Education is Elevation

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Mandy Ohman, PJ Schuster, Andrews, Martha, Molly Z, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Huey P. Newton said that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. Today the phenomenon is this: how does small-town politics spill over into the global? Or, if you flip it, how does global politics trickle down and root itself inside the local? Because I’m going to tell you something — when I go back to Bryan, Texas, the town I was raised in, I don’t feel like I’m going home. I feel like I’m walking back into plantation politics.

And I mean that structurally. Not metaphorically. Structurally.

I recently sat down with my homie Ethan Brisby — a brother from Bryan who went to Morehouse College, got his master’s in land and property development from Texas A&M, and has spent the last fifteen years building an organization called SHIFT Enterprise Academy. SHIFT stands for Save your money, Help your family, Imagine your goals, Follow directions, and Think accurately. It’s a mindset framework, an ecosystem, and a material response to the oppressive conditions Black people face in small-town America — and increasingly, across the African continent. What Ethan is doing is real work. Ground-level, community-rooted, globally conscious work. And our conversation cracked open something I’ve been sitting with for a long time about what small-town Texas politics really is, where it comes from, and why it never seems to change.

Let me give you the receipts.

The Name on the City Is a Slaveholder’s Name

Let’s start with the very name of the city. Bryan, Texas is named after William Joel Bryan — the nephew of Stephen F. Austin, the so-called “Father of Texas.” William Joel Bryan was born in Missouri in 1815, moved to Texas with his family, and grew up on Peach Point Plantation in Brazoria County, where his family managed the plantation, cattle, and property holdings of Stephen F. Austin himself. After Austin died in 1836, William Joel Bryan inherited massive land holdings across the region. By the 1860 census, Bryan owned real property valued at $176,000, personal property worth over $62,000, and held thirty-eight enslaved people. His Durazno Plantation raised cotton, cattle, and sugar using the labor of enslaved Africans. Four of his seven children went on to fight for the Confederate Army.

In 1859, William Joel Bryan granted right-of-way through his inherited land in Brazos County to the Houston and Texas Central Railroad, and the projected townsite was named in his honor. In 1860, he deeded 640 acres for the original Bryan townsite to railroad officials for $3,200 — land that enslaved people had cultivated and maintained. The city of Bryan was literally formed by former Confederate soldiers after the Civil War ended in 1865. That is not ancient history. That is the foundation beneath the streets.

So when I say I’m walking back into plantation politics when I go home, I need you to understand the literalness of that statement. The city is named after a slaveholder. The land the city sits on was inherited through the machinery of Anglo-colonial land theft and chattel slavery. And the neighborhoods where Black people live today — what folks call “the Bottoms,” what sits along the east side — those are the same areas where formerly enslaved people were relegated after emancipation.

Freedman Town and the Geography of Anti-Blackness

After the Civil War, one of the earliest Black communities in Brazos County was Freedman Town. Records indicate lots were being sold to African Americans in what was called Hall’s Addition as early as 1867. The Bryan School for Colored Youth was established on that site in 1885 and was later destroyed in a fire. Washington Elementary was built in its place, then burned again in 1971 — the same year, finally, that Black students were integrated into Bryan’s public school system. Think about that. 1971.

And this is the part that triggered me in my conversation with Ethan: the way that political consciousness gets suppressed in small-town Texas. It is not the same as the East Coast or the West Coast. When you start talking about white supremacy, anti-Blackness, challenging the legitimacy of government structures — the response from your own community is often: “Man, don’t do that.” Not because they disagree, but because the good old boy system has people psychologically conditioned to believe that defiance is dangerous and compliance is divine.

The Normalization of Suffering and the Divine Trap

This is what I call the divine trap. In small-town Texas, particularly in Black communities, there is a deep cultural tendency to make suffering sacred. “The toughest battles go to the strongest soldiers.” “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” Now, I’m not attacking faith. I’m a spiritual person. But I am saying this: when you take the various structural ways that a system has caused your reality — the over-policing, the underfunded schools, the disinvestment, the geographic containment — and you make that divine, you have just absolved the structure of accountability.

God didn’t put you on the east side of Bryan. Stephen F. Austin’s land grants did. William Joel Bryan’s railroad deal did. Post-Civil War Freedman Town designations did. Jim Crow zoning did. And the Klan’s resurgence in early twentieth-century Bryan — which the historical record documents as limiting the overall upward mobility of the African American community through segregation and terror — that did it too.

Ethan mapped this same dynamic onto the colonization of Africa. He broke it down in sequence: first came the explorers, who were welcomed. Then the missionaries, who introduced spiritual frameworks that softened resistance — turn the other cheek, your heaven is in the afterlife. Then the mercenaries, who took the land by force. And finally the merchants, who control the markets to this day. That sequence — explorer, missionary, mercenary, merchant — is not just the story of continental colonization. That is the playbook. And small-town Texas has been running the same play since the 1820s when Jared Groce arrived from Alabama with ninety enslaved people and set up a cotton plantation on the Brazos River, in Stephen F. Austin’s colony.

Machine Politics and the Good Old Boy System

Ethan said something that crystallized it for me: small-town politics is the epitome of machine politics. When you can redraw a district line today and already know who is going to win next year, that is a machine. That is not democracy. That is engineered outcomes. And machine politics runs on what Ethan called the good old boy system — people, places, and things that pull strings you never see.

In Bryan-College Station, this machinery operates in plain sight if you know where to look. Every drug under the sun can be found on the Texas A&M campus. We all know this. And yet the east side and west side of Bryan — where the Black people live — get policed at a categorically different intensity than the university. They justify the over-policing of Black neighborhoods through the rhetoric of drugs and crime, while the same substances flow freely through a predominantly white institution five miles away. So how is correlation equals causation for the Black community but not for the affluent white people at Texas A&M University? That is not just structural inequality. That is anti-Blackness baked into the infrastructure.

Ghislaine Maxwell, Federal Prison Camp Bryan, and the Contradiction

And then there is this. I’m on the east side of Bryan, visiting family. I’ve been making videos about the Epstein files, about Ghislaine Maxwell, about the entire trafficking apparatus. And I look across the street from my auntie’s house and there is a federal prison. Federal Prison Camp Bryan — a minimum-security facility that sits right there in the hood, in Bryan, Texas.

Ghislaine Maxwell is incarcerated there. Serving a twenty-year sentence for conspiring to sex traffic minors. And she is getting preferential treatment. The facility houses mostly non-violent white-collar offenders. Maxwell got transferred there from a low-security prison in Florida after meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche for two full days. Bureau of Prisons policy says sex offenders should not be housed at minimum-security facilities — but she got a waiver. She was praised in her own emails for the cleanliness and orderliness of the facility. Other inmates were warned by prison staff to use discretion talking about Maxwell. One inmate who spoke to the media was pulled out of a puppy-training program and transferred to a federal detention center in Houston.

Meanwhile, I’ve got family members from that very neighborhood who got locked up for moving narcotics and are sitting in rougher federal institutions than a woman who trafficked children. Think about the moral architecture of that. Think about the fact that Greg Abbott brings the hammer down on communities like east side Bryan while Ghislaine Maxwell gets an emotional support dog at a facility that locals used to call “Club Fed.”

This is what plantation politics looks like in 2026. The geography hasn’t changed. The hierarchy hasn’t changed. The relationship between who gets punished and who gets protected hasn’t changed.

Epigenetics, Programming, and the SHIFT Response

I’ve been working on a video about epigenetics — about how suffering, trauma, and modes of emotion get passed down through DNA. Dr. George Yancy’s work on the elevator effect, on how anti-Black racism operates at the level of bodily encounter, has been central to how I think about this. And when I connect that to small-town Texas, I think a lot of our epigenetics are still captured within the plantation. The way Black people in Bryan relate to each other, measure each other’s success, police each other’s defiance — it is still structured by proximity to whiteness.

This is why what Ethan is doing with SHIFT matters. His response to the intellectual alienation of going back home — after attending Morehouse, after getting his master’s at A&M, after seeing the world differently — was not to lecture. It was to build. SHIFT started in 2010 as a college access program. By 2014, it pivoted to homeownership and first-time homebuyers. In 2021, after a radio appearance in eastern Uganda went viral and his phone rang with over thirty missed calls, Ethan launched SHIFT East Africa — running five cohorts of fifteen students across eight countries, training over 112 alumni, and funding pitch competition winners with $500 of his own money to start businesses.

And here is what hit me hardest about Ethan’s story: he could have stopped at the vibes. He could have been the small-town kid from Bryan who went to Morehouse, showed up in Africa, dropped his number on the radio, and bathed in the feeling of impact. But he didn’t. He said he couldn’t just give them language. He had to give them something material. That distinction — between emotional satisfaction and material impact — is everything.

The Emotional Economy and Whose Feelings Have Value

This made me think about what I’m going to call the emotional economy. Not just emotional intelligence, though that matters. I’m talking about the political economy of feelings. Whose emotions get to be mobilized into policy? Whose anger creates action? Whose anger gets criminalized?

When white colonists were angry at King George, “give me liberty or give me death” became a founding principle. That was an emotional argument that built a nation. When white men feel economic anxiety, politicians respond with policy — tariffs, tax cuts, border walls. But when Black people express anger at structural conditions, that anger gets coded as criminality, defiance, danger. When women express emotion, patriarchy says they cannot lead. But whose emotional decisions have led us into more wars?

The Afro-pessimists talk about the libidinal economy — the economy of feelings and desire. I think what I’m adding is that in the attention economy, in social media, in the entire structure of how we process information, there is a hierarchy to whose emotions get to count. White male anger generates legislation. Black anger generates incarceration. Trans visibility generates erasure. Women’s emotion generates dismissal. And in small-town Texas, this emotional hierarchy is enforced through every institution — from the church to the courthouse to the police department.

From Doers to Beings: The Capitalism of Black Bodies

There’s a distinction I’ve been sitting with between being a doer and being a being. Capitalism reduces Black people to doers — your value is what you can produce, what you can perform, what your body can generate for someone else’s profit. If you can’t do anything, you don’t have value. But being — being a full person, being allowed to show emotion, being seen as an individual with interiority — that is a luxury reserved for those whose humanity is already assumed.

This is what makes plantation politics so persistent. On the plantation, your value was your labor. In the modern economy, your value is your productivity. In the emotional economy, your feelings don’t count unless they serve someone else’s agenda. And in small-town Texas, the programming runs so deep that people don’t even see it operating on them. They think the machine is just the way things are.

But it’s not the way things have to be. And that’s what Ethan’s mantra — build, create, evolve — is about. The way we get trapped in machine politics is that we’re not willing to create anything new. We don’t think we’re creators. We think whatever was handed to us is what we rock with. But when you make the commitment to build something new, you have to be creative. And as you create, you evolve.

That’s all life is. Evolution. The studies say one thing, but your evolution can say another.

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

Research Over MeSearch: What the Historical Record Shows

Here is what the historical record tells us about the soil beneath Bryan, Texas:

Stephen F. Austin wrote in 1824 that “the principal product that will elevate us from poverty is cotton, and we cannot do this without the help of slaves.” Jared Groce arrived from Alabama in 1822 with ninety enslaved people and established a cotton plantation on the Brazos River. By the first census of Austin’s colony in 1825, there were 443 enslaved people in a total population of 1,800. By 1860, enslaved people constituted over 70 percent of the population in Brazoria County — the heaviest concentration of enslaved people west of the Mississippi. In Brazos County, the lands along the Brazos River and the Navasota River had been claimed and assigned titles by 1824. By 1860, the average price of a prime male field hand was $1,200, while good Texas cotton land could be bought for six dollars an acre. The institution of slavery in Texas was not incidental. It was foundational.

Brazos County proclaimed April “Confederate History and Heritage Month” as recently as 2016, with 161 Confederate battle flags marking graves at Bryan Cemetery. The lone African American commissioner was absent and unable to sign the carefully worded proclamation that said the county “acknowledges that slavery was one of the causes of the war.”

One of the causes. The audacity.

How to Support SHIFT Enterprise Academy

Ethan Brisby and his team are doing the real work — from Bryan, Texas to East Africa and back. You can support their mission by visiting www.shiftenterpriseacademy.com, joining their mailing list, purchasing Ethan’s books (Five Proven Strategies on How to Pay for College and The Roaring 30s), and staying locked in for upcoming training sessions in college strategy, home buying for smart buyers, and capacity building for small business developers.

PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

I need to be direct with you.

This article exists because I sat down with a brother from my hometown and we chopped it up about the structures nobody wants to name. About machine politics. About plantation geography. About a convicted child sex trafficker getting preferential treatment at a federal prison camp sitting in the middle of a Black neighborhood in Bryan, Texas. About the emotional economy that decides whose pain gets a policy response and whose pain gets a prison sentence.

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

When you become a paid subscriber, you are not just reading articles. You are funding the kind of investigative, historically grounded, structurally literate journalism that the mainstream won’t touch.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Bryan, Texas is named after a slaveholder — and that’s not a historical footnote, it’s an operating system. William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin, owned thirty-eight enslaved people and granted the land for the town. The Black neighborhoods that exist today sit on the same geography where enslaved and later freed Black people were contained. Plantation politics isn’t a metaphor in Bryan — it’s a map.

2. Machine politics and the good old boy system are not relics of the past — they are the active infrastructure of small-town governance. When you can redraw a district line and already know the outcome, that is not democracy. That is engineered power. And in Bryan, this machinery intersects with racialized over-policing, differential investment, and the suppression of political consciousness.

3. The normalization of suffering through divine framing is a tool of political control. When communities are conditioned to see their structural oppression as God’s plan, the system that created those conditions is absolved of accountability. This mirrors the colonial playbook: explorers, missionaries, mercenaries, merchants — in that order.

4. Ghislaine Maxwell’s preferential treatment at Federal Prison Camp Bryan exposes the racial architecture of the justice system. A convicted child sex trafficker resides in a minimum-security facility in a Black neighborhood where residents’ own family members serve harder time for lesser offenses. The contradiction is the point.

5. Material impact must follow emotional connection — and SHIFT Enterprise Academy models what that looks like. Ethan Brisby’s fifteen-year journey from Bryan, Texas to Morehouse to East Africa demonstrates that consciousness without material action is incomplete. Build, create, evolve is not just a slogan — it’s the counter-program to plantation politics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

Campbell, Randolph B. An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.

Torget, Andrew J. Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Kelley, Sean M. Los Brazos de Dios: A Plantation Society in the Texas Borderlands, 1821–1865. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010.

Barr, Alwyn. Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, 1528–1995. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Lundberg, John R. The Texas Lowcountry: Slavery and Freedom on the Gulf Coast, 1822–1895. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2024.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017.

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

Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.

Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Wilderson, Frank B. III. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright, 2020.

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

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

Let me ask y’all something, and I want you to sit with this for a second. Is Jaden Ivey being persecuted for his faith? Or is there a difference between using your love for Jesus Christ and using it to justify hate for somebody else? Because I need us to be very clear about that distinction right now. The Chicago Bulls waived Ivey on March 30, 2026, for conduct detrimental to the team after he went on Instagram and called the NBA’s celebration of Pride Month “unrighteousness.” And immediately, the internet lit up with people screaming persecution. Christians are under attack. They’re silencing believers. And I’m sitting here like—no, we’re not doing this. Not today. Not with this history.

Because here’s what I need y’all to understand: this is not about one basketball player having an opinion about the Bible. This is about the machinery of white Christian nationalism actively recruiting Black people to be its foot soldiers, and a 24-year-old man who either doesn’t know the history or doesn’t care. Either way, we have a problem. And I’m going to walk y’all through the receipts.

It Is Not Religious Persecution. Full Stop.

Number one, I’m going to answer the question for y’all in the back. It is not religious persecution. You cannot use your religion or faith to justify calling another group unrighteous or saying their mere presence goes against the righteousness of God. That is oppression. Period. Ivey said his conduct was detrimental to the team, and he asked why they didn’t just say they disagreed with his stance on LGBTQ people. I’ll tell you why. Because it was detrimental to the team. Instead of talking about the Bulls’ performance on the court, we’re talking about his antics, his ignorance, the way he’s trying to justify oppression in the name of Jesus.

Number two, most of the time selective moral outrage comes from ignorance. Do you know that in 2016, the NBA and the WNBA became the first professional sports leagues to march in the New York City Pride Parade? That was headline news. Commissioner Adam Silver was on the float. The WNBA had already established the first league-wide Pride campaign in 2014. Jaden Ivey was born in 2002. That means the NBA has been celebrating Pride since he was approximately 13 or 14 years old. He was drafted in 2022. He signed contracts. He cashed checks. He played in a league that had been celebrating Pride for years before he ever put on a jersey. This is not a surprise. This is a choice to ignore the environment you voluntarily entered.

The History They Don’t Want You to Know

Now let me give y’all the history, because this is where the consciousness comes in. Christian nationalism is not new. It is not a fringe movement. It is one of the oldest political ideologies in the Western hemisphere, and its roots are soaked in blood. In 1493, the Doctrine of Discovery gave European Christians papal authority to colonize, convert, and enslave non-Christian peoples. That single document became the legal and theological foundation for the transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the construction of the racial hierarchy that still governs this country today.

The New England Puritans carried this ideology to North America. They saw themselves as God’s chosen people, North America as their Promised Land, and Indigenous peoples as the Canaanites who needed to be conquered. Manifest Destiny wasn’t just a political slogan—it was a theological claim. The idea that white Christians had a divine right to rule this continent is not a distortion of Christian nationalism. It is the definition of it.

By the 1930s, anti-New Deal business interests were linking American capitalism to Christianity. In 1956, Congress adopted “In God We Trust” as the national motto during the Cold War—not because of devotion, but to distinguish America from communist atheism. Christianity became a tool of geopolitics. Then in the 1960s, the Supreme Court banned school prayer, and in 1971, Green v. Connally threatened the tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian schools. That is what birthed the modern Religious Right. Not prayer. Not abortion. Segregation. The defense of white Christian institutions that refused to integrate. That is the origin story they will never tell you.

Trump’s Relationship with Christian Nationalism

And now let’s talk about the present, because Christian nationalism is no longer just a cultural phenomenon. It is federal policy. On February 6, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” It established a federal task force under the Attorney General to investigate alleged anti-Christian persecution in government agencies. The next day, he signed a second order creating the White House Faith Office, led by televangelist Paula White-Cain. On May 1, 2025, he launched a Religious Liberty Commission.

Let’s pause and process that. Russell Vought, a self-described Christian nationalist and key architect of Project 2025, was appointed to run the Office of Management and Budget—the agency that oversees the implementation of presidential policy across the entire federal government. The architect of the blueprint is now the builder of the house. Project 2025 is over 900 pages long. It calls for a biblical definition of marriage and family, the rollback of LGBTQ protections, the elimination of the Department of Education, and the defunding of what it calls “woke progressivism.” Mariko Hirose of Americans United for Separation of Church and State called it “a road map for Christian nationalism.”

And when journalists pointed out that all of this violates the separation of church and state, Trump said—and I quote because I cannot make this up—during a Rose Garden event celebrating National Prayer Day: “They say separation between church and state. I said, all right, let’s forget about that for one time.” The President of the United States said let’s forget about the First Amendment. On camera. In the Rose Garden. And somehow Jaden Ivey thinks he’s the one being persecuted? Come on, man.

Antiblackness and White Supremacy: Baked Into the Foundation

Here’s the part that should make every Black person reading this stop and think for a second. Antiblackness is not a side effect of Christian nationalism. It is a foundational ingredient. The Confederacy wrote God into its constitution explicitly—the U.S. Constitution does not mention God. The Confederate project was a Christian nationalist project, and its central institution was the enslavement of Black people.

Southern theologians constructed entire theological frameworks to justify slavery. They used the “Curse of Ham” from Genesis 9, claiming Black people were cursed by God and destined for servitude. The text says nothing about skin color. The curse was on Canaan, not all of Ham’s descendants. It was a fabrication—a lie built on a misreading and upheld by white supremacist power. They created a Slave Bible that literally removed every liberation story from Scripture—including the Exodus—and kept only the passages about obedience. If that doesn’t tell you everything you need to know about how this works, nothing will.

The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 because Northern Baptists refused to accept slaveholders as missionaries. The Methodist Episcopal Church split over slavery in 1844. The Presbyterians split in 1861. These denominations were literally born from the defense of chattel slavery using the Bible. And after slavery ended, the same theology propped up Jim Crow. White pastors preached that racial mixing violated God’s natural order. The Klan burned crosses—that wasn’t a random choice of symbol. Christianity was the scaffolding for American apartheid.

Today, PRRI research shows that 66% of white evangelical Protestants—the demographic most aligned with Christian nationalism—believe discrimination against Christians is as serious as discrimination against other groups. Meanwhile, Black people face documented disparities in housing, healthcare, education, criminal justice, and wealth. Christian nationalism has always needed a racial hierarchy. It needs Black people at the bottom or, increasingly, Black people willing to participate in their own subjugation. When a Jaden Ivey parrots Christian nationalist talking points, he’s not exercising faith. He’s being recruited.

It Always Blows My Mind

It always blows my mind when people that look like me try to use the Bible to justify denying the humanity of somebody else. Like we ain’t experienced that. Like that ain’t our history. The same book that was used to tell our ancestors to obey their masters. The same book that was edited—literally edited—to remove the stories of liberation. And now we’re using it to target someone else? The amnesia is the emergency.

Number five on my list of receipts: Christian nationalism is thriving and we should all be concerned. What you see is all the ways that the Christian nationalists—the white folks, the white supremacists—use the Bible to justify the denial of a whole bunch of things. Like Black education. They’re going to use what’s happening with Jaden Ivey to say look at this, Christians are being persecuted because we believe we have the right to say messed up things about entire identities because it goes against our beliefs. Because their beliefs have to conform to your identity.

And to the Christians of all colors who are watching this: the entire government in America is run by Christians. Every branch of government. Every entity and industry in this country is dominated by Christians. That means not only is nobody oppressing you or persecuting you for your religious belief—it means the claim is delusional. And that takes me to a very important point. Jaden Ivey is either engaging in selective moral outrage out of ignorance, or this man might be experiencing a mental health crisis. His coach, Billy Donovan, acknowledged as much, saying he’s not a doctor but that mental health is a real issue. Ivey himself has spoken about dealing with depression. I say this not to mock him but to be honest: the behavior was spiraling, and the people around him need to make sure he’s okay.

Chex Mix Christianity

A lot of y’all treat the Bible like a bag of Chex Mix. You love the pretzels but you don’t like the croutons, so you throw those out. Where is the outrage when folks are mixing their polyester with their silk? That’s in Leviticus. Where is the outrage when y’all got that swine on your mind? That’s in the Bible too. But none of these folks are on Instagram condemning the bacon cheeseburger. They’re only interested in the parts that let them target someone else.

Christian nationalism sounds great until you realize it means Christian supremacy. It’s bad because the people who want to make you live by Christian values don’t follow those Christian values themselves. The people who use your religion corruptly to try and persuade the masses to do what they want—that’s why it’s bad. One of the cornerstones of this experiment called America was religious freedom. The idea that you wouldn’t be persecuted for practicing your religion. It’s the first line of the First Amendment. All your different books that you follow—you’re allowed to do that in America without the other one establishing laws over you. That’s the whole point.

Consciousness Precedes Transformation

So where does that leave us? It leaves us with a choice. You can be recruited into a movement that was built on the subjugation of your ancestors, or you can educate yourself about why that movement exists and who it actually serves. The Slave Bible is in a museum. The executive orders are on the White House website. Project 2025 is available to read in its entirety. The receipts are everywhere. The only question is whether you’re willing to look at them.

This is why I do what I do. Research over me searching. Facts over feelings. And the fact is, Christian nationalism has never been about Christ. It has been about power. It has been about control. And it has always—always—depended on Black people not knowing their own history. That’s why they’re banning books. That’s why they’re defunding public education. That’s why Project 2025 calls for the elimination of the Department of Education. Because an educated populace cannot be recruited. An informed community cannot be fooled and a conscious people cannot be weaponized against themselves. Education is elevation.

Explicit Ask to become Paid Subscriber

Everything you just read—the history of the Slave Bible, the receipts on Trump’s executive orders, the connection between the Doctrine of Discovery and today’s Christian nationalist policy agenda, the data on who actually runs every branch of government—this is the kind of research, documentation, and teaching that is being systematically erased from public education. This is the work that nobody else is doing at this scale, with this level of specificity, and with this commitment to telling the truth about what’s really happening.

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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

5 Key Takeaways

1. This Is Not Religious Persecution — It Is Selective Moral Outrage

Jaden Ivey was not persecuted for his faith. He was held accountable by his employer for conduct detrimental to the team. The NBA and WNBA have been celebrating Pride since 2014 and 2016 respectively. He entered a league with established values around inclusion and then publicly condemned those values. That is not martyrdom. That is a contractual and professional consequence.

2. Christian Nationalism Is Federal Policy Right Now

Between Trump’s “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias” executive order, the White House Faith Office, and the Religious Liberty Commission—all launched in 2025—Christian nationalism has moved from the margins to the machinery of government. Project 2025 is the blueprint, and its architects are now in charge of implementation.

3. Antiblackness Is Structural to the Christian Nationalist Project

From the Doctrine of Discovery to the Slave Bible to the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in defense of slaveholding, white Christian nationalism has always required a racial hierarchy. When Black people are recruited into this movement, they are being asked to serve a system that was designed to subjugate them.

4. The Bible Has Been Weaponized Before — And Black People Were the Target

The same selective, proof-texting method being used to condemn LGBTQ people today was used to justify chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation. The methodology has not changed. The target has shifted. But the people wielding the weapon remain the same.

5. Consciousness Precedes Transformation

Understanding the history of Christian nationalism is not an academic exercise. It is a survival skill. When you know that the Confederacy wrote God into its constitution, when you know that they made a Slave Bible, when you know that the modern Religious Right was organized around segregation—not prayer—you can see the pattern. And once you see it, you can’t be recruited into it.

Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.

1. Gorski, Philip S. and Perry, Samuel L. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2022. A data-driven examination of how white Christian nationalism operates as a political ideology, its correlation with racial resentment, and its role in the January 6 Capitol insurrection.

2. Jones, Robert P. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future. Simon & Schuster, 2023. Traces white Christian nationalism to the Doctrine of Discovery in 1493, connecting papal authority, colonial ideology, and contemporary racial politics.

3. Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright Publishing, 2020. Documents how white evangelical culture weaponized masculinity and militarism, creating the foundation for today’s Christian nationalist movement.

4. Tisby, Jemar. The Color of Compromise: The Truth About the American Church’s Complicity in Racism. Zondervan, 2019. A history of the American church’s active participation in racial injustice from slavery through the civil rights era and beyond.

5. Whitehead, Andrew L. and Perry, Samuel L. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020. Defines Christian nationalism through survey data and examines its relationship to attitudes on race, gender, immigration, and authoritarianism.

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

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

There’s a clip from the 1950s that every single American needs to see. A white woman in Levittown, Pennsylvania, looking dead into a camera, saying the quiet part loud: “I just could not live beside them. I don’t feel that they should be oppressed. But I moved here. One of the main reasons was because it was a white community. And that’s the only place I intend to live.”

Let that marinate for a second. She didn’t say she hated Black people. She didn’t use a slur. She said she didn’t think they should be oppressed — and then in the very same breath explained that she chose her home specifically to avoid living near them. That’s not extremism the way most people picture it. That’s mainstream American ideology. That’s the moderate. That’s the liberal. That’s the person Martin Luther King Jr. warned us about in his Letter from Birmingham Jail — the white moderate who prefers order over justice, who agrees with the goal but not the method, who says “I support your rights, just not next door to me.”

And y’all, that wasn’t some fringe figure. That was the average Levittown resident. Feel me? She was the demographic.

Now let me give you the context that your school probably skipped over, because this matters.

Levittown: The Blueprint for American Suburbia

Levittown, Pennsylvania wasn’t just a neighborhood. It was one of the first and largest planned suburban communities in the United States, developed by William Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons beginning in the late 1940s and expanding through the 1950s. Levitt built thousands of affordable, mass-produced homes for returning World War II veterans and their families, and the development became the model that suburbs across the entire country would follow for the next half century.

But here’s the receipt they don’t put in the brochure: Levitt’s company had an explicit policy. No homes would be sold to Black families. This wasn’t informal, wasn’t a wink-and-nod arrangement. It was written into the contracts. Levitt himself said publicly that he could solve a housing problem or he could solve a racial problem, but he couldn’t combine the two. In other words, the prosperity of white American families was built on the contractual exclusion of Black ones. That’s not opinion. That’s the historical record.

In 1957, when William and Daisy Myers became the first Black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, they were met with mobs. Hundreds of white residents gathered outside their home. Crosses were burned. Rocks were thrown through windows. Confederate flags were raised. The police stood by and watched. And the woman in that clip — the calm, composed one who just couldn’t live beside them — she was the moderate version.

The “Class Not Race” Lie

A lot of folks today will tell you it’s more about class and less about race. I hear this constantly. It’s one of the most persistent deflections in American discourse. But Levittown dismantles that argument in real time. The Myers family had the economic means to purchase a home in that community. William Myers was a college-educated veteran with a professional career. By every metric of class status that white America claimed to value, the Myers family qualified.

It didn’t matter. Not one bit. Because when that woman said “I just could not live beside them,” she wasn’t talking about income brackets. She wasn’t evaluating credit scores. She was talking about Blackness itself. The disqualification was ontological — it was about being, not about having. You could have the job, the education, the military service, the down payment. You could check every single box. And they still didn’t believe you was worthy enough.

That’s ideology. That’s not a policy failure. That’s a belief system operating exactly as intended. And we need to be precise about that distinction because it changes everything about how we understand the present.

The Wealth Transfer You’re Not Supposed to Trace

Now here’s where the thinking deeply about shallow stuff comes in. The suburbs of today were created back then, in the 1950s and 1960s. Every cul-de-sac, every homeowners association, every property tax-funded school district — those structures trace back to this moment. And the wealth that was generated through homeownership in those communities? That wealth didn’t just sit still. It compounded. It transferred. It moved from generation to generation to generation.

The GI Bill — one of the most celebrated pieces of social legislation in American history — was administered in a way that systematically excluded Black veterans from its full benefits. White veterans got low-interest home loans, bought homes in places like Levittown, built equity, passed that equity to their children, who used it to fund college educations, start businesses, and buy their own homes. Black veterans were denied those same loans, steered into redlined neighborhoods where property values were suppressed, and locked out of the single greatest wealth-building mechanism in twentieth-century America.

The Federal Housing Administration didn’t just allow this. The FHA’s own underwriting manual explicitly warned against “inharmonious racial groups” and instructed appraisers to lower property values in neighborhoods with Black residents. The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew maps — literal maps — color-coding neighborhoods by perceived risk, and the “riskiest” designation, marked in red, correlated almost perfectly with where Black people lived. That’s where the term “redlining” comes from.

So when somebody tells you “that was a long time ago,” ask them to do the math. My grandmother was born in the 1950s. Her mother was born in the 1930s. We’re not talking about ancient history. We’re talking about the people who raised the people who run the system right now. Two generations. That’s it.

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

Ideology Outlasts Policy

This is the part I need y’all to really sit with. When we talk about white flight, gentrification, or redlining, it’s crucial to acknowledge that it wasn’t just policy — it was ideology. Policies can be repealed. Laws can be rewritten. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 technically made housing discrimination illegal. But ideology? Ideology lives in the culture. It lives in school funding formulas tied to property taxes. It lives in zoning laws that mandate single-family homes to keep density — and by extension, certain populations — out. It lives in HOA covenants and real estate steering and the algorithmic bias baked into modern mortgage lending.

The woman in that Levittown clip didn’t need a policy to tell her to exclude Black people. She had an ideology. And that ideology didn’t die with the Civil Rights Act. It adapted. It learned new language. It stopped saying “I just could not live beside them” out loud and started saying “I just want to live in a good school district.” It stopped saying “this is a white community” and started saying “this is a safe neighborhood.” The function is identical. The vocabulary evolved.

Research from scholars like Richard Rothstein, whose work The Color of Law meticulously documents how government policy created and enforced residential segregation, confirms what Black communities have always known: this was deliberate, this was systematic, and this was bipartisan. Rothstein demonstrates that residential segregation in America was not the result of private choices or market forces. It was engineered by federal, state, and local governments through explicit racial policy. And the effects compound daily.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s Race for Profit extends this analysis into the post-civil rights era, documenting how the very policies designed to expand Black homeownership in the 1960s and 1970s were captured by predatory lenders and real estate speculators who extracted wealth from Black communities while the government looked the other way. The exploitation didn’t end with the Fair Housing Act. It shape-shifted.

The Throughline to Now

Today, the Black-white homeownership gap is larger than it was in 1960. Read that again. After the Civil Rights Movement, after the Fair Housing Act, after decades of supposed progress, Black homeownership rates have actually declined relative to white homeownership rates. According to the National Association of Realtors, the Black homeownership rate sat at approximately 44 percent as of recent data, compared to roughly 73 percent for white households. The gap is nearly 30 percentage points. That’s not an accident. That’s a system performing exactly as it was designed.

And the wealth implications are staggering. The median white family holds roughly eight times the wealth of the median Black family. Homeownership is the primary vehicle for wealth accumulation in this country, and Black Americans were systematically locked out of it at the exact moment when it mattered most — when the suburbs were being built, when equity was compounding, when generational transfers were being set in motion.

So when people say “just work harder,” when they say “pull yourself up,” when they say “it’s about class not race” — they’re either ignorant of this history or they’re invested in you not knowing it. Either way, the function is the same: it protects the status quo by making structural inequality look like individual failure.

The Sound of the Modern Moderate

Let me bring it back to that woman one more time. “I don’t feel that they should be oppressed. But I moved here because it was a white community.” That sentence structure — the acknowledgment followed by the but — is the grammar of American racial liberalism. It’s the syntax of complicity dressed up as compassion.

You hear it today in every debate about affordable housing. You hear it in the resistance to zoning reform. You hear it when parents fight against school integration proposals. You hear it when neighborhoods organize against public transit expansions that would connect lower-income communities to suburban job centers. “I’m not racist, but...” “I support equality, but...” “I believe in diversity, but not in my backyard.”

That woman in 1957 is not a relic. She is a prototype. And until we confront the ideology — not just the policy, but the belief system that animated the policy in the first place — we will keep reproducing the same outcomes in new packaging.

Consider Becoming A Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

Every paid subscription directly funds the research, production, and distribution of work like this article — work that traces the ideological roots of segregation from Levittown to your zip code. If this history matters to you, if you believe education is elevation, become a paid subscriber today. This is how we build the infrastructure for the truth.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Levittown was a prototype, not an anomaly. The exclusionary model that Levitt built — affordable homes for white families, contractual exclusion of Black families — became the template for suburban development across the country. Understanding Levittown means understanding the ideological DNA of American suburbia itself.

* The “class not race” argument collapses under historical scrutiny. The Myers family met every economic standard for homeownership in Levittown and were still met with mob violence. Residential segregation was never fundamentally about income — it was about an ideology that defined Black presence as inherently incompatible with white prosperity.

* Ideology outlasts and outpaces policy reform. The Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal in 1968, but the belief systems that animated segregation adapted into zoning laws, school funding formulas, real estate steering, and algorithmic lending bias. Repealing a law doesn’t dismantle a worldview.

* Generational wealth is generational policy. The wealth gap between Black and white families is not the product of individual choices — it’s the compound interest on decades of federally subsidized white homeownership and federally enforced Black exclusion. Two generations separate us from legal segregation. The math doesn’t lie.

* The moderate voice is the most dangerous voice. The Levittown woman who said “I don’t think they should be oppressed, but I can’t live by them” is the archetype for contemporary racial liberalism — the person who supports equality in theory while actively maintaining exclusion in practice. Confronting this pattern is essential to any honest reckoning with American inequality.

BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

* Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017.

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

* Katznelson, Ira. When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America. W.W. Norton, 2005.

* Kushner, David. Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights. Walker & Company, 2009.

* Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism. Princeton University Press, 2005.

* Anderson, Carol. White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury, 2016.

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

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

Nick Cannon sat in that car and pointed to individual pardons as evidence that Trump is “good for Black people.” He pardoned one woman and made her a “pardon czar.” And that’s the whole case? That spoke volumes about his politics, because it showed that if Trump can save individual Black folks—even at the expense of harming the collective—he’s good with you. If your pocket’s good and your family’s good, never mind all the Black families being terrorized, losing their jobs, losing access to schools.

But see, the numbers tell a different story. Black women lost over 300,000 jobs between February and July of 2025. Three hundred thousand. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black women’s unemployment rate hit 7.3% by the end of 2025—the highest in four years. That’s equivalent to the unemployment rate white women experienced during the bleakest moments of the Great Recession. Let me say that again for the people in the back: the labor market that Black women are living in right now is what white women would consider the worst economic conditions they’ve ever experienced.

And it wasn’t accidental. Black women were disproportionately concentrated in federal jobs—healthcare, education, housing, veterans affairs—the exact sectors this administration gutted. When DOGE came through slashing and Trump started executing those executive orders to dismantle DEI, Black women were the first ones pushed out the door. White women gained 142,000 jobs during the same period. White men gained 365,000. Black women lost 300,000. And you want to sit in a car and tell me he’s “cleaning house”?

Yeah, he’s cleaning house. He’s cleaning us out of it.

The Democratic Plantation Talking Point Is Tired. And You Know It.

Black Free Thinkers like Nick Cannon say, “People don’t know that the Democrats are the party of the KKK.” You feel real smart saying that, don’t you? Here’s what I need you to understand: you can criticize the Democratic plantation without sensationalizing the Republican one. Critiquing liberalism is valid. Democratic policies deserve scrutiny. But you do not have to glaze or push Republican propaganda to do that. And the moment you start reciting Dixiecrat history like you just discovered a cheat code, you tell on yourself.

Because here’s my question: if you go to a rally today—right now, in 2026—where are you most likely to see a Klan flag? The Democratic rally or the Republican one? You already know the answer. So why are we playing this game?

Trump was endorsed by the KKK in 2016. In 2020. In 2024. What does that say about his politics and how he deploys them? He called the Confederate flag a “proud symbol of the U.S. South.” As somebody who is also proud of being a Southerner, I ain’t never had a Confederate flag around me. Not once. Not ever.

And my question to you, Nick Cannon: how in the hell did you go from being a pan-Africanist to aligning yourself with Confederate-flag-toting, white-supremacist-sympathizing politicians? How did Amber Rose go from building political capital with Black women through the SlutWalk—talking about reproductive justice, reproductive freedom—to being a reformed Republican whose logic sounds like that of a white patriarch? You were one of the ones pushing for bodily autonomy. Now you’re supporting a man who is systematically stripping away every mechanism Black women have to say they have rights over their own bodies. And you ain’t said nothing about the Epstein files. Not a word. In that whole car ride. You telling on yourself.

The DEI Receipts Don’t Lie

They love saying DEI stands for “Didn’t Earn It.” That everybody in these positions is a product of diversity handouts. But the numbers show that white women were the ones who benefited the most from DEI. That’s documented. That’s researched. That’s not debatable. So the real question becomes: who lost the most when Trump dismantled DEI?

Black women.

Federal DEI funding cuts threatened the work of the few remaining Black farmers in East Texas. My state. Where I’m from. Black farmers who were already fighting for survival now watching their resources evaporate in the name of white Christian nationalism. And you’re aligning yourself with the people doing this?

Nick, I know you love the women from the Caribbean islands. The Dominicans, the Cubans, all of that. How do you feel about those communities right now being terrorized by mass deportation policies? How do you reconcile that with “he’s so good for Black people”?

You can’t. Because you’re not thinking about it. You’re thinking deeply about shallow s**t.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” and What It Actually Does

Trump was bragging about that “big, beautiful bill.” He was really bragging about it too. But let’s read it together, shall we? That bill left Black communities more vulnerable to predatory lending. His job policies may deepen workplace inequality. His housing policies failed to narrow the racial homeownership gap. He’s criminalizing Black history.

Let me pause there. He is criminalizing Black history. The histories I teach, the frameworks I document, the cultural knowledge I preserve—this administration is actively working to erase and distort all of it. And you want to talk about how he was at Russell Simmons’ parties in the 90s?

Speaking of which—you brought up Russell Simmons like it was a flex. My brother, I don’t know if you noticed, but Russell Simmons wasn’t exactly cleared in the Epstein files. That was not the gotcha you thought it was. What it showed is that a lot of the creepy predators stick together regardless of race. They want the rhythm, but they damn sure don’t want the blues.

The Great Malcolm X Already Told Us

Malcolm X said white folks don’t pick the entertainers, the trumpet players, the comedians to be the leaders in their community. And what that car ride showed is that all of those entertainers Trump was rubbing elbows with back in the 90s—they probably had the same politics he did. And I imagine they are all closet Trump supporters. I imagine. Because when you already align yourself with these folks on an ideological level—with their values, with their morals—you trying to sensationalize your skin color don’t mean s**t. You feel me?

It was a whole bunch of enslaved folks who also aligned themselves with the people that ran the plantation from an ideological and values level. “They make me feel at home. They don’t even trip. They like family.” It’s game. Yeah, we see you.

The comfort you feel in those spaces isn’t because they’re not looking at you like you’re Black. It’s because they need you to not look at yourself like you’re Black. That’s the trade. That’s the transaction. You get access, proximity, a seat at the table—and in exchange, you cosign the violence being done to your own people. You become the illustration. The prop. The proof they point to when someone calls them racist: “But look, Nick Cannon f***s with us.”

And when the music stops? When the political winds shift? When they don’t need your endorsement anymore? You don’t inherit the plantation. You never did.

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

Dismantling Public Education Is the Endgame

Since he’s been in office, this man has been working to dismantle public education. Multiple reports documented four administration actions to watch. And do you know how disproportionately Black people are impacted when this happens? Public schools are the backbone of Black communities. They are where our children learn. They are where our teachers work. They are where our histories—however incomplete—are at least partially preserved. And he is tearing it apart.

This is personal to me. As an educator, this is not abstract policy. This is the ground I stand on. And every time somebody like Nick Cannon goes on a platform with millions of viewers and says “I f**k with Trump” without a single piece of policy analysis to back it up, it makes the work of educators harder. It gives cover to the people dismantling the very institutions that keep us informed, employed, and connected to our own histories.

The Logic of the Car Ride Is the Logic of the Plantation

Let me bring this home.

The entire car ride was nothing but propaganda. Y’all been around these folks, probably drinking champagne and bumping tea crumpets or whatever the hell, and now you think proximity to power is the same as power itself. It’s not. It never was.

When you cherry-pick examples—a pardon here, a party appearance there—and use them to justify a presidency that has measurably and statistically devastated Black communities, you are not being a free thinker. You are not being independent. You are being a tool. Some would even argue a fool and tools get used up.

The data is clear. The policies are public. The harm is measurable. And no amount of car rides, no amount of “he was on Fresh Prince,” no amount of “he had Black girlfriends” changes what the receipts say.

As somebody who did competitive policy debate, who has built a career on research over me-searching, who believes that education is elevation—I need you to understand that this is not about feelings. This is about what we can prove. And what we can prove is that this man’s policies have devastated Black women in the workforce, gutted Black farmers’ funding, weaponized the dismantling of DEI against the very people it was supposed to protect, criminalized Black history, and accelerated the privatization of public institutions that serve as lifelines for Black communities.

Facts over feelings. Receipts over rhetoric. And if you can’t provide them, get out. Somebody got the lights?

5 Key Takeaways

1. Loving Black culture and harming Black people are not contradictory—they are the architecture of American racism. Trump attending Black parties, dating Black women, and appearing on Black TV shows in the 90s does not inoculate him from the charge of racist governance. Racism has always functioned by commodifying Blackness while subordinating Black people. The rhythm and the blues are not the same thing.

2. Black women are bearing the measurable, statistical brunt of Trump’s policies. Over 300,000 Black women lost their jobs in the first half of 2025. Their unemployment rate reached 7.3%—the highest in four years and equivalent to what white women experienced during the worst of the Great Recession. The dismantling of DEI, federal workforce cuts, and DOGE restructuring have disproportionately targeted Black women while white men gained 365,000 jobs in the same period.

3. The “Democrats started the KKK” talking point is historically incomplete and politically dishonest. Yes, Reconstruction-era Democrats had ties to the Klan. But the Southern Strategy, the Dixiecrat exodus, and the party realignment of the 1960s are documented history. The question is not who started the Klan in 1865—it’s who the Klan endorses in 2024. That answer has never been ambiguous.

4. Individual beneficiaries do not erase collective harm. Pointing to one pardon or one appointment as evidence that a president is “good for Black people” while ignoring mass job losses, gutted education funding, predatory lending policies, and the criminalization of Black history is the logic of someone whose pocket is prioritized over their people.

5. Celebrity endorsements of political figures without policy analysis are propaganda. Nick Cannon and Amber Rose have platforms with millions of viewers. When they deploy those platforms to cosign a political agenda without a single policy receipt, they function as instruments of the very machine that is harming Black communities. Malcolm X warned us about entertainers being positioned as leaders. We should have listened harder.

A Direct Ask: Become a Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If this article gave you something—if it gave you language, data, framework, fire—I’m asking you directly: become a paid subscriber today. This is how we build independent Black media that doesn’t answer to advertisers, algorithms, or billionaires. This is how we keep the lights on.

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

Wilson, Valerie. “Black Women Suffered Large Employment Losses in 2025—Particularly Among College Graduates and Public-Sector Workers.” Economic Policy Institute, 2026.

Taylor-McGhee, Belle. “Trump-Era Federal Layoffs Hit Black Women Hardest.” Ms. Magazine, February 5, 2026.

Walker, Ezekiel J. and Nehemiah Frank. “Black Women Face Record Job Layoffs Under Trump.” The Black Wall Street Times, September 8, 2025.

Covert, Bryce. “To Be Black, Female, and Unemployed.” The American Prospect, December 2025.

Sowers, Chabeli and Claire Lampen. “Black Women’s Unemployment Has Skyrocketed. Here’s What Happened.” The 19th, January 27, 2026.

X, Malcolm. “Message to the Grassroots.” Speech, Detroit, MI, November 10, 1963.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “I Won’t Vote.” The Nation, October 20, 1956.

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Maxwell, Angie and Todd Shields. The Long Southern Strategy: How Chasing White Voters in the South Changed American Politics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010’

Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

Thank you Under the Golden Boot, Tamibetcha, Lee, Francisca Michel, The Depths of Justice, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

My co-host, Toya G, and I spent hours unpacking what this means: for the stalled movement for reparations in America, for the complex infighting among Black diasporic communities, and for the very real, documented playbook (Project 2025) that the current administration is using to privatize our government and police our bodies. We laughed, we raged, and we connected dots that the mainstream media refuses to touch. Political Plug aka Domo was out with a sinus infection.

Here’s what I need you to understand.

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

1. The Resolution Is a Mirror, and the West Is Looking Away

The UN resolution is powerful, but it’s also the UN General Assembly is essentially a “global town hall.” It has no army, no police force, and no real enforcement mechanism. Its resolutions are recommendations—the world’s opinion, written down and recorded.

The nations most responsible for the slave trade—the ones who built their industrial revolutions, their empires, and their modern wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans—are the very nations holding the keys to any international action. They abstained, pleading the fifth. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy—they all abstained.

This is where we have to be intellectually honest. Portugal, the nation responsible for trafficking more Africans across the Atlantic than any other European country, abstained. Belgium, whose King Leopold later perpetrated a genocide in the Congo that was paved by the slave trade’s infrastructure, abstained. Their abstention isn’t neutrality. It’s a refusal to be on the record for something they know, deep down, they will never be able to fully repay.

2. The “Oppression Olympics” Argument Is a Smokescreen for Debt

When the vote came down, the predictable conservative retort emerged: “Why is this the gravest crime against humanity? What about the Holocaust? What about other historical atrocities?” This is a debate tactic, not a genuine inquiry.

As Toya G pointed out, this argument is a way to avoid accountability. They love to run to “whataboutism” because it creates a hierarchy of pain that they can then claim is “divisive.” But the historical weight is not the same. When you look up “blackface,” you find a history of racial caricature and violence used to dehumanize an entire race to justify their enslavement. When you look up “whiteface,” you find clowns.

This is the foundation of the “Oppression Olympics” argument—it’s a tool used by those who benefit from the status quo to avoid paying their debt. The U.S. even argued that we can’t “retrospectively apply international laws” to slavery. The message is clear: “We’ll acknowledge it, but we won’t pay for it.”

3. Who Gets Reparations? The FBA Conversation Exposes a Deeper Dilemma

The UN resolution’s focus on the entire Transatlantic Slave Trade—and thus the entire Black diaspora—forces a conversation that Foundational Black Americans (FBA) have been having for years: who is “black enough” to get paid?

I’m not one to sit on the sidelines and dismiss the FBA conversation outright. I get it. The point they make about lineage, about the fact that their ancestors were here building this country for centuries while other immigrant groups arrived later and benefited from that struggle, is a valid historical point. But my issue has always been the political bedfellows they sometimes keep—the celebration of mass deportation, the alignment with white nationalist aesthetics.

Toya G helped me articulate the central tension: the police don’t care if you’re FBA or Caribbean. If you’re Black, you’re a target. The violence is anti-Black, not just “descendants of American slaves” anti-Black. So, while the initial reparations focus should be on those with generational lineage from the chattel slavery era, the larger framework of anti-Blackness makes this conversation infinitely more complex.

Max, our producer, dropped the widely cited benchmark from William Darity Jr. and A. Kristen Mullen: $10 trillion to $12 trillion to eliminate the Black-white wealth gap. That’s a starting point. But the how and the who will be the fight of our lives.

4. Mark Wayne Mullin, Project 2025, and the Privatization of the State

As we discussed, the appointment of Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullin—a man with no security experience who has publicly bragged about beating his child—to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not an accident. It is a feature of the system they are building.

This isn’t about incompetence; it’s about loyalty. It’s about putting people in place who will follow the playbook. And the playbook is Project 2025. We pulled it up on the stream. I typed in “TSA” (which DHS oversees) and found it mentioned 26 times. The plan is to starve the agency, cause chaos, and then privatize it.

When you privatize a state function like airport security, you don’t just hand it to corporations. You create a cloak of anonymity. The government is no longer directly accountable for the violence, the harassment, and the abuse that will inevitably follow. It’s the same logic that allowed the “Gestapo” tactics of the early Trump administration to flourish.

5. Seeing Black ICE Agents: The Ultimate Betrayal

Perhaps the most frustrating part of our conversation was seeing the images of Black ICE agents on social media. The discourse that followed—”If you don’t want Black ICE agents, why do you defend gang culture?”—is a false binary designed to make us accept our own oppression.

I was being facetious when I asked Toya G, “Why not have Black overseers on the plantation?” But the logic is the same. The desire for “representation” in institutions built on anti-Blackness is a trap. It’s identity politics commodified by the state. You don’t need Black people in the room if the room is designed to destroy Black people. It’s not representation; it’s participation in your own subjugation.

As Toya G said, if you have to choose between being a slave catcher and selling drugs, those aren’t your only two options. The fact that people defend the choice to become a state agent of violence as “hustling” shows how deeply neoliberalism has consumed our identity.

Explicit Ask to Become a Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education and media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you found value in this breakdown—the UN resolution, the FBA debate, the Project 2025 analysis—please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Your support allows me to do the deep research, produce these articles, and keep the conversations going that you won’t find anywhere else. Click the button below to join the community.

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

5 Key Takeaways

* The UN Resolution is Symbolic, But Important: The declaration of the slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” is a major moral statement, even if it lacks enforcement power. It creates a historical record that future generations can use to demand justice.

* The “No” Votes Are a Warning: The U.S., Israel, and Argentina voting no isn’t an anomaly. It signals a global realignment of states that are comfortable with white supremacy and the erasure of Black historical trauma.

* Reparations is a Global Diaspora Question: The FBA conversation about lineage is valid, but the reality of anti-Blackness means any reparative justice framework must grapple with the interconnectedness of the entire Black diaspora.

* Privatization is the Path to Fascism: Project 2025 is the blueprint. From TSA to USPS, the goal is to privatize public goods, stripping them of accountability and turning them into profit centers that can be weaponized against marginalized communities.

* Representation is Not Liberation: Seeing Black faces in oppressive institutions like ICE is not progress. It is a deliberate strategy to give these institutions a veneer of legitimacy while they continue to carry out the state’s anti-Black agenda.

Related Readings (Bibliography)

* The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times Magazine): For a foundational understanding of slavery’s centrality to American capitalism and democracy.

* From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen: The definitive text on the moral and economic case for reparations, including the $10-12 trillion benchmark.

* “Project 2025” Presidential Transition Project (The Heritage Foundation): The primary source document outlining the conservative agenda for the next administration. A must-read for understanding the policy goals.

* The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Explores how the construction of Black criminality was essential to the formation of modern policing and state violence.

* “The United Nations General Assembly Resolution on the Transatlantic Slave Trade” (March 24, 2026): The full text of the resolution itself, detailing the 123-3-54 vote and the official language of the declaration.

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

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

On March 24, 2026, the United Nations passed a historic resolution. With 123 countries in favor, it officially declared the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.

It should have been a moment of global consensus, a long-overdue acknowledgment of a 400-year nightmare that birthed modern capitalism, funded the Industrial Revolution, and built empires. On the surface, it looks like an easy decision to make. Some would even say a finger roll.

But 52 countries abstained. And three—the United States, Israel, and Argentina—voted “hell no.”

When you start to see the pathology and the ratio at work, you start to see the truth: Certain groups get to decide which history counts and which history gets erased. And it is always people of European descent who get to decide which history is and which history ain’t.

Let’s unpack what they’re actually denying.

What Makes It the “Gravest Crime”?

Before we get into the specificity of the vote, we have to sit with the claim itself. Some of y’all might not know what that actually means.

The transatlantic slave trade lasted for 400 years. An estimated 12 to 15 million Africans were forcibly taken, kidnapped, chained, and shipped across the ocean. But the scale of the violence is only part of the story.

This was the first time in human history that an entire system—of law, economics, and theology—was built on the complete dehumanization of a people. The world bought into the idea that a human being got on the boat as an African with a culture, a language, and a land, and got off the boat as a slave, as property, as a commodity.

It was the first time we saw that your state of being property was inherited. It was passed down to your kids and your kids’ kids. It was the codification of chattel slavery: the idea of a human being as perpetual property, as three-fifths of a person.

That’s the reason why it’s one of the gravest crimes against humanity. It’s not just about violence; it’s about the idea. And that system didn’t end in 1865. It transformed. It was remixed and reshaped into sharecropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs.

There is no American economy, no global empire, without King Cotton, without the free labor extracted on the backs of my ancestors. That’s the reason why this resolution matters. It’s about accountability, recognition, and responsibility. It’s about closing a wound that never really even healed.

The United Nations: A Body of Words, Not Teeth

To understand the full weight—and the frustrating limits—of this resolution, we have to understand the institution that passed it. The United Nations was founded in 1945 in the ashes of World War II, with the lofty goal of preventing future global conflicts and promoting human rights. Its charter speaks of “fundamental human rights,” “the dignity and worth of the human person,” and “equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”

But here’s the thing about the United Nations that nobody wants to admit out loud: the UN is not a world government. It has no army. It has no police force. It has no real enforcement mechanism.

The UN General Assembly, where this resolution passed, is essentially a global town hall. Every member state gets a vote, but those votes carry no binding legal weight. Resolutions passed by the General Assembly are recommendations, not commands. They are the world’s opinion, written down and recorded for history.

The only body within the UN that can issue binding resolutions is the Security Council, and that body is structured to protect the very powers that built their wealth on the slave trade. Five countries—the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—hold permanent seats with veto power. Any one of them can kill any resolution that threatens their interests.

This structural reality creates a cruel irony: the nations most responsible for the transatlantic slave trade hold the keys to any binding international action on it.

So when we talk about this resolution, we have to be clear about what it is and what it is not. It is a symbolic victory. It is a moral statement. It is the collective conscience of the majority of the world’s nations saying, This crime was the worst of the worst.

But it is not a court ruling. It does not compel the United States to write a check. It does not create a tribunal. It does not force Argentina to open its archives or Israel to issue an apology.

And the powerful nations know this. That’s precisely why they felt comfortable voting no. Their opposition was not fear of legal consequences—there are none. Their opposition was about message. It was about refusing to validate the moral authority of the Global South to define history. It was about maintaining the power to decide which crimes matter and which crimes are swept under the rug.

As my grandmother used to say: They pissing on our legs and telling us it’s raining. They give us a symbolic win while ensuring the substance remains out of reach.

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

The Vote: Why the U.S. Said No

The resolution came from Caribbean and African nations—nations who understand that you cannot close a wound you refuse to name. For them, this was never just about symbolism. It was about laying the groundwork for a future where accountability is possible.

But the United States pushed back. Their reasoning?

They said they do not recognize the legal right to reparations for historical wrongs because slavery was “not illegal under international law at the time.”

Their argument, in essence: We can acknowledge slavery was bad now, but we shouldn’t have to pay for it because back then, it wasn’t seen as bad.

They said, “This ain’t Jordan. We ain’t into that retro or retroactivity.”

This is the pathology. The law is always flexible when it needs to be. The U.S. has no problem applying today’s laws retroactively to maintain military power, to justify drone strikes, to maintain global order. But when it comes to the foundational crime that built their wealth? Suddenly, they are strict constitutionalists, clinging to a statute of limitations for a crime that is still actively shaping the present.

They oppose reparations. They want us to “get over it.” But you can’t get over something that is still happening.

The Complexity of Argentina and Israel

When we look at the other two “no” votes, the layers get thicker.

Argentina was a major hub of the contraband slave trade in the 17th century. They have a complex history as both a slave society and an early abolitionist nation (abolishing slavery in 1853). But there is also the Zwi Migdal—a criminal organization that operated in Buenos Aires from the 1860s to the 1930s, where Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe trafficked thousands of Jewish women into sexual slavery. It’s a dark, silent chapter in both Argentine and Jewish history.

Israel, like Argentina, has a history of being both victim and perpetrator. When you have a country that is currently engaged in practices that obviously genocide mixed with apartheid its a conflict of interest and you don’t want to open a door that might swing back on you.

When you see these two countries vote no alongside the United States, you have to ask yourself: What are they really saying no to?

They aren’t just denying history. They are protecting themselves from accountability. They don’t want to establish a precedent where nations must answer for historical crimes, because they know the spotlight might turn to the crimes they are committing right now—unapologetically.

The Symbolic Win and the Hard Truth

So where does that leave us?

Let’s be honest with each other. This resolution is a win, but it is a symbolic win. And in the fight for justice, symbols matter. They matter because they shape the narrative. They matter because they become the foundation upon which future legal frameworks are built. They matter because they tell the descendants of the enslaved that the world sees their pain.

But we cannot mistake symbolism for substance.

The UN has passed countless resolutions over its 80-year history. It has condemned apartheid. It has condemned genocide. It has condemned occupation. And yet, apartheid in Palestine continues. Genocides continue. Occupations continue. The powerful nations that vote against these resolutions do so with the comfortable knowledge that no UN peacekeeper is going to show up at their doorstep to enforce compliance.

The United States alone has vetoed dozens of Security Council resolutions critical of its allies or itself. It has ignored International Court of Justice rulings. It has withdrawn from UN bodies when they became inconvenient. The language of international law is powerful, but it is only as powerful as the political will behind it.

So when we celebrate this resolution—and we should celebrate it—we must also ask ourselves: What comes next?

The Caribbean and African nations who pushed this through know the answer. They are not naive. They understand the limitations of the UN. But they also understand that you cannot build a house without a foundation. This resolution is the foundation. It is the official record. It is the admission, on paper, that 123 nations agree: the transatlantic slave trade was the gravest crime against humanity.

Now the work is to build on that foundation. To push for a permanent UN memorial. To push for a commission on reparative justice. To push for educational curricula that teach this history in full. To push for local and national governments to act where the international body cannot.

The Unbroken Chain

To the people in the back: the logic of the Black body being seen as property didn’t stop in 1865.

After the plantation came sharecropping. After sharecropping came convict leasing. After convict leasing came Jim Crow. After Jim Crow came the war on drugs and mass incarceration.

The U.S. says we can’t apply today’s laws retroactively, but they have no problem applying today’s laws to maintain the global order that was built on that very crime. They have no problem applying today’s laws to justify the continued extraction of wealth from Black bodies, whether through the prison-industrial complex, predatory lending, or the systematic underfunding of Black schools.

This is why the Caribbean and African nations pushed this resolution. Because we cannot close a wound that we can’t even name. And we cannot heal a wound that the people who inflicted it refuse to recognize even exists.

The UN gave us the name. Now it is up to us to demand the healing.

Education is elevation.

5 Key Takeaways

* Historical Recognition is a Prerequisite for Justice: The UN resolution names the transatlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity.” For nations that built their wealth on this system, refusing to acknowledge the title is a refusal to acknowledge the debt.

* The UN Has No Enforcement Mechanism: The General Assembly resolution is a powerful symbolic and moral statement, but it carries no binding legal weight. The Security Council, where permanent members hold veto power, remains the only body that can compel action—and it is controlled by the very nations that benefited from the slave trade.

* The U.S. Opposition is Based on a Flawed Legal Argument: The U.S. claims reparations are invalid because slavery was “legal” at the time. This ignores the fact that international law is a flexible tool used to justify military action and global order when it suits the empire.

* The “No” Votes Reveal Hypocrisy and Fear: Israel and Argentina voted no likely because acknowledging the precedent of accountability for historical crimes could open the door to scrutiny of their own historical and contemporary human rights abuses.

* Naming the Wound is Necessary for Healing: Caribbean and African nations pushed this resolution because you cannot close a wound you refuse to name. Global acknowledgment is the first step toward any meaningful form of repair, even if the path to enforcement remains obstructed.

Explicit Ask to Become a Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education and corporate media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted.

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise.

But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you found value in this breakdown—if you understand why naming the crime is the first step to justice—please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It allows me to continue doing the research, the writing, and the teaching that the mainstream refuses to do.

Click the button below to upgrade. Let’s build this together.

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)

* The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones

* The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

* Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi

* The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

* A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by Mary Ann Glendon

* The Zwi Migdal: A Story of Jewish Traffickers in Buenos Aires by Nora Glickman (Academic Articles)

* The United Nations and Transnational Advocacy Networks by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink

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

Thank you Lynette, Pamela R. Daniels, Carol Phipps, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I posted a video this week. It was a simple flex, really—highlighting some of my college policy debate accolades. My partner and I were the first two Black people to go undefeated at the NDT exhibition rounds. We were ranked in the top 20 in the country. It was a celebration of Black excellence in a space we were told we didn’t belong.

And like clockwork, it brought out the roaches.

The lights came on, and the insecure white men scattered, desperate to prove themselves. Not to me, but to themselves. They had to conquer, to dominate, to engage. This isn’t an accident. It’s a pattern. It is what I call white men and intellectual pathology.

This pathology isn’t just about being rude on the internet. It’s a structural logic. It’s the same logic that has criminalized Black thought since the moment this country was founded. When Black people learned to read, the plantation trembled. When we produce knowledge, when we refuse to be dictated to, those in power see a threat that must be neutralized. From Reagan to Trump to Wilson, the fear is the same: a Black man who can say what he means and mean what he says.

This is my mini-lecture, my case study. We’re going to look at a man named Cam Higby—a perfect illustration of this pathology—and use him as a jumping-off point to talk about settler colonialism, the manufactured consent for genocide, and the delusion that white men have been conditioned to call “rationality.”

We have a world structured around the comfort and development of mediocre white men. They make up 30% of the country but dominate every industry and level of government. When they see a Black man articulate, they feel insecure. And because the world has conditioned them to be entitled little pricks, they feel they have the right to challenge, to conquer, and to define the terms of reality.

Let’s get into it.

The Case Study: Cam Higby and the Settler’s Move to Innocence

I posted my accolades. I talked about being a top speaker. In response, we see these rage-baiters, these white men who manufacture Black folks being pissed off to farm engagement. But the real pathology is in the content of their arguments.

I came across one of Higby’s old videos, a “response” to a point I made about Israel-Palestine. And it’s a masterclass in how this logic works.

He starts by manipulating time, using a concept created in the 1800s (Zionism) to justify a retelling of history back to Roman times. He argues about the “legitimacy” of laws, claiming that under the Ottoman Empire, there was “no distinct Palestinian people.” He says they were just a sector of a larger empire, like the “Rocky Mountain region in America.”

This is the settler’s move to innocence. It’s a narrative framework described by scholars Tuck and Yang. It’s the attempt by settlers and their descendants to erase the violence of their existence by claiming the land was empty, lawless, or ungoverned. It’s the same logic used against Indigenous peoples here: “They didn’t have a legal system; they were savages; so we aren’t breaking any laws by taking it.”

He says there was no Palestinian state, so it was just a region. But this argument falls apart when you look at history. He conveniently forgets that the British government lied to the Palestinians during World War I, promising them sovereignty if they fought against the Ottomans. So either A) his claim that there was no legal framework is b******t, or B) it never actually mattered because the colonizer can change the rules whenever it suits them.

This is the hypocrisy. It’s the intellectual pathology that allows for the creation of a state like Israel—an ethno-religious state founded on the principle of a “right to exist”—while ignoring that the people living there (Palestinians) had their rights erased from the start.

And let’s be clear: Zionism is the Middle East version of Manifest Destiny. God always comes down and tells people of European descent it’s their right to own some land. But when a Black or Indigenous person says God gave them their land, suddenly God’s will is overridden by a “closer claim.”

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

The Material Reality vs. The Idealistic Democracy

Right now, we are fighting a war with Iran. We are sending American tax dollars—your cousin, your nephew, your brother—to die in the name of protecting Israel’s political and economic interests. They just raised the recruitment age to 42 and said they don’t care about marijuana convictions anymore. But it wasn’t too long ago that those same convictions were used to deny Black people resources and opportunities.

This is the interconvergence theory at work. It ain’t good for Black folks unless it’s good for white folks first.

And this brings me to the biggest lie we’re fed: Democracy.

We are told democracy is the highest form of government, the protector of humanity. We look at the idealism of it—the vote, the rights, the utopia—while ignoring the material reality.

From its inception in Athens, democracy was built on the subjugation of women and the exclusion of slaves. It was never about “everybody.” And today, when we go into Iraq or Iran or Nicaragua to “spread democracy,” we leave behind destruction, fire, and bodies paid for by our tax dollars. The visual is the same in Baghdad in 2003 and Tehran in 2026: U.S. bombs.

Everything Black people have gained in this country—the right to vote, to sit on a bus, to take a s**t next to white folks—we gained in spite of democracy, not because of it. We had to fight for it, bleed for it, die for it. The “unalienable rights” weren’t alienable to us until we forced the issue.

So when I hear “protecting democracy,” I have to ask: protecting what? Protecting the system that gave us Trump? A man who broke the law more times than I can count, who installed unqualified loyalists (Jared Kushner, Linda McMahon) in positions of power while telling us that Black people are the unqualified ones?

Donald Trump is not an aberration. Trump is a product of democracy. He used the tools of democracy to amass wealth, power, and legitimacy. And the “checks and balances” we were taught would save us? They aren’t stopping him from being tyrannical.

This is white intellectual pathology. It is the ability to permute logic one way for yourself and a different way for everyone else. It is the delusion that your emotion—your fear, your rage—is a rational reason to mobilize the military, while everyone else’s emotion is just “being emotional.”

Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.

A Rhetorical Question That Exposes Everything

I want to end this with a clip that says everything I’m trying to say. It’s from Matthew Cook, a white man who flipped the script so perfectly, I had to give him his props.

He asked the question we’ve all been trained to ask: “Does Israel have a right to exist?”

His answer? “No, of course not. People have rights. The concept of a state’s right to exist is a little rhetorical trick designed to make the rights of certain people disappear.”

He breaks it down. Nationalism is a brand-new religion, invented less than 250 years ago. It’s a story—an imaginary group identity based on a cartoonish version of history—used to control populations. It glorifies conquerors as saints, turns political texts into holy scrolls, and real estate into holy land.

It’s a tool to deny universal human rights.

Albert Einstein called it a disease. Hannah Arendt said the expansion of European power into non-European territory was the beginning of totalitarianism. They all saw it.

And here we are in 2026, in the third apex of nationalism in less than 100 years, living under oppressive regimes, with record-breaking inequality, watching people reshape their personalities to reflect their cult leaders.

They are lost in the sauce. They believe they are defending democracy by destroying it. They believe they are fighting for God while ignoring the atheist who started Zionism. They believe they are qualified because of their skin, while calling us unqualified for the positions we earned.

This is the intellectual pathology we have to name, define, and dismantle. Because once you can name the phenomenon, you can navigate it. You can see it for what it is: a delusion being inscribed on the world through violence.

And we, as Black thinkers, as producers of knowledge, are the biggest threat to that delusion. That’s why they fear us. That’s why they try to erase us. And that’s why we must keep building, keep reading, and keep saying what we mean.

5 Key Takeaways

* Intellectual Pathology is a Structural Logic: The reaction to Black intellect is not random. It is a systemic response rooted in the history of slavery and settler colonialism, where Black thought is criminalized because it poses a threat to the established hierarchy of domination.

* “Settler Moves to Innocence” are Narrative Weapons: The arguments used to justify the genocide in Palestine (e.g., “no distinct people,” “lawless land”) are the exact same arguments used to justify the colonization of Indigenous lands in North America. They are deliberate attempts to erase history and manufacture a moral high ground.

* Democracy is an Ideology of Domination: The material reality of democracy—from its origins in Athens to its modern manifestation in US foreign policy—is defined by expansion, subjugation, and war. The rights Black people have were won in spite of this system, not because of its inherent goodness.

* White Male Mediocrity is a Privileged Delusion: The American power structure is currently dominated by unqualified white men who are propped up by a system that rewards their projection and insecurity as “rationality” while punishing Black excellence as a “threat.” This is not a bug; it’s a feature of white supremacist patriarchy.

* Nationalism is a Cult: Nationalism is a manufactured religion designed to divide people and concentrate power. We must reject the question “does a state have a right to exist?” and instead focus on the universal human rights of people, which transcend the violent borders created by colonial powers.

Explicit Ask to Become a Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education and corporate media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you value this work—the mini-lectures, the bibliographies, the analysis that cuts through the propaganda—please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. It’s the only way to ensure this work continues and grows. Click the button below to join the community and help build the independent, Black-led media space we deserve.

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)

* Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012.

* For the framework on “settler moves to innocence” and how the academy and society commodify indigeneity.

* Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1951.

* For the analysis of how European expansion laid the groundwork for totalitarian movements and the critique of nationalism.

* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1961.

* For the foundational understanding of colonial violence, the psychology of the colonized and colonizer, and the necessity of decolonization.

* Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Beacon Press, 2002.

* For the history of Black radical thought, creative imagination, and the fight to build new worlds in spite of systemic erasure.

* Derrida, Jacques. “The ‘World’ of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, and Sovereignty).” *Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971-2001*, Stanford University Press, 2002.

* For the philosophical deconstruction of sovereignty and the “right” of a state to exist.

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

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

For years, the public discourse has been dominated by a narrative that weaponized the safety of women and children, painting entire communities as threats. But as newly disclosed FBI records reveal, the most credible threat may have been hiding in plain sight—in the highest office in the land.

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

This is not about politics. This is about the systematic burial of evidence. The Department of Justice (DOJ) initially tried to conceal three of the four interviews a victim gave to the FBI. It was only under immense pressure from the media and Congress that these documents saw the light of day. And now, we understand why the establishment was so desperate to keep them hidden.

The FBI, an agency often criticized for its handling of sensitive information, found one victim’s allegations to be unquestionably credible.

The AccountBetween August and September 2019, the victim, who was between the ages of 13 and 15 at the time of the alleged incident, sat for multiple interviews with federal investigators. Her account was chillingly consistent.

On August 7, 2019, she recounted being left alone with Donald Trump. According to the transcript, Trump allegedly approached her, mentioning something to the effect of, “let me teach you how little girls are supposed to be.”

What followed was a violent assault. The victim stated that Trump unzipped his pants and forced her head down toward his penis. She recounted that she bit him because he “disgusted her.” In response, Trump allegedly struck her and said words to the effect of, “get this little B the hell out of here.”

She provided additional, consistent details in subsequent interviews two weeks and a month later. The FBI did not dismiss her. They deemed her credible.

The Context of HypocrisyLet us place this in the context of the moment. The same administration that buried this evidence spent years painting an entire demographic—specifically Black and brown men—as inherent threats to women and children. They weaponized the legal system, claiming that if people simply “followed the law,” they would not face persecution.

But here we are, watching a man ascend to the role of Commander in Chief—a man already convicted of 34 felonies—while the FBI had credible evidence of sexual assault against a child in its files.

As one observer noted, George Orwell would likely call this “legal doublespeak.” We are being asked to uphold the social order of the law by a convicted felon. It is a dizzying hypocrisy.

A Pattern of EntitlementThis isn’t an isolated moment. The entitlement suggested by this accusation echoes statements made publicly years prior. When Donald Trump made comments about his daughter in the 2010s—suggesting that if she weren’t his daughter, he would be dating her—it was often brushed aside as “locker room talk.” Now, viewed through the lens of this credible allegation, it looks less like bravado and more like a confession of entitlement.

This pattern reveals a systemic failure. The same system that will raid the homes of individuals like Breonna Taylor or Afroman based on anonymous tips refused to act on a victim who sat for multiple interviews with the FBI. The same institutions that claim to protect the vulnerable chose to bury the truth to protect the powerful.

The Void We Must FillWe are living in a moment where public education media has retreated. The history we just walked through—the documents, the context, the legal hypocrisy—is not being taught. It is being distorted or erased.

This work exists to fill that void. We document the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that the establishment hopes you forget. Because if you forget that the FBI buried credible evidence of a crime, you will not understand why the justice system looks the way it does today.

Explicit Ask to Become A Paid Subscriber

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe that a 13-year-old victim deserved to have her credible accusation taken seriously—and that we deserve to know why it was buried—then please, become a paid subscriber today. Help me continue to do the work that corporate media and the Department of Justice won’t do.

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

5 Key Takeaways

* The FBI Found a Victim Credible: In 2019, the FBI interviewed a victim who accused Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her when she was between 13 and 15 years old. The agency found her account to be “unquestionably credible.”

* The DOJ Attempted a Cover-Up: The Department of Justice initially tried to hide reports of three of the four interviews. They were only disclosed due to media and congressional pressure.

* Consistent Testimony: The victim provided the same harrowing details across multiple interviews, including that Trump allegedly assaulted her and that she bit him because he disgusted her.

* The Hypocrisy of Weaponized Law: The administration that buried this evidence spent its time painting Black and brown communities as inherent threats to women and children, weaponizing legality against them while protecting a man with credible allegations against him.

* A Convicted Felon Upholding “Order”: We are witnessing the paradox of a convicted felon being entrusted to uphold the social order of the law, highlighting a system of “legal doublespeak” where rules apply differently based on status.

Related Readings

* Federal Bureau of Investigation. *FD-302 Interview Reports (August 7, 2019; August 21, 2019; September 19, 2019).* Released under FOIA pressure from congressional oversight committees, 2023.

* Orwell, George. 1984. Secker & Warburg, 1949. (For context on “doublespeak” and the manipulation of legal language).

* Taylor, Breonna. Case File. Louisville Metro Police Department. 2020. (For context on raids based on anonymous tips and the disparity in legal protection).

* The United States Department of Justice. Office of Legal Policy. Review of the Handling of High-Profile Investigations. 2021. (For background on DOJ protocols regarding the burial of investigative files).

* The House Judiciary Committee. Memorandum on the Disclosure of FBI Interview Reports Related to High-Profile Political Figures. 2023.

* The New Yorker. “The Allegations Against Trump and the FBI’s Investigation.” Staff Report. 2023.

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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Under the Golden Boot, M Hope, Evan, Judy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

We are often taught that the Civil Rights Movement was a monolithic struggle for “integration.” We are taught that the goal was simply to sit at the same lunch counter, drink from the same water fountain, and be judged by the “content of our character.”

But in 1963, during a conversation that has been largely erased from the mainstream historical record, Malcolm X offered a different diagnosis. He wasn’t just critiquing racism; he was critiquing the structure that produces it. And as I sat with this transcript in 2026, I realized that nothing has changed—except the names and the platforms.

The Zionist Question as a Mirror

In the segment of the conversation I focused on, Malcolm is asked about Zionism. It’s a trap, or at least a test. He is being questioned about his Black Nationalist, Pan-Africanist politics, and the interviewer tries to corner him by asking about a different nationalist movement.

Malcolm’s response, and the analysis I lay out in the transcript, flips the script. He points out the fundamental contradiction that exists then and now: Black Nationalism is criminalized, while Jewish Nationalism (Zionism) was supported and funded by Western powers.

“When you throw the word black in front of nationalists, it adds a different stigma onto how we start thinking about nation building... So when we demonize black nationalists... while also simultaneously supporting the nation state of Israel, it shows there’s a contradiction.”

In 1963, while the U.S. government was infiltrating, surveilling, and assassinating Black leaders who spoke of self-determination, they were actively helping “all these white Jews” establish a separate state in the midst of “dark-skinned people.”

In 2026, we see the same dynamic. We are told that Black people asking for economic autonomy, separate community control, or reparations are “divisive” or “radical.” Yet the United States continues to fund a nationalist project abroad. The lesson is clear: Nationalism is only acceptable when it serves whiteness.

The Black Bourgeoisie and the Puppet Masters

Malcolm X didn’t just attack white supremacy; he attacked the Black leadership that enabled it. When asked about a poll showing that 90% of “Negro leaders” supported Dr. King and less than 20% supported Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm laughed.

He pointed out that these “leaders” were Lena Horne, Dick Gregory, and baseball players—entertainers.

“These aren’t leaders. These are puppets and clowns that have been sent up over the white community and over the black community... They genuinely say exactly what they know that the white man wants to hear.”

This critique resonates deeply in 2026. We are told to rally behind Black celebrities and politicians who are “palatable” to the empire. But as Malcolm notes, the system is functioning exactly as designed. The Constitution wasn’t written for us; it was written to codify us as property.

When I think about the modern Democratic Party, and the Black liberals who scold anyone critical of the status quo, I see the 1963 playbook in action. They trade in “identity politics” while ensuring the material reality of Black people—poverty, over-policing, health disparities—remains unchanged. They weaponize the tropes of “unity” and “stability” to silence those who, like Malcolm, demand autonomy, not just inclusion.

The System Isn’t Broken; It’s Working

One of the hardest truths in the transcript is Malcolm’s dissection of the Constitution. He brings up Article 1, Section 2—the Three-Fifths Compromise.

“It relates us to the level of cattle... a commodity that could be bought... It was written by whites, for the benefit of whites, and to the detriment of blacks.”

I paused on this to connect it to something I recently learned about gerrymandering. There are counties in Tennessee where, for years, the electoral college counted livestock—cows, pigs, chickens—with more political weight than Black human beings. The hubris of placing animals before Black people didn’t end with the plantation; it was built into the zoning and districting maps of the 20th century.

Malcolm X understood this. When we say the “system is failing,” we are wrong. It is operating exactly as the original framers intended. The only thing that has changed is the branding. The problem isn’t that America is broken; the problem is that America is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And as Malcolm warned, if you believe in reform rather than revolution, you are simply asking the arsonist to hand you a bucket of water.

Separation and Self-Determination

When asked for the “ideal solution,” Malcolm didn’t mince words. He proposed separation.

He argued that if white people can get together and help European Jews establish a nation in the Middle East, then Black people in America should be given the resources to govern themselves. He wasn’t asking for handouts; he was asking for the machinery, the transportation, and the land to till.

“If the white man doesn’t want us to go back to our own people... then since we can’t get along together in peace in this country with white people, let us separate part of this continent and migrate to that separate territory.”

This isn’t about hate; it’s about autonomy. It is about the right to solve our own problems without begging the master to fix the chains. Malcolm predicted that if Black people were exposed to the truth about their history and the nature of the system, they would choose separation.

In 2026, we are seeing the seeds of that truth take root. As public education is gutted and Black history is erased, we are forced to do our own research. As the “liberal” order crumbles and reveals its imperialist core, more of us are waking up to the reality that the Black bourgeoise tried to shield us from: The United States is not the Black man’s country.

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

Critical Conclusion: Malcolm X’s Evolution from Separation to Global Solidarity

It would be intellectually dishonest—and a disservice to his legacy—to conclude this analysis without addressing the most profound transformation in Malcolm X’s life: his break with the Nation of Islam and his shift away from strict Black separatism.

The Malcolm X we hear in this 1963 interview is Minister Malcolm, the national spokesman for the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. He is disciplined, sharp, and unwavering in his commitment to the Nation’s doctrine of separation. He argues that Black people should not seek integration into white society but should demand their own land, their own economy, and their own nation.

But history shows us that Malcolm X did not die with those views unchanged.

Malcolm X was murdered for this tenacity. The same unapologetic nature that gets a man like Donald Trump elected president got Malcolm X killed. He was targeted because he refused to let the oppressor define the terms of the struggle.

We are living in the shadow of 1963. The conversations about Zionism, Black leadership, the Constitution, and self-determination are not “old news.” They are the foundation of our current reality. As we watch the erasure of Black history and the commodification of Black identity, we must return to the source.

We must stop asking to be integrated into a burning house and start building our own.

Related Readings

* The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X

* Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements by George Breitman

* The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches by Malcolm X (edited by Benjamin Karim)

* Message to the Blackman in America by Elijah Muhammad

* Black Bourgeoisie by E. Franklin Frazier

* The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

* How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education and the corporate media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you found value in this deep dive into Malcolm X’s evolution—if you believe that understanding his full journey is essential to navigating 2026—please consider upgrading your subscription. Your support allows me to continue this work: digging through archives, connecting historical dots, and providing the context they don’t want you to have. Together, we can build the independent, Black-centered media infrastructure that the establishment refuses to fund.

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

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

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

One of the most powerful parts of traveling and engaging with different communities is discovering the histories that never made it into the textbooks. Sometimes those histories exist right under our noses, hidden in plain sight, buried beneath national narratives that prefer simpler stories.

A recent trip to Iowa reminded me of that.

Many people imagine Iowa as farmland, cornfields, and presidential caucuses. In the popular imagination, it is not a place associated with Black history, Black institutions, or Black political struggle.

Yet that assumption falls apart the moment you start digging into the historical record.

Because Iowa has a deeper Black history than most people realize.

And understanding that history reveals something much bigger about American politics.

It reveals the contradictions that sit at the center of the country itself.

The Political Puzzle of Iowa

One of the things that immediately stands out about Iowa is its unusual electoral history.

The state voted twice for Barack Obama.

Then it voted for Donald Trump.

At first glance, that pattern confuses the standard political narratives people use to understand American elections. It cannot easily be explained through simple partisan loyalty or racial backlash alone.

The same electorate that supported the first Black president also later supported a candidate whose political rhetoric was built around nationalist and populist themes.

Understanding that contradiction requires something deeper than partisan talking points.

It requires looking at how local history, economic conditions, media environments, and institutional power shape political behavior.

And Iowa offers a powerful case study for that complexity.

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

The Black History Hidden in the Midwest

One of the most surprising discoveries during my visit was the depth of Black history embedded in Iowa itself.

Places like Fort Des Moines played a major role in American history. During World War II, the fort served as a training site for Black officers and members of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Figures such as Charity Adams—later known for leading the historic 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion—trained there.

That alone challenges the popular assumption that Black military leadership was concentrated only in coastal or southern cities.

The Midwest played a role too.

Iowa was also home to significant Black institutional development. The National Bar Association, created when Black lawyers were excluded from the American Bar Association, was founded in Des Moines.

These institutions remind us that Black history did not only emerge from the trauma of the Jim Crow South. It also developed through migration, community building, and institutional formation across the country.

Buxton: The Forgotten Black Utopia

Another powerful example of this history is Buxton, Iowa.

At the height of its existence in the early twentieth century, Buxton was a coal-mining town where Black and white residents lived in close proximity and Black professionals held significant positions in the community.

Black doctors practiced medicine there.

Black business owners operated stores.

Black workers held stable jobs in the mining industry.

For many historians, Buxton represents one of the closest examples to a racially integrated community during a period when segregation dominated much of the United States.

Yet Buxton eventually disappeared after the mines closed. Residents were forced to relocate, and many of the opportunities they had in Buxton did not exist elsewhere.

Black doctors who had once practiced successfully struggled to find work in other towns.

The collapse of the town shows how fragile community progress can be when it depends on economic structures outside the community’s control.

The Mississippi River and Migration

The geography of Iowa also played an important role in shaping its communities.

Cities along the Mississippi River became hubs for commerce, migration, and cultural exchange. Areas such as the Quad Cities developed across both Iowa and Illinois, forming interconnected economic regions.

These river towns attracted a wide range of populations, including Black communities and Latino communities that helped shape the cultural landscape of the region.

Today, these areas remain examples of how migration patterns and economic geography influence political and social dynamics.

The Political Economy of Iowa

Understanding Iowa’s modern politics requires examining the state’s economic structure.

Agriculture dominates the economy.

Farming communities depend on global markets, federal policies, labor availability, and trade relationships.

When those systems shift, rural communities feel the consequences immediately.

Farmers have faced declining labor availability, unstable crop markets, and increasing corporate consolidation within agriculture. These pressures shape political choices in ways that are often invisible in national political debates.

Economic vulnerability can make communities more receptive to political messaging that promises stability, protection, or economic revival.

The challenge is that political rhetoric and political outcomes do not always align.

Corporate Power and Local Governance

Another lesson from Iowa involves the power of institutions and corporations in shaping policy outcomes.

Conversations around environmental policy reveal the influence of agricultural corporations and pesticide companies on regulatory decisions. Proposals to limit accountability for pollution and water contamination highlight how corporate interests can shape legislation even when public health concerns are at stake.

This dynamic illustrates a broader truth about American politics.

Political parties compete for power, but corporate influence often operates above partisan lines.

Understanding that relationship is essential for anyone trying to analyze how policy decisions are made.

Why Local Government Matters

One of the most overlooked aspects of American politics is the role of local government.

Positions like county supervisors control budgets, oversee local services, and influence policies related to infrastructure, environmental protection, and community resources.

Yet many voters know very little about these positions.

Local officials help determine:

* how budgets are allocated

* how environmental policies are implemented

* how community services operate

* how public resources are distributed

Paying attention to these offices can have a direct impact on everyday life.

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

The Lesson Iowa Teaches

Traveling through Iowa reveals something fundamental about American politics.

Communities contain contradictions.

Places with rich Black histories can still exist alongside political systems that attempt to erase that history.

States that once supported progressive candidates can later shift in different political directions.

None of this is accidental.

It reflects the complex intersection of economics, media environments, historical memory, and institutional power.

Understanding those intersections requires curiosity.

And curiosity is the first step toward political literacy.

Education is elevation.

Key Takeaways

1. Black history exists in places many Americans overlook

States like Iowa contain rich histories of Black institutions, military leadership, and community building that are rarely taught in mainstream narratives.

2. Political behavior is shaped by local conditions

Economic pressures, media consumption, and community experiences all influence how people vote and engage with politics.

3. Institutional power often transcends party politics

Corporate influence can shape policy outcomes regardless of which political party controls government institutions.

4. Local government plays a critical role in everyday life

County supervisors and local officials influence budgets, infrastructure, environmental policy, and community resources.

5. Understanding complexity is essential for political literacy

Simple explanations rarely capture the realities of political behavior. Studying local histories helps reveal the deeper forces shaping national politics.

Related Readings

* Malcolm X & Alex Haley — The Autobiography of Malcolm X

* Cedric Robinson — Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

* W.E.B. Du Bois — Black Reconstruction in America

* Michelle Alexander — The New Jim Crow

* Isabel Wilkerson — The Warmth of Other Suns

References

* Historical accounts of Fort Des Moines and the 6888th Battalion

* National Bar Association historical archives

* Transcript conversation discussing Iowa politics and history

* Midwestern migration and river-town development studies

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