy Earhart at Texas A&M, who leads the Millican Massacre digital project, has argued you can make the case it was designed to end Black voting in that part of Texas. That’s the difference between a riot and a massacre. A riot is an accident of crowds. A massacre is a policy.

Kidada E. Williams’ I Saw Death Coming is the book you read next to Millican, because she tells Reconstruction terror from inside the house: the knock, the night riders, the family deciding whether to stay or run, the land left behind. Apply Williams here. When the history books skip from emancipation straight to Martin Luther King, they are skipping the Brooks family, the Millican families, and the moment Black political power in Brazos County was met with guns. In Texas, the people who control the curriculum read Reconstruction as Northern aggression, a federal assault on states’ rights by a government making sure Southerners weren’t too mad they lost their property. All that Black progress gets cast as dialectically opposed to Texas heritage. Of course they don’t teach it. It would wreck the social order the curriculum exists to protect.

The land is the other half of this. By 1910 Black farmers owned somewhere around 16 to 19 million acres across the country, the peak of Black land ownership in America, and by 1997 roughly 90 percent of it was gone, through heirs’ property sales, discriminatory USDA lending, foreclosure, and plain theft. My family going from 200 acres to 87 is not a family failure. It is a national pattern with my last name on it. The thing Dr. Roberts named her book after, never sell the land, is not a sentimental phrase. It is a strategy that our grandparents understood before economists did.

Then look at how the place is policed now. Where I’m from, the east side of Bryan, across the tracks, used to get called the Bottoms, or Freedmantown. Since the beginning of law enforcement in Bryan College Station, policing Black bodies has been a core function. In Bryan, if Black folks get into a fight, the whole venue gets shut down, and a hip hop event, and they won’t say Black, they say hip hop, gets told to bring extra security and extra insurance until it can’t afford to exist. The same weekend I recorded this, the streamer BenDaDonnn, a Black dude who runs with Drake and them, got tased and arrested in Northgate outside a bar near Texas A&M after the Aggies game. Police say they were clearing people from the roadway and charged him with evading arrest. You can debate the clip. What you can’t debate is which neighborhoods have been policed like a threat since the 1860s and which ones get treated like a college town having a good time. Two things can be true: a person can be responsible for his own choices, and a place can still have a policing tradition older than the person.

The Other Million

Stacey dropped a stat I need every Texas politician to tattoo on their forearm. Texas has the largest Black population of any state in the country, somewhere between 3.4 and 4 million people depending on how the Census counts us. Most of us live in the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metros, roughly two thirds. Then ask the question she asked: where is that other million?

That other million is me. I’m a country Black, a proud son of Bryan, Texas, with family in Hearne, Texas and Dallas. Growing up, when we went to the track meet or the basketball tournament, it was always, oh, you from the little country town. You’re not from Houston. You’re not from Austin. You’re not from Dallas. Rural Black folks get skipped when people think about Black people at all.

That skipping is not an accident of taste. It is vocabulary. In the late 90s and early 2000s, the era of neoliberalism, they started using code. Instead of saying Black, you say urban. Stacey called it the grant language, and that’s perfect, because grant language is how pain gets sold, how it gets told, how it becomes a commodity. Urban, underprivileged, at risk. When Black equals urban, people literally can’t locate us on the lexicon when we start talking about growing up country. Perry would recognize the move instantly: America invents a South it can stand outside of, and then it invents a Black America that only lives in cities, so the rural Black South disappears twice.

Stacey drives all over this state, Houston to Austin, Houston to Nacogdoches, Houston to Dallas, and she said something every organizer needs to hear. The political signs you see on the major freeways read like intimidation. Then you get up in the neighborhoods and the signs change. Rural Black people have their own politic. They’re just not paying for a billboard on 45. There are Black mayors in small Texas towns most of y’all have never heard of. That’s not an absence of power. That is power the maps don’t count.

It matters because small towns and country municipalities lean harder on state and federal money than Houston or Dallas ever will, which means a governor, a lieutenant governor, a U.S. Senate seat, and a State Board of Education seat hit the other million first. Stacey asked the question that turns this whole essay into homework: those of us registered in big metros, how do we leverage that growing political power for preservation and land retention back home where our grandparents’ freedom colonies are? I don’t have the full answer. I know it starts with voting like the other million is watching.

Don’t Start That Muslim S**t

Stacey said something on October 7 that I want the whole internet to hear. She’s Christian, raised in a Christian household, and she still said a certain group of Black folks educated in revolutionary thought see themselves in Palestinians, partly because of our relationship with Islam through the Nation of Islam. She knows the Nation is not the same as Sunni or Shia Islam. She also knows what the Nation’s discipline did for our communities, and that her household always held deep reverence for Malcolm X. Malcolm and Muhammad Ali were so unapologetic, y’all got me messed up, I believe in the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, I am a Muslim and I will not be disrespected, that they forced a lot of Black people to see Islam through a different lens. There was a lot of intentionality behind demonizing Islam among us precisely because of how much influence Malcolm had.

Here is what my degree in African and African American Studies taught me. America’s first sustained encounter with Islam was not 9/11 and it was not oil. It was the enslaved. Sylviane Diouf’s Servants of Allah documents African Muslims enslaved across the Americas, many of them literate in Arabic, keeping prayer times, fasting, writing. Apply Diouf here. A literate, disciplined, praying person is a threat to captivity, so Muslim discipline got read as danger on the plantation long before it got read as terrorism on the news. The Roots remake catches that texture, the overseer energy of don’t start that Muslim s**t. Then you see the syncretism all over the South, in New Orleans, in the freedom colonies, in Black Christianity carrying the remnants of older practices, hoodoo, conjure, the time of day you pray, which way you face. Those are remnants of our native land.

Now watch Texas, a month before this conversation. On September 4, 2026, the State Board of Education gave final approval to new high school social studies standards that require students to study early Islam through the Prophet Muhammad’s “brutal military campaigns,” the “normalization of slavery,” and female captives taken as “harem slaves,” and that tie the 9/11 attacks to “radical Islam.” A last minute amendment to strike the word brutal failed. One Republican board member, Will Hickman, noted out loud that they had not called any other wars brutal. The same rewrite cycle identifies 1948 as the year Israel was established in “the ancestral homeland of the Jews.”

Just admit what that is. A state whose Revolution was fought in part to protect slavery, whose Republic wrote slavery into its founding constitution, whose board in June 2026 cut lessons on slave revolts and pulled back on Jim Crow, has decided that the religion that needs to be taught through the normalization of slavery is Islam. Every accusation is a confession. They will tell your Black child that Muhammad normalized slavery and then refuse to tell that same child that William Barret Travis tried to drag escaped Black men back into it. That is not history. That is projection with a TEKS number.

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Self Taught in a State That Unteaches

Literally, I had a teacher tell me we should be grateful slavery happened, because if it hadn’t, we’d be in Africa dealing with famine. They used the Save the Children style commercials of starving Ethiopians and told us that could have been us. Then you grow up and learn Ethiopia was one of the fastest growing economies on the continent in the 2010s and that the image of a permanently hungry Africa was a curriculum decision. Spoon fed. Propaganda, as Stacey said, politically, socially, economically, historically, and contemporarily, all designed so Black children see ourselves as inherently inferior.

Heather Andrea Williams wrote the book that answers that teacher. Self Taught shows how enslaved people stole literacy in defiance of the law and how, the minute freedom came, freedpeople built schools themselves, paid teachers out of their own pockets, and treated education as part of freedom rather than a gift from it. Apply Williams here. That is why a school is one of the three anchors of a freedom colony. People who had been punished for reading built the schoolhouse before a lot of them built the house.

Now hold that next to what the Texas State Board of Education did in 2026. In June the board adopted new K through 8 standards and, according to reporting from the time, cut lessons on slave revolts, pulled back in depth discussion of Jim Crow segregation, and removed language acknowledging that African Americans were enslaved because of the color of their skin and that Southern states seceded to preserve slavery. Proposals reported in June also dropped the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 from a seventh grade civil rights unit. On air I said there is not one Black person in seventh grade Texas history; treat that as my read of the classroom experience, and check the final adopted text, because the standards are the receipt. The point stands either way: the people who built 557 towns are not the people the seventh grade is built around.

Dr. Tiffany Clark of DeSoto, a Black Democrat on the board, said out loud during the April debate that when it comes to Black and brown information, the board keeps undermining our experiences, and a Republican colleague moved to cut her off. Staci Childs of Houston fought those same fights and has since vacated her seat to run for Texas House District 131, where she is the Democratic nominee. Governor Abbott filled her seat with a Republican appointee through the end of the year, temporarily making the board 11 to 4. Democrat Coretta Mallet Fontenot is on the November ballot for that District 4 seat. Shout out to both of them for fighting for their lives in those meetings. It never was enough. Could you imagine it being less? That is the dichotomy we’re in.

Then there is the route nobody teaches. Stacey said it plainly: we don’t learn about the underground railroad to Mexico. Alice Baumgartner’s South to Freedom documents thousands of enslaved people escaping south across the Rio Grande because Mexico had abolished slavery, and how that southern route fed the very slaveholder panic that helped drive Texas toward revolution and the nation toward war. Apply Baumgartner here. The seventh grade Texas history that skips the southern underground railroad is not just leaving out a heartwarming story. It is hiding its own motive. Freedom was to the south, and Texas was built to block the road.

So when somebody asks what Palestine and Israel have to do with us, tell them to read the TEKS. The same board that made 1948 a required anchor is the board that decided our enslaved ancestors running to Mexico was optional. Tell that to your legislators. Tell that to the policymakers who take millions from AIPAC.

Family Reunion Plus

Every Labor Day weekend my family has a reunion. Stacey’s family goes back to Panola County, and she learned that 1100, where her grandparents grew up, is a freedom colony too. Both of us learned the most important parts of our history the same way: somebody, usually a woman, at a reunion or a homecoming, telling it.

Elsa Barkley Brown is the scholar for this, and she changed how historians read Reconstruction. Studying freedpeople in Richmond, she showed that Black women, who could not vote, still participated in politics collectively: they packed the galleries at conventions, attended mass meetings, and treated the vote as a community possession that the men cast on the household’s behalf. Their public sphere was the church, the mass meeting, and the community gathering, not the ballot box alone. Apply Barkley Brown here. A homecoming is not a picnic. It is that public sphere still running. The graveyard cleaning is governance. Who keeps the cemetery deed, who knows which plot belongs to which family, who knows the cousin in California whose name is still on the heirs’ property, who tells the children the chain story, is a political office. It’s mostly been held by Black women, and it has never shown up on a ballot.

That is why the land question is a gender question. Heirs’ property, the land passed down without a clear will, is the number one engine of Black land loss, and the people most often holding the family together while that land is under pressure are the aunties and grandmothers keeping the taxes paid and the reunions on the calendar. When the state cuts the history and the county sells the parcel for back taxes, it is not hitting an abstraction. It is hitting her ledger.

It’s also why the violence was always aimed at the household. Pastor Brooks’ first move in Millican was to set perimeters around the women and children. Kidada Williams shows that Reconstruction terror came through the front door and into the bedroom, that night riders targeted homes, wives, and daughters as a way to break Black political power. The massacre and the curriculum cut are two tools aimed at the same target: the Black household’s ability to remember itself.

Stacey embodies the answer. She is the founder and artistic director of Nia’s Daughters Movement Collective, a professional Houston dance company focused on Black history, a dance professor, an author, and on air she shared that she wrote a chapter called “Dancing Beyond Aesthetics” in the Oxford Handbook of Ballet Pedagogy, about the duty of artists and educators to embed cultural history back into the work. Her papa moved to California to work on the railroads after being called a nigger in East Texas, then moved back home. That’s the Great Migration in one sentence, and she learned it at the reunion. A majority of Black Californians trace roots to Texas and Louisiana, she said, and that migration runs through the same families whose freedom colonies emptied out. She carried the story out of the reunion and onto a stage.

Blood Memories Ain’t Nostalgia

Alvin Ailey was born in Rogers, Texas, in 1931 and grew up partly in Navasota, right down the road from where I was raised. His most famous piece, Revelations, came out of what he called blood memories of the Black church in Texas. Thomas DeFrantz, in Dancing Revelations, reads Ailey’s work as Black Southern memory stored in the body and performed for the world. Apply DeFrantz here. Blood memory is not looking backward. It is a technology for carrying the past forward intact when the textbook won’t.

That is what Stacey’s show does. The Fairytale Project is historical fiction built on the love story of Jim and Winnie Shankle, the story her father in law told her before he passed. It premiered in 2022, and her company has taken it to small towns, to Crockett, to Kyle. The best compliment she gets, she said, is when somebody finds her later and tells her they went and looked up their family history. Some have done their genealogy. Some have put their land in trust. Some have started taking actionable steps to repair some of the loss. That is the counterweight to everything above. The state can cut the TEKS, but it cannot cut what happens when a grandmother in the audience leans over and says, that’s us.

Black optimism is not pretending the archive is safe. It is knowing the archive has always lived in more places than the state controls: the cemetery, the reunion, the church fan with the funeral home on the back, the dance floor.

The Vote Is the Homecoming

October 7 is today. Early voting in Texas runs October 19 through October 30, and Election Day is November 3. Do not wait. If you don’t want to be preyed on, if you don’t want to be intimidated, if you don’t want masked federal agents breathing down your neck at a polling place, vote early. If you’re not in Texas, look up when early voting starts where you are.

See, Perry reminds us that the South is not the country’s exception, it’s the country’s evidence, and that anybody who tells you Texas ain’t Southern is building an alibi. Williams teaches us that a people punished for reading built the schoolhouse first, so every TEKS cut is an attack on something our ancestors already paid for. Barkley Brown shows us that the homecoming was always a public sphere, run largely by Black women, and DeFrantz shows us that blood memory carries what the state won’t. Put them together and you get the thesis of this whole conversation: they keep doing an investigation to tell us what we saw, in Gaza and in Galveston, and the freedom colonies are proof we already know.

This is the history they are trying to erase. This is the history Project 2025 got corporations to put private money behind so our kids don’t learn it. Here in Texas, on October 7, the anniversary of when we started to see that genocide put in our face, they will say it is inappropriate for our children to learn Black history in Texas but appropriate for them to learn the formation of Israel in 1948.

In my own words, the way I said it live:

“When y’all start to pop y’all chest and y’all talking s**t to people that’s talking about Palestine and Israel and you saying, what they got to do with us, they got s**t to do with us, they got to do with us, tell that to your legislators. Tell that to the policy makers. The ones that take millions of dollars from APEC. The ones that say that our kids should learn about the formation of Israel and not learn about how our enslaved ancestors did not go to Canada. A lot of them ran to Mexico. October 7th is today. November 3rd is less than a month away... You know, when somebody asks, What is Donald Trump going to do? How he going to do it? The midterm elections is going to dictate all of that, man. The midterm elections is going to determine how much he can continue to bend us over and unconsensually, you know, violate our bodies. You know what I’m saying? That’s what he’s doing, man.”

Education Is Elevation. Research over MeSearch.

Five Key Takeaways

* The map is an argument. Texas sells itself as the West to avoid being read as the South. Stacey’s rule, anywhere there was slavery in Texas is East Texas, is the correction, and Imani Perry explains why the nation keeps needing the South to be somewhere else.

* 557 is the rebuttal. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project has recorded 557 known Black settlements founded from 1865 to 1930, anchored by churches, schools, and cemeteries. “Black people can’t work together” does not survive that number.

* Millican was a policy, not a riot. In July 1868, white mob violence killed or drove off up to 300 Black people fifteen miles from Texas A&M after Pastor George Brooks, a USCT veteran, organized voter registration and community defense. Black land ownership peaked around 1910 at 16 to 19 million acres and roughly 90 percent was lost by 1997.

* Texas projects its own history onto Islam. On September 4, 2026, the SBOE approved standards teaching early Islam through “brutal” campaigns and the “normalization of slavery,” while the state’s own revolution was entangled with protecting slavery and its June standards cut slave revolts and Jim Crow depth.

* The other million votes. Roughly a third of Black Texans live outside the Houston and DFW metros, in places that depend most on state and federal funding. Early voting runs October 19 to 30; Election Day is November 3.

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

Work Cited and Related Readings

Baumgartner, Alice L. South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War. Basic Books, 2020.

Barkley Brown, Elsa. “Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom.” Public Culture 7, no. 1 (1994): 107 to 146.

Coates, Ta Nehisi. The Message. One World, 2024.

DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Revelations: Alvin Ailey’s Embodiment of African American Culture. Oxford University Press, 2004.

Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York University Press, 1998; fifteenth anniversary edition 2013.

Earhart, Amy, and team. Millican Massacre, 1868 digital archive.

https://millican.omeka.net

Francis, Dania V., et al. “Black Land Loss: 1920 to 1997.” AEA Papers and Proceedings 112 (2022).

Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Ecco, 2022.

Roberts, Andrea R. Never Sell the Land: Freedom Colonies, Black Storytelling, and Keeping Home. University of Texas Press, forthcoming 2027.

Sitton, Thad, and James H. Conrad. Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. University of Texas Press, 2005.

Southern Poverty Law Center. Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy. 2016, updated 2019.

The Texas Freedom Colonies Project and Atlas.

https://www.thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com

Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press, 2017.

Williams, Heather Andrea. Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom. University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

Williams, Kidada E. I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction. Bloomsbury, 2023.

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How much money do you need to blow up a 12 year old in Gaza? How much funding do you need to blow up a pregnant woman in the West Bank? How much? How much do you need?

Today is October 7th, 2026, the third anniversary of the attack on Israel, and I know a bunch of Zionists are pissed off when they hear folks like me talk about this day, because we don’t center Israeli victimization as the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. Let me be precise, because precision is the whole point of this work. On October 7th, 2023, roughly 1,200 people were killed in Israel and about 250 were taken captive, and those were human beings with names and mothers and futures, and I will never be the kind of scholar who has to pretend otherwise in order to tell the truth about everything else. Two things can be true. The killing of civilians is a crime no matter whose passport they hold, and October 7th did not fall out of a coconut tree, it is part of an ongoing structure of dispossession that has been happening in Palestine since before 1948. Shout out to the Balfour Declaration, shout out to the partition of Palestine, shout out to all the various congresses that Theodor Herzl and the founders of political Zionism convened to decide whose land was available.

Three years later, the Gaza Health Ministry counts more than 73,600 Palestinians killed as of September 2026, a number that has kept climbing even after the October 2025 ceasefire, with well over 1,000 killed in so called ceasefire violations alone. Three years later, I still have not heard one elected official in Texas tell me how much a 12 year old costs.

My psyche, the chemistry of my heart and how it connects to my brain, how I view the world, will forever be changed, because seeing a parent pick up the limbs of their child and put them in a bag will never let you see the world the same again. Most of y’all saw that footage too. Most of y’all scrolled past it because the algorithm put a dance challenge right underneath it, and that is its own kind of violence, the violence of being trained to keep it moving.

October 7th, 2023 changed the geopolitics forever because it forced into the open the people who have always been able to dictate the narrative of being seen as the benevolent good people, the ones who deserve to exist and deserve to defend themselves, and it showed us how they deploy that narrative while blowing up Muhammad and blowing up Miriam in Gaza and in the West Bank. We never hear anybody on cable news ask whether Palestine can exist, or should exist, or whether Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. That question is not even allowed in the room.

Today is about me reflecting on how much I have learned about Palestinians, how much I have learned about the Middle East, how much I have learned about American imperialism, and how much it solidified what young George Lee already suspected. Young little George in Bryan, Texas, sitting in a high school classroom, thought the world was so evil. I was right. The people in power who got me to think about Muslims as inherently criminal and inherently terroristic were the very people who had figured out how to manufacture terrorism in a way that got seen as legitimate. We even had headlines warning that 2023 was on pace to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank, and those headlines ran before October 7th, not after it. The bodies were already stacking up while the world was looking the other way.

That is what we mean by unmitigated, gratuitous violence, violence justified by Israel and America and the French and the English, all of them saying that Muslims and Palestinians are who we ought to worry about. They have manufactured so much terror that they have convinced the rest of the world that opposing colonial order is terrorism, and that colonial terrorism is just foreign policy. Research over MeSearch. Let’s get into the archive.

Herzl Had a Shopping List: Uganda, Argentina, and the Colony That Called Itself a Homeland

October 7th forced me to go back through the archive, and the archive does not stutter. In 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, and in it he weighed two candidate sites for a Jewish state, Palestine or Argentina, like a man comparing listings on Zillow. In 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. In 1902, he wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the same Cecil Rhodes whose name is literally stamped on the colony of Rhodesia, asking for his support and describing his plan as something colonial, which is why he thought Rhodes would understand it. In 1903, the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered land in East Africa, the so called Uganda Scheme, which actually sat in what is now Kenya, and the Zionist movement debated it until the Seventh Congress rejected it in 1905.

Sit with that. Israel could have been in Argentina. Israel could have been in East Africa. The founders held conference after conference to figure out where this Jewish homeland should go, and they landed on Palestine because the religious ties to Judaism could generate global sympathy and a story the West already knew how to tell. Crazy how the land was never the starting point. The project was the starting point, and the land was chosen to fit the project.

Herzl even confided to his own diary in June 1895 that the penniless local population would need to be spirited across the border. Then in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall,” and he said the quiet part as loud as anyone ever has: no native people in history has ever voluntarily accepted colonization, so the settlers would need a wall of force the natives could not break. On my livestream I credited that line to Herzl, and I want to correct the record, because receipts matter. It was Jabotinsky. Herzl wrote the business plan. Jabotinsky wrote the security memo. Same company.

Apply Sayegh here. In 1965, the Palestinian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, and his argument was that Zionism was not an exception to European colonialism, it was one of its last and most efficient expressions, a settler project designed not to rule the native population but to replace it. That is the difference between Britain in India and Britain in Australia. One colony wants your labor. The other colony wants your absence. Wolfe would later call this the logic of elimination, but Sayegh had already written it down while Jim Crow was still the law in Bryan, Texas.

Then came the paperwork that made the colony official. On November 2nd, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised a national home for the Jewish people in a land Britain did not own, inhabited by people Britain did not ask. On November 29th, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 recommended partition, handing roughly 56 percent of Mandate Palestine to a Jewish population that made up about a third of its residents and owned a small fraction of its land. Then in 1947 and 1948 came the Nakba, the catastrophe, when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and hundreds of villages were emptied and erased. On December 11th, 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, affirming that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so. Nearly 78 years later, that return has never been honored. Preventing civilians from returning home is a violation of international humanitarian law. You cannot justify the Nakba. You cannot justify forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and never letting them come back.

Now do the root cause analysis. Hamas was founded in December 1987, at the start of the First Intifada, growing out of an Islamist charity network that Israeli authorities had tolerated through the 1970s and 1980s as a counterweight to the secular PLO. On air I said 1984, and the accurate date is 1987, but the point lands even harder with the correct date: the Israelis were murdering, obliterating, and stealing Palestinian land for four decades before Hamas existed. So when somebody tells you the bombing of Gaza is a response to Hamas, ask them what the Nakba was a response to. Ask them what Deir Yassin was a response to. Watch them get quiet.

Every State Is Debatable Except One: The Playbook With a Laminated Cover

I would argue October 7th deconstructed the Zionist playbook, because it forced us to sit with and debate what it means for Israel to exist, especially if that existence is predicated on Palestinian dispossession. If your existence as a state is made possible through genocide, we have to ask the question: does your existence actually need to look like that? Notice I said the state. Not the people. A state is a political arrangement, a set of borders and laws and armies, and questioning how a state was built is something political science does every single day.

You can criticize America. You can criticize Germany. You can criticize Venezuela. You can criticize Nigeria. You can stand in a lecture hall and argue the Soviet Union should never have existed in the form it took, and nobody calls campus police. Ahh, but criticize Israel, and all of a sudden you must be engaging in some form of antisemitism. That is the playbook that insulates one state from the ordinary scrutiny every other state receives, and its whole power comes from collapsing three different things into one: Jewish people, the religion of Judaism, and the government of Israel.

This means the people who collapse those categories are the ones doing something dangerous. Let me say this as somebody who is vehemently against antisemitism. When a government claims to act in the name of every Jewish person on earth, and then uses the very real history of Jewish suffering in Europe to justify the suffering of Palestinians now, it puts a target on Jewish people everywhere who never signed off on any of it. Every accusation is a confession. The ones screaming that criticism of Israel endangers Jews are the ones who wrote Jews into the military budget without asking them.

All Jewish people are not Zionists, and some of the most devout opponents of Zionism I have met since October 7th have been some of the proudest Jewish people I know. Jewish Voice for Peace sat in at the Capitol. IfNotNow got arrested in Senate office buildings. I have seen footage of Israeli police and soldiers putting hands on Israeli citizens who dared to protest what is being done in Gaza and the West Bank to people who happen to be Muslim and happen to be Arab. Two things can be true: antisemitism is real and rising, and the Israeli state is one of the forces making Jewish people less safe, not more.

The second move in the playbook is vocabulary. They do not want us to call what has happened to Palestinians a genocide. They want us to call it a war. Then they use moral labels, good guys and bad guys, to narrate that war. When we learned World War I and World War II, even when it was taught through good guys and bad guys, nobody demonized every German grandmother as a combatant. So the question becomes the one nobody on cable will touch. What is a legitimate form of resistance for Palestinians? If everything Hamas does is seen as illegitimate terrorism, and every protest by a Palestinian civilian gets treated as Hamas, and every journalist in Gaza gets labeled a militant after they are killed, then what form of resistance is left that would not be called terrorism on face value? The Great March of Return in 2018 was largely unarmed, and Israeli snipers shot thousands of protesters. Boycott, divestment, and sanctions is nonviolent, and over 35 American states passed laws to punish it, including Texas. Just admit the answer you are actually giving: there is no acceptable form of Palestinian resistance, only acceptable forms of Palestinian disappearance.

Little Red Riding Hood Had a Defense Budget: Proportion, Tonnage, and the Courts That Were Legit Until They Weren’t

Let’s talk about proportion like grown folks. If I mush you and you sucker punch me in the face, that is a disproportionate response. If a teenager insults a bodybuilder and that bodybuilder breaks the teenager’s face, that is a disproportionate response. Now scale that up to a state with one of the best funded militaries on the planet, backed by roughly $3.8 billion a year in American military aid under the 2016 memorandum of understanding, plus billions more in emergency packages since 2023, carpet bombing a strip of land about 365 square kilometers, smaller than the city of Houston by a mile and then some.

I was fumbling for the numbers on air, so here they are. By November 2023, just one month in, Euro Med Human Rights Monitor estimated that Israel had dropped more than 25,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which they compared to the explosive force of two Hiroshima bombs. Later estimates ran much higher; by 2025, researchers cited by University of Bradford emeritus professor Paul Rogers put the total around 70,000 tons, roughly six Hiroshimas. Hiroshima is about 900 square kilometers. Gaza is about 360. I said “10 times smaller” on the livestream; the accurate figure is closer to two and a half times smaller, and the bombs fell on it for two years straight. You do not need the exaggeration. The arithmetic is already obscene.

On one side, multibillion dollar infantry, F 35 jets, and 2,000 pound bombs. On the other, men in street clothes with nine millimeters, and boys with slingshots. They want to tell us it’s a war. Katt Williams had a stand up bit about Iraq, about America fighting people in sweatpants and still somehow losing the narrative, and I am reminded of that bit every time a general goes on television to explain why a tent camp was a military target.

Apply Wilderson here, briefly, because the word “gratuitous” came out of my own mouth on that livestream. Wilderson distinguishes contingent violence, the kind that happens because you did something, from gratuitous violence, the kind that happens because of what you are. Two years ago we were told Israel was only getting the bad guys, and the only reason it bombed hospitals, tents, churches, and mosques was that Hamas was hiding underneath them. Then we watched the bombs keep falling after the hostages came home. That is the moment contingent violence reveals itself as gratuitous. When there is no action a Palestinian can take that stops the bombs, the bombs were never about the action.

Crazy how the human shields argument only runs one direction. The Israeli military’s headquarters, the Kirya, sits in the middle of Tel Aviv, surrounded by civilians, apartment buildings, and a shopping mall. If Hamas or anybody else fires at it, the world calls it an attack on civilians, a war crime, a human rights violation. When Israel places its own command center in a civilian neighborhood, that is called city planning. When Gaza’s civilians live on top of a tunnel they never dug, that is called a legitimate target. October 7th put on display that the people who have been claiming to be Little Red Riding Hood were the wolves the whole time, wearing grandma’s glasses.

Now watch the courts. The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March 2023, and Washington cheered. The court was legitimate. The court was the conscience of the world. On air I called it the ICJ, but the warrant came from the ICC, and that distinction matters because there are two courts and both of them got the same treatment. In January 2024, the International Court of Justice, ruling in South Africa’s case, found a plausible risk of genocide and ordered provisional measures. In July 2024, the same court issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful. In November 2024, the ICC issued warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. In September 2025, a UN independent commission of inquiry concluded Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. All of a sudden, the very courts we were told were good when they went after Putin and after West African warlords no longer had credibility or legitimacy. By February 2025, the United States was sanctioning ICC officials. We see the flies in the buttermilk. The law was always welcome, as long as it was aimed at somebody else.

Same Year, Same Paperwork: 1948 Was a Very Busy Year for Settlers

1948 was the year Israel officially declared statehood, and it was the same year the National Party won power in South Africa and began building apartheid into law. I do not think that is ironic. I think that is a calendar telling on itself. When apartheid South Africa was trying to crush the sovereignty of Black South Africans, under arms embargoes and international isolation, where was it able to get a bunch of backup from? Israel. Sasha Polakow Suransky documented it in The Unspoken Alliance: military cooperation, arms sales, and Prime Minister John Vorster, a man who had been interned during World War II for his pro Nazi sympathies, received in Israel on a state visit in 1976. Read that sentence twice.

Here is the pattern. Somehow, white settlers can always believe a land belongs more to them than to the people already living on it, and therefore the indigenous folks no longer have a claim. We’ve seen that with the Khoekhoe and the San in South Africa. We’ve seen that in Palestine. We’ve seen that if a settler can evoke God, he can say God told him this land is his and he is the rightful owner. We saw it in Manifest Destiny right here in America. We see it in the Congo, where Leopold called mass murder a civilizing mission. We see it in Hawaii, where American sugar planters overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani in 1893. We see it in Haiti, which was forced to pay France reparations for its own freedom. If you believe a land has more value in white hands, and you believe Black and Brown folks have no value, then of course the land is being misused by the people who live on it.

This is what October 7th showed me about settler logic. It is always contradictory logic, and the contradiction is the point. The United States government will tell you Israel rightfully belongs to the Jewish people because of what a religious tradition says about events 3,000 years ago. Then those same Americans will turn to a Choctaw, a Cherokee, a Lakota, a Comanche, to any Native nation and say get over it, your people lost a war. Never mind that the United States ratified roughly 370 treaties with Native nations and violated them routinely, so routinely that the Supreme Court in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (1903) blessed Congress breaking them at will. I said over 500 on air; the precise count of ratified treaties is closer to 370, and the broken promise count is effectively all of them. They will say they don’t give a damn what Native Americans believed 3,000 years ago, this land is my land now. Those are the same people who will tell you a 3,000 year old covenant settles a 20th century land claim in the Levant. Ancient title only counts when it helps a settler. Ancient title becomes “get over it” when it helps a native.

October 7th showed me that white supremacist logic can hand you a long, brutal history of Jewish people being persecuted in England and throughout Europe, from expulsions to pogroms to the Holocaust, and then present that European crime as the justification for taking land from Arabs who had nothing to do with it. Europeans did the persecuting. Palestinians paid the bill. It doesn’t make any sense, and that is precisely why it had to be wrapped in scripture and security language: an argument that cannot stand on its own logic has to borrow God’s credentials.

The Syllabus Got a Foreign Policy: What October 7th Did to Classrooms From Katy to College Station

As a Texan, let me bring this home. October 7th landed so hard in the global psyche that the state of Texas went and rearranged what our children are allowed to know. In June 2026, the State Board of Education moved to cut lessons on slavery and segregation down to size, and then on September 4th, 2026, the board voted to require that students learn the 1948 establishment of Israel framed as the return to an ancestral homeland. So slavery became optional and 1948 became mandatory. A Black child in Houston can now graduate knowing more about the founding narrative of a state 7,000 miles away than about the Juneteenth that happened 50 miles down the road in Galveston. That is not an accident of curriculum. That is a foreign policy written into a lesson plan.

K through 12 is the front door, and higher education is where they bolt it shut. Since October 7th, state after state and university after university has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism as a disciplinary tool, including examples that treat claims about the racist character of the state of Israel as potentially antisemitic. Texas got there by executive order: in March 2024, Governor Abbott ordered public universities to discipline speech that violates that definition. The working definition did not fall from the sky. Kenneth Stern was its lead drafter back in 2004, written as a tool for European data collectors to count incidents consistently.

Apply Stern here, because this is the kill shot. Stern has testified before Congress and written in The Conflict over the Conflict that his own definition was never meant to regulate campus speech, and that using it that way chills legitimate political expression and ends up hurting Jewish students too, because it turns every argument into an investigation. The man who wrote the definition is telling you it is being misused. When the author of the rule says the rule is being weaponized, the debate is over. This means the administrators citing his definition to punish students are wrong, by the standard of the very document they claim to enforce.

Now look at who gets punished first. Before October 7th, if you said anything critical about Israel, your career was going to be fried, and Black educators knew it in their bones. In November 2018, Marc Lamont Hill, a Black professor at Temple University, gave a speech at the United Nations calling for a free Palestine and was fired by CNN the next day. In Except for Palestine, Hill and Mitchell Plitnick name the pattern: progressives who will defend every marginalized group on earth, except for Palestine. Hill kept his faculty job because tenure and academic freedom protections held. Most of the people being disciplined now do not have that. Adjuncts, graduate workers, untenured Black and Brown faculty, students on visas, those are the bodies standing closest to the fire.

The implication for higher education is concrete. When a public university adopts a speech code built on one government’s preferred definition, every professor teaching settler colonialism, every Africana studies department teaching South African apartheid, every ethnic studies instructor teaching Manifest Destiny becomes a potential policy violation. You cannot teach the comparison between 1948 Johannesburg and 1948 Jerusalem if the comparison itself is presumed hateful. The implication for K through 12 is just as concrete: a teacher in Alief or Aldine who answers a 9th grader’s honest question about Gaza now has to calculate whether the truth is worth her certification. As somebody who worked with students at both PWIs and HBCUs and taught DEI at the university level, I am telling you this is how erasure works. They do not ban the book first. They make the teacher afraid to open it.

Who Is Left Holding the Bag: The Women, the Mothers, and the Black Members of Congress

Intersectionality is not a vibe. It is an accounting method, and the ledger here has names. When Gaza’s hospitals were bombed and besieged, UN agencies warned that roughly 50,000 women in Gaza were pregnant at the start of the war, delivering in tents, delivering without anesthesia, delivering in hospitals running on generators, some undergoing cesarean sections without painkillers. The UN has reported that women and children make up a majority of the identified dead. When a bomb hits a family home in Gaza, it does not hit an abstraction called Hamas. It hits the kitchen, the nursery, the woman who was nursing at 3 in the morning. That is what I mean when I say blowing up Miriam.

Apply Davis here. In Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Angela Davis argues that the struggles in Ferguson and Palestine are not parallel by coincidence, they are connected by the same circuits of militarized policing, the same prison industry, and the same habit of treating certain populations as permanent security threats. Then Davis lived her own argument. In January 2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, in the city where she grew up, rescinded the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award it had offered her, after pressure tied to her support for Palestinian rights. The board reversed course after public outcry, but sit with it: a Black woman born in Dynamite Hill, in the city of the 16th Street bombing, was told she was too dangerous to honor in her own hometown because she said the word Palestine. Black women always get disciplined first for saying what everybody else will say five years later.

Apply Lubin alongside her. In Geographies of Liberation, Alex Lubin traces the Afro Arab political imaginary from W. E. B. Du Bois through SNCC, whose 1967 newsletter published a piece on the Palestine question and caught hell for it, through the Black Panther Party, which publicly backed Palestinian liberation by 1970. Black solidarity with Palestine is not a TikTok trend. It is a 60 year archive with receipts.

Now bring it to the ballot. In 2024, the United Democracy Project, the super PAC affiliated with AIPAC, spent around $14.5 million to defeat Congressman Jamaal Bowman in New York and around $8.5 million to defeat Congresswoman Cori Bush in Missouri, both Black members of Congress, both critics of the Gaza war, both among the most expensive House primaries in history. Cori Bush is a Black woman, a nurse, a former unhoused single mother, and an organizer out of Ferguson, and she was outspent in her own district by money that came from everywhere but St. Louis. That is the intersectional material impact. The same machine that bombs a Palestinian mother removes the Black mother in Congress who objected to it.

Then look at the contradiction at home. This country tells Americans we have to fight each other for food, for water, for health care. It asks rhetorically, who’s going to pay for it, where is the money going to come from? Meanwhile, Israel has universal health coverage under a 1995 national health insurance law, and the United States sends it about $3.8 billion a year in military aid. To be precise, our aid pays for weapons, not Israeli doctors, but money is fungible: every dollar Washington covers for defense is a dollar the Israeli budget can spend on its own people. In the United States, the CDC’s 2023 data show Black women died of pregnancy related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women. Texas mothers are still waiting on a system that treats their survival like a line item, while Congress never once asks who is going to pay for the bombs. Whitey on the Moon, except the moon is a weapons shipment.

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Friday Night Lights, Oil Field Money, and a War on Iran: It Was Always One Ledger

Right now, we are in a war with Iran. On February 28th, 2026, the United States joined Israel in launching major combat operations against Iran, and by March, Trump was telling reporters he “might have forced Israel’s hand.” On air I said Trump told us straight up we’re fighting on behalf of Israel; I could not find that exact sentence, so I am not going to put words in his mouth. I do not need to. A senator who calls himself a supporter of Israel said on the record he was disturbed that the nation was being committed to war based on a decision by an ally. When even the folks who love the alliance are uneasy, the question answers itself.

You might say, hey, the South don’t care about Israel and Palestine. I guarantee you the people who represent you do. Your senator has probably taken AIPAC aligned money. Your congressperson has probably been to Tel Aviv on a sponsored trip before they ever held a town hall in your zip code. If you are a senator or a congressperson who does not believe our tax dollars should help blow up Palestinians, they see you as an op, and they will spend whatever it takes to keep you out of office. Ask Jamaal Bowman. Ask Cori Bush. So instead of asking regular people why y’all care so much about Israel and Palestine, turn that question around and point it at your senator, your congressperson, and your governor. Why in the hell do you pass so much legislation for Israel and so little for the constituents of your own state?

Texas Senator Ted Cruz sat across from Tucker Carlson in June 2025 and told him he came into Congress with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States Senate. Then he justified it with a Bible verse he could not locate. Shidd. I have to sit there like, hold on, man. You are the senator of Texas. How does that make sense? How does that make sense? It don’t make sense. Most of Texas is still waiting on a defender for its grid, its rural hospitals, and its public schools.

Now follow the oil, because this is where the ledger closes. In 1986, a senator from Delaware named Joe Biden stood on the Senate floor and said that if there were not an Israel, the United States would have to invent one to protect its interests in the region. Interests, in the Middle East, is a polite word for oil and gas. Here in Texas, we manufacture weapons: Lockheed Martin builds the F 35 in Fort Worth. Here in Texas, we also build $70 million high school football stadiums, Katy’s Legacy Stadium at $70.3 million and McKinney’s at about $70 million, financed with voter approved bonds that the state’s Permanent School Fund guarantees, a fund fattened for a century by oil and gas royalties from public lands. On air I called it money laundering. I can’t prove laundering and I won’t print it. What I can prove is one ledger: oil money guarantees the bonds that build the stadiums, oil interests justify the alliance, the alliance justifies the weapons, and the weapons get built down the road from the stadium. It’s all tied together, and you’re smoking dope and dog food if you think a ledger that tight is a coincidence.

The data centers belong in the same ledger. In August 2025, reporting revealed that an Israeli military intelligence unit had used Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store mass surveillance of Palestinian phone calls, and Microsoft cut off part of that access in September 2025. Those same hyperscale servers are now being planted across rural Texas, drinking water from farmers who never got a vote. The cloud is not in the sky. The cloud is on somebody’s land, and it is watching somebody’s family.

Lastly, the name. On air I called Benjamin Netanyahu a white man from Philadelphia who changed his name to sound more ethnic, and the receipt is more interesting than the roast. Netanyahu was born in Tel Aviv in 1949, spent his teenage years in the Philadelphia suburbs, and graduated from Cheltenham High School in Pennsylvania. The name change belongs to his father, Benzion, born Mileikowsky in Warsaw, who adopted Netanyahu, meaning “God has given,” as a Hebrew pen name. So the more accurate charge is the more damning one: a family from Warsaw rewrote its name into scripture, and the son grew up to rewrite a whole people out of the map.

Hope Is a Discipline, Not a Hashtag: Where We Go From the Third Anniversary

I refuse to end in a funeral. Afropessimism can describe the wound, but it was never meant to write the prescription, and I did not do all this research just to leave y’all sad and scrolling.

Apply Kaba here. Mariame Kaba teaches that hope is a discipline, something you practice on purpose, especially when the evidence don’t support feeling good. Hope is not optimism. Optimism waits for the news to get better. Hope organizes while the news is still bad. Look at what has moved in three years: students who built encampments and took the suspensions, Jewish organizers who sat in at the Capitol, dockworkers in Europe who refused to load weapons, South Africa, a nation that knows apartheid from the inside, walking into the International Court of Justice with a case, and Black folks in Ferguson who remember Palestinians tweeting them tear gas advice in 2014 now returning the favor with their voices. That is not a feeling. That is a practice.

So here is the practice for you. Find out what your senator, your congressperson, and your governor have taken and from whom. Show up to your school board when they vote on what our children are allowed to know. Teach your kids the Nakba and Juneteenth in the same breath, because they are the same lesson: people do not lose their claim to freedom just because the powerful wrote a different story.

In conclusion, man, a lot of y’all was beefing with people for talking about international relations because you believed international relations had nothing to do with a domestic election. If you still believe that, not only are you smoking dope and dog food, you’re being willfully ignorant. If you’re running and the truth is chasing you, you’re running faster. There is no way to say in good faith that you want to understand what’s going on, but you don’t think it has anything to do with you. Your local officials, your state officials, and your federal officials are all being lobbied to keep billions of our dollars flowing into bombs every year, while you are told there is no money for your mama’s insulin.

October 7th was the answer to an illogical equation that never made sense, but we were always conditioned and indoctrinated to plug in the equation as a truism, even if the equation itself did not add up. Why does Israeli general welfare matter more to American tax dollars than American citizens? Why do Americans have to fight each other for health care while our tax dollars fund the military of a country whose citizens are guaranteed coverage? Why? Why do you view us as crazy, as against America, for exercising our First Amendment rights? Y’all making y’allselves look crazy.

See, Sayegh reminds us that a colony that wants your absence will always call your presence a threat, and Kaba teaches us that the answer to a structure built on despair is a practice built on discipline. Two things can be true: the bombs are real, and so is the organizing.

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Five Key Takeaways (For the Folks in the Back)

* The project picked the land, not the other way around. Herzl weighed Argentina and East Africa before Palestine, wrote to Cecil Rhodes calling his plan colonial, and Jabotinsky’s 1923 “Iron Wall” admitted no native people ever accepts colonization voluntarily. Sayegh named it settler colonialism in 1965.

* Root cause comes before Hamas. The Nakba expelled roughly 750,000 Palestinians in 1947 and 1948, UN Resolution 194 affirmed their return that same year, and Hamas was not founded until December 1987. Any analysis that starts on October 7th, 2023 is starting in the middle of the sentence.

* International law was legitimate until it named Netanyahu. The ICC warrant for Putin (2023) was celebrated; the ICJ’s genocide case orders (2024), its occupation ruling (2024), the ICC warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant (2024), and the UN commission’s genocide finding (2025) were met with American sanctions.

* The classroom is the battlefield at home. Texas cut slavery and segregation lessons and mandated an “ancestral homeland” framing of 1948, while public universities adopted a definition of antisemitism its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, says should never police campus speech. Black and untenured educators pay first.

* It is one ledger. Oil interests justify the alliance, the alliance justifies roughly $3.8 billion a year in weapons, Texas builds those weapons, oil royalties guarantee the bonds for $70 million stadiums, and super PAC money removed two Black members of Congress who objected. Follow one dollar and you find all of them.

WORKS CITED/RELATED READING

* Herzl, Theodor. Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). 1896.

* Herzl, Theodor. Letter to Cecil Rhodes, January 11, 1902. In The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, ed. Raphael Patai. Herzl Press, 1960.

* Balfour Declaration, November 2, 1917.

* Jabotinsky, Ze’ev. “The Iron Wall.” Rassvet, 1923.

* United Nations General Assembly. Resolution 181 (II), November 29, 1947; Resolution 194 (III), December 11, 1948; Resolution 3379, November 10, 1975 (revoked 1991).

* Biden, Joseph R. Remarks on the Senate floor, June 5, 1986.

* International Court of Justice. South Africa v. Israel, Order on Provisional Measures, January 26, 2024; Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of Israel’s Policies and Practices in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, July 19, 2024.

* International Criminal Court. Warrants for Vladimir Putin (March 17, 2023) and for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant (November 21, 2024).

* UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Report, September 2025.

* Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, 187 U.S. 553 (1903).

* Texas Governor’s Executive Order GA 44, March 27, 2024.

* Sayegh, Fayez A. Zionist Colonialism in Palestine. PLO Research Center, 1965.

* Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 to 2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.

* Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.

* Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006).

* Stern, Kenneth S. The Conflict over the Conflict: The Israel/Palestine Campus Debate. New Jewish Press, 2020.

* Hill, Marc Lamont, and Mitchell Plitnick. Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics. The New Press, 2021.

* Palestine Legal and Center for Constitutional Rights. The Palestine Exception to Free Speech. 2015.

* Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket, 2016.

* Lubin, Alex. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro Arab Political Imaginary. UNC Press, 2014.

* Feldman, Keith P. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

* Polakow Suransky, Sasha. The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa. Pantheon, 2010.

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

* Kaba, Mariame. We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. Haymarket, 2021.

Reporting and data

* Euro Med Human Rights Monitor. Press release on explosive tonnage in Gaza, November 2023.

* University of Bradford. Paul Rogers on Gaza bombing tonnage, 2025.

* Gaza Ministry of Health cumulative toll, as reported by Middle East Eye, September 6, 2026.

* Houston Chronicle and KPRC reporting on Texas high school stadium costs (Katy Legacy Stadium, $70.3 million, 2017).

* Tucker Carlson Network interview with Sen. Ted Cruz, June 2025.

* The Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call reporting on Unit 8200 and Microsoft Azure, August 2025.

* CDC National Center for Health Statistics. Maternal Mortality Rates in the United States, 2023.

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Trigger warning for everybody that has experienced sexual violence. We talking about sexual violence for educational purposes only, and I need y’all to take care of yourselves while you read this.

The Group Chat Is the Confession

Have y’all heard the news? CBS News New York obtained more messages from the group chat of the seven Cornell men accused of drugging and raping a woman for hours inside the Chi Phi fraternity house, and kinfolks, they are not good. According to the lawsuit, while this young woman was being assaulted, somebody in that chat asked if the “shop” was “still open,” somebody answered yeah with a devil emoji, and somebody else added a yeah of their own, which means that instead of stopping it, grown men with Ivy League student IDs was referring to a human being as a store with its lights on. Just utterly disgusting, awful behavior, and I want to sit in that word for a second, shop, because the language is the evidence, the language tells you exactly how they saw her, not as a classmate, not as somebody’s daughter, not as a person with a future, but as inventory.

Let me give you the receipts, because here at Education Is Elevation it’s Research over MeSearch. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, was 20 years old in October 2024 when she went to the Chi Phi house at Cornell. Her 101 page civil complaint, filed in Manhattan in September 2026, alleges she was pressured into ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol until she was incapacitated, that around 1:42 in the morning one member posted in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was free sex upstairs, and that more men came into the room over the next several hours, with the assault ending somewhere around 5:45 that morning. On stream I said seven hours, and the filing actually describes more than four, which don’t make it better, it makes it a timeline.

Crazy how the punishment was the part that went viral. The complaint says Cornell suspended the men, then let some of them “mitigate their conduct” by writing essays, and her lawyer says only two of the seven were expelled. Essays. Somebody’s daughter left that campus and never came back, and some of the men accused of breaking her got a writing assignment. One of the men named in the suit reportedly went on to work at a Wells Fargo branch in Charlotte and was let go only after Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced on September 28, 2026, that he was reopening the case and taking it to a grand jury. Think about that. If he got a degree from Cornell, he was not out here struggling, he was able to go live his best life for two whole years while she carried it, and the bank didn’t flinch until the cameras did.

Now I want to be precise, because precision is power. No criminal charges have been filed against any of these men, at least two of them deny the allegations through their lawyers, and the civil claims have not been tested in court. Two things can be true. Every man named in that suit is entitled to his day in court, and the institution that let “essays” stand in for accountability is entitled to none of our benefit of the doubt, because the institution already had its day, and it spent it protecting itself.

Born From the Movement, Raised by the General Counsel

To understand how we got here, we gotta go back. Title IX was a major federal civil rights law passed in 1972, signed by Richard Nixon on June 23 of that year, written into being by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color ever elected to Congress, alongside Representative Edith Green, with Senator Birch Bayh carrying it in the Senate. It was modeled after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means this law is the direct progeny of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, it is the grandchild of the lunch counter and the consciousness raising circle at the same time.

Most of y’all don’t know the Black women’s history sitting underneath that. On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24 year old Black mother, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, when six white men kidnapped her at gunpoint and raped her. The NAACP sent its best investigator to Abbeville, a young woman named Rosa Parks, and Parks helped build a national campaign around Recy Taylor more than a decade before anybody knew her name from a bus. Two separate all white, all male grand juries refused to indict. Historian Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street makes the argument plain: the civil rights movement was, in no small part, a movement against the sexual violence Black women survived, and the Montgomery organizing infrastructure was built by women who had been fighting rape long before they ever fought segregated seating. So when people act like campus sexual assault is a “women’s issue” separate from civil rights, they are erasing the very women who made the civil rights movement possible.

Then came the legal ladder. In Alexander v. Yale (1980), Yale students argued for the first time that sexual harassment was sex discrimination under Title IX, with a young Catharine MacKinnon advising. In Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), the Supreme Court said students could sue for money damages. In Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), LaShonda Davis, a fifth grader in Georgia, gave us the rule that schools are liable when they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment they know about. In 1990, after Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm in 1986, Congress passed the Clery Act forcing colleges to report campus crime. Then the 2011 Dear Colleague letter pushed schools to act, the 2017 administration rescinded it, the 2020 rule rewrote the whole process around live hearings and cross examination, the 2024 rule tried to widen protections again, and on January 9, 2025, a federal court in Kentucky vacated the 2024 rule entirely, which put the country right back on the 2020 framework that governs today.

So here’s what I know as somebody with a degree in adult and higher education, as somebody that has been faculty and staff at multiple different universities and different entities and elements. In a lot of these institutions, sadly, the Title IX office that was created for gender equity, for making sure women can participate fully in education, functions in practice to make sure the university is not sued. In too many places, the office only exists to protect the institution from the assailant’s liability, not to protect the student from the assailant. Let me say that again for the folks in the back. It protects the institution from the assailant, not the woman from the assailant.

Cornell’s own numbers tell on it. A student who shared her story on campus said that after she was assaulted her freshman year and reported it, she learned someone else had already reported the same man, and later found out they weren’t the only two. Cornell’s own Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault, launched after this 2024 incident, reported that a 2025 campus survey found 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men experienced sexual assault during their time at Cornell. An earlier survey cited in The Cornell Daily Sun found only 38% of respondents even knew how to file an official complaint. That is a communication breakdown at best, and at worst it’s a design feature, because what you can’t find, you can’t file, and what you can’t file, can’t be counted against you.

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Purple and Gold Probation

Let me get around here real quick, because this is the part that really pissed me off, and I’m only saying it in a humorous way to keep from saying it in a violent way. At LSU, the university’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape. Let me repeat that slowly, the university found him responsible, this ain’t a rumor, this ain’t a TikTok, this is the institution’s own finding. LSU suspended him for a year. He appealed. The university kept the finding of rape and then reversed the suspension, swapping it for two years of “disciplinary probation without restrictions,” which let him right back onto the team. According to reporting from the coverage I was reading, this was a Black woman, and from what’s been reported the young man has not been publicly named, a criminal investigation is open with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney, and no charges have been filed.

So you mean to tell me a university can look at the evidence, say yes, he raped her, and then say, but we need him on Saturdays? That is not discipline, that is a depth chart. We see how the system of white supremacy and capitalism always sides with patriarchy when patriarchy is profitable, and when the profit is a Black man’s body on a football field, the system will even protect a Black man against a Black woman, because in that moment he’s not a man to them, he’s a revenue stream. That’s on Anita Hill and that’s on Clarence Thomas, and I’ll say more about that in another video.

LSU also got a history here that should make all of us uncomfortable, because this ain’t the first time the institution has been caught choosing the program over the victim. The 2021 Husch Blackwell investigation into LSU found years of mishandled sexual misconduct reports involving athletes, and the people who reported it were too often the ones who paid. Same school, same playbook, same tired ending.

Protecting Women From Ghosts While the Wolves Get Scholarships

Now here go the contradiction that I need y’all to sit with. Louisiana, the state where LSU sits, passed its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2022 to “protect women” from trans athletes, and the governor at the time let it become law without even signing it. Louisiana loves to say they want to protect women from trans people in sports. They want to protect women in the category of people they claim are trying to erase them. Hey, listen. A woman was raped at LSU, by the university’s own finding, and they suspended the player and then reinstated him.

I genuinely ask: how do we have more energy for make believe threats to women when it comes to trans people than for the real threats to women when it comes to sexual assault and violence? In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker told the Senate that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among roughly 510,000 college athletes. Fewer than ten. Then on February 5, 2025, the White House signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and the NCAA changed its policy the next day. Meanwhile a 35% assault rate for undergraduate women at one Ivy League school produced a task force and a press release. This means the folks running the “protect women” campaign are wrong about where the danger is, and they know it, because if you actually cared about women’s safety you would follow the numbers, and the numbers lead to the frat house, not the locker room.

As men, a lot of us sensationalize trans women in sports because we believe our daughters should never have to play against a trans woman because that’s not fair. Why do you care more about fairness in competitive climates than you care about sending your daughter to a college where she can be raped by somebody in a fraternity? I promise you the Greek system in America has been a breeding ground for sexual violence toward women, white women, Black women, Asian women, Latina women. Go to any big campus, especially the Power Four schools, the ones that is the university of the state, and I guarantee there is a long legacy of women that have been fucked over by the institution because the institution was protecting the same face.

One time, Macy Gray hopped in my comment section and asked me, basically, if y’all gonna protect trans women in the WNBA, what are y’all doing for the real women? My point was, there is no trans woman in the WNBA, but I let it go. Then I had to tell her, the “real women” in the WNBA been telling you what they worried about. They worried about the league not giving them their equitable share of the revenue compared to how the NBA treats its laborers. They worried about the summer of 2025, when men threw sex toys onto WNBA courts in game after game because they thought it was funny to mock women’s sexuality in their own workplace. So right here we have the victimization pattern: instead of dealing with what’s in front of you, you’d much rather deal with hypotheticals. You don’t want to deal with the unethical billionaire, you want to deal with the hypothetical ethical billionaire. You don’t want to deal with the actual sexual assault threat in front of your face, you want to deal with the potentiality of what if a trans woman was in the WNBA. That’s how I know y’all use women’s sports as an aha gotcha moment, and that’s how I know y’all don’t really mean it.

Power Hates a Name Tag

To me, this is all about power. One of the first literature bases that taught me how to understand the power of labeling, the power of going unnamed, and the power of going uncategorized is whiteness studies. Richard Dyer, in his 1997 book White, argued that whiteness secures its power by passing as the default, the unmarked norm, the thing that represents “just people” while everybody else gets a label. Apply Dyer here. Power always wants to go unnamed and unidentified, which is why it has always been treated like a crime, in different ways, to speak truth to power, because the moment you name the thing, you make it visible, and visible power can be held to account.

That’s the whole architecture of rape culture, too. The rapist wants to be “a good kid who made a mistake.” The fraternity wants to be “a brotherhood.” The university wants to be “a community.” Nobody wants to be named. A part of gaslighting is linguistically disarming you, making sure you don’t even have the language to describe what you’re going through, because if you can’t name it, you can’t fight it. That’s the reason Project 2025, in its very foreword, calls for deleting terms like “gender equality,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “reproductive health” from every federal rule and regulation. That’s the reason they go after books and words and whole fields of study. The fight over vocabulary is a fight over who gets to name the harm.

Think about it like this. When they’re recalling lettuce and garlic and onion powder and baby food and dog food, remember we got food safety law in this country in the first place because, in the early 1900s, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed what the Chicago meatpacking barons was putting in the can. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day in 1906, the ancestors of today’s FDA, because everybody knew that if a company didn’t have to worry about feeding you rat pellets, and wasn’t regulated for it, they gonna feed you rat pellets. The deregulation agenda flips that. In spring 2025, the USDA withdrew its proposed rule to crack down on salmonella in poultry. Then somebody in my comment section said salmonella is “a personal problem.” A personal problem. It ain’t the problem of the corporations, bro, it’s a personal problem for the people eating it.

Crazy how it’s never a personal problem for the right people. When El Chapo moving weight, they don’t say it’s a personal problem for the fiends. Well, actually they do, depending on who the fiend is. Y’all know the difference between the crack epidemic and the opioid epidemic. The Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986 punished crack 100 times harsher than powder cocaine, and it took until 2010 to bring that down to 18 to 1, while the opioid crisis got framed as a public health emergency with treatment money attached. One got rehabilitation, the other got criminalization. That’s just what that is.

Same logic with proximity. It blows my mind how rich people can be in proximity to a bunch of thugs and Epsteins and never be seen as an accessory, but when poor people are seen in proximity to a gang, that proximity is an affiliation. My boy Zero once said association brings about simulation: hang out with a fiend, you’ll become a dope fiend. I thought it was just a bar when I was younger, but it’s a theory of power. So if some rinky dink Cornell students and a no name LSU player can get away with sexual violence, what you think the billionaires in the Epstein class get away with? What you think for them?

Mr. Montgomery’s Question and the Statute of Limitations on Somebody’s Soul

Somebody in the chat, Mr. Montgomery, asked me a question, and I’m glad he did, because it brings this whole thing home. He said, iMa bE, “Stopping individual behavior is nigh impossible, there are already laws that should prevent those behaviors, so what further action would you desire be taken against students from two years ago?”

When the Me Too movement went viral in October 2017, a lot of people asked the exact question you asked. What’s the point? Why now? Why you wait so long? Here’s what the record shows: the student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun been pushing on this case since 2024, the woman reported to campus police within weeks, and her lawyer says police had the Snapchat messages and never followed up, while the district attorney says those messages never reached his office. So the “delay” was not her silence, the delay was the system passing the file around like a hot plate.

My answer is simple. I think that if you rob anybody of their livelihood and their sanity and their peace, then you should go to jail. Even the State of New York agrees that time ain’t an alibi: in 2006 New York eliminated the statute of limitations for first degree rape entirely, and in 2019 it extended the window for second degree rape to 20 years and third degree rape to 10. Two years is not even close to the line. So the legal answer to “why now” is “because the law says now is still on time.”

A lot of us have trouble seeing the humanity in women because it’s like a nebulous woman that exists out there somewhere. So let me make it personal. If your sister or your mother or your auntie was violated by a man, and she tried to get charges brought for two years, and two years later they’re finally brought, do you think those charges are just? I think they would be just. If somebody broke into your house, stole your s**t, and robbed your sense of peace, and two years later the police found them, would you feel like two years transpiring means they no longer deserve consequences for robbing you? How is it that our law has more capacity to criminalize an individual for stealing property than for stealing a person’s personhood?

This is where the debate coach in me comes out. Mr. Montgomery’s question presents itself as neutral, just a reasonable question, but claimed neutrality is itself a position. The question plays two roles: what it says is “what’s the remedy,” and what it does is put the burden back on the victim to justify her own pain. That’s exactly why so many women feel discouraged from coming forward, because they will be trivialized this way, asked “so what do you want?” as if wanting accountability is greedy. And this comment fits so ugly poetically into my analysis about whiteness and power, because power is strongest when it goes unnamed, and asking a survivor to justify the timing is just another way of asking her to stop naming it.

What I know as an advocate for women and gender equality is that most sexual assault offenses go unreported. Repeat that: most sexual assault offenses go unreported. Follow it up with another data point that’s not my feelings, it’s the facts: the majority of the men who are reported go uncharged and unconvicted. RAINN’s long cited analysis of federal data estimates that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, only about 310 are reported to police and only about 25 end with the perpetrator incarcerated. So when we talk about it as an error of judgment, or boys will be boys, or so much time has passed and now he got a family and a career, how does any of that center what happened to her?

The Syllabus Says Consent, the Sanction Says Essay

Let me speak directly to higher education, because this is my field. When a university lets students “mitigate” an alleged gang rape with essays, it is teaching a lesson to every student on that campus, and the lesson is that the conduct code is a writing prompt. Sociologists Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan, in Sexual Citizens (2020), studied Columbia undergraduates and showed that campus assault is shaped by what they call “sexual geographies,” meaning who controls the space, the alcohol, and the door. Apply Hirsch and Khan here. When a fraternity owns the house, supplies the substances, and runs the group chat, the institution has outsourced its most dangerous geography to the people with the least incentive to police it. Peggy Reeves Sanday saw it back in 1990 in Fraternity Gang Rape, after a 1983 incident at the University of Pennsylvania: brotherhood rituals can turn a woman into the shared object through which men prove loyalty to each other. A group chat that says “shop still open” is that ritual with Wi Fi.

Crazy how Cornell is also the birthplace of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Black Greek letter fraternity, founded on that very campus on December 4, 1906, because Black students were shut out of white social life. Two things can be true: Black Greek life was born from exclusion and has given us leaders and service for over a century, and every Greek organization, ours included, has to answer for hazing, coercion, and the culture of protecting the brother over the person harmed. Accountability can’t be selective, or it ain’t accountability.

Now the policy…. Because a federal court vacated the 2024 Title IX rule in January 2025, campuses are back on the 2020 framework, which requires live hearings with cross examination in higher education and narrows what counts as harassment to conduct that is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.” That means a survivor at Cornell or LSU today can be forced to relive her worst night under questioning by her alleged attacker’s advisor, while the institution calls the process “fair.” Pair that with a Department of Education whose Office for Civil Rights has been gutted by staffing cuts, and you get campuses grading their own homework with nobody checking the grade.

K through 12 is where it starts, though. Davis v. Monroe County was about a fifth grader, LaShonda Davis, which tells you the culture is learned long before freshman orientation. Meanwhile a growing number of states restrict or require opt in permission for sex education, and consent instruction gets swept up in fights over “parental rights,” which means a lot of boys arrive at college with a playbook from porn and a group chat and no vocabulary for consent. If we can mandate standardized testing in third grade, we can mandate consent education in middle school. A child who learns to name consent at 12 is a man who can recognize its absence at 20.

Too Black to Be Believed, Too Woman to Be Protected

This is where intersectionality ain’t optional, it’s the whole analysis. Historian Treva B. Lindsey, in America, Goddam (2022), documents how violence against Black women and girls is both constant and invisible, how Black women are least likely to be believed and most likely to be blamed. Apply Lindsey here. When the LSU case involves a Black woman, she faces a double bind: report a Black man and some folks in our own community call her a traitor feeding the old white myth of the Black rapist, stay silent and the institution gets to pretend nothing happened. Angela Davis named that myth in Women, Race and Class (1981), showing how the lie of the Black rapist was used to justify lynching while the actual rape of Black women by white men went unpunished. Both histories live in that LSU case at the same time.

The receipts on Black women’s credibility go back generations. Joan Little, a Black woman in a North Carolina jail, killed the white jailer who sexually assaulted her in 1974, and she became the first woman in U.S. history acquitted on the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault, in 1975. In October 1991, Anita Hill testified about Clarence Thomas in front of an all white, all male Senate Judiciary Committee, and she got interrogated like a defendant. A month later, 1,603 Black women bought an ad in The New York Times titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” That’s how we learned to protect ourselves when the institution would not.

The material impacts are real. A survivor who drops out, like Jane Doe did, loses tuition, credits, scholarships, and the earnings premium of a degree, and Black women already carry more student debt than any other group. Survivors with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, face sexual assault at rates far above everybody else and get believed even less. Men can be sexually assaulted too, and patriarchy tells them it would make them less of a man to say so, which keeps them silent. Trans women, the very people politicians claim to be protecting women from, reported being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives at a rate of 47% in the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. So the people being used as the boogeyman are some of the people most likely to be harmed. Every accusation is a confession.

A Working Definition, Since Somebody Asked

I’m giving you a working definition of rape culture because here at Education Is Elevation, it’s all about giving you the language, the ability to say what you mean and mean what you say. Rape culture is a societal environment where sexual violence is normalized, trivialized, or excused through prevailing attitudes about gender, power, and sexuality. The term came out of the radical feminist organizing of the 1970s, including New York Radical Feminists’ 1974 Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. Its key characteristics are victim blaming, normalization and trivialization, rape myths, and gender stereotypes.

Victim blaming holds survivors responsible for their assault based on their clothing, behavior, or consumption of alcohol, rather than holding the perpetrator accountable. What did you have on? What time was it? Why was you over there? One of my good friends and mutuals, Raven, a Cornell alum, class of 2020, talked about how it’s understood that women going to frat houses should watch themselves so they don’t get raped, instead of saying rapists shouldn’t rape. We put the onus on the victim. We put it on Black people to not be victims of racism. We put it on women to not be victims of sexism. We put it on gay people to not be victims of homophobia, and on trans people to not be victims of transphobia. Power always wants to pervert the individual that’s calling it out. It wants the perpetrator of the violence to be seen as the victim of the violence.

Then there’s normalization. Think about the casual ways we talk about dominating somebody in sports and competition. “Man, we raped them.” “I’m gonna take your s**t.” We even sexualize how we talk about beating people. A lot of people have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the s**t you used to get away with saying to women 15 years ago is not gonna fly now, and it’s the same energy as the folks crying about how they can’t tell racist jokes anymore. Back in your day you could say “go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich” and call it humor. We now live in a time where we are more conscious, we have more literacy, we have more ability to call s**t out. So to my fellow dudes: if you violate a woman in 2018 and in 2027 she starts talking about it, you don’t get to be the victim, fam.

Me Too Started With Black Girls, Not Hollywood

Lastly, I don’t want to leave you in the pit, because Afropessimist despair is a description, not a prescription. Tarana Burke built Me Too in 2006 through her work with Black and brown girls who survived sexual violence, more than a decade before the hashtag went viral, and her framework was “empowerment through empathy.” In her memoir Unbound (2021), Burke makes clear the movement was never about destroying men, it was about survivors finding each other and finding language. That’s the counterweight. Before any courtroom gets it right, survivors been building their own institutions of belief: the Black women who organized for Recy Taylor, the 1,603 who signed for Anita Hill, the Cornell Sun students who refused to let this story die.

My granny used to say, if you gonna be a man, you gotta stand in responsibility for your actions. I’d say if you gonna be a good human being, a person of principle, you have to be held accountable for your actions. So why do we act like gender violence against a woman has an expiration date? Look at the dialogue around these women at Cornell and LSU, how they’re being berated, how they’re being chastised, how they’re being forced to relive their trauma, how they got people defending their abuse and justifying their assault, and ask yourself: if a woman was already violated, what would encourage her to bring that person to justice after she’s seen how everybody else gets treated?

See, Sanday reminds us that brotherhood can be built on the shared body of a woman nobody bothered to see as a person, and Lindsey teaches us that the women least likely to be believed have always been the ones building the movements that protect everybody else. Your individual self determination matters, and it will not make you immune from how systems position you. You can be a go getter, you can engage in commerce, you can engage in trade, and the system will still decide whose pain counts. You can want to learn more about sexual assault, more about patriarchy, more about misogyny, more about consent, and still have to fight people who say a man shouldn’t be held accountable for how he violated someone’s consent.

I hope that we can become people that not only knew better, but that do better, and people that want to encourage each other to do better.

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Five Key Takeaways

* The language is the evidence. Calling a woman a “shop” in a group chat is not a joke, it is a confession of how the men in that chat saw her: as inventory, not a person. Rape culture always shows up in the vocabulary before it shows up in the courtroom.

* Title IX was born from the civil rights movement, and Black women built that movement fighting rape. From Recy Taylor in 1944 to Anita Hill in 1991, the women least protected by the law did the most to create it.

* The danger to women is in the frat house, not the locker room. The NCAA president counted fewer than 10 trans athletes among roughly 510,000, while one Ivy League survey found 35% of undergraduate women assaulted. Policy energy that ignores that math is politics, not protection.

* Two years is not an alibi. New York has no statute of limitations for first degree rape and a 20 year window for second degree. “Why now” is a question the law already answered: now is still on time.

* Power hates a name tag. Whiteness, patriarchy, and institutions all keep power by staying unnamed. Naming consent, naming rape culture, and naming the institutions that cover for it is how accountability starts.

Works Cited and Related Readings

* Burke, Tarana. Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. Flatiron Books, 2021.

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

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. Random House, 1981. See “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist.”

* Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997.

* Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Shamus Khan. Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. W. W. Norton, 2020.

* Lindsey, Treva B. America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. University of California Press, 2022.

* McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Knopf, 2010.

* New York Radical Feminists (Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, eds.). Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. Plume, 1974.

* Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus. NYU Press, 1990; 2nd ed. 2007.

* Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Doubleday, 1906.

Law and policy

* Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. § 1681.

* Alexander v. Yale, 631 F.2d 178 (2d Cir. 1980).

* Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, 503 U.S. 60 (1992).

* Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999).

* Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (1990).

* Tennessee v. Cardona (E.D. Ky., Jan. 9, 2025), vacating the 2024 Title IX rule.

* Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” (Feb. 5, 2025).

* Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025), Foreword (2023).

Reporting on this case

* PBS NewsHour / AP: Prosecutor reopens probe into Cornell gang rape allegations

* NPR via TPR: Prosecutors are reopening a Cornell fraternity rape case

* Finger Lakes 1: Lawsuit accuses Cornell, Greek organizations and students

* IBTimes: Lawsuit says Chi Phi men could cut penalties with essays

* IBTimes: “Shop still open?” texts emerge

* TMZ: Accused fraternity brother no longer at Wells Fargo

* Law Commentary: LSU found football player responsible for rape, reduced suspension

* WAFB / Gray News: LSU player accusation prompts criminal investigation

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Thank you Nora Lyn St. Clair, PJ Schuster, Jen Champion, Heather A Murphy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Huey P. Newton said power is the ability to define phenomena and make them act in a desired manner, and I told the students at Tuskegee University that quote governs my life, so let’s define the phenomenon real quick before somebody else defines it for us. In late September 2025, Frank “Chris” Lee beat the incumbent mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama in a runoff by 1,002 votes to 929, a margin of 73 votes, and he credits the students of Tuskegee University for showing up, and when I sat on that livestream and looked at the room, the mayor said it out loud, we probably got that many people in this room right now. Seventy three people. Like, that’s not a statistic, kinfolks, that’s a classroom, that’s a step show, that’s the line at the cafe on a Tuesday, and that classroom decided who runs the city.

Most of y’all were taught to treat the local race like it don’t count, so let me say it the way I said it on stream. I think it’s a part of the intelligent design to make it where we always sensationalizing the national federal races and make it where we view the local races as the meaningless games. For us that watch the NBA, we know it’s like 82 games, and most of us don’t give a damn about the 82 games, we only care about if you’re going to make the playoffs. Then we apply that same sports culture to politics and wonder why we alienated from how our own communities is ran. Ahh, but here’s the part they don’t put on the poster: Tuskegee is the place where the state of Alabama proved, in writing, that it understood the small games better than we did. In 1957 the legislature took a square city and redrew it into a figure with 28 sides to cut Black voters out of the municipal elections, and in 2026 the legislature took the congressional district Tuskegee sits in and redrew it from roughly 48 percent Black voting age population to 40 percent. Same pen, different century, same intelligent design.

This is about a city that was born from a vote, carved up over a vote, and is now being told again that its vote is a rounding error. It’s also a pack about what happens after the vote, because I said something in that room that I need to stand on: I’m rocking with Mayor Lee, hell yeah I am, and if he don’t deliver what he said he would, y’all should be on his helmet. Two things can be true.I. A City Born From a Vote

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Before there was a Tuskegee Institute there was a deal, and the deal was electoral. In 1880, Lewis Adams, a formerly enslaved tinsmith and one of the most respected Black men in Macon County, sat down with two white Democratic candidates, W. F. Foster and Arthur L. Brooks, and made them an offer that every organizer in this room should study: I can deliver the Black vote in Macon County, what will you deliver back. Foster and Brooks won, and in February 1881 the Alabama legislature passed the act creating a normal school for Black teachers in Tuskegee with a $2,000 annual appropriation for salaries. Booker T. Washington arrived that summer and opened the school on July 4, 1881.

Sit with that, because it means the most famous Black school in the South was not a gift, it was a receipt. Lewis Adams understood in 1880 what I was trying to explain on stream in 2026, that politics is who gets what, when, where, and how, a definition I took from my own college coursework by way of Harold Lasswell, and that the vote is a currency you spend for something specific. Lewis Adams did not have a parasocial relationship with Foster. He had a contract.

Crazy how the state has honored that contract ever since in the smallest possible font. The original appropriation was $2,000 a year. The appropriation bill for fiscal year 2026 sends Tuskegee University $15,816,579 from the Education Trust Fund, and the bill’s own text explains that Tuskegee’s relationship to the state is unique, that the state holds seats on the Tuskegee board and the State Superintendent of Education sits as an ex officio voting member, and that because Tuskegee is both private and state related it should not be funded the way the state’s public universities are funded. Hold that sentence in your pocket. We are coming back to it with a calculator.

II. Twenty Eight Sides

By the 1950s the Black residents of Tuskegee had turned the institute into the most educated Black electorate in the Deep South, and the Tuskegee Civic Association, led by the sociologist Charles G. Gomillion, spent years pushing Black faculty, staff, and townspeople through a Macon County registration board that met rarely and rejected often. As the registered Black vote inside city limits climbed toward 400, the white political class did the math, and they did not like the math.

So in 1957 state Senator Sam Engelhardt, who also chaired the White Citizens Councils of Alabama, pushed Act 140 through the legislature. Act 140 redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee from a square into a 28 sided figure that, by the plaintiffs’ allegations, removed all but four or five of the roughly 400 Black voters from the city while removing not a single white voter. The institute itself ended up outside the city it built. The Tuskegee Civic Association answered with a selective buying campaign, a boycott of white merchants in the new, whiter downtown, and with a lawsuit argued by Fred Gray, the same Fred Gray who represented Rosa Parks and would later represent the men of the syphilis study.

On November 14, 1960, the Supreme Court decided Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had spent years telling the Court to stay out of the “political thicket” of districting, wrote that the state could not use its power over municipal lines as an instrument to fence Black citizens out of the vote. The 28 sided city was struck down. Gomillion is the hinge case that opened the door to Baker v. Carr two years later and to the whole architecture of voting rights litigation that followed.

This means the folks who tell college students that districting is boring are wrong. Districting is the oldest weapon in the Tuskegee story, and the people who drew Act 140 were not confused about what they were doing. They were small games specialists.

III. Same Pen, Different Century

Let’s run the 2026 receipts in order, because this is the part that’s on your ballot November 3.

In 2023, in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court order finding that Alabama’s congressional map likely diluted Black voting power and required a second district where Black voters had a real opportunity to elect their candidate. The legislature drew a second map that still did not comply, and a federal panel appointed a special master who drew a new 2nd District stretching from Mobile through Montgomery and the Black Belt to the Georgia line, a district that for the first time pulled Tuskegee and Macon County out of the bottom of a Republican district run from Anniston. In 2024 Shomari Figures won that seat with 54.6 percent of the vote, and Alabama sent two Black representatives to Congress for the first time in its history.

Then came Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026, which gutted the race conscious remedy under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Gov. Kay Ivey, who had said she opposed redistricting before the 2026 elections, called a special session for May 4. The legislature went back to its 2023 lines. The Supreme Court then released Alabama from the court ordered map, the state postponed the primaries for four districts, and on August 11 Republicans nominated state Rep. Rhett Marques, endorsed by Trump, to take on Figures in a district where the Black voting age population drops from 48 percent to 40 percent and where Trump would have won by 14 points in 2024. The Cook Political Report moved the race to Lean Republican in June. Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved it from Likely Republican to Leans Republican in September, and the reason they gave is the whole sermon: Black turnout could be relatively strong across the South partly in response to Callais itself.

So when the mayor stood up and said that if you live in Tuskegee and change your registration you can have a direct impact, he was not hyping, he was reading the forecast. Then he said the line that every student in that room should tattoo on the back of their hand: they are not counting your votes, they have already factored out that you all don’t care about congressional elections, you all live in Georgia, Louisiana, you don’t pay attention. The map was drawn on the assumption of your absence. Crazy how a 40 percent district is “safe” only if the 18 to 22 year olds sitting inside it keep acting like guests.

Shout out to the student moderator who brought numbers to that conversation, because that’s research over mesearch in practice, and we gotta tighten the numbers up so nobody can shuck and jive around them. The district Figures won in 2024 went for him 54.6 to 45.4. The new lines would have gone for Trump by 14. That’s the swing the legislature bought with a pen. The moderator was also right that the 2024 results inside Macon County are lopsided Democratic, and the mayor clarified the arithmetic better than any consultant could: Figures is going to win Tuskegee by a huge percentage either way, but 3,000 votes versus 10,000 votes out of Tuskegee is what moves the districtwide number from 46 to 51. The percentage is not the weapon. The raw count is.

IV. The Small Games Decide the Playoffs

Apply Guinier here. In The Tyranny of the Majority (1994), Lani Guinier described voting rights in three generations. The first generation was access, the fight to get on the rolls at all, the fight the Tuskegee Civic Association fought at a registration board that barely opened its doors. The second generation was dilution, the fight over how lines are drawn so that Black votes are packed into one district or cracked across several until they are “wasted,” which is Act 140 in 1957 and the 2026 redraw both. The third generation, the one most people never get to, is governance, the question of what Black voters actually get once their candidate is seated, whether the representative stays accountable to the people who sent them or becomes, in Guinier’s language, a role model with no leverage, one Black face in a room built to outvote them.

The mayor gave the clearest third generation example I’ve heard from an elected official. There are five members on the city council plus the mayor, and he said with four votes somebody could come in and change the name of Tuskegee if they wanted to. If the wrong people moved in and organized a voting bloc and got their four people elected, Tuskegee might change its identity. Most of y’all heard that as a warning about outsiders. I heard Guinier. That’s what a majoritarian system does, it hands the whole institution to whoever controls 50 percent plus one, which is exactly why the folks who drew Act 140 wanted a city council without Black voters, and why the people who redrew AL 02 wanted a congressional seat that Black Belt turnout alone can’t carry.

Lasswell gives you the definition, Guinier gives you the stages, and the student in the room gave you the question: how do we encourage people who think their vote doesn’t matter. Here’s what I said and I’ma stand on it. Our vote matters so much that it impacts whether we get salmonella in our lettuce. Our vote matters so much that it impacts whether y’all are able to even learn about Booker T. Washington, or whether the country is able to learn about Carter G. Woodson. My grandma deserves to be able to afford insulin, so I got to figure out what policy is impacting the cost of insulin. Every single thing that happens to us, whether it’s my mama on drugs or people eating sleep for dinner or bombs blown up over Baghdad, there’s a policy and a policymaker, probably a lobbyist, probably a bureaucracy, probably an interest group behind it. They complicate politics in a way that causes voter apathy. We gotta simplify it.

Then I said the part I need everybody in the back to hear. A lot of us as Black people are used to being acted upon. We ain’t used to being the actors.

V. On His Helmet

This is where the third generation turns into a posture. We have too many parasocial relationships happening in politics. Does Chris Lee remind me of a cousin, an uncle, a brother? Yes. That’s not the capacity I was talking to him in. I was talking to him in the capacity of a public official, and after you vote for a person who gets in office, you got to put that magnifying glass on them, you got to act like the mama checking whether you did your chores. You told me you was going to do this. If you don’t do it, you getting grounded.

Charles Payne helps us name what the mayor already built. In I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Payne distinguishes the mobilizing tradition, big events, big speeches, big turnout days, from the organizing tradition, the slow work of building people who can act for themselves long after the speaker leaves town. Apply Payne here. The 73 votes were mobilizing. The Tuskegee City Ambassador Program, which the mayor described as student led, with students in internships, students in blazers with the city seal, students bringing him problems like a 45 minute ambulance response to a medical emergency on campus, that’s organizing, and that’s the infrastructure that makes the helmet possible. You can’t hold a man accountable from the outside of a building you never walked into.

Then, to his credit, the mayor turned the helmet on himself. This position belongs to the people, he said, I’m just a vessel. Follow the money, he said, and he told them his political science professor taught him the real golden rule: whoever has the gold rules. He said he’s proud he didn’t have big donors pulling public strings, and he said he thought he was coming in with a magic wand and found out it takes replacing personnel, taking resistance, and time. Two things can be true. That transparency is real, and it’s also the exact moment the students should write his promises down with a date next to them, because a vessel that nobody checks becomes a bucket with a hole in it.

Here’s the receipt that shows what the third generation looks like when it works. When the company running the dialysis center in Tuskegee decided to shut down the local operation and send patients to surrounding areas, the mayor said Figures came down, they pulled up on the company, and Figures called the higher ups to make sure the company did what it said it would do. Somebody please tell me what a 14 point Trump district does for a dialysis patient in Macon County. The orange man up in D.C., his ability to do what he wants to us these last two years is going to be predicated off the local elections. Keep that in mind in these midterms, because these local elections could be decided by five votes, 100 votes, 70 votes.

VI. A Town With a College, a College Town, and a Calculator

I asked the mayor to break down the difference between Auburn, a college town, and Tuskegee, a town with a college, for the folks who don’t know Alabama, and he started with the obvious: Tuskegee is about 95 percent Black. He said the federal posture toward the city has been benign neglect, represented for decades by people the community did not vote for, so what motivation did they have to let infrastructure money trickle down. He said Auburn 40 years ago was in worse shape than people remember and took advantage of what he called strategic favor. Then he said he didn’t have the exact numbers. Bet. Let me hand him the calculator.

For fiscal year 2026, the Auburn University System is appropriated $436.3 million from the Education Trust Fund, out of roughly $1.95 billion in total operating appropriations. Tuskegee University is appropriated $15.8 million. Then the legislature passed a supplemental from the Advancement and Technology Fund this spring that sends Auburn University $30.6 million and Tuskegee University $990,360. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon with a gift shop.

Ahh, but it gets more specific. Tuskegee is an 1890 land grant university, and land grant funding runs on a match: Washington sends formula money for agricultural research and extension, and the state is supposed to match it. On March 6, 2024, Senators Stewart and Beasley introduced SB 189, which would have required $475,470,075 from the Education Trust Fund to Tuskegee over ten years to make the university whole for the state match it never got from 1987 through 2020, calculated against what Tuskegee would have received if its per student state funding matched Alabama’s 1862 land grant university. That bill was read once, referred to the Senate Finance and Taxation Education Committee, and has sat there ever since. Meanwhile the annual Tuskegee appropriation earmarks “at least $2,000,000” for the agricultural research and extension state match, and somebody in Montgomery calls that generosity.

Whitey on the Moon, kinfolks. The state found $30.6 million in one supplemental for one Auburn campus. The state could not find the first dollar of a $475 million debt it owes the school it created by statute in 1881 off a Black vote. When the mayor says “if I had one wish, it probably would be to bring a hospital,” and when he says the building we were sitting in used to be a hospital where Black babies were born to Black nurses and Black doctors, understand that the absence is not an accident of the market. It’s a budget line. The mayor said it himself: a hospital is a business, it shouldn’t be like that, but in this capitalistic system somebody’s got to pay for the doctors and the MRI machines. Just admit the state already decided who that somebody is.

This also proves the mayor’s other point, the one he made almost in passing: if you don’t own it, then you don’t have control over it. He said the city and Black developers have been quietly acquiring property so the wrong people can’t get their hands on it the way the wrong people could get their hands on four council seats. I’m with it, and I’m also going to keep that helmet handy, because I told that room the other half of what I’ve seen across Alabama: a lot of city municipals and mayors sell out their constituents for outside profits. Y’all ain’t got time for that.

VII. Sammy Younge Was Registering Voters Too

Apply Williamson Lott here. In Jim Crow Campus, Joy Ann Williamson Lott shows that Southern state governments treated higher education, Black and white, as an instrument for maintaining the racial order, using appropriations, board seats, and loyalty pressure to keep campuses in line, while students kept turning those same campuses into bases for movement work. Tuskegee is a textbook case with the textbook written into the appropriation bill. The state funds Tuskegee one year at a time, through a standalone bill that must pass every session, with state appointees on the board and an operations plan and audited statements required before a dollar is released. That’s not just oversight. That’s a leash with a reporting requirement.

So when the mayor said the university is “private, but quasi public when it comes to state funding,” he was naming the exact mechanism Williamson Lott studies. Then when he said that for years the campus and the local government “operated in silos,” maybe because the mayor didn’t get along with the president at the time, apply Eddie Cole. In The Campus Color Line, Cole shows that college presidents have always been political actors, managing what their campuses can say and do on race to protect funding and standing with the state. A university president who depends on an annual appropriation from a supermajority legislature has every incentive to keep the campus quiet and the city at arm’s length, and a city that depends on that campus as its economic base, the mayor’s words, “you all are the economic base of this city,” pays the price for that distance in ambulances and potholes.

Now let me tell the students who they are standing on, because this is the part the brochure leaves out. On January 3, 1966, Sammy Younge Jr., a Tuskegee Institute student and Navy veteran who worked with SNCC and the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League registering Black voters in Macon County, was shot and killed by a white gas station attendant after he tried to use a whites only restroom. James Forman called him the first Black college student to die in the Black liberation movement. Days later, SNCC issued its statement opposing the war in Vietnam and named Sammy Younge in it, connecting a Black veteran killed at home for demanding a toilet to a government asking Black men to die abroad. An all white jury in Lee County acquitted the man who killed him. Tuskegee students marched downtown, and that same year Macon County elected Lucius Amerson sheriff, the first Black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction. Six years later the city elected Johnny Ford its first Black mayor.

That’s who the 73 votes belong to. When the mayor told students to put Rockefeller Hall and their room number on the registration form instead of the generic campus address, because a form with the wrong address gets thrown out and nobody calls you back, and when he said out of state students can’t register online in Alabama and have to fill out a paper form with a pen, which he joked half of y’all haven’t touched in years, understand that every one of those barriers is a descendant of the board that met twice a month and rejected Tuskegee faculty with PhDs. The paperwork is the registration board now. Fill it out like Sammy Younge is grading it.

Here’s what I told the student who asked for one action item besides registering. Ask yourself what you want in the next two semesters, and who you need to talk to, what you need to engage, what you need to do to get it. Excuse my French, if the s**t don’t matter in five years, don’t do it. I’m not the person I was when I was in y’all’s seat in 2012, 2013. I spent time learning how the world works and figuring out how to get what I wanted from it based on the tools I had access to. Right now we got a lot of us lost in the sauce for quick results, and because so many of us are lost in the sauce, we don’t recognize that most things happen over time and require information before you respond. Before you act, collect some data, do some research, understand the who, what, when, where, and how. Then act.

The last thing on education. The young man who described tutoring a fifth grader using first and second grade worksheets asked how students leave a lasting impact when they can’t be there 24/7. The mayor told him the truth: he has watched kids he drove home every day go on to do great things, and he has watched some of them get killed, including the homicide near Howard Road the day after students were there tutoring. Those two facts sit side by side in the same city that holds a world class research university, and that is the education problem in one sentence. The answers are literally inside these gates, the mayor said, the architecture students who could draw plans for residents who can’t afford an architect, the professors who want to turn the city’s waste into fuel. The gates have just been closed from both sides.

VIII. The Women Who Ran the Clipboard

Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee on February 4, 1913. Most of the country remembers her for a seat. Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street remembers her for a clipboard. In 1944, a decade before the bus, Parks was sent by the Montgomery NAACP to Abbeville, in Henry County, to investigate the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a young Black mother and sharecropper, by a group of white men who were never convicted. McGuire argues that Black women’s organizing against sexual violence, the fight for bodily integrity, is the buried root of the Alabama movement, and that the movement’s public memory turned a network of tough, strategic women into a single tired seamstress.

That same erasure was sitting right in front of us on the stream. The questions that drove the policy conversation came from women like Deirdre Newcomb, a double major in aerospace engineering and political science and a member of the NAACP, who asked for one action item for every young person listening. The person who closed the event, who told the room the forms were in the back and that it takes less than three minutes, was the NAACP’s press and publicity chair, a Black woman whose name the transcript didn’t even catch. The mayor credited the Greeks, the campus NAACP, and the organizations with clipboards. That’s correct, and it’s also how the story gets told every time, with the men at the mic and the women at the folding table, and then fifty years later the folding table is where the history actually happened.

Now take the lens from the ballot to the body, because the mayor and the students kept circling the same three things: no hospital, a dialysis center the company tried to close, and no mental health facility. Apply Harriet Washington. In Medical Apartheid, Washington documents the Tuskegee study, run by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 on roughly 600 Black men in Macon County, about 399 with syphilis and about 201 without, who were never told they had the disease and were kept from penicillin even after it became the standard cure in the late 1940s. It’s remembered as a study of men. It was also a study that let the disease reach their wives and children, which is why the federal health benefits program created after Fred Gray’s lawsuit was later extended to wives, widows, and offspring. The study ended only after Jean Heller’s AP story in July 1972. Clinton apologized in 1997.

Washington’s point is that medical abuse is not only a scandal, it is a structure, and the structure shows up as absence. When the mayor says the city has no hospital, when kidney failure hits Black Americans at several times the rate of white Americans and the dialysis provider decides Tuskegee isn’t worth the overhead, when a student asks about mental health and the mayor says plainly there’s no facility here and that the root is often poverty, the bodies carrying that absence are disproportionately Black women. Black women are the caregivers who drive the dialysis patient to the next county, the mothers taking off work, the grandmothers whose insulin I was talking about. Intersectionality is not a vibe here. It’s a mileage log.

Then flip the gender lens to the young men in the room, because the betting conversation was about them. The gambling apps market hardest to young men, and they praying on y’all. They hope instead of sending your Pell Grant money to your mama and daddy, you put $5 on a player getting this many dunks, $10 that some Auburn player makes this tackle. Watch a football game or a basketball game and count how long it takes before they encourage you to bet. The same economy that won’t fund a hospital is spending millions to make sure a 19 year old in Rockefeller Hall has a sportsbook in his pocket.

IX. They Sold Us Dog Racing to Keep the Schools Open

The mayor brought up a race nobody thinks about, a seat on the Macon County Racing Commission, and he said it’s the entity that oversees the money from VictoryLand in Shorter, which started as greyhound racing and is basically a casino now. He’s right that it’s not sexy and he’s right that it matters, and the history explains why.

According to former Mayor Johnny Ford’s own account, in December 1982 the Macon County Board of Education announced that schools would be closing for lack of funding, and that was the beginning of dog racing in Macon County. VictoryLand opened in 1984. At its peak around 2010 it employed roughly 2,500 people. Then the state raided it, seized its electronic bingo machines and cash, closed it for years, fought it all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court, and left Macon County with the bill while, Macon County leaders argued, similar operations elsewhere kept running. Live racing ended in 2011. Today the floor runs historical horse racing machines.

Look at what that sequence teaches. A Black Belt county was left so underfunded that gambling got sold to it as school money, then the state treated that same gambling as a crime when Macon County did it. Every accusation is a confession. Now in 2026 a super PAC backed by DraftKings and FanDuel, the American Conservative Fund, spent more than $9.3 million in Alabama’s Republican primaries backing 17 legislative candidates and winning at least 12, shaping the next legislature before it ever votes on lottery or sports betting. Alabama still has no legal sports betting, yet prediction markets like Kalshi operate in the state under federal commodities regulation, and an Alabama resident filed a class action in January 2026 alleging Kalshi has been operating illegally under the state’s gambling laws.

To be precise, because precision protects us: the Racing Commission oversees the racetrack license, not Kalshi or Polymarket or PrizePicks. My point on stream was that the technology is moving faster than our policing and our policies, and eventually somebody at the county level is going to have to account for the betting that happens inside the county on apps nobody locally licenses. Me, Deontay, and a few other Black folks with platforms are very conscious, no pun intended, of how the gambling industry preys on Black people. Connect the dots is all I want to do. Connect the dots.

X. Cast Down Your Bucket, Just Not on Your Neighbor’s Land

Now let me hand y’all something to build with, because I did not come to Tuskegee to tell students they’re doomed. Apply Imani Perry. In South to America, Perry argues that the South is not America’s embarrassing exception but its key, the place where you can read the whole country most clearly, and also a place of extraordinary Black beauty, ingenuity, and home. She writes the South as somewhere you can choose, not just escape.

That’s the mayor’s thesis, and I want to give him his flowers for it. People think he wants to be governor and then go to president, and he told the room he doesn’t, that Tuskegee is the biggest platform where he can lead Black America, the same way Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Lionel Richie and the Commodores did from the same ground. He told students they can work remotely from Tuskegee, get a few acres instead of a little bitty one bedroom, start a business inside the student economy, come back for more than homecoming, and tune into council meetings. He quoted Washington’s “cast down your bucket where you are” to the young man from rural Louisiana deciding whether to register in Alabama, and he was honest that it’s election by election, which is why he told the story of switching his own registration to Virginia as a Hampton student in 2008 and feeling like his class helped carry the state for Obama.

Two things can be true. Perry’s South also remembers that “cast down your bucket” was the Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895, and Du Bois spent the next decade arguing that Washington’s bucket came with a promise not to ask for the vote. The students who cast down their buckets in Tuskegee in 2025 did it at the ballot box, which is the part of the bucket Washington’s critics said he left in the well.

There’s one more two things can be true I owe this room. The mayor told students about buying property at county tax sales, the lists of properties with unpaid taxes the revenue office publishes every spring, and he was clear that most of the time the owners come back and redeem. That’s real wealth advice and it’s also a door that has swung the other way in the Black Belt for a century, because tax sales are one of the ways Black families lost land, especially heirs property passed down without a clear title. So yes, buy the lot. Also check whose grandmama it belonged to, and if you can help a family keep it instead, that’s an investment too. Ownership that comes from your neighbor’s eviction is just Auburn with a Tuskegee address.

Power in Closing

See, Guinier reminds us that voting rights come in generations, first the right to cast the ballot, then the right to have it count inside a fair line, then the right to have it govern, and that a city redrawn into 28 sides in 1957 and a district redrawn from 48 percent to 40 percent in 2026 are the same second generation attack wearing a different suit. Williamson Lott teaches us that the state has always tried to manage Black campuses through the purse and the board seat, and that the students who refused to be managed, from Sammy Younge Jr. to the 73 votes in that room, are the reason the campus means anything at all.

So define the phenomenon. The phenomenon is a map drawn on the assumption that you will not show up. Make it act in a desired manner. The forms are in the back. Use your dorm and your room number. Write legibly. Vote November 3. Then get on the helmet of everybody you voted for, including the folks you love.

I put blood, sweat, and tears into creating this platform and then making sure that communities like Tuskegee, Alabama is accounted for. You feel me? Make sure that it got depth, breadth, perspective, visibility over there.

Education Is Elevation, but power. How do you define power?

5 Key Takeaways

* Tuskegee was born from a vote. Lewis Adams traded Macon County’s Black vote for a state funded school in 1880, and the school opened July 4, 1881. The vote has always been a contract, not a vibe.

* Districting is the oldest weapon in the Tuskegee story. Act 140 turned the city into a 28 sided figure in 1957, Gomillion v. Lightfoot struck it down in 1960, and the 2026 redraw cut AL 02’s Black voting age population from 48 to 40 percent after Callais.

* The raw count beats the percentage. Figures will win Tuskegee either way. Whether Tuskegee delivers 3,000 votes or 10,000 is what moves the districtwide number, and the map was drawn assuming students won’t show up.

* The funding gap is a budget decision. Auburn’s system gets $436.3 million from the Education Trust Fund for FY 2026 to Tuskegee’s $15.8 million, and a $475 million land grant match repayment bill has sat in committee since March 2024.

* Voting is the entry point, not the finish line. Keep the receipts, keep the dates, and stay on the helmet of every official you elected, including the ones who feel like family.

Paid Subscriber Ask

This piece exists because somebody has to fill the critical void left by the retreat of public education media, and I’m doing it from the ground, from Tuskegee’s campus to your phone, with no corporate backing and no institutional cover. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession, I am that 2%, and every pack like this one takes hours of archive work, case law, budget documents, and fact checking so you can walk into any room with receipts. If this helped you understand why 73 votes matter, why a 28 sided city matters, and why a $475 million debt sitting in committee matters, become a paid subscriber today. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue.

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

WORKS CITED/RELATED READINGS

* Cole, Eddie R. The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. Princeton University Press, 2020.

* Forman, James. Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement. Grove Press, 1968.

* Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. Free Press, 1994.

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

* McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Knopf, 2010.1819 News, “Tuskegee incumbent Haygood defeated by Lee in mayoral runoff.” https://1819news.com/news/item/tuskegee-incumbent-haygood-defeated-by-lee-in-mayoral-runoff

* Alabama Political Reporter, “Can Shomari Figures win reelection after redistricting?” July 15, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/07/15/can-shomari-figures-win-reelection-after-redistricting/

* Alabama Political Reporter, “Race rater narrows GOP edge in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District,” Sept 11, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/09/11/race-rater-narrows-gop-edge-in-alabamas-2nd-congressional-district/

* Alabama Political Reporter, “DraftKings, FanDuel backed PAC scores big wins in Alabama primaries,” May 26, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/05/26/draftkings-fanduel-backed-pac-scores-big-wins-in-alabama-primaries/

* Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Ecco, 2022.

* Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday, 2006.

* Williamson Lott, Joy Ann. Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order. Teachers College Press, 2018.

* Further reading: Blain, Keisha N. Until I Am Free (2021); Gray, Fred D. Bus Ride to Justice (1995); Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. Bloody Lowndes (2009).

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe

A little old white lady clutched her purse when a Black man stepped onto the elevator, and in that one second she did more sociology than most PhD programs do in a whole decade, because she wrote his entire life off his skin, wrote the beginning, wrote the ending, and convicted him before the doors even closed, and she ain’t never even met him. Today we ain’t talking about her purse. Today we talking about who taught her how to read.

You ever been found guilty of a crime that ain’t even happened yet? Convicted by a side eye, sentenced by the clutching of a purse, no trial, no jury, no evidence but your own skin. My grandpa always said your skin is your sin, and if you Black in America you ain’t got to imagine that, that’s just a regular old Tuesday. White supremacy don’t always show up in a hood holding a torch, sometimes it shows up in a cardigan on the elevator holding the purse a little tighter, sometimes it shows up jogging past you and crossing the street, same system, different uniform.

Yancy did not invent this feeling, Black folks been living it since the auction block, but he named it with precision. In his 2008 essay “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism,” and later in Black Bodies, White Gazes, Yancy walks us into the elevator and describes the click of the car door locks, the clutched purse, the woman who suddenly needs to stare at the floor numbers, and he argues that none of that is a private feeling, it is a learned way of seeing that whiteness rehearses so often it starts to feel like instinct. Peep the third edition of that book, released in July 2025, because it adds a whole new chapter on George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Sonya Massey, and Kayla Moore, which tells you the elevator keeps getting new passengers.

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

Power Is Who Holds the Pen

Huey P. Newton told us that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner, so sit with that for a minute, because power ain’t just about who got the guns and the money, power is also about who gets to define, who gets to identify, and who gets to say what a thing is before the thing ever gets to be itself.

Today’s phenomenon is what Yancy calls the elevator effect and what I call getting your whole biography written by a stranger who don’t know you from a can of paint in under a few seconds. It’s the moment a Black body enters a space and the space decides who you are before you do, the purse clutches, the door locks click, the security guard starts his little stroll behind you in the store, nobody said a word, yet a whole conversation just happened and you wasn’t allowed to talk in it.

The Ignorance Ain’t an Accident, It’s an Achievement

The system behind the purse is whiteness operating as a whole knowledge system, and the key term comes from philosopher Charles Mills: the epistemology of ignorance. Epistemology is the study of knowing, which to me is just a fancy word for how do you know what you know. If you believe Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, that’s an epistemological understanding of the world, and if you believe girls wear pink and boys wear blue, that’s one too. Academia likes to throw a bunch of syllables at you to confuse you, but don’t worry, Education Is Elevation and I got you.

Mills argued in The Racial Contract (1997) that the contract requires white folks to sign on to an inverted epistemology, a structured agreement to misread the world and then call the misreading neutral, objective, common sense. Peep that. The ignorance ain’t an accident, it’s an achievement, it gets taught, funded, rehearsed, and graded, and it’s built into the intelligent design of how America perceives Black bodies.

Yancy shows us what that misknowing does to being. He describes the Black body under the white gaze through what I’m calling the ontology of surfaces, meaning whiteness looks at Black skin and believes the surface is the depth, that everything worth knowing about you is pinned onto your epidermis. Sartre said existence precedes essence, you live first and become who you are after, and Yancy says whiteness flips that script for Black folks, so essence precedes existence and the verdict arrives before the person does. Fanon felt the same thing on a train in 1952 when a child pointed and said “Look, a Negro!” and he watched himself get turned into an object in real time. The not knowing already did its homework, already prescribed a reality for you that was never meant for you, it was built to cover up for what they refuse to know.

Same Gaze, Different Sentences

Now here’s what that means for your neighbors, because you gotta make sure your neighbor is good, and this gaze don’t read every Black body the same way.

It reads Black men as threat, which is why the purse clutch. It reads Black women through what Dr. Moya Bailey named misogynoir, which is why Serena Williams told reporters at Wimbledon in 2018 that she had been drug tested more than any other top American player, male or female, five out of competition tests in the first half of that year alone, and why Black women’s pain gets dismissed in delivery rooms. It reads Black children as grown, what I call the adultification of our Black children, which is why the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found in 2017 that adults see Black girls as less innocent and more adult than white girls starting at age five. Five, y’all, five. Phillip Goff and his colleagues found the same thing for Black boys starting around age ten, with police overestimating their age by about four and a half years.

Tamir Rice got twelve years on this earth and about two seconds of assessment. The gaze reads Black disabled and neurodivergent folks as noncompliant, which is why Elijah McClain is not with us today. Same gaze, different sentences. That’s why I always say we need a multiplicity of Blackness, because white supremacy has different ways of texturizing Blackness, different ways of positioning Black folks and magnetizing violence onto us, and down South we bury Black trans women at rates that should make the whole country ashamed, because their Blackness and their transness and their womanness collide in front of the same gaze.

We see this in the law too. You won’t find the word slavery in the original Constitution, yet we know what the three fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause was doing, and you won’t find the word Black in it either, yet we know who it wasn’t written for. That’s whiteness at power, mapped onto legislation, mapped onto bodies, and mapped onto the phone in a white woman’s hand.

Receipt Number One: She Knew What Product She Was Ordering

May 25, 2020, the Ramble in Central Park. Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher and Audubon board member, asks Amy Cooper, no relation, to leash her dog in an area where leashes are required. She tells him she is going to call the cops and tell them there’s an African American man threatening her life, and then she does exactly that, and on the recording her voice climbs into panic as if somebody had laid a hand on her, and nobody did.

Now watch what she did, because this part is important and Yancy illustrates it perfectly. She announced his race first. She knew exactly what product she was ordering when she dialed 911, and she understood that the state would deliver it. Christian Cooper put it best when he told NPR she was threatening to bring the machine down on his head. Crazy how that same day, about a thousand miles west in Minneapolis, that same machine put a knee on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. Same day. Same machine. Different zip code.

Here’s the receipt on the receipt. Amy Cooper was charged with a misdemeanor for filing a false report, completed five therapy sessions in a restorative program, and the Manhattan DA dismissed the charge and sealed the file in February 2021. Five sessions. Meanwhile states and cities had to write whole new laws, New Jersey, California, San Francisco’s CAREN Act, just to say out loud that weaponizing 911 against Black folks is a harm, which tells you the law never saw it as one on its own.

Receipt Number Two: Sonya Massey Dialed the Same Number

Two things can be true. 911 is a weapon in a white woman’s hand, and 911 is a death sentence in a Black woman’s hand.

July 6, 2024, Springfield, Illinois. Sonya Massey, a 36 year old Black mother, calls 911 because she thinks there’s a prowler outside her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrive. Inside her kitchen, she moves a pot of hot water off the stove, and Deputy Sean Grayson shoots her in the face. In October 2025 a jury convicted him of second degree murder, and on January 29, 2026, a judge sentenced him to 20 years. At sentencing, her mother Donna Massey told the court that she is now afraid to call the police herself.

Sit with the mirror image. Amy Cooper called the police and the state showed up to serve her. Sonya Massey called the police and the state showed up and read her as the threat in her own kitchen. Same number. Same dispatcher. The only variable was whose body was holding the phone. That’s not safety, that’s a racial sorting machine wearing a badge.

The Definition Ain’t Mine

Now let’s name the system. White supremacy runs on its favorite fuel, antiblackness. When I say white supremacy, I mean a synergistic system of privileges, presumptions, institutions, and enforcement that positions whiteness as the norm, the neutral, and the supreme, and that benefits white people individually and institutionally whether they asked for it or not. That’s damn near Yancy, so take it up with the academics, not me.

That’s bigger than Amy Cooper and bigger than a purse on the elevator. Who has the power? White people, individually and institutionally, wealthy and poor. Yancy is careful here, y’all. Even poor white folks catching hell from capitalism every day of their lives still walk through stores without being followed, and still get read as individuals instead of specimens. Peggy McIntosh called this an invisible knapsack of unearned assets back in 1988, and Yancy sharpens it: whiteness is an inheritance, you ain’t got to sign for it, it came in the mail anyway.

Yancy also invokes Herrenvolk democracy, a term the sociologist Pierre van den Berghe coined in 1967 for a system that is a democracy for the ruling racial group and a domination for everybody else, reminding us that America was never a democracy with racism sprinkled on top, racism was the recipe.

The Body and the Flesh

So who pays the cost? Black bodies, paid in flesh. Apply Spillers right here. Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), distinguishes the body, which the law sees and protects, from the flesh, the zero degree of social conceptualization, where personhood gets stripped and a human being becomes raw material for other people’s meanings. Whiteness issues white folks bodies and assigns Black folks flesh.

That’s why the cost ain’t just hurt feelings on an elevator. The cost is material. The cost is a jail cell. The cost is a knee on your neck for over nine minutes while bystanders beg. The cost is being denied a position or a resource because of a microaggression in an office that nobody wrote down. The trick is that a manufactured hierarchy presents itself as nature, as just the way things are, and then Mills closes the loop: under the epistemology of ignorance, the not knowing is load bearing, the system produces white folks who genuinely cannot see it, and then it points at their sincerity as proof that nothing is there.

Essence Preceded Existence in Money, Mississippi

Willful ignorance gets the benefit of the doubt in this country, unless you a Black child. Emmett Till was 14 years old, a baby from Chicago, when Carolyn Bryant accused him of advances in her husband’s store in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955. In 2008 she told historian Timothy Tyson that part of her story was not true, and when his book The Blood of Emmett Till made that public in 2017, the country had to sit with the fact that a white woman’s testimony had been enough to end a child’s life.

Peep the mechanics. His accusers never had to prove he was a threat. His skin testified against him. An all white jury took about an hour to acquit, and one juror said they’d have been faster if they hadn’t stopped for a soda. Essence preceded existence. Four months later, protected by double jeopardy, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam confessed to the murder in Look magazine and got paid for the story. The confession was the content, the content was the commodity, and Emmett’s family had to live with that for the rest of their lives.

That ain’t ancient history either. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a law on July 23, 2026, making July 25, Emmett’s birthday, Emmett Till Day across the state, and he signed it at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the same church where Mamie Till Mobley opened that casket so the world could see. Mamie understood the gaze better than anybody, so she turned it around and made the country look at what it did.

The Spectator Is a Member

Now go to Yancy’s hardest bar, the one that won me a lot of college debate rounds. As a former college policy debater, if your school got a football team, I probably made a living intellectually whooping its debate team with this exact impact, so if you’re asking why whiteness matters and how it touches anything in real life, here it go.

Yancy argues that the white spectator who watches and refuses to protest becomes part of the violence itself, indistinguishable in effect from the one who tied the noose. Thousands of white folks attended lynchings like county fairs, with photographs, postcards, and souvenirs. Historian Amy Louise Wood shows in Lynching and Spectacle that the crowd was not a side effect of the lynching, the crowd was the point, because watching together is how a white community taught itself that it was white, that it was innocent, and that it was in charge. The camera didn’t record the ritual, the camera was part of the ritual.

We know that being a spectator is what a lot of judges call my homeboys and family members when they catch a case: an accessory. If you were in proximity to the crime and you didn’t stop it, the state says you guilty too. The monstrosity of white supremacy says that if you ain’t the one who tied the noose, you can take pictures, sell the postcard, and monetize the violence without being accountable for it, and that ain’t equal protection under the law. Self consciously signing the contract is not a requirement for membership. Let that hang. Let that marinate in your spirit. You ain’t got to light the fire. Standing there warming your hands is enough.

Superpowers on Demand

A grown, armed, trained officer, Darren Wilson, described 18 year old Michael Brown to a grand jury in 2014 by saying he felt like a five year old holding onto Hulk Hogan, and that Brown looked like a demon. Under oath. Accepted as reasonable. That’s the monstrosity of the Black body, and that is exactly what the subconscious is whispering when somebody clutches a purse on the elevator: the Black body doing its oldest job, transforming an unarmed teenager into a supernatural threat so that killing him reads as self defense. Crazy how the Black body only gets superpowers at the exact moment somebody needs to exterminate it.

Doing Philosophy in a Chokehold

Twenty three years old. Massage therapist. Anemic, so he wore a ski mask to stay warm walking home with an iced tea in August 2019 in Aurora, Colorado. Somebody called 911 and said he looked sketchy. Elijah McClain told the officers he was an introvert and asked them to respect the boundaries he was speaking.

Listen to that sentence. That man was doing philosophy in a chokehold, asserting his autonomy, his depth, and his personhood in real time, and they couldn’t hear him, they refused to hear him, because whiteness had already decided that the surface was the whole story. The ontology of surfaces don’t take testimony from the deep.

Now look at the ledger. Officer Randy Roedema got 14 months in jail. Paramedic Peter Cichuniec was sentenced to five years, and in September 2024 a judge converted that to probation and he walked out. The people of Aurora paid the McClain family a $15 million settlement in 2021. So the gaze made the mistake, the badge carried it out, and the taxpayers covered the tab. That ain’t accountability, that’s a subscription.

Her Caution Is His Costing

Somebody gon’ say: “She was just being cautious, she’s a white woman alone.” Two things can be true, so let’s talk about crime statistics. If she was clutching that purse based on data, she would clutch it hardest around the people statistically most likely to hurt her, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that from 2012 to 2015, 57 percent of violent victimizations of white people were committed by white offenders, and most violence against women comes from people they know. Statistically, the threat is her cousin, her daddy, or her brother, not Christian Cooper.

The fear ain’t data driven, it’s curriculum driven. Whiteness taught her that fear, drilled it, rehearsed it, and then handed her a phone that turns the rehearsal into an armed response. Her caution is his costing. That’s not safety, that’s a subsidy, and it’s paid for by Black bodies that are always already scripted as criminal.

Prejudice Is a Feeling, Racism Has a Government

For those of you about to type “not all white people” in the comments, “I never owned slaves, I never called the cops on anybody,” Yancy already answered you with a lynching photograph: the spectator who watches and says nothing speaks through his silence.

Some of y’all gon’ say, “Conscious Lee, Black people profile too, everybody’s a little prejudiced.” For y’all I say this: prejudice is a feeling, racism is a feeling with the government behind it. When Amy Cooper performed fear, an armed state apparatus stood ready to make her fiction real, and when a Black person side eyes somebody, ain’t no institution mobilizing behind that. Yancy is precise here: the white imaginary without infrastructure would just be empty ideas. It’s the courts, the police, the banks, and the schools that turn imagination into incarceration. Symmetrical feelings, asymmetrical firepower.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying every individual white person is a villain. I’m making an analysis about patterns and trends. If you was raised around ostriches and told me birds can’t fly, I’d say that’s a cool personal experience, but it does not negate the data. Birds, in fact, do fly.

The Hall Monitor Learned to Read in Kindergarten

The elevator has a classroom version, and it opens at five years old. Jamilia Blake, a Texas A&M professor in College Station, right down the road from where I grew up in Bryan, coauthored that 2017 Georgetown study showing adults see Black girls as needing less nurturing, less protection, and less comfort than white girls the same age. The same report noted Black girls were under 16 percent of girls in school but 28 percent of girls referred to law enforcement and 37 percent of girls arrested at school. That’s the purse clutch with a hall pass.

Apply Annamma here. Subini Ancy Annamma’s The Pedagogy of Pathologization follows disabled girls of color through schools and into juvenile lockups and shows how the school reads their bodies as problems before it reads their needs, so a girl who is anxious gets read as defiant, a girl who is processing gets read as noncompliant, and a girl who needs support gets a referral. That’s Yancy’s ontology of surfaces wearing a lanyard. It’s the same read that killed Elijah McClain on a sidewalk, introvert read as resistant, a boundary read as a threat, only in school it starts with a write up instead of a chokehold.

So teachers, notice who in the group is shouldering all the labor and who is getting a grade for other people’s work, notice whose quiet you call focused and whose quiet you call attitude, notice which kid you send to the office for the same thing you let the other kid slide on. The gaze ain’t just a cop thing. It’s a lesson plan.

The Delivery Room Has an Elevator Too

When I said Black women’s pain gets dismissed in delivery rooms, I meant it as a receipt, not a metaphor. The CDC reported that in 2023 Black women died of maternal causes at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births compared to 14.5 for white women, a gap of almost three and a half times, and that gap widened even as white maternal deaths fell.

Apply Dána Ain Davis here. In Reproductive Injustice (2019), Davis names obstetric racism: the way medical staff read Black women’s bodies through the same surface logic, as stronger, as exaggerating, as less in need of care, so the gaze literally decides who gets believed about her own pain. A 2016 study in PNAS found that about half of the white medical students and residents surveyed held at least one false belief about biological differences between Black and white people, like Black skin being thicker, and those who held those beliefs rated Black patients’ pain lower. That’s the elevator effect with a stethoscope.

Come back to Serena, because it’s the same woman twice. The most tested player on tour in 2018 had, months earlier, nearly died after giving birth to her daughter when she told staff she was having a pulmonary embolism and had to push to be taken seriously. Surveilled when her body was winning, doubted when her body was dying. That’s misogynoir as a schedule. Then look again at Sonya Massey, a Black woman in a mental health struggle in her own kitchen, read as a threat by a man she called for help. The gaze don’t just see race. It sees race, gender, disability, and class at once, and it gives each combination its own sentence, which is why Spillers’ flesh is never abstract for Black women, it’s an intake form.

They Be All Up in the Kool Aid and Don’t Know the Flavor

Secondly, I’m not saying Black folks are just passive victims of the gaze with no interior of our own. Yancy himself honors the counter semiotic systems Black folks built, the churches, the music, the language, the freedom dreams, whole worlds of meaning constructed behind the veil where the gaze can’t even see.

Elizabeth Alexander called this the Black interior, the inner life, the imagination, the private language that exists beyond what white folks think they’re looking at. It’s the reason we say they be all up in the Kool Aid and don’t know the flavor. The gaze is powerful, but it don’t know everything, it has never been total, and it has never been universal no matter how hard they try to hoodwink and bamboozle us into believing that the way they see the world is the way the world is. That’s why Du Bois gave us double consciousness in 1903: he understood the criminality the white gaze puts on our bodies, but he also knew how we see ourselves still matters.

The Paperwork of Refusal

So what’s the alternative? For white folks watching, Yancy’s word is that whiteness is an inheritance you do not have to accept, so start the paperwork of refusal. That means marking the unmarked. Notice when you are not followed in a store. Notice when your fear spikes in a hallway, and ask who taught you that. Notice who in the meeting gets listened to and who gets talked over, and interrupt it in real time, out loud, in the room where it happens, not in the group chat afterwards and not when you feel a little remorse and want a pat on the back. Spectator silence is membership. Cancel that membership. Your discomfort at being named white for the first time is a fraction of a fraction of what it costs to be named Black every day since 1619.

For my folks, keep building the counter semiotics. Keep looking back at the white gaze. The gaze wants us flat, a surface of hieroglyphics somebody else gets to read, so every time we insist on our depth, our contradictions, and our joy, and refuse to perform for nobody, our rage don’t need an apology, our study and our organizing is ontological work, proof that essence does not precede existence, that we exist first, loudly, and define ourselves after on our own terms. If Huey said power is the ability to define the phenomenon, then liberation is snatching the pen back and writing our own stories.

For all of us, individual awareness without institutional change is a spa day. The purse clutch is downstream of the redline, the sentencing disparity, and the school funding formula. So think differently and act differently: support policy that defunds the infrastructure of the white imaginary, organize where you are, and put your minutes and your money where your mouth is.

The little old lady clutched her purse because the system taught her to read wrong. The best job for all of us is to teach the world to read again.

See, Yancy reminds us that whiteness wrote a script and called it nature, and Mills teaches us that the racial contract required white folks to agree not to know what they wrote.

Five Takeaways

* The elevator effect is a reading, not a reflex. Yancy shows the purse clutch is learned perception that whiteness rehearses until it feels like instinct, and Mills shows the misreading is maintained on purpose.

* 911 sorts bodies. Amy Cooper (May 25, 2020) called and the state came to serve her; Sonya Massey (July 6, 2024) called and the state shot her. Grayson got 20 years on January 29, 2026, and her mother now fears calling police.

* The gaze hands out different sentences. Black men read as threat, Black girls read as grown from age five (Georgetown, 2017), neurodivergent folks read as noncompliant (Elijah McClain), Black mothers read as exaggerating (50.3 vs 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 in 2023).

* The spectator is a member. From lynching postcards to the Look magazine confession, watching and profiting without protest is participation, not neutrality.

* Awareness without infrastructure change is a spa day. Prejudice is a feeling; racism is a feeling backed by courts, police, banks, and schools, so the work is defunding that infrastructure and building Black interiors the gaze cannot read.

EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

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’m independent with no corporate sponsor, and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. If everyone 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: become a paid subscriber. 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.

WORKS CITED/RELATED READINGS

* Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior: Essays. Graywolf, 2004.

* Annamma, Subini Ancy. The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School Prison Nexus. Routledge, 2018.

* Davis, Dána Ain. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. NYU Press, 2019.

* Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

* Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. summary

* Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952.

* Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014.

* Hoffman, Kelly M., et al. “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment.” PNAS, 2016.

* Lindsey, Treva B. America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. UC Press, 2022.

* McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” 1988/1989.

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

* Newton, Huey P. To Die for the People. 1972.

* Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987.

* Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon & Schuster, 2017.

* van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective. 1967.

* Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890 to 1940. UNC Press, 2009.

* Yancy, George. “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008). record

* Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes, 3rd ed. Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury, 2025. listing

* Yancy, George. Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Temple, 2012.

Reporting and data

* Amy Cooper charge dismissed (NPR/WGBH, Feb. 16, 2021); Christian Cooper interview (NPR, 2020)

* Sean Grayson sentenced to 20 years (AP, Jan. 29, 2026); Donna Massey statement (ABC Audio, Jan. 29, 2026)

* Cichuniec sentence converted to probation (CNN, Sept. 13, 2024); Roedema sentenced (CNN, Jan. 5, 2024)

* Tyson on Carolyn Bryant Donham (AP, Jan. 28, 2017)

* Illinois Emmett Till Day (July 23, 2026)

* Serena Williams USADA testing (AP, July 1, 2018)

* BJS, Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012 to 15

* CDC 2023 maternal mortality (AP/PBS, Feb. 2025)

* New Jersey race based 911 law; San Francisco CAREN Act; California AB 1775

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To all my parents out there, if your kid is asking you for one more chance, what has transpired before they asked you that? They did something bad. They did something wrong. They are acknowledging there was a shortcoming, an expectation you had as a parent that they did not meet, and now they are standing in the kitchen saying, give me one more chance.

To all my teachers, my professors, my former teachers and former professors, if a student comes to your office hours asking for one more chance, what are they saying? They are saying they failed the objective at hand and they want one more opportunity, and the acknowledgement of failing is sprinkled all up in there.

So on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, on the All In podcast, when Chamath Palihapitiya asked the Vice President of the United States what message folks need to hear before November, JD Vance fixed his mouth to say this: “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.”

GiVe Us AnOtHeR cHaNcE.

Now watch what happened in the middle of that sentence, because CNN caught it and so did everybody with ears. He said “another chance,” heard himself, and swerved into “or, another couple of years.” That swerve is the whole essay. The first draft of the thought was the truth, and the second draft was the spin. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz called it the most mind boggling midterm pitch he had ever heard, Hakeem Jeffries translated it as Republicans admitting they failed and asking for another chance anyway, and even the Maddow blog asked the only question that matters: if you want more time, explain what you did with the time you already had.

Like, think about the syllabus. They gave us a syllabus, basically. Lower prices, cheaper groceries, cheaper gas, the golden age, all of it laid out on day one like the professor who promises you’re gonna love this class. Two years later the professor is asking the students not to drop the course. There is a power differentiation between what they are doing and what they are saying, and the power differentiation just flipped, because now the professor is the one in office hours.

I can already hear the maggots in my comment section: play the whole clip, you’re playing it out of context. Hey, I encourage you to play the entire clip. The fuller version has him saying “don’t give power to the people who cause the problems that we’re fixing” right before the plea, and “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” right after it. The burden of proof is on you to show me what in that context changes the meaning. Adding “the other side is worse” to “give us another chance” don’t erase the confession, it just adds a second excuse. That’s the student saying, yeah I failed, but have you SEEN the other kids’ grades?

Research over MeSearch. So let’s grade the homework.

The Dog Ate the Homework

As a former professor, I knew a student was chicken s**t when they came to my class and fixed their lips to tell me, “Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, the reason I don’t have my homework is because my dog ate it.” I know the dog don’t got that jurisdiction over your homework.

Now turn on the TV in Texas. I’m just trying to enjoy some football, I’m just trying to watch Chip and Joanna with my wife, and what they show me? Horribly baked, bad creativity political ads that spend millions to tell me trans people and immigrants are the reason my life costs what it costs. The dog ate the homework, and the dog is always a trans woman or a man from Venezuela.

Most of y’all saw the Ken Paxton ad by now. On September 8, 2026, the Paxton campaign posted a thirty second spot called “King James,” where an AI generated James Talarico writes in and reads from a fictional “King James Talarico Bible.” FactCheck.org found the disclaimer in tiny print about twenty seconds in. Talarico’s answer was clean: they don’t have any real attacks, so they’re firing up their data centers and making up fake ones. Crazy how the same party selling you “protect the children” can’t even pay a human being to shoot the commercial. Donors, y’all ain’t pissed that one of the most expensive Senate races in history is buying AI slop with your checks? If my editor used AI on my s**t, I would just use AI and skip the editor.

I was in Detroit doing work with The Root, packing my bag to come back to Houston, and every ad break was Hasan Piker. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, has been calling Piker Abdul El Sayed’s “running mate,” and the Senate Republicans’ account posted that the two of them are “a socialist package deal.” Hasan Piker is a streamer who lives in California and is not on the ballot in Michigan. The person on the ballot is Mike Rogers, whose side is asking Michigan for another chance while he runs against a man who ain’t running.

That’s the dog eating the homework in two states at once.

Why the Scapegoat Is Always Cheap

In 1978, Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies published Policing the Crisis, a study of how Britain went into a full blown panic over “mugging” in 1972 and 1973. Mugging, as a label, was imported from American crime reporting, and what it named was mostly ordinary street robbery that had not suddenly exploded. What Hall and his coauthors found was that the panic arrived exactly when the British state was losing its ability to deliver the postwar promise of rising wages and stable work. When a government can no longer win consent by delivering the goods, Hall argued, it starts winning consent by delivering a threat. The folk devil in that case was the young Black man in the inner city, and the solution sold to the public was law and order.

A party that promised cheaper groceries and delivered ground beef up more than twenty percent in a single year cannot win on the syllabus, so it has to win on the dog. George said it plain on air: “It’s a low effort political issue for them. They ain’t got to spend no money. They ain’t got to go rally against no entity that has any power.” That is Hall’s argument about why the folk devil is always drawn from the powerless. You cannot run an ad against the meatpacking cartel, because the meatpacking cartel buys ads. You can run an ad against a trans woman, because she can’t.

All they got to do is convince the general public that they have stopped trans women from entering the WNBA, when the WNBA ain’t the thing that’s costing you. Meanwhile the President expanded the low tariff quota for Argentine beef trimmings by 80,000 metric tons in February 2026, then announced a 90 day tariff holiday on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef in August, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which is not a leftist organization, said flooding the market with foreign beef is not how you rebuild the American herd. The Texas cattle rancher is being undercut by an “America First” president’s favor to Argentina, and the ad he sees at halftime is about a drag queen.

This also proves the Hall move works both ways. The panic is not just a distraction, it’s a transfer. Every dollar of attention you spend on the folk devil is a dollar of attention the powerful didn’t have to defend.

Take the human trafficking example George raised, because this one is personal for every Texan with a cousin. In the third special session of 2023, Texas passed Senate Bill 4, which took effect February 6, 2024, and set a ten year mandatory minimum for smuggling of persons. The penalty can be reduced if the person you’re transporting is a close relative, and advocates from the Tahirih Justice Center to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center warned that Texas’s definition of smuggling is broad enough that giving a friend a ride to church or the doctor could be charged. Now sit that next to the same political coalition slow walking the Epstein files. They will build a ten year cage for the church ride and hold the door open for the billionaire’s jet. Does that tell you they care about human trafficking? Does it?

In 2015, when Donald Trump rode that escalator down and said Mexico was sending “rapists,” he had already been doing business for decades with non Mexican bad people who came to this country and made his s**t. Every accusation is a confession, and every folk devil is a receipt for what the accuser is hiding.

Take a Look, It’s in a Book, Then They Took the Book

Now we switch gears, because the confession JD Vance made about groceries is the same confession the federal government made about reading twenty years ago. It just took longer to show up on the report card.

Reading Rainbow premiered on PBS in 1983, produced out of WNED in Buffalo with Nebraska ETV, hosted by LeVar Burton, the same brother who six years earlier had carried Kunta Kinte on his back in Roots. The show’s premise was never phonics. Each episode took one children’s book, let LeVar take you somewhere that book lived, and then let real children review books for other children. It was built to fight the “summer slide,” the reading loss that piles up when school’s out, and the method was joy. Get the kid to love the book, and the kid does the rest.

In 1995, the Clinton Department of Education created the Ready To Learn grant, which funded PBS children’s programming aimed at school readiness. Then in January 2002, George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, and the whole federal apparatus reorganized around what could be measured. After 2005, the Ready To Learn money was aimed much more narrowly at programs that taught literacy skills, phonics, and spelling. The last original Reading Rainbow aired November 10, 2006. Reruns ran until August 28, 2009, and then it was gone.

In the 2014 interview George played on stream, LeVar laid it out: the mandate was to teach the rudiments of reading, and there was no money in the budget to foster a love of reading. The interviewer asked if that made it seem like a luxury. “Exactly,” he said, and then he said the part that should be on a billboard on I 45: we spent so much on the machinery of war that we are making ridiculous choices, and we are sacrificing our kids.

Two things can be true, so let me hold the receipt that complicates it. When the show went off the air in 2009, the WNED executive told Current, the public media trade paper, that the immediate problem was money to renew the rights, hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees for the books and the writers, and that PBS wanted the show “refreshed.” That’s real. What it also tells you is that a show the federal government no longer prioritized could not find anybody to pay the rights fees. Funding priorities don’t kill shows with a gun. They kill shows with a budget line that stops showing up.

The Debater’s Move: Change the Definition, Win the Round

One of the reasons I’m proud of being a former college debater is it gave me portable skills, and one of those skills is knowing what an interpretation does. In policy debate, the round is often won before anybody reads a card, because whoever defines the terms controls what counts as evidence. You don’t have to beat the other team’s argument if you can define it out of the resolution.

That’s what they did to reading. From a policy standpoint, the government changed the interpretation of what it means for our students to know how to read. Reading became decoding, a skill you can put on a bubble sheet, and anything that couldn’t be measured on the bubble sheet, the love, the curiosity, the kid who stays up with a flashlight, became “out of scope.” Once you change the definition of what it means to master reading, you get to justify funding something that ain’t necessarily teaching kids to read.

Huey P. Newton taught me that power is the ability to define phenomena and make it act in a desired manner. The Department of Education defined “reading” and then made PBS act in the desired manner. Burton said it himself in that clip: they funded the rudiments, and they defunded the reason.

Here’s the receipt that should end the argument. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, released its 2024 reading results in January 2025. The average fourth grade reading score was two points lower than 2022, five points lower than 2019, and, this is the line, not significantly different from the first reading assessment in 1992. One third of eighth graders scored below NAEP Basic, the largest share in the history of the test, and around forty percent of fourth graders were below Basic, the largest share since 2002. Thirty two years of “accountability,” a whole generation of test and punish, and the national average for a fourth grader reading is right where it was when Reading Rainbow was in its tenth season. The kids at the 75th and 90th percentiles went up since 1992. The kids at the 10th and 25th went down.

Just admit it. You didn’t close the gap. You measured it, and you cut the show that was working on the part you couldn’t measure.

The Show Taught Us Why, the Law Only Paid for How (Education)

In “Freedom for Literacy and Literacy for Freedom,” Theresa Perry reads the African American philosophy of education straight out of the slave narratives: Frederick Douglass learning his letters in defiance of an enslaver who warned that reading would unfit him to be a slave. Perry’s point is that for Black people in this country, literacy was never a neutral skill. It was always tied to freedom, to citizenship, to leadership, and the reason for reading was the engine of the reading. Take away the why, Perry teaches, and you get compliance with the mechanics of school without the identity that makes a child claim school as theirs.

That is the exact thing Reading Rainbow was funding, and the exact thing No Child Left Behind defined out of the budget. Burton wasn’t being sentimental. He was describing a Black educational tradition, love of the book as the door to freedom, getting ruled “unnecessary” by a federal formula.

Now, for my small international audience: George W. Bush was the President of the United States and before that the governor of my state, Texas. No Child Left Behind was built on the so called “Texas Miracle,” the test score gains Texas claimed in the 1990s. Apply Valenzuela here. In Leaving Children Behind: How “Texas Style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth (2005), Angela Valenzuela and her contributors documented what that miracle did on the ground: narrowed curriculum, test prep crowding out instruction, and a system where the students most likely to be pushed out were the same students the numbers claimed to be saving. Her earlier book, Subtractive Schooling (1999), named the whole thing: Texas schools subtracting culture, language, and relationship from Mexican American kids and calling what was left “achievement.” Texas had No Child Left Behind before the rest of the country got it, and then the rest of the country got it.

So here’s the chain. Texas builds a test and punish machine. The governor who built it becomes President and takes it national. The national version narrows the federal children’s media grant to measurable skills. The show that taught kids why to read loses its funding priority. Two decades later the national report card is flat against 1992. That ain’t a conspiracy theory. That’s a paper trail.

Then comes the part that should make every parent in America sit up. In May 2025, the Trump Department of Education terminated the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s 2020 to 2025 Ready To Learn grant, effective immediately. The Department’s spokesperson said the grant was funding “racial justice educational programming” and promised not to fund “woke propaganda.” In July 2025, Congress rescinded roughly $1.1 billion in previously approved money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In January 2026, CPB ended its operations. PBS Kids and its producing partners lost nearly $30 million from the Ready To Learn termination and the rescission together.

Guess what the last show funded by that thirty year grant was about. Phoebe & Jay, which premiered February 2, 2026, follows six year old twins and their family living in an affordable housing apartment complex. The last federally funded children’s show in America is about working class kids in affordable housing, and it only got finished because a few foundations stepped in when the government walked out.Highest Taxes, Lowest Care: The Texas Receipt

Something that blew my mind, y’all. Texas has no state income tax, so it leans on property taxes, and our effective property tax rates sit among the highest in the country. They teach us that property taxes are what fund schools. So high property taxes should mean high school funding, right?

In the 2023 to 2024 school year, Texas public schools received about $16,200 per student, roughly $4,900 less than the national average. The biggest gap is the state’s own share: the average American school got about $9,700 per student from its state, and Texas schools got about $6,200. The basic allotment, the core amount the state guarantees per student, was set at $6,160 in 2019 and barely moved; the 89th Legislature raised it by $55. Fifty five dollars. Raise Your Hand Texas says even after the new money, Texas stays in the bottom ten for per student funding.

Here’s how the “siphon” actually works, and I want to be precise because precision is what makes it land. The money don’t get stolen out of your tax bill in the dark. The state leans on rising local property values to cover its own share of the school formula, spends its surpluses on property tax “relief” that gets announced at press conferences, and holds the per student guarantee nearly flat while inflation eats it. Districts that collect “too much” send it back to the state under recapture. The result is exactly what George said on air: some of the highest property taxes in the country and some of the lowest state investment in the kids those taxes are supposed to serve. That’s intentional, because a formula is a choice written down.

Most of the people cutting the ribbon on the voucher program send their own kids to well funded schools. The billionaires know the research, the causal relationship between access to education and healthcare and lower rates of crime, because they buy that research for their own children. They just don’t want to pay for yours.

Popular Sovereignty, Checks and Balances, Separation of Powers

My high school government teacher, Mr. Chad Cryer, may he rest in peace, was the first white man who ever intellectually challenged me in a way that accounted for me being an intellect too. He taught me three cornerstones of the American republic: popular sovereignty, checks and balances, and separation of powers. I made A pluses on three big assignments because I understood the distinctions. I believe Mr. Cryer is turning over in his grave.

Popular sovereignty means the people’s will is supposed to bind the government. The PBS News, NPR, and Marist poll taken September 14 and 15, 2026 found 65 percent of registered voters oppose data center construction in their communities. Gallup had it at 70 percent in March. Heatmap had it at 75 percent in August. Americans have swung hard against these things across party lines, and the administration is still on the side of the data centers.

Now watch Texas. Greg Abbott said last November he wanted Texas to be the “epicenter of AI development.” Then the rural backlash hit, in the same counties that give Republicans their majority, because the land, the water, and the electricity those farms need are the same land, water, and electricity the data centers want. So in June 2026 Abbott wrote regulators demanding data centers pay their own way. On June 30, at a campaign stop in East Texas, he called for blocking them in “rural Texas neighborhoods.” In August he ordered a moratorium on new grid connections. On September 21, six weeks before his own reelection, he ordered the TCEQ to stop issuing permits. That is not a governor leading. That is a student turning in the homework after he saw the grade.

Checks and balances means each branch can stop the other from running ripping and rampant. We are watching an executive fire career people in jobs that have been treated as nonpartisan for decades, and a Congress that rescinds the money it already appropriated when the executive asks. Separation of powers means King George don’t get to be judge, jury, and treasury. The founders plagiarized a lot of this, then took credit for creating it, but even the plagiarized version is being failed right now. You could have failed that class.

The Syllabus Nobody Assigned: Black Mothers, Pregnant Girls, and the Paperwork of Disposability (Intersectional)

They say they want to protect women, and they bring up sports. They don’t talk about who is pushing the policy that makes Texas one of the most dangerous places in America to be pregnant.

On September 10, 2026, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune published an analysis of CDC data: deaths involving ectopic pregnancy nearly doubled, from about 100 in the six years before 2020 to almost 200 from 2020 on, and the climb was much steeper in states that banned abortion after Dobbs. An ectopic pregnancy is almost never viable, and to treat it doctors have to end it. With prompt care, the experts say, women should not die. The researchers were careful: bans alone can’t explain the national rise, COVID played a role early, and more research is needed. Hold that caveat, because it’s honest. Then hold this: earlier, ProPublica found the sepsis rate for Texas women hospitalized during second trimester pregnancy loss rose more than 50 percent after the ban, and the state’s own maternal mortality review committee chose to skip full reviews of 2022 and 2023, the first two full years after the ban. Now the state’s report is delayed, and lawmakers say that delay is political. That is not a data gap. That is a decision not to count.

Apply Davis here. In Reproductive Injustice, Dána Ain Davis follows Black women through premature birth and NICU stays and finds that class, education, and insurance do not protect them from medical racism, and that the system narrates their losses as personal failures instead of structural outcomes. Davis teaches us to ask who gets believed in the delivery room. Apply that to a state that won’t publish its own death review: when the state refuses to count, the only record of the harm is the testimony of the women who survived it, and the state has already decided their testimony is not evidence. So even if you are Christian or Muslim and you don’t believe in abortion, you have to put the general welfare of how women actually live and raise their kids above what these politicians bamboozled you into thinking about one issue.

This is where Geneva comes in. In August I went to the United Nations in Geneva with Pearl Ricks and Kiana Lewis for the shadow report work on the Universal Periodic Review, and I sat listening to cohorts from country after country make their pleas. It was undeniable how interconnected every issue was. I heard testimony about pregnant children in immigration detention, including a child detained for a year and a half who was six months pregnant. I have not been able to verify the specifics of that account independently, so I’m telling y’all what I heard in that room, and I’m asking the obvious question: how does a detained child become pregnant in state custody?

Apply Luibhéid here. In Pregnant on Arrival, Eithne Luibhéid shows that immigration law has always policed sexuality and reproduction, that “illegality” gets made through pregnant bodies, and that the state’s obsession with who gives birth where is really an obsession with who gets to belong. That is why the trans person and the immigrant keep showing up in the same ad. Both are policed through the body, and both are treated as a threat to “who counts as a real American family.” When you scapegoat one, the machinery gets built for the other.

The mass deportation machine does not discriminate the way its sellers promise. On September 30, 2025, around 300 federal agents raided 7500 South South Shore Drive in Chicago, a predominantly Black and Latino building in a largely Black neighborhood, with agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter after midnight. Residents, undocumented and U.S. citizens alike, were zip tied and marched outside, and witnesses described children without clothes in the parking lot in the middle of the night. DHS denies children were restrained. Eighteen residents filed federal tort claims in May 2026. Black residents were telling agents “I’m Black” like that was supposed to be a hall pass. The agents were looking for Venezuelan gangsters, and the Black children sat outside in their drawers.

I know me and the FBA folks don’t always get along, and we gonna call a thing a thing. What I understood in Geneva is that the same logic that makes Black mothers disposable in a Texas hospital makes a pregnant girl disposable in a detention center and a Black child disposable in a Chicago parking lot. Sometimes y’all able to, quote unquote, kill two birds with one stone. When JD Vance is begging for one more chance, that’s why he’s begging. Too many of us are starting to connect the dots.

What Is Important Versus What Is Necessary

Conversations about who can say nigga, about whether you say birthing people or women, about who sits in the front seat, those can be important. The scholar in me taught me the distinction between what is important and what is necessary. Right now what is necessary is figuring out why the Vice President of the United States fixed his mouth to ask for another chance, and connecting that confession to the gas, the grocery bill, the beef coming in from Argentina, the ectopic deaths, the school funding formula, and the cartoon about twins in affordable housing that the federal government refused to finish.

Some of y’all voted because it wouldn’t happen to you, and now it’s happening to you. My grandma told me, “Little George, act like I raised you.” So I’m extending the olive branch. I hope the bitterness in your mouth keeps steaming, and I hope it guides you to the polls, and I hope when you get there you remember that immigrants were never the ones tearing up your grocery bill. In 2022, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, and paid an average 10.1 percent effective state and local tax rate, compared with 7.2 percent for the top one percent. They pay into Social Security they will never collect. The folk devil is subsidizing the people who made it a folk devil.

Windows, Mirrors, and a Ballot Party (Counterweight)

Now let me bring it home with some love, because that’s what Reading Rainbow would do.

In 1990, the scholar Rudine Sims Bishop, often called the mother of multicultural children’s literature, wrote that books can be windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. A window lets you see a world that isn’t yours. A mirror lets you see yourself reflected back as someone worth writing about. A sliding glass door lets you walk through into the world the author created. Bishop warned that when children never find themselves in books, they learn a lesson about how little they are valued, and when the children in power only see themselves, they learn an exaggerated sense of their own importance.

Apply Bishop here. The whole war on reading, from the phonics only mandate to the book bans to the drag story hour panic, is a war on the sliding glass door. They’ll let your kid decode. They don’t want your kid walking through. You can’t convince me you care about kids by supporting policies that don’t support our kids being able to read, and then create a narrative about the devil when a drag queen wants to read to them.

Here’s the good news. On October 4, 2025, Reading Rainbow came back, a four episode digital revival hosted by Mychal Threets, the librarian from Fairfield, California, who has said he became a reader and a librarian because LeVar Burton made us believe we belong in books and we belong everywhere. It came back on YouTube, through Buffalo Toronto Public Media and Sony’s KidZuko channel, not through a federal grant, because the federal grant was gone. When the government walks out, the community walks in.

I saw a smaller version of that on this very stream. Charlene told me to turn the volume up. That’s all she did. She cared that I wanted y’all to hear me, and she cared that she wanted to hear me, and she gave me constructive criticism in real time. That’s communal care. That’s a ballot party in miniature.

So here’s the practical. Sway, spelled S W A Y, at sway.co, is sponsoring ballot parties. I am not being paid by them, I don’t have a partnership with them (I probably should, feel me), and Sway says it’s nonpartisan and doesn’t endorse anybody. If you build a voting group of 25 verified voters who are new to Sway, they’ll send you a digital card for up to $500 in supplies to host a ballot party of ten or more people near you. Your 25 can be anywhere: your mama in Ohio, your old roommate, your group chat.

I live in Harris County, which, the first time I ever voted here, ambushed me with one of the longest ballots in the country. Two hundred, three hundred races, county commissioner, judges, railroad crossings, and you standing in the booth overwhelmed. That’s exactly what a ballot party is for. Start your party with the Vance clip. Then play the LeVar Burton clip. Then pull up your sample ballot together.

Texas, the dates are not negotiable. The last day to register for the November 3 election is Monday, October 5, 2026. More than a million Texans were recently placed on the voter suspense list and have until October 5 to update their address. Early voting runs October 19 through October 30. Check your registration at VoteTexas.gov today, not tomorrow.

In Closing

See, Hall reminds us that when a government can no longer deliver the goods, it starts delivering a threat, and the threat always wears the face of somebody without power. Perry teaches us that for Black people in this country reading was never a skill set, it was a freedom practice, and a law that funds the how and defunds the why was never neutral. Davis shows us that when the state refuses to count Black women’s losses, the refusal is the policy. Bishop leaves us the way out: build the mirror, open the window, walk through the door together.

We got 40 days and 40 nights to make sure J.D. Vance does not get another chance. We got 40 days and 40 nights to instill that checks and balances and separation of power can come back in some shape, way, or form or fashion. I say that as a leftist. I say that as somebody that believes that the United States federal government is inherently imperialist, inherently genocidal. I do know, though, goddamn, that if you tell me something and you give me something I should expect, then I’m going to do that very least, expect what you said you don’t give to me. And if that expectation that you’re going against is obviously coming in opposition to me, I’m finna do something about it, man.

FIVE TAKEAWAYS

* “Another chance” is a confession. Vance’s own words on the All In podcast, September 15, 2026, and his mid sentence swerve, concede the syllabus was not delivered. Adding “the other side is worse” is a second excuse, not a context that erases the first.

* The scapegoat is cheap by design. Following Stuart Hall, the folk devil shows up exactly when consent through results fails. Trans people and immigrants carry no donor money and no ad budget, which is why they get the ads.

* Reading got redefined before it got defunded. No Child Left Behind narrowed the Ready To Learn grant toward measurable skills after 2005, Reading Rainbow aired its last original episode in 2006, and the 2024 NAEP fourth grade reading average is statistically no different than 1992.

* The same fight is happening again, with bigger numbers. The Education Department terminated Ready To Learn in May 2025, Congress rescinded about $1.1 billion from public broadcasting, CPB shut down in January 2026, and Texas funded a $1 billion universal voucher program that allows up to $200 million for families earning over $500,000.

* The fix is local and it’s on a clock. Texas registration closes Monday, October 5, 2026. Early voting is October 19 to 30. A 25 person voting group and a ballot party turn a 300 race Harris County ballot into a community study session.

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Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom 6, no. 3 (1990).

Davis, Dána Ain. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. New York University Press, 2019.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Macmillan, 1978.

Haney López, Ian. Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. Oxford University Press, 2014.

Leonardo, Zeus. “The War on Schools: NCLB, Nation Creation and the Educational Construction of Whiteness.” Race Ethnicity and Education 10, no. 3 (2007).

Luibhéid, Eithne. Pregnant on Arrival: Making the Illegal Immigrant. University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Newton, Huey P. To Die for the People. Random House, 1972.

Perry, Theresa. “Freedom for Literacy and Literacy for Freedom: The African American Philosophy of Education.” In Theresa Perry, Claude Steele, and Asa Hilliard III, Young, Gifted, and Black: Promoting High Achievement among African A

Valenzuela, Angela. Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. SUNY Press, 1999.

Valenzuela, Angela, ed. Leaving Children Behind: How “Texas Style” Accountability Fails Latino Youth. SUNY Press, 2005.

CNN, “JD Vance’s telling ‘give us another chance’ flub,” Sept. 17, 2026. https://www.cnn.com/2026/09/17/politics/vance-another-chance-comment

Rolling Stone, “JD Vance Pleads With Voters: ‘Give Us Another Chance,’” Sept. 2026. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance-pleads-voters-give-us-another-chance-1235627842/

MS NOW / Maddow Blog, Vance “more time” coverage, Sept. 22, 2026. https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/vance-republicans-midterm-elections-2026-more-time

IBTimes UK, Vance “another chance” and reactions, Sept. 2026. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jd-vance-another-chance-midterm-election-appeal-1820635

Sway, “Throw a ballot party.” https://www.sway.co/ballot-party

Texas Secretary of State, Oct. 5 registration deadline release, Sept. 28, 2026. https://www.sos.state.tx.us/about/newsreleases/2026/092826.shtml

Houston Public Media, registration deadline and suspense list, Sept. 17, 2026. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/election-2026/2026/09/17/562107/texas-2026-midterm-voter-registration-deadline-november/

NPR, “’Reading Rainbow’ Reaches Its Final Chapter,” Aug. 28, 2009. https://www.npr.org/2009/08/28/112312561/reading-rainbow-reaches-its-final-chapter

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Thank you Lynette, Laurel Fairchild, Jen Champion, Leanna, FREEFREEPALESTINE🇵🇸, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I came in hot on Nolan Wells, and I’m not apologizing for it. On Monday, September 21, 2026, Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath went on Facebook with a video and a redacted grand jury report and told the public that a 23 member grand jury had unanimously returned a no true bill in the death of an eighteen year old Black boy, after 132 subpoenas and 43 witnesses. No indictments. No charges. Now peep the calendar. Nolan would have turned nineteen that same week, and the day before the announcement his mother posted that all she wanted for her birthday was a hug from her son. So I asked my cohosts straight up: is that intentional, or are we reaching?

Toya said probably coincidence, then immediately made the sharper point, which is that the timeline itself is the tactic. Investigations get stretched out until they slide out of the public purview, and once the outrage cools, in her words, a lot of tricky s**t gets to happen without garnering so much outrage. That’s why she likes and shares every “we won’t forget Nolan Wells” post she sees, because she knows the intent is for us to stop making noise. Domo agreed on coincidence and then named the other trap, which is that people will go to war over intentionality while the actual evidence sits right there unread.

So let’s read the evidence, because the receipts don’t need my speculation to be damning.

The grand jury wrote that the position, the condition, the time of discovery, and the location of Nolan’s body were “consistent with drowning.” Hold that phrase. Then hold this one from the same report: the State of Mississippi Chief Medical Examiner and the family’s independent pathologist both said the cause and manner of death were undetermined, and that drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion. Undetermined. Then on Thursday, September 24, the same day we recorded, Ben Crump’s team walked through the state’s own autopsy on a press call. Attorney Liza Park said the state’s report showed no fluid or debris in the airway, no water in the lungs, no water in the stomach, and two contusions about two inches each on the back of Nolan’s head, with Dr. Roger Mitchell’s independent exam finding no white blood cells at the injury, which Park read as the injury happening shortly before he died. Forensic examiner Andrew Garrett pulled more than a million digital artifacts off Nolan’s phone, Snapchat, Instagram, GPS, Apple Health, and said he couldn’t speak to intent, but from a digital standpoint, things were deleted.

That’s why I asked it the way I asked it on air: how do you drown with no water in you? If you were found in water with none in your lungs, the most boring explanation is that you weren’t breathing when you went in. Now I’m not a pathologist, and I’ll be honest with y’all that a drowning can sometimes present without much fluid, which is exactly why the forensic folks call it a diagnosis of exclusion. Crazy how that cuts, though. A diagnosis of exclusion means you land on drowning only after you rule everything else out. The report didn’t rule everything else out. It said “consistent with,” and then it said “exonerate.”

Here’s the DA’s own line, and I need y’all to sit with it: “In addition to bringing prosecutions against the guilty, the grand jury must also exonerate those who have been falsely accused.” She also told the public that Nolan bought his own alcohol with a fake ID, that Nolan “chose to stay on the island,” and she spent a whole chunk of her statement going at Ben Crump by name. I called it legal gaslighting on the show, and I’m standing on it.

Apply Razack here. In Dying from Improvement, Sherene Razack studies the inquests and inquiries Canada holds when Indigenous people die in custody, and what she finds is that the official inquiry is not a neutral search for cause, it’s a storytelling ritual. It produces a narrative where the dead person’s own choices, habits, and pathologies explain the death, and where the institutions and the people standing nearby walk out clean, even caring. Her title is the punchline: the dead are dying from improvement, dying of their own failure to be improved by the state. Crazy how the Jackson County report reads like it came straight out of her archive. The dead boy bought liquor. The dead boy chose to stay. The friends loved him. The allegations were false. The grand jury must also exonerate. Razack would tell you that last move ain’t a side effect of the inquiry. It’s the product. The living walk out with innocence certified by the state, and the dead walk out with a story about himself he never got to contest.

This is why I said on the show, and I’m going to keep saying it, from here on out, you’re going to hear me say a lot of, this is why identity politics matter. The liberals and the left keep telling us we need to move away from identity, and I’m telling you that’s a privilege y’all can afford and we can’t. Historically, the local governments in places like Mississippi are known for covering s**t up. That ain’t a vibe, that’s the archive, from Emmett Till’s acquitted killers to the three civil rights workers dug out of an earthen dam in Neshoba County in 1964. The one tool Black families used to have against the county was the federal government, specifically the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and that tool got turned around and pointed back at us. Under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division joined a lawsuit against UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine in January 2026, issued a finding in May that it discriminated against white and Asian applicants, and sent a similar letter to Yale’s medical school. Nolan’s family has asked for an independent DOJ review. Just admit which one of those two requests this Civil Rights Division was rebuilt to answer.

Two things can be true, and Domo made sure I held both. It’s true that a 23 person grand jury heard a mountain of evidence, including testimony from the family’s own pathologist, and it’s true that “no true bill” is not the same thing as “nothing happened.” Mississippi has no statute of limitations on murder, and the report itself says a future grand jury can take up new evidence. The case ain’t closed. It’s shelved. There’s a difference, and the family knows it.

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II. They Don’t See Us as People: The Panel vs. Stacey Patton

Then I pushed us somewhere most shows won’t go. A lot of folks have been running Nolan’s story through adultification, the idea that Black children get treated like adults and denied the protections of childhood. I brought Dr. Stacey Patton into the room, because in 2021 she published the sharpest rebuttal to that whole thesis, and her title said it plainly: Black children are not being killed because they’re “adultified,” they’re being murdered because they’re Black. Drawing on Toby Rollo’s work on the child/human binary, Patton argues the adultification thesis is a trap, because it perpetuates the myth of protected childhood and invites Black communities to go beg for white protection for Black bodies. Her history flips the script. White supremacy never adultified us, it did the opposite. Douglass wrote that his enslaver’s son could grow into a man while he stayed a minor his whole life. Under that logic we are, in Patton’s phrase, the children of children, permanently infantilized, irrational, correctable by force. So begging the state to see Nolan as a boy is begging for a protection that was never built for him.

So I asked the panel: can two things be true, or does this critique have teeth?

Toya took it seriously and said childhood is ultimately a question about humanity, about who gets innocence, nurture, and a future, and that those things been reserved for white children since the plantation, where a Black child’s only assigned purpose was to grow into labor as fast as possible. In her words: “Who gives a s**t about innocence? Hurry up, get up, pick your s**t up.” There’s never been an investment in protecting Black childhood because Black people were never granted access to humanity in the first place.

Domo said the critique stops a bit short, and he’s right. Patton is correct that the problem ain’t age, it’s Blackness, but the deeper claim underneath both frames is that they don’t see us as people at all. That’s why the world isn’t asking in unison what happened to Nolan Wells. If it was a white boy on that island, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Then we reached for Orlando Patterson’s three constituent elements of slavery from Slavery and Social Death: gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and general dishonor. Natal alienation is the kicker here, the severing of the enslaved from any recognized lineage, so that a child belongs to no one who can legally protect him.

My piece of it was what I called the adult matrix, a time matrix. They call a grown Black man “boy” when they want him small and call a Black teenager a grown man when they want him dangerous. They move the clock on us whenever the clock is useful. This means the adultification crowd and the Patton crowd are describing the same machine from two different sides: the age was never the point. The age is a dial, and somebody else’s hand is on it.

III. The Mother Is the Jurisdiction

This is where the episode got intersectional without anybody announcing it, and I want to slow down here.

I made sure the audience knew what Nolan’s mother, Christine Wells Wonsley, has been carrying. On August 5, 2026, the Mississippi Board of Nursing opened a professional misconduct investigation against her off an anonymous complaint. Crump called it a warning shot meant to scare a grieving mother quiet, pointing out that she had a whole career with no prior complaints and the only thing that changed was that she started asking questions. The board closed it the next day. She wrote that it added more hurt to an already devastating time because she loves her job and loves her patients. Toya hadn’t even known about the harassment, and she used that to critique how bifurcated the news has become, how with Trayvon and Mike Brown we used to get every piece collectively, and now even somebody who follows closely has to get lucky and catch Don Lemon live at five o’clock on TikTok.

Then Domo raised what had been weighing on him. Wonsley wasn’t only harassed by strangers and anonymous complainants, she got criticized by Black folks online for raising her son around white people and not putting him somewhere he’d be protected. In the same news cycle, Nikole Hannah Jones published her ten year follow up in the New York Times, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, about enrolling her daughter Najya in a high poverty, segregated Brooklyn public school back in 2016, and her daughter’s own verdict that the choice cost her the education she wanted. The internet called Hannah Jones performative for choosing a Black school. The internet called Wonsley negligent for letting her son run with white friends. Domo asked the question that should haunt every one of us: where can Black parents exist?

Apply Nash here. In Birthing Black Mothers, Jennifer Nash argues that Black motherhood has become a hypervisible political category, a figure the public organizes around crisis, loss, and grief, from the Mothers of the Movement onstage at a convention to maternal mortality numbers on a slide deck. Nash isn’t dismissing that visibility, she’s warning us about what it does, which is turn the Black mother into the place where a society relitigates its own failures. So when the state can’t answer what happened on Horn Island, the question migrates to the mother. Is she a good nurse? Did she raise him around the wrong people? When a city spends decades refusing to integrate its schools, the question migrates to the mother again. Did she experiment on her own child? The mother becomes the jurisdiction. She gets the investigation the county won’t open on itself.

I called it a crazy dualism on the show, because a few months ago the timeline was chastising Black parents for sending their kids to white schools, and now it’s chastising Hannah Jones for doing the opposite. Somebody always wants to come in on the surface level like, iMa bE, “well, not every Black school is a bad school and not every white school is a good school.” Yeah, but if I tell you birds fly, you ain’t going to try to sensationalize peacocks and tell me that peacocks don’t fly. The correlation between whiteness and school funding is the rule, the exceptions are peacocks, and a Black mother is forced to choose inside the rule and then gets blamed like she wrote it.

That’s the intersection. Race decides which schools got funded. Class decides which mothers get to choose between them. Gender decides who gets blamed for the choice. Most of the fathers in both of these stories barely show up in the discourse at all.

IV. Soulja Boy Ain’t a Curriculum

Toya brought a viral video into the room: a STEM kid, eleven or twelve, thick rimmed glasses, crisp diction, whose daddy gave him two weeks to learn a Black dance, and he came back doing Crank That. Cute, sure. Toya’s read was sharper, though. That relational knowledge can’t be downloaded off YouTube. You needed to be in there messing it up and looking silly until somebody decided to teach you. She said she did Crank That in the hallways at Emporia State two years after the song came out, and she had the confidence to do it because she learned to dance with her Black friends in high school. Her prescription for parents who choose the resourced white school: you still got to go do some very, very hyper Black s**t with your kids, the same way you go home and read with them. If y’all doing times tables, you also need to be building cultural literacy.

Domo pushed back, and this was the best exchange of the night. A lot of what we call Black s**t, he said, is s**t associated with poverty, with where we grew up. His example was the butter bucket in the fridge that you bust open and find out ain’t butter. Toya came right back: that’s a common immigrant experience. Then she offered hers, learning to sing Lift Every Voice and Sing before the Star Spangled Banner, knowing what a repast is after a funeral. Domo clarified he wasn’t saying Blackness is poverty. He was saying the reason he now has to think about his son’s cultural connection is that he no longer lives in the hood. He moved into a heavily funded school zone out in the Valley, and that very mobility is what put his son among a few Black kids. Toya granted the point, and then she named what the exchange proved, which is that when you actually hear each other out, you demystify it. For the record, I live in the Houston suburbs, Harris County, where white folks are actually the minority, so I get a mixture Domo doesn’t get out there, and that’s a class and geography question too.

Apply Carter here. In Keepin’ It Real, Prudence Carter studied Black and Latino youth in Yonkers and found that the students who did best were often the “cultural straddlers,” kids who could move between dominant cultural capital, the codes schools reward, and nondominant cultural capital, the codes that earn you standing and belonging among your own people. Carter’s intervention is that schools treat that second kind of capital as noise or deficit when it’s actually a competence, a whole second curriculum. Toya’s Soulja Boy story is Carter in miniature. The dance ain’t the lesson. Knowing how to enter the circle, look silly, and get taught is the lesson.

Then Pattillo teaches us why Domo’s point ain’t a contradiction. In Black Picket Fences, Mary Pattillo showed that the Black middle class historically lived close to, not apart from, Black poverty, sharing neighborhoods, churches, and kin networks in a way white middle class families rarely did, so much of what gets remembered as “real” Black childhood got formed in that overlap. Domo put all of us on blast with this one, too. Back in college, him, me, and Rashid used to clown the middle class, suburban dudes whose parents went to college, like they ain’t seen real niggas yet. Now he’s raising one of those suburban kids. He’s got his son skipping through the school hallways singing a song he made up, “and I’m Black, y’all, and I’m Black, y’all,” which he called childish. It ain’t childish. It’s Carter’s second curriculum, delivered by a father because the building won’t deliver it.

That’s the tie back to Nolan and to Hannah Jones. Black parents ain’t choosing between a good school and a bad school. They choosing which curriculum the state will fund and which one they’ll have to teach at the kitchen table, and then the timeline grades them on both.

Domo closed this segment with a shout out to Dr. Amber, who got dragged for saying some folks simply can’t grasp a conversation like the one Hannah Jones was having. Domo’s defense: we’re living through a post literacy crisis, a lot of adults struggle to hold multiple complex concepts at once, and it’s easier to turn it into outrage and judgment. That ain’t an insult. That’s a diagnosis. Hold onto it, because we’re about to see what a society that can’t read does with a man who lies to it on live television.

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V. Moral Cowards With a Bodyguard

Thirty eight minutes into Nolan Wells, in true Chop Up form, we pivoted, and I played the opening of Benjamin Netanyahu’s September 24 speech at the 81st UN General Assembly, his fifteenth address to that body. Dozens of delegations walked out as he stepped up. His opening line: “If there are any other moral cowards who haven’t yet left this hall, please do so now.”

So I asked the room: what does it mean for the man bombing children in tents, in refugee camps, in hospitals, to call anybody a moral coward?

Domo’s answer was the thesis of the second half: “You can say anything when you got the bully at your back.” He compared it to them streamers who big body their way through a crowd, bump into people on purpose, and then sic the bodyguard on whoever pushes back. Then he refused the easy take. When folks say Israel got the United States wrapped around its finger, Domo says nah: “They useful.” Do not pretend as if our interest isn’t tied up directly in how they moving. That’s the Black radical tradition talking, the same analysis that read Vietnam and Angola as one war, and it’s more honest than the lobby only story because it doesn’t let Washington play victim.

Toya read the chat into the record. Jen: “Projection. Every word they say is a confession.” South Dakotans for Integrity: for his words to carry any weight, I’d have to have some respect for him. Toya’s own verdict: you’re not powerful, you’re a weak man hiding behind good security. Domo put it in workplace terms, like quitting and your manager yelling, “Well, you’re fired.”

Then I made the law and order argument. The International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Netanyahu in November 2024 for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for crimes against humanity including murder and persecution, and, as the explainer I played on air made clear, the warrant did not charge genocide. That question lives at the International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case against Israel. Keep those straight and the argument gets stronger, not weaker, because the man is wanted for starving civilians and still tiptoed into a country whose politicians love to say nobody is above the law. Republicans say it about “illegals,” our undocumented brothers and sisters. Democrats say it about Trump and about the Epstein class. Nobody said it Thursday.

This is where Razack’s second book comes in. In Casting Out, she describes race thinking as the habit of dividing the world into those who belong inside the law and those who must be managed outside it, in camps, on lists, under suspicion. Look at how the words move. I broke it down on air: they interchangeably throw around “terrorist” and “war” while fighting the word “genocide” the whole time. When we talk about World War II, we don’t call every soldier fighting in it a terrorist, not even the Nazis, so understand that “terrorist” is racially provoking language that treats simply existing inside the war as terror. They use “war” to deny genocide, they use “terrorist” to justify total obliteration, and they use “humanitarian” to describe themselves doing it. Anybody Palestinian is Hamas, anybody who aids them is aiding terrorists, and when Netanyahu does it, he’s a humanitarian. The man with the warrant is inside the law. The people on First Avenue are outside it. The Palestinians are outside even the category of civilian.

Domo called Israel the Mississippi of the Middle East, and that lands, because it’s the same move the grand jury made on Horn Island. The powerful get a report that certifies their innocence, and the dead get a story about themselves.

VI. Mamdani, the Warrant, and the Cap We Okay With

Domo pressed the room on Mayor Zohran Mamdani. As a candidate, Mamdani promised to have Netanyahu arrested if he came to New York. As mayor, his administration reviewed it and concluded the city doesn’t have the legal authority to execute an ICC warrant, while noting the federal government does. Domo asked whether campaigning on locking him up and then turning around and saying “I can’t” hurt his credibility.

Toya, speaking as a Californian and not a New Yorker, said anybody who understood jurisdiction knew it was never a thing. It was spirited language, the accountability metric people needed to hear from somebody at the top. Then she drew the line where it belongs, because the chat did. South Dakotans for Integrity pointed out that Mamdani’s police were arresting protesters. According to reporting that afternoon, about a hundred people got arrested near the UN, including City Council members Chi Ossé and Alexa Avilés and Darializa Avila Chevalier, the Democratic nominee in New York’s 13th District, with the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group, the unit Mamdani once pledged to disband, doing the zip tying. Toya: you can’t arrest him, fine, but you can do something about your police officers arresting protesters while he’s there. That’s where she said he loses her, because you can get people riled up about what you can’t control and then not do s**t with what you can.

I asked Domo straight: is Mamdani’s answer b******t, is it pragmatic, or did he pump fake us? Domo said it’s the honest answer, and that there’s a certain level of cap we okay with during an election. He also caught something nobody else did. When the Senate was grilling Kash Patel, nobody stood up and asked, hey, FBI, y’all can arrest war criminals, right? My read was geopolitical. A city mayor was never finna buck the international order and every ally of Israel that’s also an ally of America, especially when both 2024 presidential candidates ran what I called an Israel off, competing over who was the most loyal. Domo said you can’t really say whether Kamala Harris would’ve let Netanyahu walk around freely either. I told him she would. She would. Domo agreed, and he said it plainly: ain’t nobody pretending this is an “only if Kamala” situation.

Then I played the clip of Netanyahu explaining that it’s “the opposite of genocide,” the millions of text messages, the millions of phone calls, the millions of leaflets, the two million tons of food. Domo’s whole response: “I just hate being talked to like I’m stupid.” Toya’s: “You’re not going to piss on me and tell me it’s Super El Niño.” So I supplied the receipt the clip skipped. If you been following this since October 7, every time he dropped those leaflets telling people in Gaza to go south because it’d be safe, then they bombed them in the places they were told to go. Then they double tap. Imagine your house gets bombed, the ambulance pulls up, the aid pulls up, and they bomb it again. So when he’s asking these remedial questions, these demonic questions, understand that’s the same thing massa and them used to do. What type of evil master feeds his slaves? Feeding a people you are starving and then asking for credit is the plantation’s oldest defense.

Toya dropped the vocabulary word of the night: agathokakological, made of both good and evil. The surface of the act is the leaflet and the food. The underbelly is the cat playing with the mouse, playing with its food. Toya’s point is that this is predator behavior, animal and prey behavior, and naming it that way is how you refuse the dehumanization instead of mirroring it. BK Hustler put the military math in the chat: Palestinians don’t even have a Navy or an Air Force. Toya called it an eleventh grader pummeling kindergartners and bragging about it, and reminded everybody that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

Then came the second clip, where Netanyahu turned his UN address into a New York City council meeting, telling Mamdani that since his election many Jews no longer feel safe in New York, going after the mayor’s friendship with Hasan Piker and his wife’s social media likes. Imagine a foreign leader coming to a U.S. city to drag a Republican mayor from the UN podium. I said it on air and I’ll say it here: I believe wholeheartedly that a lot of the Hasan Piker obsession has been fueled by Israeli loyalists. Mamdani’s response that same day called the speech baseless lies meant to sanitize a genocide.

I’ll tell on myself a little here, because it connects. After I called out Macy Gray, she called me a know it all and then called me dumb, me, a man speaking from a master’s degree in human relations. So I know exactly what Domo meant. When somebody who can’t hold a basic argument gets up and insults your intelligence, it hits different. Stop playing with me. That’s what “moral cowards” is. It’s a man with no argument trying to insult the room into silence.

Domo said it best, we in our cartoon era, Gargamel and Cobra Commander running actual countries. The audience in the theater knows who the villain is, and the only people who don’t are the characters in the movie. That’s the scariest part of the post literacy crisis Dr. Amber and Domo named. The lie doesn’t have to be good. It only has to be loud enough, and backed by enough force, that nobody in the movie is allowed to say it out loud.

VII. “They Got Health Insurance and You Don’t”: The Whitey on the Moon Ledger

My last argument on the show was aimed at the folks who were mad about purity tests and single issues during the election. In 2026, if you still believe talking about Israel and Palestine is a single issue, you are a willing d*****s. Domo said purposely obtuse. I said an unethical d*****s. My receipt was local. The Texas State Board of Education voted on September 4, 2026 to require students to learn Israel’s 1948 founding framed as a return to an ancestral homeland, in the same year the board trimmed lessons on slavery and segregation. That has nothing to do with the federal government. That’s the Texas Education Agency spending Texas tax money deciding which history your child owes allegiance to.

Then I said the line I want on a shirt: “They got health insurance and you don’t, and we paying for it.” Under the 2016 memorandum of understanding, the United States sends Israel $3.8 billion a year in military aid through 2028. Meanwhile, the same federal government found $75 billion in new money for ICE, handed out signing bonuses of up to $50,000, and hired roughly 12,000 new officers so fast that, per a 2025 whistleblower letter, applicants were getting cleared without fingerprints, identity verification, or credit checks. By mid September 2026, the Washington Post was reporting that ICE had quietly started firing new hires over red flags it should have caught in vetting. Toya’s words: they deputized demons on behalf of Satan himself, and now they finding out none of them are qualified.

Put those two lists next to each other and you see the whole Whitey on the Moon of it. Money for bonuses. Money for a war. Money to sue a medical school for being too Black. No money, no DOJ review, and no working Civil Rights Division for a mother in Ocean Springs asking why her son had no water in his lungs.

Toya added the part most folks missed. ICE arrests hit records this summer, 50,208 in July and 50,925 in August, while the whole country was fixated on Minnesota and LA. On air she said only about ten percent of the people arrested were convicted criminals. The real number is worse in the way that matters: according to Deportation Data Project figures reported in September, 73.5 percent of the people ICE arrested in July had no criminal conviction, and only 1.6 percent had a conviction for a violent crime. So much for the worst of the worst. Toya called it the kid with cookie crumbs all over his face. Red handed.

Then there’s Kash Patel, and I had to put y’all on. At a September 15 Senate Judiciary hearing, the FBI director defended quietly changing hiring rules so that prostitution and bestiality are no longer automatic disqualifiers, saying the bureau didn’t want to punish victims of bestiality. Who are y’all talking to? The victim of bestiality is the dog. Two days later, on September 17, Patel named Shaquille O’Neal an honorary FBI special agent at the National Academy graduation, and when a homie of mine out here in Houston made a video calling Shaq out for cozying up to this FBI, Shaq slid in his DMs, told him he heard he was a broke boy, and told him to enjoy his apartment. Terrell Owens told Shaq to give the badge back. Domo: everybody collecting honorary badges like Thanos collecting stones.

Crazy how the federal government can find context and nuance for an FBI applicant’s past, context for an ICE hire’s past, and context for a war criminal’s present, and has zero context for a Black eighteen year old’s last day alive. The benefit of the doubt is a budget line. We just ain’t on it.

VIII. Ambient Fascism and a Boy Singing in the Hallway

Near the end Toya shared a post from Maxim, Mr. Hot Sauce himself, the man behind the scenes: we live in a state of ambient fascism, and the sociopolitical weight of an unknown future weighs on you even if you aren’t aware of it. Toya unpacked it like the teacher she is. Ambience is background. You work to it. Sometimes you sleep to it. It’s undiscerning, unthreatening, benign. Now imagine good old fashioned fascism running at its best with that ambience as cover. She also warned that a lot of what’s in Trump’s bag lands in 2027, the Easter eggs after the credits. Don’t wait for a blue wave. The movie ain’t over.

Domo said he’s only 38 and doesn’t want to pretend it’s never been this bad, but the facade is gone. We showed up in Kosovo and told ourselves all the fucked up stuff was a means to an end, that we was protecting democracy, policing the world. After welcoming the criminal with open arms, there’s no legs left for American exceptionalism to stand on. We are officially the bad guys. We always was. He said he’s not appalled, he’s irritated. Outraged at the genocide and the loss of life. Irritated at the lying.

This is where the Afropessimist line we ran through the middle of the night has to meet its counterweight, because the machine ain’t the whole story. Apply Perry here. In Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Imani Perry writes to her two boys as a Black mother who knows exactly what the world has in store for them and refuses to raise them inside that fear alone. She doesn’t promise them safety. She promises them an inheritance, a lineage of Black people who knew the machine and made beauty, argument, and joy anyway. In May We Forever Stand, her history of Lift Every Voice and Sing, Perry shows how that song, the same one Toya learned before the Star Spangled Banner, carried a whole counter citizenship through segregated schools, churches, and graduations, so Black children were formally initiated into belonging to each other even when the nation refused to claim them.

That’s what Domo’s son is doing skipping through the hallway of his school singing “and I’m Black, y’all.” That’s what Toya meant by knowing what a repast is. That’s what the Chop Nation chat is doing every Thursday when Jen and BK Hustler and South Dakota and FBA’s Defense and Brandon and Jim and JM show up and talk back. Patterson called it natal alienation, the severing of the child from any lineage that could protect him. The song is the rebuttal. Lineage ain’t granted by the state. It’s sung into a child by the people who love him. The state can shelve a case. It cannot shelve a song.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* “Consistent with drowning” is not “cause of death: drowning.” Both the state medical examiner and the family’s pathologist listed Nolan Wells’ cause and manner of death as undetermined, and the state’s own report found no fluid in his airway, lungs, or stomach. A no true bill is not an acquittal, and Mississippi has no statute of limitations on murder.

* The official inquiry is a genre. Sherene Razack shows how inquests produce innocence for the living and pathology for the dead. The Jackson County report’s own language, that the grand jury must also exonerate, is the genre announcing itself.

* When the state won’t answer, the mother gets investigated. Christine Wells Wonsley faced an anonymous nursing board complaint; Nikole Hannah Jones faced the timeline. Jennifer Nash’s work explains why Black mothers become the place a society relitigates its failures.

* The law has a direction. A man with an ICC warrant spoke at the UN and went home; about a hundred protesters were zip tied outside. ICE hired 12,000 without full checks and arrested record numbers, with 73.5 percent of July arrestees having no criminal conviction.

* Lineage is the counterweight. Prudence Carter’s “cultural straddlers” and Imani Perry’s history of Lift Every Voice show that Black parents are running a second curriculum at home, and that it works.

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WORKS CITED

* Razack, Sherene H. Dying from Improvement: Inquests and Inquiries into Indigenous Deaths in Custody. University of Toronto Press, 2015.

* Razack, Sherene H. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. University of Toronto Press, 2008.

* Carter, Prudence L. Keepin’ It Real: School Success Beyond Black and White. Oxford University Press, 2005.

* Pattillo, Mary. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

* Nash, Jennifer C. Birthing Black Mothers. Duke University Press, 2021.

* Perry, Imani. Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. Beacon Press, 2019.

* Perry, Imani. May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. University of North Carolina Press, 2018.

* Patton, Stacey. “Black Children Are Not Being Killed Because They Are ‘Adultified;’ They’re Murdered Because They’re Black.” MadameNoire, June 3, 2021.

* Patton, Stacey. “The Children of Children: Why the Adultification Thesis Is a Misguided Trap for Black Children and Families.” In Trust Kids!, ed. Carla Bergman. AK Press, 2022.

* Rollo, Toby. “The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Child/Human Binary in the Production of Anti Black Racism.” Journal of Black Studies 49, no. 4 (2018): 307 to 329.

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

* Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855.

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Christine Wonsley posted on Sunday, September 20. All she wanted for her birthday was to hug her son and hear his jokes. That Wednesday before, Nolan would have turned 19. Monday night the Jackson County District Attorney’s office released the grand jury report, and the report told her, in writing, that her boy chose to stay on that island, that he went in the water, and that the questions she and her husband have been asking since July are, and I’m quoting the state of Mississippi here, solely the result of public clamor and private malice.

Sit with the timing. Nobody at that DA’s office had to release an eight page document the week of a dead child’s birthday and the day after his mother’s. They chose the week. They chose the words. Then folks will look at y’all sideways for saying Mississippi don’t care about Black children.

Research over MeSearch, so let me walk it.

The Frame Everybody Reached For, and Why Patton Says Put It Down

The first thing a lot of us did when this story broke was reach for adultification. Essence caught outlets calling Nolan a man while his friends of the same age got called teens, and that trick is real, I clocked it too. Nolan was 18 by the calendar and a child by every other measure, a college kid on a boat on the Fourth of July.

Ahh, but here’s where I want y’all to slow down, because the scholar most people would cite on this is actually the one telling us to drop it.

Stacey Patton is not an adultification theorist. Patton, with Toby Rollo, wrote the sharpest rebuttal of that whole thesis back in 2021, and the title says it plain: Black Children Are Not Being Killed Because They Are Adultified, They’re Murdered Because They’re Black. Her argument is that the adultification thesis is both mistaken and a counterproductive trap, because it perpetuates the myth of protected childhood and invites Black communities to seek white protections for Black bodies. Patton’s read of the history is that white supremacy never adultified us, it did the opposite. Slavery was a denial of Black adulthood. Douglass said his master’s son could grow into a man while he had to stay a minor his whole life. Under that logic Black youth are the children of children, and childhood was never a protected category anyway, it was a category of the irrational, the ones who can be struck and confined without consent. So begging the state to see Nolan as a boy is begging for a protection that was never built for him.

Apply Patton here. The question was never whether Jackson County would see an 18 year old as a child. The question is why a Black body pulled out of the Gulf starts from a presumption of accident while everybody else on that trip starts from a presumption of innocence. That’s not adultification. That’s the racial contract, Mills would say, the agreement that some deaths require an explanation and some deaths are the explanation.

Then go one layer deeper with her, because Patton and Rollo don’t just reject the conclusion, they go after the receipts. The study everybody cites for adultification, Goff’s Essence of Innocence, showed cops and college students photos of boys already tagged as suspects in felonies and asked them to guess ages and rate innocence. Patton’s point is that the method bakes in the answer. If you tell a participant a ten year old is suspected of a carjacking, that participant is gonna age him up just to avoid saying something absurd, and if you ask a police officer to explain why he shot a child, that officer is gonna swear the child looked grown and looked armed, because that’s what a police officer says. Patton says we already know not to believe the “he looked armed” line, so why do we take the “he looked older” line on faith and build a whole theory on it? The age inflation ain’t a perception error, it’s a strategic threat inflation after the fact, the same move as calling a bruised child’s mother malicious after the fact. Feel me. That’s what makes her critique bigger than a semantics fight. If you accept adultification, you’re accepting the cop’s own alibi as the diagnosis, and you end up asking the state that killed the child to please recognize him as a child next time. Patton wants us out of that loop entirely. Black youth don’t need to be recategorized. The order that categorizes them needs to fall.

No Foul Play Is a Verdict Before the Autopsy

Two things can be true, so let me put both on the table.

First truth. The things that fueled this family’s suspicion were not internet fantasy. His parents said messages had been deleted off his phone when they found it, after tracking it to a friend’s house the day his body was found. Crump says the friends claimed Nolan was talking to a young lady, and the young lady said Nolan told her he was getting back on the boat with the boys. That’s a contradiction at the center of the whole “he chose to stay” story. The family alleged his friends were reluctant to turn over his keys. The autopsy noted a 12 inch by 8 inch area of red discoloration in the soft tissue at the back of his head, and both the state medical examiner and the family’s independent pathologist found the cause and manner of death undetermined. The grand jury itself conceded drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion. So when the DA says “consistent with drowning,” understand what that phrase does. It means nothing else was proven. It does not mean drowning was.

Then there’s the opening move, which is the one nobody wants to talk about. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office initially investigated this as a death, not a homicide, and his parents said law enforcement moved too quickly assuming no foul play while being slow to communicate with them. That first classification is the original sin. It decides what gets preserved, whose phone gets pulled that night versus that week, who gets separated for interviews and who gets to ride home together and get their story straight. You can’t un ring that bell with 132 subpoenas two months later.

Second truth, and I’m saying this on the record because credibility is the only currency we got. Not everything held. That enhanced 911 audio TMZ put out, the one folks swore had somebody asking if he was dead, a digital forensics expert said he could not corroborate it, and the TMZ version was 20 seconds longer than the original with a different digital fingerprint. Then the DA said Crump’s own team, after the independent autopsy and hundreds of tips, advised her office they had no evidence of a crime. If your argument is that the state covered up a murder, that’s the wall you hit, and I’m not gonna pretend it ain’t there.

Like, here’s the thing though. My argument was never that I know somebody killed Nolan Wells. My argument is what the state did with a Black family’s grief once it decided nobody did.

Same Old Script, New Toilet

Mississippi didn’t invent this move for Nolan. Mississippi has been running this exact play since before his grandmama was born, and the play goes: Black person turns up dead, local authorities announce no foul play before the body is cold, the autopsy comes back undetermined, and the family gets told they’re the problem.

Emmett Till, Tallahatchie County, 1955. The founding text. An all white jury took about an hour, the killers sold their confession to Look magazine for a few thousand dollars, and Mississippi wrote the rule that a Black child in the water is a matter of opinion.

Willie Andrew Jones Jr., Scott County, 2018. A 21 year old found hanging in the yard of his white girlfriend’s family. The sheriff said suicide inside of days. The family has never accepted it.

Rasheem Carter, Smith County, 2022. Carter was reported missing October 2 after he went to police for help and called his mother frantic that white men in three trucks were pursuing him. His head was severed from his body and his spinal cord was recovered in a separate area. Then a day after finding his remains the Smith County Sheriff’s Department posted that it had no reason to believe foul play was involved. The medical examiner ruled cause and manner undetermined. A man with no head, undetermined. The sheriff only walked it back after Carter’s family and Crump accused authorities of stonewalling them for more than four months. Tiffany Carter said something at that press conference that Christine Wonsley could have said this week: “I am overwhelmed with the oppression that this state have caused in our lives.”

Dexter Wade, Jackson, 2023. Hit by an off duty officer’s cruiser, buried by the city in a numbered pauper’s grave while his mother filed missing person reports for months. The state didn’t kill him and hide it. The state just didn’t think his mother needed to know.

Dau Mabil, Jackson, 2024. Vanished on a walk, pulled from the Pearl River weeks later. No foul play first, questions second.

Rankin County, 2023. Michael Corey Jenkins was handcuffed and shot in the mouth, and his attorney said local authorities filed false charges to try to blame the shooting on him. It took a federal courtroom to do what Jackson County’s neighbors wouldn’t.

Now put Nolan Wells at the bottom of that list and read the grand jury’s language again. “Public clamor and private malice” is just the 2026 edition of “no reason to believe foul play was involved.” Crazy how the paperwork changes and the sentence don’t.

I’m gonna be precise for the folks in the back, because the ops will try to use this against us. Till and Rankin County are proven homicides. Jones, Carter, Mabil, and now Wells are officially undetermined. That is exactly the point. The claim isn’t that every one of these was a murder. The claim is that Mississippi’s system produces “undetermined” for Black bodies with a consistency that should itself be under investigation.

The Threshold

Here’s the two roles frame, what the grand jury says versus what the grand jury structurally does. What it says… we heard 43 witnesses, we read the phone forensics, we found nothing. Fine.

What it does, it converts a Black mother’s questions into an offense. Read the report’s own framing. The grand jury noted online speculation about a fight and allegations against Wells’ friends and their families, then stated the allegations were all false. It debunked assertions that Nolan was the only Black person on Horn Island and said those false assertions led to misidentification, speculation and rumors. Every paragraph of that document is written to rehabilitate the people who came home with Nolan’s phone and keys. Not one paragraph is written to explain why an 18 year old would stay alone on a barrier island ten miles offshore without his phone. The friends get a character reference from the state. The mother gets a diagnosis.

That’s the threshold I keep talking about. Black families in this country have to build a prosecutable homicide case out of their own grief before the state will grant them the status of victim, and if they can’t, the state doesn’t just decline to charge, it recasts the asking as malice. Meanwhile everybody else in the story is presumed innocent before a single question gets answered. Patton put a note up on her Substack in June that reads like it was written for this week: the legal system keeps reminding Black America that our children can be killed and their killers afforded reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt is a beautiful principle. Just admit it only runs one direction down here.

Now zoom out, because Jackson County didn’t write that report in a vacuum, it wrote it in a year where the federal government has been dismantling every instrument we had for proving what Mississippi just did. In April 2025 the White House ordered agencies to stop using disparate impact, the standard that let you prove discrimination by pattern instead of by confession. By December the Justice Department had pulled its Title VI disparate impact regulations without so much as a public comment period, and this July the EEOC voted to kill the EEO forms that were the only federal count of Black workers by race and sex at the same time. The Supreme Court’s Callais decision gave Southern legislatures the green light to crack Black districts, and Mississippi’s neighbors took it within the week. Read the pattern. Every one of those moves says the same thing the grand jury said: no intent proven, no injury recognized, and if you keep pointing at the pattern you’re the one with the problem. Just admit that “public clamor and private malice” is the same sentence as “no evidence of discriminatory intent,” written smaller. Gilmore calls it organized abandonment, and Mills would remind us the ignorance is the design, not the accident. So when a Black mother in Pascagoula asks why her son’s phone came home without him and gets called malicious, that ain’t a local sheriff being lazy. That’s the national climate arriving on schedule, in a county that never needed the encouragement.

What the Mothers Already Know

I want to close on the women, because that’s where this story actually lives.

Mamie Till Mobley, Tiffany Carter, Bertha Wade, Christine Wonsley. Every one of these cases was investigated by a mother before it was investigated by a state, and in most of them the mother did the better job. Ida B. Wells taught us this method in 1892, that when the official record calls a lynching justified, you go get the receipts yourself and publish them, because the record is the crime scene too. Christine Wonsley tracked her son’s phone to a friend’s house on the day his body was found. That’s not clamor. That’s investigation the sheriff’s office didn’t do.

So the state can call it closed. The grand jury itself acknowledged there is no statute of limitations on homicide in Mississippi, which is the state’s way of saying it knows it didn’t answer the question either. There’s no expiration on a mother’s right to ask it.

See, Patton reminds us childhood was never gonna save Nolan, and Wells teaches us the record is ours to write when they refuse to. Nolan Wells would have turned 19 last Wednesday. His mother turned a year older on Sunday. Mississippi told her on Monday.

5 Takeaways

* The timing was a choice. Christine Wonsley’s birthday was Sunday, Nolan would have turned 19 the Wednesday before, and the state released its report Monday night. Nobody made them pick that week.

* Stacey Patton is the critic of adultification, not its champion. Her point is that childhood was never a protected category for Black youth, so asking the state to see Nolan as a child asks for a protection that was never built for him.

* “Consistent with drowning” means nothing else was proven. Both autopsies are undetermined, the grand jury conceded drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion, and the back of his head still carried a 12 inch by 8 inch area of discoloration nobody has explained.

* Mississippi runs one script. Till 1955, Willie Jones 2018, Rasheem Carter 2022, Dexter Wade 2023, Dau Mabil 2024, Rankin County 2023, Nolan Wells 2026. “No foul play” first, “undetermined” second, the family blamed third.

* The threshold is the story. Black families must build a prosecutable homicide case out of grief before the state grants them victim status, and when they can’t, the asking itself gets renamed malice.

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This piece took a full morning of pulling grand jury language, forensic reporting, and Patton’s actual argument instead of the version of it that gets passed around. No network paid for that. No institution cleared it. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession, I am that 2%, and I’m doing it from a laptop with your support and nobody else’s. If “Education Is Elevation” gives you the receipts the news won’t, become a paid subscriber. It’s the only way this platform fills the critical void left by the retreat of public education media. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue.

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RELATED READINGS AND CITED WORK

* CNN: grand jury finds no evidence of criminal wrongdoing

* NPR: grand jury finds no evidence of criminal conduct

* NBC: no criminal charges

* ABC/AP: no charges following grand jury review

* NewsNation: grand jury report

* NewsNation: forensic expert on the enhanced audio

* WLOX: court documents

* CBS: parents and Crump on contradictions

* TheGrio: the birthday post

* Baller Alert: Crump on deleted texts

* Essence: adultification in the coverage

* Patton and Rollo, Black Children Are Not Being Killed Because They Are Adultified, NewsOne, June 3 2021

* Patton Substack note, June 2026

* Patton, Strung Up: How White America Learned to Lynch Black Children (Beacon Press)

* Patton, “The Children of Children: Why the Adultification Thesis is a Misguided Trap,” in Trust Kids! (AK Press, 2022)

* ABC: Rasheem Carter autopsy undetermined

* NBC: Smith County sheriff walks back no foul play

* ABC11: Tiffany Carter press conference

* Capital B: Carter, Rankin County, and the Till lineage

Theory

* Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (1997)

* Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors (1892)

* Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), as read by Patton and Rollo

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Macy Gray, respectfully, you are wrong as two left shoes for the comments you left under my post concerning the Ed Sheeran tour. Now as a Southern man that was taught to have respect for my elders, even when you think they are wrong, I hope you do not take this as condescending or patronizing, because I’m about to use my transferable skills of being a professor of adult and higher education, as well as having a master’s in human relations, to illustrate to you point for point why you were wrong. Not to slam dunk on you. To do what I was trained to do, which is take a comment, break it into its claims, and check every one of them against the record.

Because here is the thing about what you wrote, Ms. Gray. You did not leave an opinion. You left a series of claims that can be tested, and then you put the word OPINION in all caps on top of them like a tarp over a leaking roof. Then you hoped nobody would look under the tarp. Ahh, but somebody looked..

Let me read it back to you the way you wrote it. You started off by saying, why does he have to sabotage his story just so y’all can understand? You went on to say, neither his opinion or Macklemore’s is going to fix Israel. You said, I want to see any one of you turn down playing in stadiums, employing thousands of people, making millions of dollars, just to take a side in a war that’s been going on since the 50s. Then you said, you think Ed Sheeran is going to make a dent? What have you ever done for Palestine? Y’all can’t wait to tear somebody down.

Four moves. Every one of them is going to get graded.

Move One: “Why does he have to sabotage his story?”

Ms. Gray, Ed Sheeran did not sabotage anything. A billionaire sabotaged Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran let him. Let’s put the timeline on the table so we are working from the same facts.

Macklemore opened for Sheeran at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5, 2026. He wore a keffiyeh, he said the words Free Palestine, he performed Hind’s Hall while footage from Gaza played on the screens, and he told the Jewish folks in the building, in his own words, that criticism of a state is not criticism of a people. That is what happened on that stage. Then Pink reposted a StopAntisemitism story demanding he be removed from the tour, and a week later she wrote a three part statement saying she never asked for anybody to be silenced. Two things can be true. She amplified the call to remove him, and then she said she never asked for it. We call that shucking and jobbing.

Then Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, got on the phone with Sheeran. By Macklemore’s own account, and Sheeran’s cousin and the reporting since have not contradicted it, Kraft told Sheeran that if Macklemore was on the bill, the Foxborough shows on September 25 and 26 were off, and that he had rallied other stadium owners to hold the same line. Kraft’s own statement said the quiet part in public: Gillette Stadium, he said, would not provide a platform for what he called hate speech, and he cited Macklemore’s stage material as the reason. On September 14 the promoter, Messina Touring Group, announced that venues had refused to host the tour with Macklemore on the lineup and that Macklemore would not be performing on the remaining U.S. dates. Sheeran said the decision was the promoter’s. The promoter said it was the venues’. The venues are owned by billionaires. Follow the money and you find the mouth.

Then here is the part you skipped, Ms. Gray. Every single remaining opening act quit. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga, Lukas Graham. All of them. Sheeran walked out in Philadelphia on September 19 with no openers, cried on stage, said he had made mistakes, and told the crowd he never wanted to be an activist musician. Ticket resale prices dropped to 42 dollars. That is not Macklemore sabotaging Ed Sheeran’s story. That is what happens when you let a stadium owner write your set list. The sabotage came from the top of the building, not from the opening act.

So when you ask why should Ed Sheeran have to sabotage a successful tour, the honest question is why should a billionaire get to sabotage a successful tour where an artist was already exercising freedom of speech with his artistry, and why did you decide the artist was the problem?

Move Two: “It’s just an opinion”

This is the move that made me want to teach.

See, the thing about opinions, Ms. Gray, is they are non falsifiable, meaning they cannot be proven true or false. An opinion is, I believe jazz is better than R&B. You feel me? That is subjective. Nobody can run a test on it. What you wrote is not that. What you wrote is a set of empirical claims, and empirical claims can be checked. So let me check them.

You said it is a war that has been going on since the 50s. The number is 1948. In Arabic it is called the Nakba, the catastrophe, and it is not an opinion. Between late 1947 and 1949 roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, more than 400 villages were depopulated and destroyed, and on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin, over 100 villagers were killed by Irgun and Lehi fighters in a massacre that sent panic through the countryside and accelerated the flight. Their descendants are still refugees to this day, registered with UNRWA in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. When you say the 1950s, you are not stating a position. You are stating a date, and the date is wrong. So everything you built on top of that date is built on sand.

You said, neither his opinion or Macklemore’s opinion is going to fix Israel. Ms. Gray, Israel is not the one that needs fixing. Gaza is rubble. Here is what the courts, not the activists, the courts, have said. In January 2024 the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel’s conduct in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention and ordered provisional measures. In July 2024 the same court issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. In September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Those are not opinions. Those are findings by bodies with jurisdiction, rules of evidence, and judges. You can disagree with them, but you cannot call them an opinion and walk away.

You said every president has tried to end it. Every president has armed one side of it. Since the 1970s the United States has been the principal supplier of weapons to Israel, and under the 2016 memorandum of understanding the floor is 3.8 billion dollars a year through 2028, before the supplemental packages since October 2023 that pushed it into the tens of billions. That is your tax dollars, Ms. Gray. Mine too. When you say every president has tried to end it, the arms ledger says every president has funded it. Apply Mills here. Mills calls this white ignorance, and he is careful to say it is not stupidity, it is a structure, a way of not knowing that gets protected because knowing would cost something. The word “opinion” in your comment is the tarp. It is the mechanism that lets a person with access to every fact I just listed say “who’s to say” and keep their brunch reservation.

So no, Ms. Gray. What you wrote was not an opinion. It was misinformation.

Move Three: “I want to see any of you turn down a stadium”

Ms. Gray, we all got options and choices. When you say you want to see anybody turn down a stadium, playing in front of tens of thousands of people, employing thousands of people, making millions of dollars, you are trying to provoke an emotional response, and you are pretending the thing you are describing has never happened. It has happened. It has happened so many times that there is a whole shelf of history about it, and most of it was written by Black artists.

Historical context, the part they skip in the group chat

Start with Paul Robeson. In 1950 the State Department revoked his passport because he would not stop speaking about colonialism, lynching, and the Soviet Union in the same breath. His income went from over 100,000 dollars a year to a few thousand. Concert halls cancelled. Record labels dropped him. He did not get his passport back until 1958. That is a man who did not turn down a stadium. The stadium got taken from him, and he kept singing anyway.

Then Harry Belafonte. He funded SNCC out of his own pocket, bailed out Freedom Riders, and in 1968 guest hosted The Tonight Show for a week and put Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy on the couch. Belafonte did not have to do any of that. He had the stadiums. He used them.

Then 1985. Steven Van Zandt organized Artists United Against Apartheid, 49 artists including Miles Davis, Gil Scott Heron, Run DMC, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen, and they recorded Sun City, a song whose entire message was I ain’t gonna play there. Sun City was a resort in the Bophuthatswana bantustan where the apartheid government paid Western entertainers millions to play so the world would believe things were normal. The United Nations kept a register of entertainers who took the money. Some of the biggest names in music were on that list. The artists who refused lost checks. The artists who played got their names published as collaborators. That is the exact choice you just said nobody makes, Ms. Gray. Whole careers were built on making it.

Then the part that matters most for this conversation, because it is the Black and Palestine part. Fischbach documents that in the summer of 1967, right after the Six Day War, SNCC published a newsletter with a two page piece on Palestine, and the price was immediate. Jewish donors who had funded the movement pulled out. Liberal allies broke. The organization was already under pressure, and Palestine became the reason a lot of people had been looking for. Two years later the Black Panther Party opened its own relationship with the PLO and paid for it in the press. Then 1979, Andrew Young, Dr. King’s lieutenant, the first Black U.S. ambassador to the UN, resigned after it came out that he had met with the PLO’s UN observer. One meeting. Career over at that post. Fischbach’s point across two books is that Palestine has functioned since 1967 as a test that Black organizers and artists could not pass without paying, and that the payment was never symbolic. It was donors, jobs, stages, and passports.

So when you say you want to see somebody turn down a stadium, the answer is you are looking at them. Macklemore just did. He is donating the entire one million dollars of his net earnings from the tour to six Palestinian relief organizations and invited Kraft to match it. Four more openers walked away from stadium money the same week. The history is not hypothetical. You just did not want to be in it.

Move Four: “What have you ever done for Palestine?”

Ms. Gray, here is a photo of my name spray painted in the rubble in Gaza, because my advocacy for Palestinians made its way from Texas all the way to the West Bank and into Gaza. Do you know how sad and empowering it was at the same time to see that? That is how much destruction there is. Enough rubble to write on. Enough rubble that folks over there know the names of the people over here who refuse to be quiet.

Then look at the logic. You said y’all can’t wait to tear somebody down. Why isn’t that directed at Robert Kraft, who used his stadium to pull an artist off a tour for saying children should not be bombed in tents? Why isn’t that directed at Pink, who reposted a call to remove him and then said she never asked for that? How come you ain’t got that beef with them? That is the two roles frame, and it is the whole game. What you said was defend Ed Sheeran. What your comment structurally did was defend the billionaire’s right to decide what an artist can say on a stage he owns. Those are two different jobs, and you signed up for the second one without reading the contract.

Because here is the question I need you to sit with, Ms. Gray. What if a billionaire said this tour will not be performed in my stadium if y’all let Macy Gray hit the stage? What would that mean for you? What would it mean for every billionaire to start feeling like, because they have the means, they can dictate what artists say on stage, and if it hurts their feelings or pisses on what they believe, then you can’t say it? You are a Black woman who has said things on stage and in interviews that made powerful people uncomfortable. You have been on the other side of that kind of phone call. You know what it is to have a career get quiet after you spoke.

That is why the word “opinion” is doing so much heavy lifting in your comment. If it is all just opinions, then Kraft’s opinion and Macklemore’s opinion are equal, and the guy with the stadium wins the tie. Once you accept that framing, you have already lost the argument for every artist who comes after you, including yourself.

THE SYLLABUS SAYS “OPINION,” THE STATE SAYS “SIGN HERE”

The specific implication for education

I teach adults. My whole discipline is built on one distinction, and it is the one Macy Gray’s comment collapsed: the difference between a claim you can test and a claim you can only feel. Wineburg calls the skill historical thinking, and his research at Stanford found that most students, and most adults, cannot tell the difference between a source that documents something and a source that just asserts it with confidence. He calls the fix civic online reasoning, and the first move is always the same. Ask what kind of statement this is. Is it falsifiable? If it is, go check. If it is not, label it and move on. Apply Wineburg here. “The war started in the 50s” is falsifiable. “Every president tried to end it” is falsifiable. “It’s just an opinion” is the thing a person says when they do not want to be checked.

Now here is why this is not just a media literacy lecture. In Texas, where I live, the state has already decided that Palestine is a subject you can be fired for. In 2017 Texas passed HB 89, which required anybody contracting with a state entity to certify they do not boycott Israel. In 2018 Bahia Amawi, a speech pathologist who had worked with children in Pflugerville ISD for nine years, was handed her renewal contract with a no boycott of Israel clause in it. She refused to sign. She lost her job. In April 2019 a federal judge in Austin, Robert Pitman, blocked the law, writing that it plainly targeted political speech, and the legislature responded by rewriting the statute to exempt sole proprietors and small contracts so the case would be mooted, and the Fifth Circuit obliged. The principle survived. A Texas teacher’s ability to hold a position on Palestine is still subject to a clause in a contract.

Then go one level up. Giroux’s whole argument is that the classroom is where a society rehearses what it will allow to be said, and that the “neutral” classroom is a classroom that has already decided in favor of the people who own the building. Apply Giroux here. When a state tells a speech pathologist to sign a loyalty clause, and when a billionaire tells a promoter to pull an opening act, they are running the same play at different scales. The stadium and the schoolhouse are teaching the same lesson: your speech is welcome up to the point where it costs the owner something.

So the education implication of Macy Gray’s comment is not about Macy Gray. It is that an entire generation is being taught, by contract and by example, that “it’s just an opinion” is the safe thing to say about a documented catastrophe, and that the artists who say more than that get removed from the bill. Which means the students I teach have to be taught, on purpose, how to tell a falsifiable claim from a feeling, because the state and the stadium are teaching them not to.

THE STAGE ALWAYS COLLECTS FROM BLACK WOMEN FIRST

Intersectional material impacts

Here is what makes the Macy Gray comment hurt instead of just being wrong. A Black woman artist is defending the machinery that has historically collected its debts from Black women artists first.

Feldstein’s book is a ledger of exactly this. Hazel Scott was the first Black woman to host her own national television show, in 1950. She was named in Red Channels, testified before the House Un American Activities Committee in September of that year, refused to name names, and DuMont cancelled her show within a week. Her U.S. career never recovered and she moved to Paris. Nina Simone wrote Mississippi Goddam in 1964 after Medgar Evers was murdered and four girls were killed in Birmingham. Radio stations in the South returned promotional copies of the record broken in half. She later said the industry punished her for it and she was right; the bookings thinned, and she spent much of the rest of her career outside the country. Eartha Kitt went to a White House luncheon in January 1968, told Lady Bird Johnson to her face that mothers were sending their sons to be shot in Vietnam, and the CIA compiled a file on her. She could not get booked in the United States for the better part of a decade. Feldstein’s point is that Black women entertainers were the civil rights movement’s most visible spokespeople and the movement’s most disposable ones. The stages they were given could be taken back in one afternoon.

Then Brooks adds the part that connects it to the word “opinion.” Brooks argues that Black women musicians have always been intellectuals, that Simone’s rage and Scott’s refusal and Kitt’s directness were arguments, not moods, and that the industry’s favorite way to neutralize them was to reclassify their arguments as feelings. Apply Brooks here. That is what “it’s just an opinion” does. It is the same move the industry has run on Black women for a century: your analysis is a feeling, and feelings do not get to cost the owner money.

So look at the material outcome. The artists who will feel this precedent hardest are not Ed Sheeran, who cried in Philadelphia in front of 50,000 people and kept the tour. It is the Black woman opening act on somebody else’s bill two years from now, who now knows that a stadium owner can pull her for a keffiyeh, a chant, or a line about a drone strike, and that a fellow Black woman artist with a platform will log on and say what did you expect. The precedent Macy Gray defended will not be enforced against Macy Gray first. It will be enforced against whoever has the least leverage, and in this industry that has always been a Black woman with a political point and no billionaire behind her.

Then the Palestinian side of the same ledger, because intersectionality is not a metaphor. Hind Rajab, the child that Macklemore’s song is named for, was five years old when she was killed in a car in Gaza City in January 2024 alongside her family, and the paramedics sent to reach her were killed too. The people who bear the largest share of a siege are women and children, and the people who bear the largest share of a blacklist are women artists. The billionaire veto sits at the exact intersection where both bills come due.

THEY TOOK ROBESON’S PASSPORT. HE SANG ACROSS THE BORDER.

Counterweight: the tradition is bigger than the stadium

I do not want to end this on the losses, because the tradition Macy Gray is standing outside of did not lose.

Redmond’s work on Robeson and on anthems in the diaspora makes a point that matters here. When Robeson could not leave the country, in 1952 he stood on a flatbed truck at the Peace Arch on the Washington and British Columbia border and sang to 40,000 people gathered on the Canadian side, because the border could not stop sound. He did it again every year until the passport came back. Redmond’s argument is that Black political music has never needed the venue’s permission, that the anthem, the chant, the song passed hand to hand, is a form of organization that travels where the singer cannot. Apply Redmond here. Kraft took the Foxborough stage. He did not take Hind’s Hall. That song has been played more this month than in the two years since it came out, and a million dollars just moved to Gaza because of a set that got cancelled.

The Sun City artists lost checks and won the argument. SNCC lost donors and was right about 1967 in 1967. Belafonte gave stadiums away and died with more respect than any billionaire who ever owned one. Macklemore lost eight shows, gave away the money from the rest, and the four artists behind him walked out on stadium money to stand with him. That is the tradition. That is the choice Macy Gray said nobody makes. People make it every week, and the ones who make it are the ones we still talk about.

See, Fischbach reminds us that the price for saying Palestine has been collected from Black organizers and artists since 1967, and that the ones who paid it are the reason there is still a movement to join. Feldstein teaches us that Black women artists have always been the first to be billed for their politics and the last to be credited for their analysis. Then Redmond shows us that a stage is a thing an owner controls, and a song is a thing an owner never has.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* “It’s just an opinion” is a claim about the kind of statement you are making, and Macy Gray’s statements were falsifiable. 1948 is not the 1950s. The ICJ, ICC, and UN findings are not opinions. The arms ledger is not an opinion.

* Ed Sheeran did not sabotage his tour. A stadium owner did, and Sheeran let him. Every remaining opener quit rather than perform under that precedent.

* Artists have turned down stadium money for politics for seventy years: Robeson, Belafonte, the Sun City boycott, SNCC’s 1967 donors, and now Macklemore’s one million dollars. The choice Macy Gray called impossible is a whole tradition.

* The precedent Kraft set will not be enforced against Kraft’s peers. It will be enforced against the artist with the least leverage, and that has historically been a Black woman with a political point.

* A stage is owned. A song is not. Redmond, Fischbach, and Feldstein all land on the same fact: the venue can be taken, the argument survives.

THE ASK: BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

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’m independent with no corporate sponsor and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. When a billionaire can pull an artist off a stage for saying two words, and a Black woman artist with a platform calls that an opinion, the only thing standing between the record and the tarp is somebody who did the reading and refuses to be quiet about it. 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, one that no stadium owner and no contract clause can take off the bill. So here is the ask: become a paid subscriber.

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)

Brooks, Daphne A. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. Harvard University Press, 2021.

Feldstein, Ruth. How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Fischbach, Michael R. Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color. Stanford University Press, 2018.

Fischbach, Michael R. The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Giroux, Henry A. On Critical Pedagogy. Continuum, 2011.

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Khalidi, Walid, ed. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992.

Lubin, Alex. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro Arab Political Imaginary. University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

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

Mills, Charles W. “White Ignorance.” In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, edited by Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana. SUNY Press, 2007.

Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.

Redmond, Shana L. Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora. NYU Press, 2014.

Redmond, Shana L. Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson. Duke University Press, 2020.

Taylor, Keeanga Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Haymarket, 2016.

Wineburg, Sam. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). University of Chicago Press, 2018.

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

So white people’s lives are seen as being just inherently careful, full of care, deserving of care, while everybody else’s is political? You can’t take a stance on it? What?

If y’all don’t know what I’m talking about, Ed Sheeran has recently kicked Macklemore off his tour because he couldn’t deal with the backlash of Macklemore using his set to say free Palestine along with caring about humanity. What blows my mind is that when we talk about white people’s humanity, it’s always seen as just humanity and you just having caring and morals and ethics. Then when it comes to everybody else’s humanity, it seems to be overly politicized and people can’t take a stance.

Let me lay the receipts out before we get into the theory, because Research over MeSearch means we start with what happened, not with how we feel about it.

The Receipts, In Order

Macklemore opened for Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5, 2026. Before performing “Hind’s Hall,” his 2024 song named for the Columbia University building students renamed for Hind Rajab, a six year old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in January 2024, he told the crowd that one reason he took the tour was to stand on stadium stages across America and say two words, free Palestine. On the second night he addressed Jewish fans directly and said that criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, and opposition to genocide is in no way a criticism of them.

Then the machine started. The Israeli American Council launched a petition demanding Sheeran remove him from the remaining dates. Pink reposted a StopAntisemitism post calling his set “anti Israel propaganda” and calling for apologies and refunds. Then on Monday, September 14, Messina Touring Group, the promoter, announced that venues on the upcoming dates had said they would not allow a concert with Macklemore on the lineup, “which would result in the cancellation of the tour and impact hundreds of thousands of fans,” and that “after discussions with stakeholders,” he would not be performing.

Now here is the part that matters. Macklemore posted his own account the same day. He said Ed, a friend of thirteen years, told him Robert Kraft was barring him from Gillette Stadium, and that Kraft had rallied other stadium owners to deliver an ultimatum, if Macklemore stays, you don’t play our venues. Kraft then confirmed the Gillette ban in his own statement, citing what he called a “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery,” and he did not address whether he called the other owners. Reporting names Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, AT&T Stadium in Arlington, and Raymond James Stadium in Tampa among the venues that objected.

If you let him keep talking, he’ll literally admit that it was because he was threatened with not being able to play those venues by the billionaire Robert Kraft and other such billionaires. That is not me speculating. That is the promoter’s own statement, translated out of press release into English. “Venues will not allow” means owners said no. “Discussions with stakeholders” means the money talked.

Ahh, but “we did it for the fans.” B***h you didn’t do it for the fans. You did it for the buildings.

What Ed Sheeran Said When It Was Safe

Hey guys, I just watched a video this morning. Thank you so much for sending it. Firstly, I just want to say to all Ukrainians that I love you, I stand with you, and I’m so proud to be playing this fundraising event next week.

That is Ed Sheeran, March 2022, ahead of the Concert for Ukraine in Birmingham, a nationally televised benefit that raised over thirteen million pounds. He went on to record a “2step” remix with the Ukrainian band Antytila while its members were serving in the war. Nobody called that a political rally. Nobody launched a petition. Nobody said a stadium full of people “didn’t buy tickets to be ambushed” by geopolitics. The entire Western civil society stood with Ukraine, and it was framed as decency, as humanity, as what any caring person would do.

Then when it comes to them Palestinians, oh man.

Macklemore’s own words on the situation were that Ed “couldn’t get past his public facing, ‘I don’t take sides.’” Just admit it. “I don’t take sides” is a side. That is the first debate move I ever learned and it still holds. Claimed neutrality is itself a position, and the tell is that the neutrality only ever activates in one direction. He took a side in 2022 with a camera on and a benefit concert booked. The side he took was the side that was safe to take. Which means the thing he can’t do in 2026 isn’t “take sides.” It’s lose venues.

And what if he would have said no? What if Ed Sheeran would have said, you know what, I’m not going to cancel him, fine, tell me I can’t play the stadium? People would have supported him. Crazy how the whole industry would have had to reckon with a billionaire telling the biggest touring act on earth who is allowed on his stage. But no, but no, but no, you couldn’t lose out on any money.

Ed Sheeran is a weak ass cowardly b***h. Not because he’s scared. Everybody’s scared. He’s a coward because he had the one thing that makes fear irrelevant, leverage, and he handed it to the man threatening him.

Apply Said Here: “Context and Complexity” Is a Permission Slip

Let’s go back to this petition, man. The IAC said this was “an Ed Sheeran concert, not a political rally, not a protest, not an activist event.” They said the issue is not whether Macklemore has the right to hold political views, the question is “where the line is to be drawn when an opening act uses a global concert platform to advance a one sided political agenda.” Then they said it “becomes even more troubling when the message relies on selective imagery, biased messaging, and disputed claims presented to a massive audience as fact without context or complexity.”

Edward Said wrote an essay in 1984 called “Permission to Narrate.” His argument was simple and it has not aged a day. Palestinians are the one people on earth who are required to obtain permission before their story counts as a story. Every fact about their dispossession must be pre approved, contextualized, balanced, and complicated before it is allowed into the room, and the people issuing the permission are the same people doing the dispossessing. Said called this the demand that Palestinians prove their own existence to a jury that has already ruled.

Apply Said here. “Without context or complexity” is not a request for information. It’s a permission structure. It says you may speak about dead children once you have first recited the complexities that make them acceptable casualties. Nobody asked Ed Sheeran for context when he said he stood with Ukraine. Ukraine’s suffering was self evident. It narrated itself. Palestinian suffering, by the petition’s own logic, cannot narrate itself. It needs a footnote first.

In what context or complexity is it cool to blow up a child in a tent?

Salaita adds the second half. In Inter/Nationalism he shows that the demand for civility and complexity is a settler colonial technology, it’s the same move the United States made on Native nations, treaty, then “complexity,” then removal. The people being removed are always the ones being asked to be reasonable about it.

The Stadium Has Always Been Political, It’s Just Somebody Else’s Politics

I can’t tell you how many damn times I’ve been sitting in my living room enjoying my nationally syndicated news, or a football game, and I ain’t trying to see nothing about nothing, but the people who blow up Palestinians in mosques tell me, with a whole bunch of blue paraphernalia and symbolism and a whole bunch of music, about a particular group being religiously discriminated against.

Let me put a name on the blue paraphernalia. Robert Kraft founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019. In 2023 it launched the Blue Square campaign, “Stand Up to Jewish Hate,” with a reported twenty five million dollars behind it, and it bought Super Bowl airtime. The blue square on your screen during the biggest broadcast in American life is Kraft’s politics. Nobody asked him for “context or complexity.” Nobody said the Super Bowl “is not a political rally.” He is allowed to put his position on the field, in the endzone, on the broadcast, because when a billionaire owner does it, it isn’t politics, it’s values.

Same league. Same stadiums. In February 2025, a performer during the Super Bowl halftime show in New Orleans unfurled a flag bearing the words Sudan and Gaza. The NFL announced he would be banned for life from all NFL stadiums and events. So the flag is a lifetime ban and the blue square is a public service announcement. This means the IAC is wrong that concerts aren’t political. The stadium is political every single night. The only question is whose politics gets called “the show” and whose gets called “an ambush.”

Two roles frame. What Kraft says his position does is protect Jewish fans from hate. What his position structurally does is establish that a billionaire who owns the building gets to decide which humanity is expressible inside it. Those are two different things and only one of them is in the press release.

Lastly on Kraft, because the Whitey on the Moon beat has to land somewhere. This is a man who can spend twenty five million dollars to put two words, Blue Square, in front of a hundred million people, and a rapper cannot say two other words, free Palestine, in front of eighty thousand without losing his job. That isn’t a disagreement about speech. That’s a disagreement about who has to ask.

Critical Historical Context: They Have Been Resisting Since Before Ed Sheeran’s Grandmother Was Born

Historical context first, then present day. Because the phrase “free Palestine” is not two words Macklemore made up in 2024. It’s the compressed form of a century of resistance that the “context and complexity” crowd conveniently never provides when they ask for context.

* The Balfour Declaration. A British foreign secretary promises the land of one people to another in a letter. Britain takes the Mandate in 1920.

1936 to 1939. The Great Palestinian Revolt. A six month general strike, the longest in colonial history at the time, followed by three years of armed rebellion. Britain crushes it with mass detention, collective punishment, house demolitions, and the execution of Palestinian leaders. Historians put Palestinian dead around five thousand. The tactics Britain pioneered there, demolishing the family home of a suspect, were inherited directly by the Israeli state.

1947 to 1949. The UN partitions the land in November 1947. Then the Nakba, the catastrophe. Roughly 750,000 Palestinians are expelled or flee, over four hundred villages are depopulated or destroyed, and on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin, militias kill over a hundred villagers. Refugees are barred from returning. Their descendants remain refugees today, the largest and longest standing refugee population on earth.

* The Naksa. Israel occupies the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan. Another roughly 300,000 displaced. The occupation the International Court of Justice would declare unlawful in its July 2024 advisory opinion begins here.

* Land Day, March 30. Palestinian citizens of Israel strike against land confiscation in the Galilee. Six are shot dead. Land Day is still commemorated every year.

* The First Intifada. Stones against tanks, general strikes, tax revolt, women’s committees running the grassroots. The Israeli defense minister’s reported instruction was to break their bones.

1993 onward. Oslo. A “peace process” that produces more settlements, not fewer.

* Palestinian civil society, over 170 organizations, issues the call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions, modeled explicitly on the South African campaign. This is the nonviolent resistance the West says it wants, and it has been criminalized in dozens of U.S. states.

2018 to 2019. The Great March of Return in Gaza. Weekly unarmed protests at the fence. Israeli snipers kill over two hundred, including medics and journalists, and wound tens of thousands. Razan al Najjar, a twenty one year old volunteer medic in a white coat, is shot dead on June 1, 2018.

October 2023 to now. After the Hamas attack of October 7, in which roughly 1,200 people in Israel were killed and about 250 taken hostage, Israel’s assault on Gaza kills tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority women and children according to the Gaza health ministry, figures the United Nations treats as reliable. On January 26, 2024, the ICJ orders provisional measures in South Africa’s genocide case. On January 29, 2024, six year old Hind Rajab calls emergency services from a car full of her dead relatives and is killed, the two paramedics sent to reach her killed with her, the vehicle later found with hundreds of bullet holes. In December 2024, Amnesty International concludes Israel is committing genocide. In September 2025, the UN Commission of Inquiry reaches the same conclusion. Hospitals, mosques, churches, and tent camps are struck, including the Church of Saint Porphyrius in October 2023, the Tal al Sultan tent camp in Rafah in May 2024, and the Holy Family Catholic Church in July 2025.

That’s the context. Now tell me what complexity Macklemore left out.

Feldman’s A Shadow over Palestine matters here because he shows that this history has been running through Black American politics since at least 1967, when SNCC’s newsletter published “The Palestine Problem” and the organization was punished for it by donors overnight. Malcolm X had already written “Zionist Logic” for the Egyptian Gazette in 1964. The Black Panther Party met with Fatah in Algiers in 1970. Andrew Young lost his UN ambassadorship in 1979 for meeting with the PLO. Then Ferguson 2014, when Palestinians tweeted tear gas survival tips to Black protesters, then the 2015 Black Solidarity Statement with Palestine signed by over a thousand Black scholars and activists, then the 2016 Movement for Black Lives platform.

And every single time, the same script. In November 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill within a day of him saying “free Palestine from the river to the sea” at the United Nations. In January 2019, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award from Angela Davis, Birmingham’s own daughter, over her support for Palestinian rights, and had to reverse itself after the city revolted. In 2014, the University of Illinois unhired Steven Salaita over Gaza tweets. Macklemore is not the first. He’s the first one this white.

So when Kraft says this isn’t about “diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians,” read the pattern. The people who got punished for saying this sentence before Macklemore were Black. The machine was built on us. He just walked into it.

Pink, LaFace, and the Costume She Took Off

Now Pink. Because Pink inserted herself, so we get to look at Pink.

Alecia Beth Moore came up through LaFace Records in the late 1990s in an R&B girl group called Choice. When the group fell apart, L.A. Reid kept her. Her 2000 debut, Can’t Take Me Home, was an R&B record on an R&B label, with Babyface, Daryl Simmons, and Kandi Burruss on the credits, and “There You Go” and “Most Girls” were worked to urban radio. Then in 2001 she pivoted, went to Linda Perry, made M!ssundaztood, and has spent twenty five years describing that first era as a label costume that wasn’t really her.

Two things can be true. She’s a talented artist. Also, by her own account, she launched from inside a Black musical lane, got the hits, then exited into pop rock where the money is longer and the questions are fewer. Greg Tate called this Everything But the Burden, white America wants the sound, the swagger, the aesthetics of Blackness, everything except the consequences of being Black. Eric Lott called the older version Love and Theft, the minstrel structure, where desire for Black culture and the theft of it are the same gesture. Apply Tate here. Pink took the sound and left the burden, and the burden includes the political tradition that sound came out of, the tradition where Nina Simone, Paul Robeson, Marvin Gaye, and Kendrick Lamar understood that a stage is a pulpit.

So when Pink reposts a call for a rapper to be removed from a stage for saying free Palestine, she isn’t just a fan with an opinion. She’s a beneficiary of Black expressive culture policing its politics. That is the burden she never picked up.

Now let me be fair, because being fair is how you win. A week later she wrote her own statement. She said “a repost isn’t a statement, and a meme isn’t a spine,” she said she never asked for anyone to be silenced or fired, she said she doesn’t need a refund. She said what she needs is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, that it scared her and scared people she loves, without being told her fear is propaganda. She said “Zionist” has become a slur, and she closed on 9/11 and Rosh Hashanah.

I take her fear at face value. I’m not in the business of telling anybody their fear isn’t real. Here’s the thing though. Her fear got a Rolling Stone headline, a Variety writeup, a thirteen hundred word Instagram post that every outlet ran in full. The mothers in Gaza whose children are in the tents get “disputed claims” and “without context.” That’s the whole essay in one contrast. A Jewish mom’s fear is humanity. A Palestinian mom’s fear is politics. Nobody has to say that out loud for it to be the rule, and the rule is the thing I’m naming.

Ruth Frankenberg wrote that whiteness works by being unmarked, it’s the position that doesn’t have to announce itself as a position. Apply Frankenberg here. “I don’t take sides” and “that scared me” both get to sit in the unmarked seat. “Free Palestine” has to sit in the marked one. By doing that, by refusing to even see the asymmetry, you are making whiteness visible.

The Civility Clause Has a Syllabus: What This Does to Education

Here is where I bring it home, because I’m an educator and this has been happening in my profession for a decade before it happened on a stage.

Steven Salaita was a tenured professor at Virginia Tech in 2013 when the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign offered him a tenured position in American Indian Studies. He resigned Virginia Tech, sold his house, and prepared to move. Then in summer 2014, during Israel’s assault on Gaza, he tweeted his anger. Donors wrote to the chancellor. Some of the emails were explicit about money. In August 2014, days before classes, Chancellor Phyllis Wise withdrew the offer, citing “civility.” The AAUP censured Illinois in 2015. The university settled with him for $875,000 in November 2015, but he never got the job back, no university would hire him, and by 2019 he was driving a school bus in the DC suburbs and writing about it.

That’s the syllabus. Uncivil Rites, his book, documents the mechanism. “Civility” is not a standard. It’s a valve. It opens for whatever the donors like and closes for whatever they don’t. The IAC didn’t say Macklemore was wrong. They said he was one sided and lacked complexity. Illinois didn’t say Salaita was wrong. They said he was uncivil. Same valve, different room.

Ferguson explains the second act in We Demand. The university, and the industry, doesn’t just punish the one person. It absorbs the punishment into a lesson for everyone watching. Every graduate student who saw Salaita driving a bus learned what not to tweet. Every opening act who watched Macklemore lose nine stadium dates learned what not to say. That’s the pedagogy. Nobody has to write a rule when the example is walking around.

Then look at what has happened to campuses since 2024. Columbia let the NYPD in to clear Hind’s Hall. In 2025, the federal government moved to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident, and detained Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts doctoral student, over an op ed. Universities have adopted definitions of antisemitism that treat criticism of a state as hatred of a people. Adjuncts, who teach most college courses now, have no tenure to protect them and have learned the lesson without needing to be told.

Here’s the education implication in one sentence. If the child in the tent cannot be named in a stadium, she cannot be named in a classroom either, and a classroom that cannot name her is not teaching history, it’s teaching permission.

Unchilding: Whose Mother’s Fear Counts

This is the intersectional section and I want to do it carefully, because the frame is not Jewish mothers versus Palestinian mothers. The frame is which mothers the system is built to hear.

Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, a Palestinian feminist scholar, was a professor at Hebrew University when she was arrested by Israeli police in April 2024 over her statements about Gaza. Her book Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding names the thing. Unchilding is the process by which a settler state strips Palestinian children of the category of child, so that a six year old in a car becomes a “security situation,” a boy with a stone becomes a “combatant,” and a tent full of families becomes a “target.” Once a child is unchilded, killing her does not register as killing a child. It registers as context.

Apply Shalhoub Kevorkian here. The IAC’s demand for “context and complexity” before you may mention a dead child is unchilding in petition form. Hind Rajab had to be complicated before she could be mourned. Pink’s children, whose fear she named, needed no complication. They’re children. That’s the asymmetry, and it’s not a matter of anyone’s intentions, it’s a matter of which category the system holds open for whom.

Then the women. Gaza’s health system has been destroyed, UN agencies have reported sharp rises in miscarriage, in births without anesthesia, in mothers giving birth in tents and shelters with no clean water. Razan al Najjar was a medic. The women’s committees of the First Intifada ran the food distribution, the underground schools, the neighborhood clinics, while the men were being detained. Palestinian resistance has always been carried disproportionately by women, and it’s always been narrated disproportionately by men, which is its own erasure.

Davis wrote in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle that the connection between Ferguson and Gaza was not a metaphor. The same companies trained the police. The same tear gas was fired. Black women in the U.S. and Palestinian women in Gaza are the ones raising children inside systems that have already decided those children are threats, and both are told their grief is political. Apply Davis here. Misogynoir taught us that Black women’s pain is the least believed pain in America. Unchilding shows the same machinery exported. That’s not two struggles. That’s one machine with two shipping addresses.

Noura Erakat closes the legal loop in Justice for Some. International law, she shows, is not neutral either, it has been read for decades to license the occupier’s violence as “self defense” and criminalize the occupied’s resistance as “terror.” Which is the same valve. Same valve as civility. Same valve as “not a political rally.”

Moving Towards Home: The Counterweight

I’m going to end where June Jordan ended, because I refuse to leave y’all in the machine.

In 1982, after the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, June Jordan, a Black woman poet from Harlem, wrote a poem called “Moving Towards Home.” She catalogued what she did not want to talk about, the details of the killing, and then she said what she did want, which was to move towards home, to be a person who could live, and she closed the poem by declaring that she had been born a Black woman and had now become a Palestinian. Jordan lost friends over that poem. She lost invitations. She wrote it anyway, and it’s the reason a whole generation of Black feminists understood Palestine before it was a hashtag.

That’s the tradition Pink could have inherited with the sound and didn’t. That’s the tradition Macklemore, to his credit, walked into, knowing the price. His own statement said it plainly, if he kept doing the shows, with the crowd getting loud, what artist might speak out next? That’s the fear Kraft is managing. Not antisemitism. Contagion.

See, Said reminds us that the demand for context is the demand for permission, and Shalhoub Kevorkian teaches us that permission is exactly what unchilding denies. Jordan shows us the way out, which is to stop asking.

So let’s go back to the petition one more time. They said the message becomes troubling when it relies on selective imagery and disputed claims presented without context or complexity.

In what context or complexity is it cool to blow up a child in a tent? How about a hospital? How about a mosque? How about a church? What is the context that’s missing?

Research over MeSearch.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

* “I don’t take sides” is a side. Sheeran took one publicly for Ukraine in 2022 with a benefit concert attached. What he can’t do in 2026 isn’t take sides, it’s lose venues.

* The stadium is already political. Kraft’s Blue Square campaign bought Super Bowl airtime. A Sudan and Gaza flag at the 2025 halftime show earned a lifetime ban. The question was never whether politics belongs in the building, it’s whose.

* “Context and complexity” is a permission slip, not a request. Said named it in 1984. Palestinians are the one people asked to earn the right to be believed before their dead count as dead.

* The machine was built on Black people first. Salaita 2014, Marc Lamont Hill 2018, Angela Davis 2019. Macklemore is not the first person removed for this sentence, he’s the first one this white.

* Unchilding is the mechanism. When one mother’s fear is humanity and another’s is politics, the difference is which children the system is willing to see as children.

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RELATED READINGS

Davis, Angela Y. Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016.

Erakat, Noura. Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019.

Feldman, Keith P. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Ferguson, Roderick A. We Demand: The University and Student Protests. University of California Press, 2017.

Frankenberg, Ruth. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Jordan, June. “Moving Towards Home.” In Living Room. Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985.

Khalidi, Rashid. The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917 to 2017. Metropolitan Books, 2020.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lubin, Alex. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro Arab Political Imaginary. University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld, 2006.

Said, Edward W. “Permission to Narrate.” London Review of Books, February 16, 1984.

Said, Edward W. The Question of Palestine. Times Books, 1979.

Salaita, Steven. Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

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