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This week I sat down with somebody I spent years trying to beat: Brian Ontiveros-Kersch, UNT to my OU, fifteen-something rounds against each other, from random little prelims all the way to the elims of the National Debate Tournament. We came together to talk about borders not borders the way cable news talks about borders, where the whole conversation starts and stops at “did you cross legally,” but borders the way Gloria Anzaldúa taught us to see them: a wound that never healed, a line that keeps moving, a weapon that gets pointed at some bodies and holstered for others.

Brian said something early that framed the whole conversation. Talking about his mama’s people, the Ontiveros side, who been in New Mexico since before it was either “New” or “Mexico,” he put it plain: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”

Sit with that for a second, for the folks in the back. Every argument about “illegals” rests on the assumption that the border is fixed, natural, and legitimate, that the line was always there and the only question is which side of it you standing on. The history says otherwise. The history says the line been redrawn, re-enforced, and re-weaponized every single generation, and the only consistent thing about it is who it gets used against.

Borderlands Ain’t Just a Place, It’s a Condition

Anzaldúa grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, right on that line, and in Borderlands/La Frontera she describes the border as an open wound, a place where two worlds grind against each other and bleed, a strip of land that belongs to both countries and neither one at the same time. Anzaldúa wasn’t just talking geography. She was talking identity. The borderlands is also the mestiza consciousness, the person who carries Indigenous and European blood in the same body, who is somehow both and neither, who gets sorted differently depending on who’s doing the looking.

Brian lives that. His mama’s family is Mexica, in that land before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dragged the United States over top of them in 1848. His daddy’s side goes back to the Mayflower. He presents white, went to a white high school, and still got called an anchor baby because, as he put it, passing is a privilege that gets revoked. He can be white, he can be Indigenous, he rarely ever gets to be both, and which one he gets to be changes on the circumstance. That’s the borderland. That’s the liminal spot the national dialogue got no room for, because America wants this OR that, never this AND that.

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Texas Was Annexed for Slavery, Period

Y’all know I’m born and raised in Texas, so let me give you the receipts they left out of your 7th grade Texas History class, the class that somehow taught “Remember the Alamo” without teaching Juneteenth.

Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 under Vicente Guerrero a president of African descent, feel me, a Black man signing abolition into law decades before the United States could stomach the thought. Anglo settlers brought enslaved people into Mexican Texas anyway. When Santa Anna’s army came, the fight at the Alamo was, at bottom, slaveholders fighting to keep human property inside a country that had outlawed owning humans. Folks did walk out of the Alamo alive women, children, and enslaved people the slavers brought with them. The annexation of Texas happened because white settlers wanted slavery. That is the impetus. That is why Texas is part of the U.S. and not part of Mexico.

Then there’s that “Come and Take It” flag your gun-rights uncle loves. That cannon was given to the settlers at Gonzales by Mexican authorities in the first place given to them to help fight off Native people, to keep the so-called savages at bay. Settler solidarity held as long as the deal was clearing Native land together. The moment Mexico’s abolition threatened the slave economy, the settlers turned the same cannon around on the government that armed them. What broke the solidarity wasn’t principle. Slavery broke it.

Crazy how the same border got flipped the other direction too. A lot of my ancestors’ folk, enslaved Africans in Texas, ran SOUTH instead of north, because Mexico’s shifting border was a freedom line. There was a whole southern road to freedom into Mexico. The border been a freedom line and a slave-catching line at the same damn time, depending on who drew it and when. Nobody’s illegal on stolen land and the land’s been stolen more than once.

The Courtroom Been a Whiteness Machine

Now watch how the law manufactured all of this. In 1897, in San Antonio, a case called In re Rodriguez asked whether a Mexican man could naturalize as a U.S. citizen. Naturalization law at the time only had two doors: you could be white, or you could be of African descent. The court dodged the question of whether Rodriguez was white they leaned on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo instead, but the frame was set. Two doors. Pick one.

Then in the 1930s comes Timoteo Andrade, a Mexican national up in Buffalo, New York, applying for citizenship after decades in this country. The government’s position leaned on him being Indigenous, and natives couldn’t naturalize — remember, Native Americans didn’t even get U.S. citizenship until 1924, damn near 60 years after Black folks. So what did Andrade argue in open court? That he’d been exaggerating his indigeneity. That his nose wasn’t flat like the Olmec or the Mexica. That his skin was light. That he was, in fact, white. He won. He argued himself white in a court of law, and the court agreed, and the door opened.

Fast-forward to 2010, when the census told Latinos that ethnicity is not race and made folks pick a race on top of “Hispanic.” Our old debate colleague Nate Cohn yeah, that Nate Cohn, he became a stats journalist wrote it up in the New York Times: over a million people who checked “some other race” in 2000 checked “white” in 2010. Latinos became white overnight, on paper, by the stroke of a pencil. Latino is an ethnicity, kinfolks, not a race there are Black Latinos, white Latinos, Indigenous Latinos, Asian Latinos and when the machine forces the underlying racial question, where do folks run? Toward whiteness. Not because they’re uniquely evil. They run toward whiteness because whiteness is a protective class in this country, because the law been teaching that exact lesson since 1897, because the white-over-Black binary logic of America says it is best to be white, and if you cannot be white, whatever you do, don’t be Black.

We talk about epigenetics when it comes to Black folks and the trauma of slavery. I’d argue there’s a social epigenetics operating in the Latino community too. Generations of symbols, patterns, norms, and court cases teaching that it is safer and more beneficial to be seen with the Europeans than to be seen with us. Black folks peep that. Consciously and subconsciously, Black folks peep that, and that inherited lesson is exactly what keeps getting in the way of solidarity.

“Peons”: The Hundred-Year-Old Script

The rhetorician Lisa Flores went back and studied how America talked about Mexican labor in the early twentieth century, and what she found should sound familiar as hell. After World War I took a generation of white and Black American men to Europe, Mexican workers filled the labor gap, and the country welcomed them — as “peons.” Docile. Menial. Cheap. The papers praised them for one thing in particular: they send their money back to Mexico, so they don’t disrupt our economy. Flores found that sentence in the 1920s. I heard that same sentence at somebody’s cookout THIS YEAR. The script is a hundred years old and ain’t missed a beat.

Peon rhetoric is slave-adjacent rhetoric that’s the point. Paid under the table, paid below minimum wage, paid slave wages, welcomed exactly as long as the labor is needed. Then the Depression hit, the labor wasn’t needed, and the same people became “job stealers” overnight. What followed was the deportation drives of 1929 to 1936, what historians call the Mexican Repatriation: as many as a million people removed, and scholars estimate somewhere around six in ten of them was U.S. citizens. Flores tells the story of a nineteen-year-old boy, born and raised in this country, birthright citizen, working the fields, who got swept up and shipped to Mexico, a country he wasn’t born in, speaking a language he didn’t speak.

Now tell me what that sounds like. Tell me that don’t sound like citizens and legal residents getting swept up in raids right now, like people getting rendered to a mega-prison in El Salvador with no process. History don’t repeat itself so much as it be reciting itself, word for word, off a script white supremacy wrote a century ago.

“Do It the Right Way” Is a Moving Target

Here’s where the good-immigrant/bad-immigrant paradigm collapses, just like we knew it would. Haitians in this country had Temporary Protected Status, which means by definition they did it “the right way.” Then the administration changed, the they’re-eating-the-dogs rhetoric did its work, and TPS got stripped. Thousands of people who did it the right way became “undocumented” overnight, not because they moved, but because the line moved. Meanwhile I need you to hold both of these at once white South Africans got offered a refugee welcome mat by the same administration.

Every accusation is a confession. They accuse migrants of disrespecting legality; the receipts confess it was never about legality, because when legality inconveniences whiteness, legality gets rewritten. Notice too whose status got revoked first: Black people. The first folks made illegal by a stroke of the pen under this administration wasn’t Latinos, it was Haitians, Black people. As Brian put it: they’re coming for everyone. You aren’t safe.

Let me be clear on Haiti while I’m here, because I don’t engage in anti-Black pathology about that country: the instability in Haiti is not some natural Haitian condition. The instability in Haiti is the compounding bill that France and the United States been making Haitians pay ever since Haitians had the audacity to free themselves — the ransom debt, the occupations, the coups, the coercion. When people flee Haiti, they are fleeing the consequences of Western imperialism, trying to follow the stolen resources back to where they got taken.

Three Pillars, One Architect

So why do Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks keep ending up at each other’s necks? Andrea Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy the framework behind my favorite debate I ever had against Brian explains the mechanism. White supremacy don’t run on one logic; it runs on anti-Blackness anchoring slavery and capitalism, on genocide anchoring settler colonialism, on orientalism anchoring permanent war. The evil genius of the design is that a group crushed by one pillar can still collect benefits from another one, and white supremacy pays out them benefits like a crooked casino, just enough to keep everybody betting against each other.

Black folks didn’t run settler colonialism stolen bodies, not stolen land yet we still live on and benefit from land taken from Indigenous people. Indigenous people in the continental U.S. largely wasn’t enslaved, yet they still benefited from the material wealth that stolen Black labor built. Then it gets uglier. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes got offered “civilization” by the United States on explicit terms: adopt settler agriculture, which meant plantation slavery, which meant practicing anti-Blackness as the price of ascending toward whiteness. Several of those nations signed treaties with the Confederacy, and the descendants of their Freedmen are still fighting for citizenship and dignity inside those nations today. Flip it around: Buffalo Soldiers, Black men fresh off the plantation, took army pensions to fight Native people across the Southwest after Guadalupe Hidalgo. If Group A harms Group B in service of white supremacy, Group A gets privileges. That’s the machine. That’s always been the machine.

This is where I bring in Wilderson, because y’all know I hold Afropessimism and coalition politics in the same hand. Wilderson’s triad puts the white settler as the Human, the “savage” as the half-human, and the slave as the non-human… the fungible flesh against which the Human defines itself. Wilderson says slavery is ontological for Black people, not an event but a structure, and “savage negrophobia” names how even the Native position gets recruited into anti-Blackness. Two things can be true: those positions was coerced through settler colonialism, AND anti-Blackness is anti-Blackness. If you’re doing impact calculus, gratuitous anti-Black violence is still the backdrop everything else plays out against. I appreciate the competing interpretations inside the academy more now than I did when I was younger everybody don’t agree with Wilderson, still, the descriptive power of that critique shows up every time solidarity gets tested.

Which brings me to the present. When mass deportation kicked off, a lot of Black folks said “I’m sitting this one out,” and I understood the hurt underneath it you feel like a community chose whiteness over you every time it counted, so now it’s “f**k the community.” That’s not paranoia, that’s pattern recognition, that’s the non-theoretical, lived version of the junior-partner critique. Here’s the nuance I argued then and I’ll argue now: I’m not advocating for no Black person to sacrifice themselves in the street for a cause that never had them in mind. What I’m saying is you don’t have to celebrate mass deportation to stay in the house and sit this one out. There is no version of a white supremacist agenda that helps your Black ass. Remember what the Supreme Court blessed with them Kavanaugh stops. ICE stopping people based on how you look, what language you speak, and what job you work. White people know Black Latinos exist. Blackness gets profiled first and asked about ethnicity never.

The SAVE Act Math Don’t Math

Same trap, different door: “non-citizens are polluting the vote, so we need strict ID and citizenship verification.” Brian broke the math down like the debater he is. If democracy is a process of maximizing the participation of the demos the actual people — then any policy that blocks one ineligible voter while also blocking ten eligible ones leaves you net down nine true votes. That’s not protecting democracy, that’s subtracting from it. Look at Texas: demand a Real ID, then close the DPS offices in your city, so now it’s a four-hour round trip you can’t take off work for, no bus route, no car and Houston-born, definitely-citizen Black folks can’t vote. All to make sure one Latino couldn’t. If fifty eligible voters get blocked to stop one ineligible one, the dilution runs fifty times the other direction. Every argument for these laws ends up anti-democratic on its own terms. Black folks cheering voter ID because it targets “non-citizens” — that’s the same knife, kinfolks, just rotated. Don’t support that.

Conservative Contradictions: Borders Matter Till They Don’t

Lastly, watch the double-speak, because this the part that’s always stuck with me since I first read Anzaldúa. The same people who say the border is sacred will conveniently forget every border on the map when it’s time to go grab Maduro over gas prices, or invade Iraq, or roll into whoever’s country talking about we got to save THEIR citizens from being mistreated while our government mistreating ours. So we see it in every instance: whatever white people create, they get to pick and choose when it matters and when it don’t matter. When they say borders matter, goddammit, borders matter. When borders inconvenience empire, borders evaporate.

Same energy with race trading and class trading. Poor whites keep trading in their class interests for their racial similarities — that’s how you get people with no boots cheering for the man taking their laces. That’s also the exact history that makes so many Black folks view so many non-Black folks with skepticism, because they be like: history tells me you gonna sell me out when there be a chance.

Where Do We Go From Here

Coalition don’t come from pretending none of this happened. Coalition comes from the tough conversations about anti-Blackness in the Latino community, about xenophobia in ours, about the settler colonialism sitting over all of it had honestly, without the academic language if we don’t need it. It’s the Fred Hamptons of the world we’re missing. It’s the Rainbow Coalition we need to get back to: solidarity built on naming exactly how white supremacy pays each of us to police the other, then refusing the payment.

See, Anzaldúa reminds us the border is a wound that keeps moving, that the borderlands live in territory and in flesh at the same time — and Flores teaches us the words always come first and the buses come after, that “peon” and “illegal” are rhetorical constructions doing a century of dirty work. The border crossed them. The ships crossed us. The land was crossed out from under the first peoples. None of us drew the line, and every one of us been cut by it.

I’m worried moving forward. I’m an optimistic worried, though, because more people are having these conversations than ever. Let’s keep having them.

Key Takeaways

* Borders are constructed and constantly moving. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) dragged the U.S. border across whole communities — folks like Brian’s family didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. Anzaldúa’s borderlands names both the physical strip and the identity condition of being both-and-neither.

* Texas exists because of slavery. Mexico, under Afro-Mexican president Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery in 1829; Anglo settlers fought the Texas Revolution largely to keep enslaving people, and the “Come and Take It” cannon was originally a Mexican gift to settlers for fighting Native people. Meanwhile, enslaved Black Texans ran SOUTH across that border to freedom.

* The courts built a whiteness pipeline. In re Rodriguez (1897) and the Timoteo Andrade case (1930s) show naturalization law offering two doors — white or Black — and the material incentive to argue yourself white. The 2010 census shift (documented by Nate Cohn) shows over a million Latinos choosing “white” when forced to pick a race.

* The deportation script is 100 years old. Lisa Flores’ work on “peon” rhetoric shows the same cycle — welcomed as cheap labor who “send money home,” then demonized as job-stealers and mass-deported. The 1929–36 Repatriation removed up to a million people, an estimated ~60% of them U.S. citizens. Citizens getting swept up today is a rerun, not an anomaly.

* “Do it the right way” is a moving target. Haitians with TPS did it the legal way and were made undocumented overnight by a policy stroke, while white South Africans got refugee status. Legality bends to whiteness; every accusation is a confession.

* The three pillars pit us against each other by design (Andrea Smith): anti-Blackness/slavery, genocide/settler colonialism, orientalism/war. Groups harmed by one pillar still collect benefits from another — Five Civilized Tribes’ coerced slaveholding, Buffalo Soldiers’ pensions — which is exactly how solidarity gets bought off. Wilderson’s triad (Human/Savage/Slave) keeps anti-Blackness named as the backdrop.

* You don’t have to celebrate mass deportation to sit one out. Black skepticism toward coalition is pattern recognition, not pathology — still, a white supremacist agenda helps no Black person, and the Kavanaugh-blessed ICE stops (race, language, job) guarantee Black folks, starting with Black Latinos and Haitians, are already in the crosshairs.

* Voter ID math is anti-democratic on its own terms: blocking one ineligible voter at the cost of ten (or fifty) eligible ones is a net subtraction from democracy — and the subtraction lands on Black and poor voters first.

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Related Reading & Cited Sources

Core theoretical frameworks

* Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).

* Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003).

* Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (Penn State University Press, 2020).

* Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010) — the Settler/“Savage”/Slave triad and savage negrophobia.

* Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020).

* Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (South End Press, 2006).

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

* Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993).

* Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” California Law Review 85 (1997).

* George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple University Press, 1998; rev. 2018).

Cases, laws, and policy referenced

* Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) — U.S. annexation of roughly half of Mexico’s territory.

* Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) — origin point of the modern “right way” legality discourse.

* In re Rodriguez, 81 F. 337 (W.D. Tex. 1897) — Mexican eligibility for naturalization in San Antonio.

* The Timoteo Andrade naturalization case (Buffalo, NY, 1930s) — see Patrick D. Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy Over “Whiteness” (University of Arizona Press, 2012).

* Indian Citizenship Act (1924) — Native Americans granted U.S. citizenship.

* Mexican Repatriation, 1929–1936 — see Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (University of New Mexico Press, rev. ed. 2006).

* Noem v. Perdomo (U.S. Supreme Court, 2025) — emergency-docket order lifting limits on ICE stops; Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence on apparent ethnicity, language, and occupation as factors.

* Trump v. Barbara (U.S. Supreme Court, June 30, 2026) — the 6–3 birthright citizenship ruling; see the prior Education Is Elevation essay on the settler/immigrant/arrivant framework.

* Termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians (2025) and the refugee program for white South Africans (2025) — DHS/State Department actions.

* The SAVE Act — proposed federal proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement.

Deeper history — related reading

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

* Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004).

* Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).

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

* Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (UNC Press, 2013).

* Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (Monthly Review Press, 2015).

* Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (UNC Press, 2013) — Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition.

* Nate Cohn, “More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White,” The New York Times, May 21, 2014.

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The clip went something like this: every American who is a natural-born U.S. citizen is only a couple generations removed from somebody who wasn’t, go back far enough and every single American is the child of a migrant, this is literally the United States of America, so trying to end birthright citizenship is the most un-American thing you could push for. And on the surface that sound like solidarity. On the surface that sound like a man with a big heart standing up for immigrants against a cruel policy. Ahh, but words have meaning.

My grandfather used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and what that means in this context is I’m not about to sit here and accuse this man of evil, I’m not about to pretend Hasan woke up trying to harm nobody, because I don’t believe that he did. I believe his heart was in the right place. I also believe his analysis was empirically false. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Lefty to lefty, that’s the whole conversation.

Because here go the problem. There is a difference between an immigrant and a settler, and calling the descendants of settlers “immigrants” ain’t a cute simplification — it’s a misnomer, and a dangerous one, and the danger is exactly what it erases.

Words Have Meaning — Immigrant, Settler, Arrivant

Let me put the definitions on the table, because this whole disagreement live and die on the definitions.

A migrant — say it with me — a migrant moves into a political order that already exists. The migrant recognizes a sovereignty that is already sitting there, submits to a state that is already built, knocks on a door that is already hung. That is Lorenzo Veracini’s whole point in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview: not all migrants are settlers. The migrant enters somebody else’s house. The migrant don’t own the deed.

A settler is a different animal. The settler don’t come to join the order — the settler come to found one. Veracini says settlers “come to stay,” and they carry a sovereign capacity with them, they bring the state in their pocket, they plant a flag and call the planting “discovery.” Patrick Wolfe gave us the line everybody quotes: settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that structure runs on a logic of elimination — the native is in the way, so the native has got to be made to vanish, made into a ghost, made into the past tense.

And then there is the third category, the one Hasan’s “we’re all immigrants” math leaves no room for. Jodi Byrd, in The Transit of Empire, borrows a word from the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, arrivant for the people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism. Not settlers, because they founded nothing and owned nothing, not even themselves. Not migrants, because didn’t nobody migrate in the belly of a slave ship. Arrivants. Forced arrivals.

Tuck and Yang built the whole frame in Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor: settler colonialism stands on a triad settler, native, slave. Three positions, three different relationships to the land, three completely different stories about how a body ended up standing on this soil. And when you take that triad and you blend it all into one smoothie called “we’re all the children of immigrants,” you ain’t being inclusive. You collapsing three histories into one. And the one you keep is the settler’s.

So when I say what I said “African Americans, we ain’t settle here, we ain’t migrate either, we was forced here,” I’m not being poetic. I’m being precise.

The Math Don’t Math — Ellis Island Showed Up Late

Most of the people who repeat the “we’re all immigrants” line are picturing Ellis Island. The huddled masses, the manifests, the new name the clerk gave grandpa. Beautiful image. Wrong amendment. Let me walk the timeline, because the dates do the arguing for me.

1790. The very first Naturalization Act says the path from immigrant to citizen is open to “free white persons.” Free. White. Persons. That is the law. For most of this country’s history, the immigrant-to-citizen pipeline that the clip is romanticizing was, by statute, a whites-only pipeline.

1857. Dred Scott. The Supreme Court looks a Black man in the face and rules that Black people, free or enslaved, are not citizens and cannot ever be that we hold no rights the white man is bound to respect.

1868. The 14th Amendment. Born out of the Civil War, written in the blood of four years of war, ratified specifically to take Dred Scott and tear it up: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That is the root of birthright citizenship in this country. Not Ellis Island. My ancestors. The freed people. Birthright citizenship was built to account for the descendants of forced labor, to finally make citizens of the people this country had spent two and a half centuries treating as property.

1884. Elk v. Wilkins. The same court rules that Native Americans the actual indigenous people, the people who were here before “here” had a name are not made citizens by the 14th Amendment.

1892. Ellis Island finally opens its doors. Twenty-four years after the 14th Amendment had already settled birthright. The immigration mythology the clip is leaning on shows up almost a quarter-century after the clause it thinks it explains.

1898. Wong Kim Ark. Now the court extends birthright to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants a real and important expansion, but notice the order of operations. The freed slaves first. The immigrant’s child after, standing on a foundation the freed people had already laid.

1924. The Indian Citizenship Act. The first peoples of this land had to wait until nineteen twenty-four to be granted citizenship by an act of Congress — granted, like a favor, like a permission slip — while the descendants of European settlers had been citizens by default the whole time.

Read that timeline back. The settler’s grandchild was a citizen automatically. The freed slave needed a constitutional amendment. The native had to wait on Congress until 1924. So when somebody tells me every single American is a generation or two removed from being an immigrant, what they are telling me whether they mean it or not is that Native Americans and Black Americans don’t count as Americans, because our citizenship did not come from Ellis Island. It came from a war, an amendment, and a sixty-year wait.

Whose Womb, Whose Nation

And here is where I have to do the both/and work, because this fight has never been only about race it has been litigated, every single time, on and through the bodies of women of color. Intersection ain’t a decoration on this argument. It’s the engine.

Go back to 1662, Virginia, the doctrine the lawyers called partus sequitur ventrem — “that which is born follows the womb.” English common law said a child’s status followed the father. The colony flipped it: a child’s status would follow the mother. And that one flip turned every enslaved Black woman’s womb into a factory for the institution her children born into bondage automatically, hereditary slavery reproduced through her body, by law. Hortense Spillers taught us to read that ungendering, that reduction of the mother to flesh and the flesh to capital. Dorothy Roberts taught us this country has always claimed the right to police who Black women are allowed to bring into the world.

Now hold that against 1868. The 14th Amendment takes partus sequitur ventrem and turns it inside out. Under slavery, the womb made you a slave; under the Citizenship Clause, birth on this soil makes you a citizen. The same site, the birth, the body, the mother went from the mechanism of bondage to the doorway of belonging. That is not a small thing. That is the whole revolution of Reconstruction compressed into one clause.

So watch what happened the same week the Supreme Court upheld birthright in 2026. Within hours, the Justice Department announced it would prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism.” Birth tourism. The phrase itself points the finger straight back at the racialized woman’s womb, the Chinese mother, the Nigerian mother, the woman who had the nerve to give birth on the wrong soil. From 1662 to 2026 the through-line never breaks: in America, the question of who gets to belong has always been answered at the site of a woman of color’s body. Crazy how that part stays the same.

The Melting Pot Makes Whiteness Disappear

Let me name the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole point. When you say “we’re all the descendants of immigrants,” it feel generous. It feel like everybody invited to the cookout. But watch who that sentence actually disappears.

It disappears the native, who was already here and didn’t immigrate to nowhere. It disappears the arrivant, who was dragged here in chains and didn’t choose nothing. And it takes the one figure who actually did come from somewhere else to take this land the settler and it rebrands him as just another immigrant, just another striver, just another huddled mass.

That is the trick. Tuck and Yang call it a “settler move to innocence” — a story you tell so the settling stops feeling like settling. And the slickest part, the part you almost can’t see, is that the melting-pot story makes the white settler the invisible default, the normal one, the natural American against whom everybody else has to be measured. Veracini said it plain: the settler positions himself as both superior and normal, while the native and the slave are the ones who have to keep explaining themselves.

So when you flatten all of us into “immigrants,” you do not make everybody equal. You make whiteness the water nobody can see they swimming in. By doing the inclusion, you do the erasure. By trying to put everybody on the same boat, you let the people who built the boat out of stolen wood and stolen labor pretend they bought a ticket like everybody else.

Same Framework, Different Continent

Now let me talk to Hasan directly, lefty to lefty, because this is where the disappointment comes from and the disappointment comes from respect.

When it comes to Palestine, the man is sharp. He’ll walk you through settler colonialism with the precision of somebody who actually read the literature — the dispossession, the logic of replacement, the difference between a person fleeing into a land and a project built on taking it. He acknowledges indigeneity over there without blinking.

Ahh, but bring that same framework home and something seizes up. The man who can see the settler clearly in one hemisphere suddenly can’t acknowledge that Native Americans exist as indigenous people here, can’t see that the descendants of colonists are not the descendants of immigrants, can’t apply the analysis to the soil he is standing on. And I don’t think that’s malice. I think that’s a blind spot — the specific blind spot a lot of the broader Left carries the second Black and native specificity is the thing on the table. A bunch of us been feeling it: brilliant on so many issues, breadth and depth for days, and then a flatness, a quickness, an intellectual laziness that only seems to show up when the subject is us.

That matters because of the platform. Millions of mostly white folks love following this man, and they learn from him, and when he says “we’re all immigrants” with that much conviction and that much reach, he ain’t just making a point, he’s teaching. He’s miseducating an audience that trusts him, even if he’s doing it passionately, even if he’s doing it by accident. I speak passionately too. I make sentences out of words too. I get it. Which is exactly why I’d rather call him in than call him out. Lefty to lefty: let’s talk, let’s fix the blind spot, because right now it’s doing both of us a disservice.

And Then the Court Said It Too

Here’s the part that would be funny if it wasn’t so on time. The same day I’m making this argument, June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court hands down Trump v. Barbara and upholds birthright citizenship six to three, striking down the executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office. And read how Chief Justice Roberts grounds it: in the Reconstruction Congress, in the abolitionists, in the men who wrote the 14th Amendment and defined citizenship broadly on purpose, because they were trying to secure freedom for people coming up out of slavery.

Even the government’s own lawyer, arguing to gut the thing, conceded the root. The Solicitor General stood up and said the Citizenship Clause was meant to give citizenship to those newly freed from slavery and their descendants that was his argument, the argument for the restriction. Both sides in front of the highest court in the land agreed on the origin: the freed slaves, not Ellis Island. The exact distinction I’m drawing isn’t fringe. It’s the holding.

And lest anybody think this is settled and soft: within hours of the ruling, the Justice Department sent every U.S. attorney a letter telling them to go prosecute “birth tourism,” and the President got on his platform telling Congress to end birthright by statute. So no, this is not a history lecture. This is a live wire. Which is exactly why getting the words right matters right now, today, not as an academic flex but as a matter of who this country is going to admit it owes.

So let me bring it back to where the clip pointed and then refused to look. Birthright citizenship in this country has got nothing to do with Ellis Island and everything to do with settlers trying to account for the free labor of my ancestors… people who did not come here voluntarily, who were not migrating toward a dream, who were forced, forced laborers, and whose forced presence is the actual root of the 14th Amendment. Wolfe gives us the structure. Veracini gives us the difference between the one who founds the order and the one who enters it. Byrd gives us the word for the ones who were dragged into it. Tuck and Yang give us the triad so we never flatten the three into one. And the freed people themselves, through a war and an amendment, gave us the very birthright the whole country is now fighting over.

We ain’t settle here. We ain’t migrate either. We was forced here. Hold the distinction, because the distinction is the history, and the history is the receipt.

Lefty to lefty, Hasan — let’s talk.

Five Key Takeaways

* Immigrant, settler, and arrivant are three different categories with three different relationships to the land and the law — a migrant enters an order that already exists, a settler founds one and comes to stay, and an arrivant is forced in. Collapsing all three into “immigrant” is the original error.

* Birthright citizenship is older than Ellis Island. The 14th Amendment (1868) predates the opening of Ellis Island (1892) by twenty-four years, and it was written to overturn Dred Scott and make citizens of the freed people — not to romanticize immigration.

* The immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, a whites-only pathway. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” Black citizenship came through the 14th Amendment (1868); Native citizenship had to be granted by the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). Different routes, both forced or delayed.

* Who counts as American has always been decided at the site of the racialized woman’s womb — from partus sequitur ventrem (1662), which made the enslaved mother’s womb reproduce slavery, to the 14th Amendment that inverted it, to the “birth tourism” panic the DOJ revived in 2026.

* “We’re all immigrants” is a settler move to innocence: it erases the native and the arrivant and makes the white settler the invisible, natural default American. Even Trump v. Barbara (June 30, 2026) grounds birthright in the freed slaves — the distinction isn’t fringe, it’s the holding.

Annotated Bibliography

Veracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (2nd ed., 2024).

The load-bearing distinction for the whole piece: “not all migrants are settlers.” Settlers “come to stay” and carry a sovereign capacity, founding political orders by disavowing Indigenous sovereignty; migrants enter an order already constituted and submit to a sovereignty they did not make.

Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.

Source of “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event” and the “logic of elimination.” Establishes that settlement is ongoing, not a finished historical moment, and that the native is targeted for disappearance so the settler can become the natural inhabitant.

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

Introduces the arrivant a term Byrd borrows from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite for peoples forced into the Americas through colonial violence. This is the precise category for enslaved Africans and their descendants: neither settler nor native, but forced arrival.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

Frames settler colonialism as an “entangled triad” of settler–native–slave and names the “settler moves to innocence” the evasions (like “we’re all immigrants”) that reconcile settler guilt without returning land or reckoning with the triad.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.

The theory of “flesh” and the ungendering of the enslaved — essential for reading how the maternal body was reduced to capital, which is the foundation the womb argument in this piece stands on.

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

Documents the long American project of policing Black women’s reproduction. Grounds the claim that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. have always been adjudicated through control of racialized women’s childbearing.

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

Theorizes the tripled antagonism of settler, native (“Savage”), and slave as structurally distinct positions reinforcing why the three cannot be collapsed into a single “immigrant” narrative without erasing two of them.

Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).

The decision the 14th Amendment was written to overturn: held that Black people, free or enslaved, were not and could not be citizens. The before-picture for birthright citizenship.

Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).

Held that the 14th Amendment did not confer citizenship on Native Americans the legal basis for why indigenous citizenship had to wait for separate statutory action in 1924.

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).

Extended birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants. Important, but chronologically and logically downstream of the 14th Amendment’s original purpose for the freed people.

Indian Citizenship Act (Snyder Act), 43 Stat. 253 (1924).

Granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans by act of Congress — nineteen years into the twentieth century, and decades after settler descendants held citizenship by default.

Naturalization Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103.

Limited naturalization to “free white persons,” establishing that the immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, racially restricted for most of U.S. history.

Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (U.S. June 30, 2026).

The 6–3 decision upholding birthright citizenship and striking Executive Order 14160. Chief Justice Roberts grounds the holding in the Reconstruction framers and abolitionists; even the Solicitor General conceded the Citizenship Clause’s origin in the newly freed and their descendants.

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The first person to ever call himself the Queen of Drag in the United States was not a reality TV star or an algorithm’s invention. His name was William Dorsey Swann, and he was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860, which means the man this country now wants to legislate out of existence predates Stonewall, predates the very vocabulary the state uses to criminalize him, and very nearly predates Emancipation itself. Let that marinate. The first person to ever call themselves a Drag Queen was not some new-age phenomenon that fell out the sky in 2014. Before America could agree that Swann was a person, Swann had already decided he was a queen.

Freed after the Civil War, Swann made his way to Washington, D.C., and in the 1880s and ‘90s he hosted secret balls. Swann called them “drags”, where Black men, most of them formerly enslaved, the butlers and coachmen and cooks of the capital, gathered in silk and satin gowns half a mile from the White House. He crowned himself “the Queen.” Channing Gerard Joseph, the historian who pulled Swann out of a 19th-century newspaper database and back into the record, tells us Swann lifted that title from the “queens of liberty” he watched ride flower-covered floats at D.C.’s Emancipation Day parades. Black women who personified a freedom the nation had just been forced to concede. Apply Joseph here, because it flips the whole frame: the drag queen was not borrowing from white femininity. The drag queen was borrowing from Black emancipation. The crown was a freedom symbol before it was ever a costume.

This wasn’t just parties, though. There was a defiance in it. In a world that refused to see Black and quare folk as fully human and I’m saying quare on purpose, the way E. Patrick Johnson taught us to say it, theory in the flesh, theory with a grandmother and a dialect and a body. Swann was moving like a swan. And the consistency you need to clock, the through-line that runs from his century to ours, is the raid. Pride Month itself starts off a police raid at Stonewall in 1969. Swann’s story is a police raid in 1888. Same script, eighty-one years apart. If you guessed raid, you guessed right.

Before the Archive Tried to Forget Him

Historically speaking, before Swann ever threw a ball, enslaved people on the plantation had already drafted the blueprint, and they called it the cakewalk. They would put on their finest and parody the stiff, grandiose mannerisms of the people who owned them.. the promenade, the bow, the exaggerated elegance of the big house. Here is the part that takes the cake, literally: the enslavers thought they were being flattered. They watched Black people satirize them to their face, mistook the mockery for admiration, and awarded a cake to the best performers. That is the popular origin of the phrase “takes the cake,” and brother, that takes the cake. Brooke Baldwin’s scholarship lays out the double-edge of it. The cakewalk was stereotype and subversion in the same breath, a thing the white elite consumed as entertainment while the performers wielded it as a weapon. Two things can be true. The master saw a minstrel; the ancestor saw a mirror.

Saidiya Hartman calls this the entanglement of pleasure and subjection, the way the enslaved were made to perform contentment, made to dance, made to simulate consent to their own captivity for an audience. Apply Hartman here, because the cakewalk is exactly that coerced scene flipped into something else. Our ancestors took the one territory they were ever granted, the space of the spectacle, and they smuggled critique inside the choreography. The cultural competency went clean over the enslaver’s head. That is the foundation of Black drag: reclaiming power through the body when the body is the only territory you have left.

E. Patrick Johnson argues that Blackness itself is a performance that it is constantly scripted, surveilled, and policed. Apply Johnson here and the whole moral panic collapses on contact: drag is not a deviation from Blackness, it is a profound expression of it. It is the place where queerness and Blackness and a whole grammar of cultural aesthetics come together and refuse to be separated. Johnson’s work shows us that Black quare performance is not separate from Black history. It is Black history. The cakewalk, Swann’s drags, Harlem’s voguing, the ballroom houses that still walk tonight: these are not footnotes to the Black freedom struggle. They are chapters. Our culture embodies that, no pun intended.

Ahh, but the state always understood this too, and the state responded the way the state responds with violence. Here I need you to hold two analytics at once, because that’s the only way the picture resolves. On one hand, Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism: the white elite looked at the cakewalk, looked at the ball, looked at voguing, and asked the only question capital ever asks — how do we commodify this? On the other hand, Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism: the gratuitous violence that rendered the Black body fungible under slavery, a thing to be moved and used and disciplined, never actually retired. It just changed uniforms. Two roles, one body… the Black quare body is simultaneously the source America strip-mines for its culture and the threat America insists on policing. Crazy how that works.

Roderick Ferguson gives us the mechanism. In his queer of color critique, Ferguson shows how the state has always treated Black gender nonconformity as an aberration to be managed, a deviance to be manufactured and then punished. Apply Ferguson here: the criminalization is not an accident, not an overreach, not a few bad apples in a few red states. It is a feature. It is load-bearing. The pattern is consistent and it is old: any time the Black body moves freely, the state moves to put it back in captivity. From the slave codes to the drag bans, the choreography of control never changes, only the statute number does.

The Implication for Education

The Hidden Curriculum They Ban Before You Can Teach It

Every society runs two curricula. There is the explicit one the standards, the textbooks, the things on the test and there is the hidden curriculum, the one Philip Jackson named back in 1968: the lessons a child absorbs about who belongs, whose body is normal, whose history is safe to know. When a state bans a drag story hour, it’s not protecting children from a threat the evidence don’t support. It’s teaching the hidden curriculum. It’s teaching every child in earshot that gender nonconformity is obscene, that the Black quare body is dangerous, and that some histories are contraband.

Watch the projection, because every accusation is a confession. They tell you a man reading a picture book in a sequined gown is sexualizing your kid. If you can look at a drag queen reading Click, Clack, Moo and the first place your mind travels is sex, I believe the call is coming from inside the house. A drag show is not inherently sexually explicit. One has to inscribe sexuality onto their body and the inscription says more about the inscriber than about the performer. What is actually being criminalized is not sex. It is gender nonconformity, the same nonconformity Swann was jailed for when they charged him with “keeping a disorderly house” and sentenced him to ten months. The same alleged nonconformity that Trump is celebrated for by MAGA. They had no law for who William Dorsey Swann was, so they invented a charge. That is the move. That has always been the move.

Here is the part that should keep every educator up at night. These bans do not travel alone. They ride in the same legislative convoy as the book bans, the anti-CRT bills, the gutting of DEI, and the dismantling of the very public-education infrastructure that might have taught a kid who William Dorsey Swann was in the first place. Whitey on the moon: we will spend the political capital to criminalize a library story hour, but we will not spend it to fund the library. We will pass a law about a performer’s prosthetics, but we will not pass a lunch. The state is not confused about its priorities. Racial and cultural literacy — the skill of reading a cakewalk and seeing the satire, of reading a ball and seeing the freedom — is precisely the competency being defunded, because a population that can read the satire is a population that is harder to govern. Apply Ferguson one more time: they are not banning a performance. They are banning a literacy.

Let me get concrete, because theory that never touches the ground is just vibes, and we do research over MeSearch around here. When a state criminalizes drag, the bill does not get distributed evenly. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us intersectionality precisely so we would stop pretending it does. The penalty lands hardest at the intersections — and in this case the intersection has a name and a face: the Black and brown trans woman. The ACLU said it plainly in the Texas litigation, that SB 12’s steep criminal and civil penalties would harm Black and Latinx transgender Texans the most. That is not a side effect. Under racial capitalism, that is the design. The invoice is itemized by race and gender, and it always has been.

Run the numbers like a load-bearing claim. A covered performance in Texas is now a Class A misdemeanor — up to a year in a cage and a fine — and the venue that hosts it eats a ten-thousand-dollar penalty. Now do the two-roles math. The same Black quare performer whose aesthetic gets strip-mined for the mainstream — the vogue in the pop video, the ballroom slang in the brand campaign, the “yas queen” the corporation tweets every June — is the one staring down the misdemeanor in that very same June. Hartman calls the Black body fungible: the culture is endlessly transferable, infinitely consumable, while the person who made it is endlessly disposable prosper. Misogynoir, the term Moya Bailey gave us, names the specific contempt aimed at Black women and, here, at Black trans women — the population GLAAD’s data shows absorbing the threats and the violence, more than 160 documented incidents against drag in a single year. That is the material residue of a “values” debate. Bodies.

Economically, the chilling effect does the work the statute can’t always finish. You don’t have to convict a single performer to empty a stage. You just have to make the cost of being seen unpayable… the lost bookings, the canceled Pride, the venue that decides the liability isn’t worth it, the small Black-owned business that cannot absorb a ten-thousand-dollar gamble. This is racial capitalism running its oldest play: it took the cakewalk and sold the cake, it took voguing and sold the Madonna single, and now it takes the very existence of the Black quare body and turns it into a fine. The culture moves freely through the market. The body that births it does not. That contradiction celebrated and criminalized in the same breath, in the same month is not a paradox. It is the system telling on itself.

The Raid Never Ended, It Just Got a Docket Number

People keep asking me where the law actually stands, so let me give you the receipts, because the picture moves fast and most of the coverage is a year stale. For a minute, the courts looked like they were holding the line. In September 2023 a federal judge in Texas a Reagan appointee, no less struck down SB 12 on five independent constitutional grounds, calling it an unconstitutional restriction on speech that would sweep up everything from The Nutcracker to a high-school Shakespeare play. Judges in Tennessee, Florida, Montana, and Utah said versions of the same thing. iMa bE honest with you: for a season it felt like the First Amendment was going to do its job.

Then came the quieter, more dangerous move the one that never makes headlines because it never argues the merits. In July 2024, the Sixth Circuit did not defend the Tennessee Adult Entertainment Act on its constitutionality; it simply ruled that the LGBTQ theater troupe that sued lacked standing, that they couldn’t prove they’d be prosecuted, and threw the whole case out. The Supreme Court declined to touch it in 2025. So the first anti-drag law in the country is back in effect across most of Tennessee, having never once been called constitutional it just outlived its challengers on a technicality. Then in November 2025, the Fifth Circuit ran the same play on Texas, vacating the injunction and sending SB 12 back down; by February 2026 it had reaffirmed that ruling, and the law took effect. Today, a covered “sexually oriented” performance in Texas can cost a performer a Class A misdemeanor and a venue ten thousand dollars.

This is the part I need you to understand structurally. The state learned it does not have to win the argument about whether your body is obscene. It just has to make you wait, make you spend, make you prove you are hurt before it has finished hurting you, and let the procedure do what the Constitution wouldn’t. Apply Ferguson a final time: criminalization adapts. Swann got charged with “keeping a disorderly house” because there was no statute for his existence. A century and a half later, they have upgraded from a euphemism to a misdemeanor, from a vice charge to a standing doctrine but the function is identical. The raid never ended. It just got a docket number.

The Oldest American Freedom Story There Is

So when they tell you drag is some new corruption, some 2020s contagion, hand them the archive. Hand them a formerly enslaved man in 1888 who fought the police rather than run, who petitioned the President of the United States for a pardon decades before there was a movement to have his back. The first drag queen in America was a man who had been somebody’s property, who lived in a country that wanted him dead, and who decided to be fabulous anyway. That is not decadence. That is the oldest American freedom story there is.

And here is the close, because this is what the whole panic accidentally reveals. When the state criminalizes the cakewalk, when it raids the ball, when it bans the story hour, when it turns a sequined gown into a misdemeanor. This is not exposing some danger in the Black quare body, its exposing itself. By performing this much fear of a man in a dress reading to children, it confesses what it was the whole time. Swann understood that in 1888. We are just citing it now.

Roderick Ferguson’s Queer of Color Critique, he shows how the state regulation on Black gender nonconformity is very unique as aberrations to control, as always already being something they can perverse and they can make deviant . The pattern is consistent. Black performance of freedom meets state violence. Anytime we see the Black body moving freely, we have to make sure we control that and put it in captivity. From plantation laws to bans today, since 2023, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, Kentucky, Montana have all introduced or passed an anti drag legislation . Currently in Texas, a drag performance can get you up to a year in jail and fine. Today ain’t just glitter or whatever you think it is. It is a lineage of resistance from slavery, through cakewalk, to Swann, to every ballroom and stage I see today and want to attack and pathologize, just like Madison did.

See, Johnson reminds us that performance remakes Blackness and Ferguson teaches us that criminalization is no accident that it is actually a key feature within this system that always already fears Black freedom . Think about it. The first drag queen was an enslaved man who dared to be fabulous in a world that wanted him dead. Education is elevation and happy pride.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Drag is not new — it’s foundational. William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Maryland in 1860, was the first American to call himself the “Queen of Drag,” hosting balls in 1880s–90s D.C. that predate Stonewall by roughly eighty years.

2. Black performance was always a weapon. From the cakewalk’s satire of the enslaver to Swann’s drags to Harlem voguing, the Black body has been used as a tool of resistance — not a deviation from Black history, but, as E. Patrick Johnson argues, Black history itself.

3. The criminalization is a feature, not a bug. Roderick Ferguson’s queer of color critique shows the state has always produced Black gender nonconformity as an “aberration” to be policed. The raid in 1888 and the drag ban in 2026 run the same program.

4. The law is moving backward on a technicality. District courts struck down the Texas and Tennessee bans as unconstitutional — but the Fifth and Sixth Circuits revived them (2024–2026) on standing and procedural grounds, without ever ruling the laws constitutional.

5. The bill is itemized by race and gender. Under racial capitalism, the penalties land hardest on Black and brown trans women — the same population whose culture is strip-mined for the mainstream and then criminalized in the same breath.

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Cited Sources & Related Reading

Johnson, E. Patrick and Mae G. Henderson, editors. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Duke University Press, 2005.

Somerville, Siobhan B. Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Duke University Press, 2000.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. NYU Press, 2005.

Manning, Susan. Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion. University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

DeFrantz, Thomas F., editor. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Currie, Netisha. “William Dorsey Swann, the Queen of Drag.” Rediscovering Black History, National Archives, 29 June 2020.

Joseph, Channing Gerard. House of Swann: Where Slaves Became Queens and Changed the World. Crown, forthcoming.

Cohen, Cathy J. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Johnson, E. Patrick. “’Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001).

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.

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

Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Bailey, Marlon M. Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit. University of Michigan Press, 2013.

Baldwin, Brooke. “The Cakewalk: A Study in Stereotype and Reality.” Journal of Social History 15, no. 2 (1981).

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

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

Bacon, sausage, ham, and hot dogs — the World Health Organization, the most authoritative health body on the planet, classifies all of them in the same cancer group as cigarettes, and that ain’t no fringe study buried in a corner of the internet, that’s the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s own arm, telling y’all back in 2015 that processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen, sitting in the same evidence category as tobacco and asbestos. Now let me sprinkle context, because Research over MeSearch, and the science has to be clean: that Group 1 label is a statement about how SURE the evidence is that something causes cancer, not a claim that one hot dog hits your body exactly like a Marlboro. Two things can be true. The certainty is real, and the industry has spent decades making sure you never sit with that certainty long enough to change what’s in your cart.

Then comes the part they REALLY ain’t trying to tell you, because the problem starts before the meat is ever processed. American pork producers use beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine to make pigs grow faster and leaner, and those drugs are banned in more than 160 countries — not restricted, banned — by the European Union, by China, by Russia, places that will not let American pork cross the border with that chemistry still in the animal. People in the back, sit with that. You got animals raised on drugs the rest of the world won’t even allow, getting processed into products the WHO says cause cancer, and that whole chain don’t end in some abstract “marketplace.” It runs straight through communities that look like mine.

Before the Label, There Was the Lagoon

Before any of this showed up as a sticker in your grocery store, it showed up as a lagoon behind somebody’s house. Let me take you to eastern North Carolina, the second-biggest hog state in the country behind Iowa, where roughly nine million hogs live in about twenty-three hundred industrial swine operations that generate something like ten billion gallons of liquid waste a year, most of it stored in around thirty-three hundred open-air pits the industry politely calls “lagoons,” where the feces and the urine sit and ferment until the company sprays it across the fields as fertilizer, and the mist drifts onto the porches, the clotheslines, the schoolyards, and the lungs of the people who live downwind. Crazy how the people downwind keep being the same people.

That ain’t a feeling, that’s a finding. A 2014 study out of UNC by the epidemiologist Steve Wing and his colleague Jill Johnston mapped these operations and concluded that the proportion of people of color living within three miles of an industrial hog operation was more than one and a half times higher than the proportion of white folks, with Black communities and especially American Indian communities carrying more than twice the burden in some measures. Bullard told us this would happen. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert Bullard — a Houston man, a Texan like me — showed all the way back in 1990 that the question of where the waste goes is never random, it tracks the color line as faithfully as a deed restriction, and when the industry says siting is just about “cheap rural land,” that claim of neutrality IS the position. The view from nowhere is a position. Cheap land is just a polite map of who the country decided it could afford to poison.

Gilmore gives us the sharpest word for what that does to a body. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, and once you have that frame, the health record around these operations stops reading like a coincidence and starts reading like a policy: researchers have documented elevated rates of anemia, kidney disease, infant deaths, and septicemia in the surrounding communities, and Wing himself documented the headaches, the coughing, the nausea, the respiratory distress among the neighbors before he died of cancer in 2016, before the trials even started. A lagoon of hog waste behind a Black grandmother’s house is not a smell. It’s a vulnerability, manufactured and maintained.

And those neighbors fought. In 2014, an eighty-year-old Black woman named Joyce McKiver became the lead plaintiff in McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, one of more than two dozen federal nuisance suits brought by over five hundred plaintiffs, the majority of them Black, against Murphy-Brown, the hog-production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods — which is itself owned by the Chinese conglomerate WH Group. Across five trials in 2018 and 2019, juries awarded thirty-six plaintiffs almost $550 million. Then North Carolina’s punitive-damages cap shrank that to roughly $98 million. Read the choreography again: the people won in front of juries, and the LAW reached in to make the win smaller.

They were warned, too. Folks built waste pits in a floodplain, and when Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999, the lagoons breached and turned whole rural communities into seas of dead hogs and toxic slurry. So the legislature did what legislatures do for the people who fund them: Right to Farm laws now exist in all fifty states, and North Carolina passed HB 467 — carried by a longtime farmer-legislator who took hog-industry money — to gut the very nuisance suits the neighbors were winning. Here’s the part that should stop you cold. Defending the industry, that same legislator told people to close their eyes and imagine how ham and sausage smell, and called the residents’ complaints exaggerations and outright lies. Read that back slow. The man waved bacon in your face to dismiss the people choking on its byproduct. Every accusation is a confession. This is the historical context that label will never carry.

Sneaky, Sneaky: How Big Pork Redraws the Map

So now you understand the stakes, watch the move. When voters in California passed Proposition 12 in 2018 — nearly 63 percent of them, more than seven and a half million people — and Massachusetts passed Question 3 back in 2016 with two and a half million votes, all they were saying, at minimum, is that a breeding pig should have enough room to turn around and lie down before it ends up on your plate. That’s the floor. That’s the whole radical demand. The National Pork Producers Council sued anyway, dragged it all the way to the Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross in 2023, and LOST — a conservative court upheld Prop 12 and rejected their main claim. That should have been the end of it. That means the industry’s legal argument is wrong, on the merits, by their own preferred referees.

When they couldn’t win in court and couldn’t win at the ballot box, they went to Congress. The thing they used to call the EATS Act got a new costume and a friendlier name — the “Save Our Bacon Act” — introduced in 2025 and then buried as Section 12006 inside the 2026 farm bill, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, which the House passed 224 to 200 at the end of April 2026. The Pork Council celebrated that the bill gave them one hundred percent of their policy requests. One hundred percent. And the provision doesn’t just touch Prop 12; an analysis out of Harvard Law found it threatens hundreds of state and local laws, including disease-prevention and public-health rules. As of this summer the Senate draft left the language out because it can’t find sixty votes — but it’s up for negotiation, which means the fight ain’t over, it’s just moved rooms.

Now here’s the contradiction I want to let hang in the air. These are the same people who built whole careers on states’ rights, right up until seven and a half million Californians USED states’ rights to regulate a pig crate. States’ rights when it’s a book ban or a bathroom; sudden, urgent federal supremacy when voters protect an animal, a worker, or a watershed. What they SAY is “protect interstate commerce.” What the position structurally DOES is hand a trade group that lost in court and lost at the ballot box a federal eraser for any democratic decision it finds inconvenient. The principle was never the principle. The principle was the profit. And the name is the tell — it ain’t saving your bacon, it’s saving the industry from having to answer to you.

This also proves something bigger about where the money actually goes. The same farm-bill politics that hands concentrated operations bigger checks is the politics that comes for SNAP and food assistance with a knife. Gil Scott-Heron gave us the structure for this kind of receipt, so let me borrow the frame, not his lines:

A child got asthma from the spray field — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.

Grandma’s well ran foul from the lagoon — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.

Food assistance got cut by the billions — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag.

That’s not a budget. That’s a value statement with a dollar sign attached.

Humane Washing Is a Finesse

When they can’t kill the regulation, they trick you with the marketing. The group Farm Forward gave the practice a name — “humane washing” — and on my mama, I know a finesse when I see it. Humane washing is when companies sell animal products to conscientious consumers using deceptive packaging and labeling that manufactures the illusion of good welfare, and the labels doing the heavy lifting — “cage-free,” “humanely raised,” “natural” — are far from neutral, far from sloppy accidents of regulation. They are engineered.

Here’s where the scholarship sharpens it. Farr and Mills both teach us that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge that nobody got around to filling in; ignorance gets PRODUCED, manufactured, and actively maintained because somebody benefits from your not-knowing. Mills calls one version of it white ignorance — a way of not-seeing that does real work for power. A label like “natural,” which means almost nothing legally, is a perfect little engine of manufactured ignorance: it exists to let a caring shopper feel resolved at the shelf so they’ll stop asking the next question — about the drug, the lagoon, the worker, the vote. The sticker isn’t there to inform your conscience. It’s there to retire it.

And when documentation threatens the finesse, the industry reaches for the law again. Ag-gag statutes criminalize the act of going undercover to film what happens inside these operations — the state literally outlawing the lesson, criminalizing the camera. Just admit what that confesses. You do not make it illegal to record something you’re proud of. Brother Malcolm’s words, the ones Spike Lee put in Denzel’s mouth, fit too clean here: you been hoodwinked, you been bamboozled, led astray. The meat industry manufactured these terms to trick us, the same way every system of extraction manufactures a comfortable story for the people it’s extracting from, and then pisses on us and tells us it’s raining.

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The Hidden Curriculum of the Meat Aisle

Freire taught us the difference between a banking education — where knowledge gets deposited into you and you’re expected to accept the balance — and a problem-posing education, where you learn to read the word and the world together. Most of us were handed the banking version of the grocery store: deposit the label, accept it, push the cart, move on. The hidden curriculum of the meat aisle — the thing it teaches without ever printing it — is that some lives are inputs and some communities are sacrifice zones, and you will never read THAT on the package. The package is designed to graduate you ignorant.

This is why ag-gag laws and book bans rhyme. The same political machinery that criminalizes the camera at the CAFO is the machinery that pulls the lesson on Tulsa or Rosewood out of a classroom: in both cases, somebody made a curriculum decision that the public must not be allowed to learn how the harm actually works. Different aisle, same store. And the antidote is the same skill I teach with the debate frameworks — trace the chain. The label is the link. The lobbying is the internal link. The lagoon is the impact. Teach a person to follow link to internal link to impact, at the grocery store or in the farm bill, and you have given them a literacy no sticker can survive. The grocery aisle is one of the most honest civics classrooms we’ve got, IF somebody’s willing to teach the syllabus they tried to bury. That’s the whole thesis.

Who Lives Downwind: The Material Receipts

Crenshaw built intersectionality precisely so we’d stop running single-axis analysis that loses the people standing where the harms cross, and the Combahee River Collective grounded Black feminist politics in material conditions, not slogans — so let’s do the material. Who lives downwind, specifically? Start with Black women’s bodies, because that’s where the receipts land first. The infant deaths and the birth-weight problems documented near these operations are not abstract “community health” — they are reproductive harm written onto Black women, and then the unpaid second shift of caretaking a child with asthma lands on those same women, the ones who already can’t hang the laundry, can’t crack the window, can’t let the grandkids play in the yard. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir is the machinery that makes that suffering simultaneously hyper-exposed and unheard.

It is not an accident that the lead plaintiff against the world’s largest hog producer was an eighty-year-old Black woman. Black women have always been the frontline litigators and organizers of environmental justice — the very tradition Ella Baker built, the foot-soldier, group-centered leadership the coastal left keeps forgetting was Southern first. Read disability justice in too: those courtrooms had plaintiffs on portable oxygen, because respiratory disease is the body keeping score of the air. And read the labor line, because the harm doesn’t stop at the fence. The kill floor and the packing plant are staffed disproportionately by Black, Latino, and immigrant workers, sped up to dangerous line speeds, and the COVID outbreaks that tore through those plants happened because the workers were treated as fungible — interchangeable, replaceable, disposable, exactly the condition Spillers and the Afropessimists name when they talk about the captive body. Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the white immigrant on the line a century ago; the Black and brown worker on today’s kill floor is still waiting on his muckraker.

Then widen the lens. Karen Washington reframed the “food desert” — which sounds natural, like weather — as food APARTHEID, which names it as designed, and the cruel symmetry is that the same processed meat the WHO flagged gets marketed hardest in the very neighborhoods stripped of full grocery stores. Williams-Forson reminds us not to pathologize the foodways that scarcity and survival created; the problem was never the people’s plates, it was the political economy that engineered the plate. And you cannot read this land honestly without reading Black and Indigenous analysis together: Native communities in eastern North Carolina carry more than double the proximity burden in places, and Wolfe’s point that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, lands here — the same logic that took the territory now poisons what’s left of it. Davis would tell you the plantation, the prison, and the factory farm share an architecture of confinement and extraction. Don’t let a “humanely raised” sticker distract you from the material body count.

Trace the Link. Ask Where the Smoke Is.

So loop it back. The WHO put the product in the cancer column, the industry buried the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ended up behind a Black grandmother’s house — and the “humanely raised” label exists to keep those three facts from ever shaking hands in your mind. When you reach for that sticker so you can stop thinking, understand that the reach itself makes the whole machine visible; it shows you EXACTLY where the comfort gets manufactured. So don’t stop at the sticker. Trace the link to the internal link to the impact. And ask the question the marketing was built to suppress: where is the smoke for the kid in Duplin County with asthma from the spray field, the way there’s smoke for a stolen catalytic converter? Whose harm gets a headline tells you whose harm the country decided counts.

This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the people downwind have been telling the truth the entire time, the science is peer-reviewed, the verdicts are on the docket, the lobbying disclosures are public record, and the votes were counted twice before anybody went crying to Congress. The receipts were always there. Somebody just has to teach the syllabus. Education is elevation.

5 Key Takeaways

* The Group 1 label is about certainty, not equivalence. Processed meat’s 2015 WHO/IARC classification means the evidence that it causes cancer is strong — the same evidence tier as tobacco — not that a hot dog equals a cigarette in risk. The industry profits from you never learning that distinction.

* The harm starts upstream and runs along the color line. U.S. pork is commonly raised with ractopamine, a growth drug banned or restricted in 160-plus countries; the product the rest of the world rejects gets routed into American — and disproportionately Black, Latino, and Native — communities.

* CAFO siting is a map, not a coincidence. UNC research shows people of color are far more likely to live within three miles of an industrial hog operation, and the lagoon-and-sprayfield system has a paper trail of documented illness and a $550 million jury record (McKiver v. Murphy-Brown) that a state damages cap then slashed.

* “Save Our Bacon” is the EATS Act in a new costume. After losing at the Supreme Court (NPPC v. Ross, 2023) and at the ballot box (Prop 12, Question 3), Big Pork went to Congress to nullify voter-passed laws — federal preemption dressed up as states’ rights.

* Humane washing is manufactured ignorance. “Natural,” “cage-free,” and “humanely raised” are engineered to resolve your conscience, not inform it — and ag-gag laws criminalize the documentation that would teach you otherwise.

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When the World Health Organization flags the product, the industry buries the fix in a farm bill, and the lagoon ends up behind a Black grandmother’s house, somebody has to do the unglamorous work of tracing the link to the internal link to the impact — and putting it in plain language y’all can actually use. That tracing is exactly what Education Is Elevation exists to do, and it’s the very work that “humane washing,” ag-gag laws, and corporate-funded silence are built to keep you from ever seeing.

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

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Related Readings

Name the scholar, paraphrase the move, put it to work. Research over MeSearch.

* Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition — racial capitalism as the foundation, not the aberration; the engine, not the glitch.

* Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag — racism as the production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death; the lens for reading CAFO health data.

* Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality — the founding text of environmental justice; where the waste goes is never neutral.

* Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste and Medical Apartheid — environmental racism and the long medical record of treating Black bodies as expendable.

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins” — intersectionality; why single-axis analysis loses the people standing where the harms cross.

* The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” — politics rooted in material conditions, not symbolism.

* Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed — the specific machinery aimed at Black women, hyper-exposed and unheard at once.

* Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” — flesh, captivity, and fungibility, for reading the kill-floor worker.

* Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection — the afterlife of slavery and the long present tense of dispossession.

* Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Freedom Is a Constant Struggle — the shared architecture of confinement and extraction across plantation, prison, and farm.

* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed — banking vs. problem-posing education; reading the word and the world.

* Charles W. Mills, “White Ignorance,” with Arnold Farr on the epistemology of ignorance — ignorance as produced and maintained, not merely absent.

* Monica M. White, Freedom Farmers — Black agrarian resistance, Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm, and the praxis answer to despair.

* Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs — Black women, food, and meaning; don’t pathologize the plate scarcity built.

* Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” — invasion as structure; land as accumulation.

* Steve Wing & Jill Johnston (2014), peer-reviewed work on CAFO proximity and race in North Carolina — the empirical map under the moral argument.

* Farm Forward, reporting on “humane washing” — the field guide to the label finesse.

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On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read what we now call General Order No. 3. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas were told they were free. That is the part the country likes to keep. Here is the part it tends to drop: the same order instructed the newly freed to remain where they were and negotiate wages with the very men who had held them. Freedom, in the same breath, was routed straight back onto the plantation — into sharecropping, into the Black Codes, into Jim Crow.

I grew up in Bryan, Texas, about two hours up the road from where this began. When you read the local archive, you can watch enslavers in those counties work to hide the news — hide the war, hide the Proclamation — because an informed free person is a person who can leave. So when I celebrate Juneteenth, I celebrate it the way my people celebrated it: as jubilee. But I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale. The honest word for what happened that day is free-ish.

“Granger told the freedpeople to go back to the plantation and negotiate some wages. That is the day we celebrate. So I celebrate it as jubilee — and I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale.”

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The Emancipation Proclamation Was Foundational. It Was Also Nearly Toothless.

In K–12 we are handed a clean story: Lincoln signs a paper, slavery ends, the good guys win. The Emancipation Proclamation deserves its place in history, but the mechanics matter. It applied only to states in open rebellion — places taking no orders from Washington. The loyal slaveholding border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) were untouched; people there remained enslaved. Liberation did not arrive as a switch flipped in 1863. It arrived unevenly, locally, and late — and in Texas, it arrived in 1865 wrapped in an order to get back to work.

This is why the structural detail is not pedantry. If you teach Juneteenth honestly, you have to teach that the document everyone celebrates left whole categories of people in bondage, and that the “end” of slavery was a negotiation, a compromise, and a delay. That is the difference between history and mythology.

Preserve the Statues, Erase the Slavery: The Conservative Contradiction

There is a contradiction sitting in plain sight. The same political project that, a few years ago, fought to keep Confederate monuments standing — you cannot change history, they said, you cannot erase the past — is now, under this administration, ordering references to slavery scrubbed from historical markers, national parks, and museums. The slogan was never really about history. It was about which history.

I taught ninth- and tenth-grade English in Oklahoma when the state moved to criminalize “critical race theory” — a graduate-level legal framework that was not being taught in K–12 anywhere in this country. But once you build policy around a boogeyman, the policy does the work the boogeyman cannot. Teaching the plain timeline of the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth became suspect, because an honest timeline raises an honest question: how is it that the same law used to free us is the same law that was used to re-enslave and to kill us?

Hold that question against Reconstruction. We are taught that treason is the highest crime against the country. Yet Confederate soldiers and generals — men who took up arms against the United States — were welcomed back, their leaders never made to answer for it. The same governments that extended that mercy to traitors wrote laws to criminalize Black people for not having a job, not having a pass, not having a place to be — the vagrancy statutes that fed the convict-leasing machine. Amnesty for the people who tried to break the country; criminalization for the people the country had just freed.

History Does Not Move in a Straight Line

Americans are trained to imagine progress as one long upward arc: slavery, then the Civil War, then a little rough patch, then Dr. King, then voting rights, then everything is fine. It has never moved like that. It moves in ebbs and flows, advance and backlash, and the backlash is not an accident — it is the response progress provokes.

Reconstruction sent Black men to Congress; Mississippi sent the nation its first Black U.S. senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, in 1870. A generation later, a Black person in Mississippi could be lynched for going near a ballot box. One hundred years after those Union troops reached Galveston, the country passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court took an axe to Section 2 of that Act — the dissent warned it leaves the provision all but dead — clearing the way for state after state across the South to redraw maps that erase majority-Black and majority-minority districts. The Callais standard even tells courts to give less weight to historical discrimination and demand proof of present-day intent. They are legislating the very forgetting we are here to refuse.

“Everything Black people have gained, we gained in spite of democracy, not because of it. Every right that is supposed to be God-given, we had to spill blood for.”

“All Fascism Matters”: On Selective Outrage

I want to be careful and precise here, because I am talking about policy, not personalities. The tools this administration is using — banning books, criminalizing ideologies, attaching penalties to words like equity, diversity, inclusion, and woke — are democratic tools, mastered and turned against the vulnerable. Calling them undemocratic is comforting and incomplete. They are operating the machine exactly as it was built to be operated.

Which is why I cannot let my white liberal and leftist friends off the hook. Fascism cannot only matter to you when the administration changes hands. There were people exercising their First Amendment rights — students getting their heads beaten in, protesters criminalized for how they assembled — under the previous administration too, and a lot of folks stayed quiet because the man in the White House had the right letter next to his name. You do not get to pick and choose when fascism counts, any more than you get to pick and choose when Black lives matter. Pastor Niemöller already wrote the ending to that story: first they came, and there was no one left.

Look at this week. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen people with conspiracy to impede federal officers — community members who acted as legal observers, documenting ICE during last winter’s Operation Metro Surge. City council members called it political repression. Meanwhile, the federal agents who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti during that same operation have not been charged for those killings. Observing is now a felony. Killing remains a matter under review. That is the priority structure, stated plainly.

The Insatiable Appetite for Black Death Is Bipartisan

If you want literacy in how Black people are positioned in this country, you need a structural analysis — otherwise you will keep reading every killing as an isolated tragedy instead of a pattern. So let me lay it down. Police violence is not a partisan brand. George Floyd was killed in a blue city in a blue state. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down in a red city in a red state. There has always been a bipartisan solidarity around Black suffering, going back to the Compromise of 1877, when ending Reconstruction — pulling the federal troops out of the South — was the deal both sides could live with. The currency of that compromise was Black death.

Huey P. Newton defined power as the ability to define a phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. The phenomenon here is Black life — defined, again and again, as expendable, and made to behave accordingly. Democrats do not own the fight against it. Republicans do not own the production of it. It runs underneath the partisanship.

Black Children Are Never Allowed to Be Children

Adultification is the engine I keep coming back to, because the numbers are obscene: the overwhelming majority of children charged as adults in this country are Black children and children of color. We are denied childhood and held to adult standards before we can read. Watch how it operates across three cases unfolding right now.

In Senatobia, Mississippi, this past Sunday, police responding to an alleged shoplifting call fired into a car in a Walmart parking lot and killed Kohen Wiley, one year old, critically wounding a family friend. His mother has not been charged with any crime; her attorney says she was trying to tell officers her baby was in the car. Family members say they were buying diapers. Authorities say the vehicle drove toward an officer. Whatever the investigation concludes, hold this fixed: even if every accusation against the adults were true, shoplifting is not a capital offense, and a one-year-old cannot commit a crime.

Now set two other cases side by side. In Texas, Karmelo Anthony, seventeen at the time, was tried as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to thirty-five years in the death of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet. In South Carolina, a store owner, Rick Chow, chased fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than 130 yards and shot him in the back over a suspicion about four bottles of water — and a jury found him not guilty, accepting that he feared for his life. The same public sentiment that wants a Black teenager held to the absolute ceiling of the law extends a Black child’s killer the absolute floor. “Fear for my life” acquits the man with the gun; it never seems to cover the child running away from one.

And notice the cover story for so much of this machinery: protecting children. Anti-LGBTQ and anti-trans bills, drag bans, book bans, the criminalization of Black culture — all of it marched out in the name of protecting children. Page through Project 2025 and count how many times that phrase appears. Then ask how a politics so obsessed with protecting children rationalizes the killing of a one-year-old. That is what I mean by conservative contradictions.

The Second Amendment Was Never Written for Us

Here is the ugliest part of the gun conversation, and it is not only conservatives who are caught in it. “Shoot first, ask questions later” is normalized in this country — but not for everybody. When some people heard that a teenager in South Carolina may have had a firearm, that was enough to justify shooting him in the back as he fled. Plenty of self-described left-leaning folks said the same thing: well, he allegedly had a gun. If that is your reflex, you are part of the problem too.

In open-carry states — South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana — carrying a firearm is legal. “Come and take it.” But the mere presence, even the rumor, of a gun in a Black person’s hand has always functioned as a license to kill, while the same hardware in other hands is celebrated as liberty. That is why the press has to keep saying unarmed, unarmed, unarmed — as if being legally armed should have been a death sentence. The Second Amendment, like the rest of the founding documents, was written with a very specific set of people in mind, and we were the exception, not the beneficiaries.

From Plantation to Prison: Sugar Land and the Long Chain

Trace the chain forward from Juneteenth and you arrive at the prison. In Sugar Land, Texas — now marketed as a comfortable suburb — a plantation became a prison, and a few years ago construction crews unearthed a mass grave of African American remains, the people we now call the Sugar Land 95. They were victims of the convict-leasing system: the machine that re-criminalized the same Black people who had just celebrated freedom, then worked them in the cane and the marshes until disease or exhaustion killed them, at which point the state simply criminalized a new Black body to replace them. The dead ranged from children to old men.

That is not ancient history with no address. It has a corporate name on it, named founders, and a named graveyard — which is exactly why “that was too long ago” does not hold. And it did not end as a relic: my home state of Texas leads the nation in incarceration. The plantation, the sharecrop, the lease, the cell — it is one continuous economy, and Juneteenth sits at the seam between its chapters.

“If you think what we’re living through is unprecedented, dig deeper into the archive. It is monumental. It is not new.”

Free in Spite of Democracy

So when people tell me to protect democracy, to defend democracy, I ask them not to do the same thing this administration does to history — sand off the edges and call it a love story. Everything Black people have endured, we endured under democracy. The right to drink from the same fountain, to use the same bathroom, to read the same book, to receive the same diploma — supposedly God-given rights — we had to spill blood for every one of them, inside this democratic framework, not outside it. We are free in spite of democracy, not because of it.

I will end on the hardest metaphor I know, and I offer it as a content warning before I say it. Think about how we talk about the domestic-violence survivor who keeps believing the abuser will change — after years and years of documented harm. I am not going to pretend that dynamic is not gendered; it is. I would argue that is the relationship many people in the democratic West have with democracy itself: a cognitive dissonance, a placebo, a faith that the thing that keeps hurting you will, this time, become the thing it promised to be. I am not asking you to abandon the fight. I am asking you to stop romanticizing the abuser. Sit with the real, ugly, transparent history — and then decide what you are actually willing to give up to change it.

What gives me hope is people coming into consciousness — no pun intended. Native Americans did not secure the vote until the 1920s; rights in this country have always been late, partial, and contested. If you believe this moment is monumental, you are right. If you believe it is new, you have more reading to do. The archive is right there. Education is elevation — and that is not a motto, it is the assignment.

Five Key Facts

The takeaways to carry out of this conversation.

* Juneteenth marks a delayed, conditional freedom. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3 (Galveston, June 19, 1865) freed Texas’s enslaved people two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation — and instructed them to remain and work for wages, channeling emancipation into sharecropping and the Black Codes.

* The Emancipation Proclamation left people enslaved. It applied only to states in rebellion. The loyal border states — Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri — kept slavery legal, making the document foundational but, on its own, nearly toothless.

* Voting rights are backsliding in real time. In Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, prompting Southern states to redraw maps that eliminate majority-Black and majority-minority districts — a Reconstruction-to-Jim-Crow pattern repeating.

* Black children are adultified by the justice system. The vast majority of children charged as adults are Black children and children of color. The contrast is stark: one-year-old Kohen Wiley killed by police in Senatobia, MS; 17-year-old Karmelo Anthony tried as an adult and given 35 years in Texas; while the man who shot 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton in the back in South Carolina was acquitted.

* The repression is bipartisan and built on democratic tools. George Floyd (blue state) and Ahmaud Arbery (red state); 15 Minneapolis legal observers federally charged while the agents who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not. Black gains came in spite of democracy, not because of it — and the convict-leasing chain (the Sugar Land 95) runs straight into Texas leading the nation in incarceration today.

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WORKS CITED AND RELATED READINGS

Voting Rights / Louisiana v. Callais

* Supreme Court opinion, Louisiana v. Callais, 608 U.S. ___ (decided Apr. 29, 2026). https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-109_21o3.pdf

* Congressional Research Service, “High Court Narrows Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais.” https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB11431

* Brennan Center for Justice, case analysis of Louisiana v. Callais (6–3, Alito). https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/louisiana-v-callais

* NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Louisiana v. Callais case page. https://www.naacpldf.org/case-issue/louisiana-v-callais/

Kohen Wiley (Senatobia, MS)

* Mississippi Free Press, officer shooting of 1-year-old Kohen Wiley, June 14, 2026. https://www.mississippifreepress.org/mississippi-police-officer-shoots-and-kills-1-year-old-child-in-response-to-senatobia-shoplifting-call/

* NBC News, Mississippi 1-year-old killed during Walmart shoplifting response. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mississippi-1-year-old-dies-walmart-shoplifting-police-incident-rcna350260

* ABC News, officer placed on administrative leave in Kohen Wiley shooting. https://abcnews.com/US/officer-involved-shooting-walmart-killed-1-year-boy/story?id=133965022

* Mississippi Today, tear gas used on protesters after toddler’s death. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/06/16/1-year-old-killed-law-enforcement/

Karmelo Anthony / Austin Metcalf (Frisco, TX)

* CBS News Texas, Karmelo Anthony found guilty of murder (June 9, 2026). https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/karmelo-anthony-trial-verdict-austin-metcalf-frisco-track-meet-stabbing/

* NBC News, Karmelo Anthony sentenced to 35 years; charged as adult at 17. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/karmelo-anthony-found-guilty-murder-texas-high-school-stabbing-rcna349132

Cyrus Carmack-Belton / Rick Chow (Columbia, SC)

* Associated Press via ABC7, store owner found not guilty in killing of Black teen. https://abc7chicago.com/post/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-murder-killing-black-teen/19218916/

* Prism / Times Free Press, acquittal of Chikei Rick Chow; chase of 130+ yards over water bottles. https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2026/jun/03/south-carolina-jury-finds-store-owner-not-guilty-of-murder-in-killing-of-black-teen/

Minneapolis Legal Observers / Operation Metro Surge

* Sahan Journal, 15 ICE observers face federal charges (June 16, 2026). https://sahanjournal.com/public-safety/minnesota-ice-observers-face-federal-charges/

* Newsweek, DOJ charges and the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. https://www.newsweek.com/dhs-antifa-cells-minnesota-ice-doj-charges-minneapolis-12079686

* NBC News, DOJ charges 15 over Operation Metro Surge. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-charges-15-minneapolis-protesters-metro-surge-immigration-rcna350335

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The Most Honest Acre in America

The lawn looks like nothing. That’s the point. A flat green silence out front, mowed to the same height as the neighbor’s, asking for nothing, saying nothing. But the landscape in this country is shaped by colonialism, and the yard is where it’s hiding in plain sight. A lawn is an argument — a small, watered manifesto about land, labor, race, and who this country was built to hold. Let’s read it.

Start with the thing nobody says out loud: the grass is not from here, and it is not innocent. The carpet of Poa pratensis — Kentucky bluegrass — that anchors most American lawns is native to Europe and the cooler reaches of Asia. It rode over in the 1600s in the holds and feed of colonists and their livestock, naturalized fast, and only later got rebranded with a homegrown name (NASA Earth Observatory; sod-industry historical record). Across the prairie and grassland West it is now classified as one of the most invasive plants on the continent — it crowds out the deep-rooted native perennials that held those ecosystems together for millennia. Bermuda grass, the Southern default, is African. The fescues are European. The American lawn is, almost in its entirety, a transplanted ecology laid down on top of a continent that was emptied to receive it.

I. An Invasive Species Is the Whole Story in Miniature

That is not trivia-night material. It is the argument at ground level. The historian Alfred Crosby called this ecological imperialism: European conquest of the temperate world was never only guns, germs, and steel — it was a biological invasion. Settlers traveled with a portmanteau biota, the grasses, weeds, livestock, and pathogens that remade conquered land until it looked and functioned like home. The land had to be made legible to the colonizer before it could be made profitable to him. Turfgrass is part of that portmanteau. The lawn isn’t the backdrop to settlement. It is settlement, growing.

As the cultivation-narrative scholarship lays out, those imported grasses first took hold as feed for colonial livestock — but they did a second, quieter kind of work. A grassy, ordered field functioned as a physical marker, a piece of testimony that “civilized” use of the land had arrived. The mown green drew the boundary: this side colonizer, that side native peoples and the Indigenous ecologies the colonizer intended to displace. Even where the grass could not directly drive expansion the way cattle and the plow did, it normalized the alteration — it announced that the land was now permitted to be remade. Put it next to Patrick Wolfe’s formula that settler colonialism runs on a logic of elimination and is a structure, not an event, and the front yard reveals itself as one of the quietest expressions of that structure we have. The violence is finished and ongoing at once. That is what a structure is.

II. They Decided the Land Was Inferior, Too

Here is the part that should sit in your chest. The colonial project did not only decide that the people here were beneath them. It decided the land was beneath them.

“Understand how evil you gotta be to not only believe the people are inferior and beneath you, but also believe the land itself is inferior and beneath you — and that you gotta bring your own in.”

They were so lost in the sauce that everything indigenous to this place — the people and the ground they stood on — read to them as deficient. So they imported a replacement. The grass is the receipt. You don’t haul a European meadow across an ocean because you respect the prairie that’s already there; you do it because you have judged the prairie unworthy and decided to overwrite it. The manicured carpet of grass was a symbol of colonial possession — proof of conquest you could stand on in your slippers.

There was a whole legal theology underwriting that contempt. John Locke, in the Second Treatise, made property flow from labor: the “industrious and rational” improver earns title, and land left “waste” is land going to ruin for want of improvement. The Puritans had vacuum domicilium — John Winthrop’s reasoning that land the natives hadn’t “subdued” in the European manner was legally vacant and free for the taking. The Crown had the broader terra nullius: nobody’s land, so anybody’s. Read those doctrines closely and the lawn is already inside them. The “improved” landscape — ordered, mown, visibly worked — was the proof of ownership. The “unimproved” landscape was the proof of vacancy, and vacancy was the license to dispossess. Indigenous land-management — controlled burns, polyculture, the cultivation of “wild” abundance — didn’t register as improvement because it didn’t look like an English estate. The aesthetic was the legal argument. And it still is: the “overgrown,” “unkempt” yard is treated as a moral failing and a fineable offense to this day. The colonist’s eye survives in the municipal weed ordinance.

III. But Don’t Blame the Grass

One thing has to be said clearly, because the rigor is the whole point. When we call the grass “invasive,” there’s a trap right next to the truth, and we step around it on purpose.

The trap is making the plant the villain. Some Indigenous scholars — see the Anishinaabe framework of an “invasive land ethic” in the journal Sustainability Science — push back on the popular move that treats introduced species as settler-occupiers and their eradication as “decolonization.” Their point is sharper than the binary: the grass is the passenger, not the driver. Plants are opportunistic; they go where a disrupted landscape lets them. What disrupted the landscape was colonialism — the land ethic, not the seed. Blaming the bluegrass is its own kind of being lost in the sauce: it lets the actual structure off the hook and slides toward the ugly place where native-versus-alien talk starts sounding like the rhetoric fascists used (German and Italian landscape movements in the 1930s literally weaponized “native plants” and “purity” to talk about people). We are not doing that.

So hold both: the grass is non-native and it does real ecological damage where it crowds out native systems — and the indictment is of the colonial relation to land that brought it, normalized it, and keeps it on life support. The villain is never the messenger. It’s the regime that sent the message.

IV. The Dream Had a Deed Restriction

Now the thing people actually mean when they invoke the lawn: the American Dream. The single-family house, the white picket fence, the dog, the green out front. That picture isn’t ancient. It was designed, marketed, and — the part that gets sanded off — racially engineered.

The open, unfenced front lawn that reads as quintessentially American was a 19th-century invention. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, Illinois (1869) with mandatory setbacks and continuous green frontage. Frank J. Scott, in 1870, told the rising suburban middle class that hedging your yard from your neighbor’s view was practically un-Christian — the lawn was to be a shared civic offering, a commons stitched out of private parcels. Sold as democratic. Sold as community.

But the commons it built had a color line written into the deed. When the lawn went mass-market — Levittown, the assembly-line Dream — it came with two kinds of fine print. The maintenance covenant: Levitt & Sons contractually required residents to mow on schedule and banned fences, so the uniform sweep would hold. And the racial covenant: Levittown’s standard lease and deed barred occupancy by anyone not of the “Caucasian race.” The grass had to be the same height and the people had to be the same color, written into the same document. Underneath sat the federal machinery — FHA and GI Bill financing routed by redlined appraisal maps toward white families and away from Black ones. Black veterans with the same benefits on paper were locked out of the neighborhoods where those benefits paid off. The lawn was the visible surface of a wealth-transfer machine: home equity that compounded for the families allowed onto the grass, denied to the families kept off it. When we talk about the racial wealth gap now, we are partly talking about who got a front yard in 1950. (This is the throughline straight out of the Levittown / residential segregation pack — the lawn is where that history is still standing.)

V. The Lawn as Private Government

The covenant didn’t die when courts made the racial clause unenforceable — it mutated into the homeowners’ association, a private government most Americans don’t recognize as a government. It taxes (dues), legislates (covenants), polices (compliance officers), and punishes (fines, liens, even foreclosure) — disproportionately aimed at the yard. Grass too tall, wrong species, a vegetable garden where turf should be: people have been fined, sued, and in this country even arrested over the state of their lawns. “Property values” is the stated reason, but property value is itself a coded system — the market’s memory of who and what was supposed to be where. The weed ordinance is where the old logic of “improvement” and the newer racial-property regime fuse into a single enforceable rule about grass height.

VI. The Largest Crop That Feeds No One

Now the ecology presents its bill. Using satellite data, NASA researcher Cristina Milesi estimated turfgrass covers roughly 163,000 square kilometers of the continental U.S. — about the size of Texas, on the order of three times the acreage of irrigated corn. By that measure the lawn is the single largest irrigated “crop” in the country. It yields no food, no fiber, no fuel. Its only product is the appearance of order.

What it drinks to make that appearance is staggering. The EPA puts landscape irrigation at nearly one-third of all residential water use — nearly 9 billion gallons a day nationwide — with as much as half lost outright to wind, evaporation, and runoff. The numbers are clear: it is unsustainable to keep a monoculture turfgrass alive at continental scale, and we defend it hardest in the arid West, exactly where it least belongs. Ecologically the lawn is a desert — a monoculture is a biodiversity dead zone that feeds almost none of the pollinators and soil life a varied native ground cover would. We’ve turned a Texas-sized stretch of the continent into a green that is, biologically, close to empty.

Then the chemicals — and the genealogy here rhymes with everything above. One of the most common broadleaf herbicides in American weed-and-feed is 2,4-D, one of the two active ingredients in Agent Orange. Both 2,4-D and its partner 2,4,5-T were developed as herbicidal weapons in classified military research at Fort Detrick during WWII before being used to defoliate Vietnam (National Pesticide Information Center; U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs). The notorious dioxin toxicity tracked mainly to the 2,4,5-T component, and 2,4-D is not Agent Orange — that distinction matters and the honest version keeps it. But the lineage is real and not a metaphor: the chemical in the suburban garage descends directly from a chemical-warfare program. We took a tool built to strip the life off a landscape, scaled it down, dyed the bag friendly colors, and sold it as the path to a perfect yard.

VII. The Double Whammy: From the Lawn to the Data Center

Here is where the past stops being the past. When we talk about data centers, we’re dealing with a double whammy of coloniality, and the lawn is step one.

Step one was teaching the land to be thirsty for something it was never meant to grow — normalizing a water-guzzling invasive monoculture as the default American landscape, billions of gallons a day, no questions asked. Once a society accepts that it is normal to pour scarce water into an ornamental import, the harder ask gets easier. Step two arrives in our moment: the hyperscale data center, siting itself in already water-stressed regions and drinking enormous volumes for cooling, often in the same Sunbelt and Western communities that are already rationing during drought. Same move, new century — impose an alien, resource-devouring system on the land, brand it progress, and push the cost onto the people and ecologies least able to refuse. The grass and the server farm are run by the same logic: extraction dressed as improvement. (Pull this thread all the way back to the data centers / environmental justice pack — it’s the coloniality of infrastructure, and it never left.)

VIII. Who Cuts the Grass

And the labor — because racial capitalism, in Cedric Robinson’s sense, is the frame that holds all of this together. Robinson’s argument is that capitalism didn’t develop and then pick up racism by accident; it developed as racial capitalism, with racial hierarchy as a load-bearing part of how value is extracted. The lawn is a near-perfect specimen. The aesthetic of leisure — the green that signals you’ve arrived, that you have time and money for the purely ornamental — is overwhelmingly produced by the labor of people who are not at leisure, racially marked and politically precarious. The landscaping workforce leans heavily on Latino and immigrant labor, much of it low-wage, a meaningful share of it undocumented and therefore stripped of bargaining power. The same political order that polices the border manufactures the cheap, deportable labor that keeps the suburban yard immaculate. The lawn produces the image of one group’s ease out of the extracted hours of another group’s exhaustion. That isn’t a flaw in the system. That is the system, doing exactly what Robinson said it does.

The Whole Chain Is Still Standing

Put the pieces in a line and the lawn stops being innocent for good:

* the invasive grass (off the colonial ships, on land cleared of Indigenous people and Indigenous ecologies);

* the double contempt (a colonial mind that judged the people and the land beneath it, and brought its own in);

* the doctrine of improvement (Locke, vacuum domicilium, terra nullius — the ordered green as proof of ownership and alibi for dispossession);

* the racially engineered Dream (Olmsted’s open lawn, Levitt’s twin covenants, FHA redlining turning grass into compounding white equity);

* the private government (the HOA and the weed ordinance, enforcing conformity for capital);

* the ecological sacrifice (the largest irrigated non-crop in America, watered through droughts and dosed with the descendants of chemical weapons);

* the double whammy (the same extractive logic now siting data centers in the communities the lawns already left thirsty);

* the extracted labor (the racialized, deportable workforce producing the picture of someone else’s leisure).

Anybody who wants to wave this off reaches for the same move: that was a long time ago. But there is no “long time ago” here, because the chain is unbroken. The grass is still imported. The improvement logic is still in the code. The equity built behind the covenant is still in the family that inherited it and missing from the family that didn’t. The HOA is still writing letters. The mower is still burning gas. The data center is still drinking the aquifer. The crew is still in the truck at 7 a.m. The lawn is not a relic of these systems — it is the place where every one of them is still operating, in the open, out front, mowed to a respectable height so you won’t look twice.

This is the colonization and capitalism they keep trying to convince us benefited the whole world. I beg to differ. That is why it’s the most honest acre in America — everything this country would rather not say about itself is buried right there in the yard, and it is growing.

5 Key Takeaways

* The grass is colonial. Kentucky bluegrass is a Eurasian import, invasive in native prairie. Crosby called it ecological imperialism — the lawn isn’t the backdrop to settlement, it is settlement, growing.

* They judged the land inferior — not just the people. The colonial mind held both in contempt and imported a replacement landscape. The lawn is the receipt, and “improvement” doctrine (Locke, vacuum domicilium, terra nullius) was the legal alibi for dispossession.

* The Dream was racially engineered. Levittown’s deed required you to mow and barred anyone not “Caucasian” — same document. FHA redlining routed the lawn-and-equity to white families. The racial wealth gap starts at the front yard.

* It’s the largest irrigated crop that feeds no one. Roughly Texas-sized, ~9 billion gallons of water a day (EPA), a biodiversity dead zone — dosed with herbicides (2,4-D) descended from WWII chemical-weapons research.

* The chain is unbroken. The same extractive logic now drives data centers drinking the same scarce water, while precarious racialized labor maintains the picture of someone else’s leisure (racial capitalism). “Too long ago” is nonviable — it’s all still operating, out front.

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Sources & Further Reading

Settler colonialism & ecological imperialism: Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900; Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” (2006); Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” (2012); Paul Robbins, Lawn People.

The “invasive” framing — and its critique: envirobites and The Re-enchantment on Kentucky bluegrass as one of the most invasive grasses in North America; on the cautionary side, the Anishinaabe “invasive land ethic” (Sustainability Science, 2018) and critiques warning that native-vs-alien rhetoric can echo nativist discourse.

Property, improvement, dispossession: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government; the colonial doctrines of vacuum domicilium and terra nullius.

Racial geography of the suburb: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law; Frank J. Scott, The Art of Beautifying Suburban Home Grounds (1870); on Levittown’s maintenance and racial covenants.

Ecology, water & inputs: Cristina Milesi et al. (NASA Earth Observatory / Environmental Management) on turfgrass as the largest irrigated crop; U.S. EPA WaterSense on landscape irrigation (~9 billion gallons/day); National Pesticide Information Center and U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs on 2,4-D, 2,4,5-T, and Agent Orange.

Histories of the lawn & racial capitalism: Ted Steinberg, American Green; Virginia Scott Jenkins, The Lawn; Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism.

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Yesterday I was standing in front of AT&T headquarters in Dallas, 10,000 signatures in my hand, asking one company to reinstate the very initiatives that once gave my community inclusivity, resources, access, and opportunity. I need y’all to sit with the geography of that for a second, because this is the same building, the same brand, the same gold-and-blue letterhead that less than five years ago looked Black America dead in the eye during the summer of 2020 and said we see you, we hear you, we’re committing $10 million to you. Then it folded. The receipt is public: on July 30, 2020, AT&T announced an additional $10 million to create economic opportunity in Black and underserved communities, stacked on top of a claimed $215 million over the prior five years, and the press releases were warm, the language was tender, the photo ops were plentiful. Crazy how the same company that wanted all that political capital in 2020 is now writing letters to the federal government bragging that it does not and will not have a single role focused on DEI. Two things can be true: the 2020 statement was real ink on real paper, and it was always temporary, always performative, always a lease the community was never going to be allowed to renew.

The Receipts: $10 Million Then, a Letter to Carr Now

Here’s the part the press release won’t tell you. In November 2024 AT&T agreed to buy roughly a billion dollars in wireless spectrum licenses from U.S. Cellular — a $1.02 billion deal that cannot close without the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission — and the FCC under this administration has made the terms of that blessing crystal clear: end your DEI, in substance and not just in name, and we’ll talk about your spectrum. So in December 2025 AT&T’s general counsel sent a letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr memorializing exactly that, no roles focused on DEI, no diversity training, merit and merit alone. For the folks in the back: that is not a change of heart, that is a transaction. AT&T did not discover a new moral principle; it discovered a billion-dollar incentive.

Let me correct the record before somebody clips this and runs with it — AT&T was not even the first telecom to fold. Verizon ended its DEI program in May 2025 to clear a $20 billion fiber deal; T-Mobile folded in July 2025 to clear its own mergers; AT&T came in December, last in line, which somehow makes it worse, because AT&T watched the price of admission, counted the cost, and paid it anyway.

Now AT&T says the new standard is “merit-based,” and I want us to name what that word is doing, because claimed neutrality is never neutral; it is a position wearing a lab coat. Apply Charles Mills here: Mills taught us that the social contract was always a racial contract, that the supposedly neutral, colorblind rules were authored by and for a specific group while presenting themselves as the view from nowhere. When a company that built its diversity numbers through decades of deliberate effort suddenly announces that merit will now sort everything fairly, it is not removing a thumb from the scale; it is pretending the scale was never tilted, that the field was always level, that history started this morning. Two roles: what AT&T says is “we treat everyone the same.” What the position structurally does is freeze in place every advantage the old, openly discriminatory system already distributed. This means the merit story is wrong on its own terms, because there is no merit measured outside of history.

Who Decides Your Internet?

So who is holding the dial? His name is Brendan Carr — not Brandon, Brendan, get it right for the citation — and he is not a neutral referee who wandered into this job. Carr wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for this presidency, and then he was handed the chairmanship of the exact agency he wrote the chapter about. As a former English teacher I have to give the author credit for his work: you wrote the assignment, you got the grade, you got the desk. Carr’s FCC has opened investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, and NPR, has threatened broadcast licenses, and oversees the telecom giants — AT&T among them — that route your call, your data, your access. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, was written precisely to stop this kind of concentrated control over the arteries of American commerce and communication, and somewhere John Sherman is rolling over in his grave, because the agency built to keep the wire fair is now being used to decide whose speech the wire will carry.

And here is the tell. You don’t have to take my word, or some outside critic’s word, that the FCC is being weaponized — the warning came from inside the agency itself. In May 2026, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, sent a letter to Disney’s CEO describing what the company was facing not as a string of coincidences but as a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.” Like that judge told my cousin at sentencing — we have to acknowledge the accessory. The call came from inside the house, y’all. Here’s the quick timing for the receipts: after the White House made its displeasure with Jimmy Kimmel loud, Carr’s FCC moved on ABC’s licenses within a day, and the Brookings Institution, no radical outfit, called this not deregulation but heavy-handed regulation, an agency expanding its reach to punish content it dislikes.

Then watch what he did with Disney’s DEI. Carr opened a probe in March 2025 even though Disney had already walked back its diversity programs the month before — ended “Reimagine Tomorrow,” renamed the metrics, shortened the content advisories — and Carr admitted in writing that he’d seen the rollback and pressed anyway. That is the boot coming down on a neck that had already gone limp. Every accusation is a confession: an administration that screams “censorship” is running the most documented censorship campaign against the American press in modern memory.

Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room while we’re here. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being played on American soil right now, and it is nothing but diversity, equity, and inclusion in motion — every continent, every language, every shade of human being on one field — and these same institutions will profit off that spectacle of difference all summer while telling the rest of us that diversity is discrimination the moment it shows up as a hiring goal or a community grant. They’ll sell you the jersey; they just won’t share the table. This is where I run the Gil Scott-Heron move, because in “Whitey on the Moon” he set the nation’s lavish spending right next to Black material neglect to expose the lie of priorities, and the same arithmetic applies here: a billion dollars is available for spectrum, and no DEI for you; a quarter-billion was available for warm 2020 statements, and a boot for you in 2025; there is always money for the merger and never money for the people the merger displaces.

From Ma Bell to the Boardroom: Who Has Always Owned the Wire

To understand this moment you have to understand that the question “who decides your internet” is just the newest version of a very old American question: who owns the means of speaking to each other? AT&T is not a young company stumbling into politics; it is the direct descendant of the Bell System, the telephone monopoly so total that the federal government broke it up in 1984, splitting Ma Bell into the regional Baby Bells precisely because one company controlling the nation’s communication was understood as a danger to democracy itself. The Communications Act of 1934 created the FCC and, crucially, established the idea of common carriage — the principle that the company carrying your speech cannot discriminate in what it carries — and for decades the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present controversial issues with some balance, until it was repealed in 1987 and the road opened for exactly the kind of one-sided, weaponized media environment we’re litigating today.

Apply Cedric Robinson here, because in Black Marxism Robinson showed that capitalism did not emerge as a colorblind system that later picked up racism as a bad habit; it was racial from the jump — racial capitalism — meaning the extraction of value has always run on racial hierarchy. The wire was never neutral. The same infrastructure that connected white suburban America was redlined out of Black neighborhoods, the same logic that made Black labor cheap made Black communication optional, and the “digital divide” is not a glitch in the system but the system doing exactly what it was built to do. Saidiya Hartman calls this the afterlife of slavery — the way the racial calculus of bondage keeps reproducing itself in new institutional forms — and the broadband map of America is one of its most precise portraits.

Here is where I hold two frameworks at once, the way I always tell y’all to. From a Black Marxist lens, the 2020 pledges and the 2025 reversals are both rational moves by capital — invest in Black goodwill when it’s profitable, divest when it’s costly — but Frank Wilderson and the Afropessimists push us further, and we have to sit in the discomfort of it: the Black position is structurally fungible, available to be acquired, leveraged, and discarded according to a logic that was never about Black thriving in the first place. The $10 million was never a relationship; it was a line item. Hortense Spillers teaches the distinction between the body and the flesh — the flesh being that which can be marked, moved, and monetized without consent — and a community reduced to a quarterly diversity statistic is being treated as flesh, as a number on a ledger that can be added in a good PR year and erased the moment a billion-dollar deal needs clearing. Afropessimism is descriptive, not a prescription for despair; it is a flashlight, and what it illuminates here is that any promise extended to Black people by an institution structured on antiblackness was always conditional, always revocable, always written in pencil.

The Hidden Curriculum of the Dial Tone

Now let’s bring it to the classroom, because the people who control the wire are quietly writing a lesson plan for every child in this country. During the pandemic AT&T itself announced a separate $10 million commitment to close the “homework gap,” acknowledging in its own press release that the lack of home internet disproportionately hit Black students, students with disabilities, and students in under-resourced neighborhoods — one in three students of color on the wrong side of the divide. Hold that admission next to the retreat. When a telecom giant ends its equity commitments to clear a merger, the bill does not land in the boardroom; it lands in a kid’s bedroom where the wifi doesn’t reach, on a grandmother’s kitchen table where the hotspot ran out, in the gap between the student who can join the class and the student who can only watch it buffer.

Paulo Freire warned us that education is never neutral — it either functions as the practice of freedom or as an instrument of domination — and infrastructure is the most invisible curriculum of all, because it teaches before a single teacher speaks: it teaches some children that the network was built for them and others that they are guests on it, lucky to be let in, easy to be cut off. bell hooks called the classroom the most radical space of possibility, but you cannot enter the radical classroom if you cannot reach it, and access is not a footnote to learning — access is the precondition. The hidden curriculum of the dial tone is a lesson in who counts, and when AT&T folds its equity work, that lesson gets taught in every household on the margins, no syllabus required.

The Ledger Where Black Women Live

Lastly, and this is non-negotiable for me on every single piece I make: who actually pays when DEI dies? Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us intersectionality precisely so we’d stop analyzing race and gender as separate lanes and start seeing the intersection where Black women stand, getting hit from both directions by traffic that single-axis analysis can’t even see. Apply it here. When AT&T dissolves its diversity hiring, its employee resource groups, and its supplier diversity commitments, the person at the sharpest point of that loss is disproportionately a Black woman — the Black woman manager whose pipeline just got quietly capped, the Black-woman-owned vendor whose contract just lost its rationale, the Black woman head of household for whom the digital divide is not abstract because she is the one budgeting whether the data plan or the light bill gets paid this month.

The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everyone would be free, because our freedom would require the destruction of all the systems of oppression at once — and the inverse is the warning: when Black women’s material conditions are the first sacrificed, it signals the whole structure is sliding. Moya Bailey named misogynoir to describe the specific contempt aimed at Black women, and you see its quiet form in a “merit” standard that treats the very people who had to be twice as qualified to get in the door as the suspicious beneficiaries of unfair advantage. Angela Davis reminds us these are not separate fights — labor, race, gender, and the carceral state are one knot — and the supplier-diversity contract canceled in a Dallas boardroom is tied to the homework gap in a child’s bedroom is tied to the spectrum deal in a federal filing. Having the luxury to treat “the end of DEI” as an abstract policy debate is itself a sign of how far you stand from the intersection where the bill actually comes due.

Closing the Loop

So let me close the loop back to where I started, in front of that building in Dallas with 10,000 signatures. The Color of Change petition I helped deliver is not just a petition; it is direct action aimed at telecom policy and at a corporate accountability that is evaporating in real time, that some of us would argue was never really there in the first place. AT&T wants to profit from the history of this country while quietly shaping the rules of your connection, and the question on the table is the one Anna Gomez asked from inside the house and the one I’m asking from outside it: who decides your internet, and who decided you didn’t get a say? The answer they’re betting on is nobody, that we’ll be lost in the sauce, that we’ll accept the $10 million memory and the boot that replaced it. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: we are going to keep the receipts, keep the names spelled right, keep showing up at the headquarters, and keep teaching the history they’re paying to erase. Because liberalism is a hell of a drug, and the cure is an organized, educated, unbought community. Research over MeSearch.

5 Key Takeaways

* The promise was always revocable. AT&T’s 2020 $10M Black-community pledge and its 2025 letter ending DEI aren’t a contradiction — they’re the same logic of racial capitalism: invest when Black goodwill is profitable, divest when it’s costly. We were a line item, not a relationship.

* It was a transaction, not a conversion. AT&T’s reversal is tied to FCC approval of a $1.02B U.S. Cellular spectrum deal; the agency made ending DEI the price of admission. And AT&T was last — after Verizon (May 2025) and T-Mobile (July 2025) — not first.

* The author is grading his own assignment. Brendan Carr wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025 and now chairs the FCC. His own Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, called the pattern a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.” Every accusation is a confession.

* “Merit-based” is not neutral. Following Charles Mills, claimed colorblindness is a position that freezes existing advantage in place — the view from nowhere doing the work the old, openly discriminatory system used to do out loud.

* The bill lands at the intersection. Per Crenshaw and Combahee, the first and sharpest costs of ending DEI fall on Black women — in hiring pipelines, supplier contracts, and the digital divide — and the homework gap in a child’s bedroom is tied to the spectrum deal in a federal filing.

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From the broken-up Bell System to the broadband age, the people who control the wire have always decided whose voice carries and whose gets static — and right now a Project 2025 author is holding the dial. When AT&T can quietly trade a $10 million Black-community pledge for a billion-dollar spectrum deal, the only counterweight left is an independent press that answers to the community and not to the FCC.

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

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Related Readings / Annotated Bibliography

Theory & the Black Radical Tradition

* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The foundational text on racial capitalism — capitalism as racial from its origins, not by accident.

* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Afropessimism (2020). The Black position as structurally fungible and available for gratuitous violence; descriptive, not prescriptive.

* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection (1997) and Lose Your Mother (2007). The “afterlife of slavery” — how the racial calculus of bondage reproduces in new institutional forms.

* Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics (1987). The body/flesh distinction; the captive reduced to that which can be marked and monetized.

* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The “neutral” social contract as a racial contract; the view from nowhere as a position.

Intersectionality, Black Feminism & Education

* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The origin and elaboration of intersectionality.

* The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). “If Black women were free, everyone would be free.”

* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). The specific anti-Black-woman contempt and its digital life.

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class (1981). Labor, race, gender, and the carceral state as a single knot.

* hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994). The classroom as a radical space — if you can reach it.

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Education is never neutral: freedom or domination.

Media, Telecom & the Digital Divide

* Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (2018). The supposedly neutral wire encoding old hierarchies.

* Wu, Tim. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (2010). The recurring cycle of communication monopoly — the Bell System as case study.

* Pickard, Victor. Democracy Without Journalism? (2019). Why an independent, accountable press is structurally necessary, and what its retreat costs.

Primary Documents (verify before citing)

* AT&T press release, “AT&T Committing $10 Million to Economic Opportunity in Black and Underserved Communities” (PRNewswire, July 30, 2020).

* AT&T letter to the FCC committing to end DEI-related policies (Dec. 2, 2025); reporting by Reuters / CNN / Fox Business.

* FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, letter to Disney CEO re: DEI investigation (March 27, 2025).

* FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez, letter to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro (May 11, 2026).

* The Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025), FCC chapter authored by Brendan Carr.

* Brookings Institution, “Not ‘deregulation’ but heavy-handed regulation at the Trump FCC” (Feb. 25, 2025).

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How E. Patrick Johnson took the most celebrated theory of identity in the academy and asked it the one question it kept refusing to answer — whose body are we actually talking about?

“Queer theory already covers all of that — once you accept that gender is performed and sexuality is constructed, race and class fall into place on their own.” That is the most generous version of the argument I want to complicate, and I am stating it honestly before I take it apart, because the people who hold it are not arguing in bad faith; they are working from a framework that genuinely revolutionized how a generation talks about identity, and they have simply mistaken a powerful theory for a complete one. Research over MeSearch: I am not relitigating this from feeling. I am tracing where a body of scholarship went, who it left sitting in the waiting room, and what one performance scholar from western North Carolina decided to do about it.

When I first encountered this material I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, reading Judith Butler and Michel Foucault alongside a much wider field of queer scholars who were, all at once, refusing the premise that our sexual and gendered identities are fixed, stable, or expressive of some inner essence we were born clutching. Queer theory’s most durable contribution is the concept of performativity, the argument advanced most influentially by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not a truth we possess but an effect we produce, brought into being through the repeated citation of acts, gestures, and styles until the performance hardens into something that reads as nature. Apply Butler here. When we tell a man that he is acting like a woman, or tell a straight person that he is acting gay, we confirm Butler’s point inside the grammar of the insult itself, because we are treating gender and sexuality as scripts that can be performed against the body rather than as essences the body simply contains. That is the gift, and I want to name it as a gift, because what follows is a critique with teeth, not a dismissal.

The Critique With Teeth

Here is the load-bearing claim: queer theory’s universalism is a position, not a neutral vantage point, and the view from nowhere is always, on inspection, a view from somewhere. When a theory announces that it speaks for all bodies while quietly modeling itself on one kind of body, it has not transcended particularity; it has universalized a particular and then forgotten it did so. This is the structural problem that quare theory names. Quare theory is a structural critique of queer studies and its tendency to drift toward white normativity — to universalize a white ideology of embodiment, or more precisely, of disembodiment, where the body in question can afford to be abstract because it has never been hunted, priced, or worked to the bone.

The charge is specific. Mainstream queer theory’s universalism too often fails to analyze the particular logics of anti-Blackness, of settler colonialism, of class and race as material conditions rather than discursive flourishes. Apply Crenshaw here: a framework that treats identity one axis at a time will always lose the person standing at the intersection, and the person most reliably lost is the Black, the poor, the Southern, the working subject whose oppression refuses to be sorted into a single tidy category. The Combahee River Collective said it plainly in 1977 — the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and a politics that abstracts away from material life is a politics built for people who have the luxury of abstraction. Having the luxury to treat the body as merely theoretical is itself a sign of which body you have.

Sprinkling Historical Context

See, to really get Quare Theory—and I mean really get it, not just academically cosign it—you gotta understand where Queer Theory came from first. Because history ain’t neutral. And the academy damn sure ain’t neutral.

Queer Theory pops off in the early 1990s. You got Judith Butler dropping Gender Trouble in 1990. You got Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with Epistemology of the Closet also 1990. Michel Foucault’s work—especially The History of Sexuality from 1976—gets resurrected and canonized. And look, I ain’t throwing shade on the contributions. Foucault taught us that sexuality isn’t some natural drive but a historical construct produced through discourse. Butler taught us that gender isn’t an essence but a citation of practice. That’s important work. That’s foundational work. I personally appreciated old Judy’s defining gender performativity when I was in grad school.

But here’s the thing nobody wanna say out loud: that foundation was poured on white middle-class soil.

Let me take you back further. While Foucault was writing in France, Black queer folks in the United States were building entirely different intellectual traditions—they just wasn’t getting PhDs for it. The Combahee River Collective formed in 1974. That’s a group of Black lesbian feminists—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier—who wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement. And in that statement, they said something that Queer Theory wouldn’t catch up to for almost twenty years. They said: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”

Interlocking. Not additive. Not “oh and also race.” Interlocking. That’s intersectionality before Crenshaw named it in 1989. That’s Quare Theory before Johnson wrote it in 2001. But because they were Black women writing from a collective—not a tenured position—the academy treated them as activists, not theorists. You feel me?

Then you got Bayard Rustin. Architect of the 1963 March on Washington. One of the most brilliant strategists of the Civil Rights Movement. Openly gay. And what happened? He got pushed to the background. Erased from the official narratives. A. Philip Randolph had to protect him, but even then, Rustin was told to stay quiet about his sexuality because it would be “used against the movement.” That’s the material cost of queer existence in Black spaces. And mainstream Queer Theory, for all its talk about subversion, didn’t have a framework for that betrayal—because that betrayal involves both anti-Blackness and homophobia and respectability politics. You need an intersectional blade to cut that knot.

Now let me bring it to the 1990s. While Butler and Sedgwick were becoming stars, Black queer scholars were fighting just to be in the room. Cathy J. Cohen wrote The Boundaries of Blackness in 1999—about how AIDS was racialized and classed—and she was critiquing both white queer theory and Black nationalism. Phillip Brian Harper wrote Are We Not Men? in 1996, asking why Black masculinity studies ignored gay men. And E. Patrick Johnson—a gay Black man from Hickory, North Carolina, not New York or San Francisco—he noticed something. He noticed that the queer theory he was reading in his PhD program talked about “the body” all day long. But it rarely talked about bodies. Bodies that are raced. Bodies that are classed. Bodies that are bruised. Bodies that are hungry. Bodies that are from below the Mason-Dixon line, where “acting gay” can get you killed differently than it gets you killed in Chelsea.

So in 2001, Johnson drops “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. And the title itself is a performance. “Quare” is Black Southern vernacular—pronounced like “kwahr” not “kweer”—and it carries multiple meanings. It means strange or odd, like queer. But it also means something more specific in Black Southern speech: quare can mean “pretentious” or “flashy in a way that invites trouble.” It can mean a person who is aggressively different, not just differently desiring. And Johnson says: that’s the difference. Queer theory is about destabilizing categories. Quare theory is about survival within categories of race and class that won’t let you go.

He argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions about mobility—the assumption that you can subvert, that you can perform your way out of constraint. But try performing your way out of a sharecropper’s debt. Try citing your way out of a police stop in Mississippi. The performance doesn’t land the same way. And Johnson offers quare as a performance rooted in the Black Southern vernacular—a direct challenge to queer theory’s erasure of race and class. Because once you get below that Mason-Dixon line, it go a little different down here.

Let me tell you a funny story. I used to be a college policy debater. And when I first came across quare theory—I was talking to somebody from the Midwest, my good sister Toya G.—and I said, “Hey, I came across quare theory.” And she was like, “You gonna be singing?” I was trying to say quare, you feel me? But it was through this Southern vernacular. That right there is good context for where I’m going with this. Even the pronunciation is a political act. The academy wanted to spell it “queer.” Johnson said nah, we spelling it like we say it. That’s epistemological warfare. Finna get in my linguistic bag, man.

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The Implication for Education

Let me be clear though: I’m not advocating for a complete disregard of the scholarship or the academy research around queer theory. I’m giving you a critique with some teeth though. Education is elevation, and I hope this little video was able to sprinkle a little literacy in how we think about different identities, especially when it comes to the intersection of race and sexuality. Shout out to everybody in the academy doing their thing around queer theory and quare theory, making sure you’re accounting for the lived experiences of the people, man.

But here’s the specific implication for education—and I mean K-12, higher ed, community workshops, even your little Instagram classroom.

Problem One: The Add-On Approach

Most gender and sexuality education treats race like a seasoning. You teach the “core” queer theory—Butler, Foucault, performativity—and then maybe, maybe, you add a footnote about Black queer people. A week on “intersectionality” if you’re feeling generous. But that’s not integration. That’s liberal guilt on a syllabus. Johnson’s critique is structural: when you build the entire theoretical framework on white middle-class assumptions, you can’t just sprinkle Black voices on top. You have to rebuild the foundation. Quare theory isn’t queer theory plus race. Quare theory is a different epistemology. It’s a different way of knowing that starts with a grandmother’s mouth, not a Parisian archive.

Problem Two: The Disembodied Classroom

Queer theory taught us that gender and sexuality are performative. Cool. But how do you teach performativity without bodies? Most classrooms—even college classrooms—teach this stuff as text. You read Butler. You discuss. You write a paper. But you never actually perform. You never sit in a circle and ask: what does it feel like when someone says “you acting like a b***h”? What does it feel like when a straight person says “you acting gay”? That’s not abstract. That’s flesh memory. Johnson’s background in performance studies allows him to swap Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance—the actual doing, the actual inflection. Education without embodiment is just white suburbia talking to itself from the Ivy Tower.

Let me give you an example. I teach a workshop sometimes where I ask folks to recall a moment they were told to “act right.” Act like a lady. Act like a man. Don’t act so Black. Don’t act so gay. And the stories that come out—those are not citations of practice. Those are scars. Those are survival strategies. Those are the moments where performativity meets the concrete wall of race and class. You can’t get that from reading a PDF. You have to sit in the discomfort of the body. That’s what Johnson is demanding.

Problem Three: The Whiteness of “Subversion”

Here’s where I get real with you. Queer theory celebrates subversion. It loves the drag ball, the camp performance, the ironic reversal. And look, I love a good ballroom scene too. But subversion is a luxury. Subversion from the safety of a university—from the academy, from the Ivy Tower, from a white suburb, from an urban nightclub—that’s a very specific kind of subversion. It assumes you have somewhere to go back to. It assumes you won’t get evicted, expelled, or excommunicated.

Johnson noticed that the queer theory he was reading always positioned subversion in spaces that are not situated within classed or racialized bodies. That’s a problem for education because it teaches students that subversion is always good, always liberatory. But ask a Black genderqueer teenager in rural Alabama: is it subversive to wear a skirt to school? Or is it deadly? The answer is both, but queer theory doesn’t have a framework for the “deadly” part. Quare theory does. Quare theory holds the contradiction: you can be both subversive and vulnerable. You can be both proud and scared. And education that doesn’t teach that contradiction is lying to young people.

What Actually Needs to Happen

So here’s my specific ask for educators, curriculum designers, and anybody with a whiteboard.

One: Stop teaching Butler without Johnson. If you assign Gender Trouble, you also assign “Quare” Studies. Not as a bonus. Not as a “diversity reading.” As a corrective. Because Butler’s performativity, for all its brilliance, is untethered without Johnson’s flesh.

Two: Teach vernacular as theory. Epistemology is a fancy word for knowledge production: how do you know what you know? And a lot of what Black queer folks know comes from a grandmother’s mouth, from the church, from the beauty shop, from the porch. That knowledge is valid. That knowledge is rigorous. And it’s been marked by this world as ahistorical, as anti-intellectual, as “not real theory.” That’s racism wearing academic clothes. You gotta call it out.

Three: Bring the body back. Don’t just read about performativity—do it. Have students reflect on their own repeated social acts. Have them write about a time they were told they were “acting” outside their identity. Have them sit with the discomfort of being seen. That’s not touchy-feely. That’s rigorous performance studies.

Four: Talk about class explicitly. Queer theory loves gender. It tolerates sexuality. It nods at race. But class? Class is almost invisible. Johnson doesn’t let that slide. He talks about hungry bodies. Bruised bodies. Bodies that work two jobs and still can’t afford the “urban nightclub” where queer theory says subversion happens. You cannot teach queerness without teaching economic precarity. Full stop.

Five: Create assignments that center lived experience, not just citation. Instead of “compare Butler and Foucault,” try: “Describe a moment you performed gender or sexuality differently than you ‘normally’ do. What did it cost you? What did it give you? Now, use Johnson’s quare framework to analyze that moment.” That’s real education. That’s elevation

Everything He Learned From His Grandmother

The founding essay of this critique belongs to E. Patrick Johnson, a performance studies scholar and a gay Black man raised in Hickory, North Carolina, who published it in 2001 in Text and Performance Quarterly under a title that announces its entire method: “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Johnson argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions, and in their place he offers quare — a rearticulation of queer theory grounded in an intersectional framework and rooted in the Black Southern vernacular that directly challenges queer theory’s erasure of race and class. The word itself is the argument. “Quare” is how his grandmother pronounced “queer” in her African American Southern dialect, and Johnson keeps the pronunciation on purpose, because the difference in sound carries a difference in knowledge.

I came to this through my own Southern ear. I was a college policy debater, and when I first mentioned that I had come across “quare” theory to my good sister Toya G, who is from the Midwest, she thought I meant “choir” — she asked if I was about to start singing. The vernacular did the work before the theory could. That small mishearing is, in fact, the whole point: quare is a Southern Black epistemological claim. Epistemology is just the formal word for knowledge production — how you know what you know — and Johnson is insisting that knowledge can come from a grandmother’s mouth, in a vernacular and a rhetoric that the academy routinely marks as ahistorical, apolitical, and unintellectual precisely because it does not arrive in the proper accent. Once you get below the Mason-Dixon line, it goes a little differently down here, and Johnson refuses to apologize for that.

From Performativity to Performance

Let me be clear that I am not advocating for the wholesale disregard of queer scholarship. In graduate school I appreciated Butler’s definition of gender performativity as much as anyone, because queer theory gave us the language and the institutional space to academically doubt the categories we had been handed. The disagreement is not whether the body performs. The disagreement is which body, and at what cost. Johnson’s training in performance studies allows him to make a precise substitution: he trades Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance — the actual doing, the actual inflection, the live event in a real and particular body. Performativity can be discussed from a seminar room. Performance cannot be separated from the flesh doing it.

And the flesh is where queer theory kept flinching. Johnson observes that queer theory loved to talk about “the body” while rarely talking about the bodies that are raced, that are classed, that are bruised, that are hungry. It celebrated subversion, but usually from a position of safety — the university, the ivory tower, the white suburb, the curated nightclub — almost never from inside the class-marked and racialized body that pays the actual price for transgression. Apply Spillers here: her distinction between the body and the flesh, the flesh being that which is seized and marked before any liberal grammar of personhood arrives, tells you exactly what abstraction conveniently forgets. This is why Johnson advances quare as a “theory in the flesh,” a term he borrows from Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa’s This Bridge Called My Back (1981), where theory is the politic that gets born out of necessity when skin color, the ground you grew up on, and desire all fuse into a single lived reality you cannot think your way out of.

The Ask

So return to the opening claim — that queer theory already covers race and class, that abstraction takes care of the rest. By insisting on quare, by keeping his grandmother’s pronunciation and refusing to launder the Southern Black voice into a more respectable register, Johnson makes the whiteness of the original universalism visible, and once it is visible it stops being a neutral default and becomes one position among others that must answer for itself. That is the move, and it converts a critique into an obligation. Two things can be true: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at the same time. The work, for everyone still doing this in the academy and outside of it, is to hold gender and sexuality together with race and class and region and the material weight of the body, to center the lived outcomes of Black queer people over the symbolic comfort of saying everyone is included, and to credit the grandmother as a theorist. Make sure your analysis can account for the bruised and the hungry, or admit that it was never universal to begin with. Education is elevation. Happy Pride.

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

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5 Key Takeaways

* Queer theory’s central contribution is performativity — Butler’s argument that gender is produced through the repetition of acts, not possessed as an inner essence.

* Quare theory, founded by E. Patrick Johnson in 2001, is a structural critique: queer theory’s universalism quietly models a white, disembodied subject and fails to analyze anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and class as material conditions.

* “Quare” preserves the Black Southern vernacular pronunciation of “queer” as a deliberate epistemological claim — knowledge legitimately comes from a grandmother’s mouth, not only the seminar room.

* Johnson’s performance studies training lets him trade Butler’s abstract performativity for embodied performance and a “theory in the flesh” borrowed from Moraga and Anzaldúa, returning the analysis to bodies that are raced, classed, bruised, and hungry.

* This is a critique with teeth, not a rejection: queer theory can be indispensable and incomplete at once, and the work is to hold gender and sexuality together with race, class, and region while centering Black queer material outcomes.

Annotated Bibliography

Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother.” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001): 1–25. The founding essay. Proposes quare studies as a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory that can hold racialized sexual knowledge, treating race and class as material rather than merely discursive. Defines quare as a “theory in the flesh” and channels Barbara Smith’s call to account for race. This is the load-bearing source for the entire piece.

Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. The anthology that institutionalized Black queer studies as a field and reprinted the quare essay (pp. 124–157). Use it to show this was not a one-off provocation but the opening of a sustained intellectual tradition.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. The source of gender performativity — gender as a stylized repetition of acts with no stable doer behind the deed. Operationalize it as the gift quare theory builds on and critiques, not the enemy.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Establishes sexuality as discursively produced through relations of power and knowledge rather than as a natural given. Background for queer theory’s anti-essentialism; cite to mark what the field inherited before quare reworked it.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981. Origin of “theory in the flesh” — a politic born of necessity when skin, land, and desire fuse into lived reality. Johnson borrows the phrase directly; cite to show the women-of-color feminist lineage queer theory often skips.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299. Intersectionality. Deploy it to explain why single-axis frameworks lose the subject standing at the crossing of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

The Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. Names the major systems of oppression as interlocking and roots politics in material conditions. Use to ground the claim that abstraction is a luxury distributed unequally.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. The body/flesh distinction — flesh as that which is seized and marked before liberal personhood arrives. Operationalize to specify what “theory in the flesh” is actually pointing at.

Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1979. In Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984. There is no liberation in isolation; community is the condition of freedom. Use to support quare theory’s insistence that the individual academic subversion is insufficient.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: New York University Press, 2021. The framework of misogynoir — the specific anti-Black misogyny aimed at Black women. Keep it in the toolkit so the intersectional analysis names gender within Blackness rather than treating Blackness as ungendered.

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When I was in college, sitting in a philosophy class before I had the vocabulary of Mills and Wilderson and Hartman to lay over it, I learned the one lesson that has organized everything I have studied since, which is that the law in this country has always been good at two specific things, justifying Black death and criminalizing Black resistance, and kinfolks, this week the country handed us the syllabus and dared us to read it out loud.

Think about the collective mourning happening for Black folks right now, because we are still processing a not-guilty verdict for the man who chased and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, and before we could catch our breath we had to sit and watch a guilty verdict come down on Karmelo Anthony. Two children. One week. Two verdicts that, laid side by side, tell you precisely how this country has priced our lives since emancipation. None of us was surprised. That right there, the not being surprised, is the whole essay, because surprise is a luxury that belongs to the people the law was built to protect, and we have never been those people.

Receipts First: What Actually Happened

Let me keep the facts clean and separate from my read of them, because in this house we never blur a record with a framing. On June 1, 2026, a jury in Columbia, South Carolina found Chikei “Rick” Chow not guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, a 14-year-old boy Chow chased more than a hundred yards and shot in the back over a false accusation about water bottles the child had already put down.

On June 9, 2026, a jury in Collin County, Texas found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for the stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet in April 2025, when both boys were 17, and that same jury sentenced him to 35 years, rejected his self-defense claim, rejected sudden passion, and sent him to a cell where he will not be eligible for parole until he has served nearly two decades.

Lawyers on both sides of the Anthony trial told the jury this case had nothing to do with race. Hold that sentence. We are going to come back to it, because claimed neutrality is never the absence of a position, it is a position wearing a lab coat, and Mills already named it for us as the view from nowhere that always somehow ends up standing exactly where power is standing.

“The Only Good Negro Is a Dead Negro”: The Law Was Built This Way

Before we talk about a single juror, we have to talk about the architecture, because the law did not wake up biased one Tuesday in Texas, it was poured into this mold on purpose. After emancipation, when the formal property claim on Black flesh was struck from the books, this country did not decide we were free so much as it decided we were dangerous, and it wrote that conclusion into the Black Codes, into vagrancy laws that criminalized Black movement itself, into convict leasing that turned the prison into the new plantation under the cover of the Thirteenth Amendment’s one loophole.

Read Cruikshank in 1876 and watch the Supreme Court tell the survivors of the Colfax Massacre that the Constitution had no protection to offer them. Apply Mills here, because the racial contract he describes is not a metaphor, it is a working agreement about who counts as a full person before the bench, and it has never been formally repealed, only renegotiated in quieter language.

When that old voice says the only good negro is a dead negro, it is not describing a fringe opinion, it is describing the default setting of a legal order that has always been more fluent in our death than in our defense. Apply Hartman here too, because she taught us that the spectacle of Black suffering was never incidental to American law, it was its theater and its ritual, and the lynching postcard and the courtroom selfie are cousins closer than this country wants to admit.

They Were Children: The Adultification Engine

Here is what gets lost in the sauce every single time. Karmelo Anthony was 17. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14. These were children, and the machinery that turns Black children into adult threats in the eyes of the law has a name and a research record, so let me give it to you.

Apply Goff here, whose 2014 work showed that Black boys as young as ten are seen as older, less innocent, and more culpable than white boys the same age, that the presumption of childhood, that soft protective assumption that a kid is just a kid, gets revoked the second the kid is Black. Apply the Georgetown research, Epstein and Blake and Gonzalez, who documented the same theft of childhood from Black girls, the assumption that they need less protection and less nurturing and already know more about grown things.

This is the engine. Emmett Till was 14 when this country decided his face was a provocation. The Central Park Five were children when the city and its newspapers and a certain real-estate man taking out full-page ads decided they were a wolf pack. Tamir Rice was 12, with a toy, in an open-carry state, alive for two seconds after the cruiser pulled up. The adultification of Black children is not a vibe, it is a documented perceptual mechanism that does the legal work of making a child’s fear illegible and a child’s death excusable, and you cannot understand either of these verdicts without it.

Self-Defense Is a White Inheritance

Now watch the inconsistency, and watch how it never embarrasses the people performing it. The same political tradition that built a folk hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with a rifle to a protest and walked out a free man with a self-defense ruling, turns around and decides that Karmelo Anthony should never have had a pocketknife in his bag at a track meet on a rainy day.

Apply the two-roles frame here, because what they say is that they believe in the universal right to defend yourself, but what the position structurally does is reserve that right for whiteness and convert that same instinct into evidence of guilt when the body is Black. George Zimmerman followed and killed Trayvon Martin and went home. Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into a wall, hurt no one, and was offered twenty years.

This also proves the point, that self-defense in this country is not a fact about danger, it is an inheritance about race, a credential issued at birth to some and withheld at birth from others. Karmelo Anthony, surrounded, afraid, a child by every legal measure that matters, reached for the only thing that felt like protection, and a jury deliberated barely longer than a lunch break before deciding his fear did not count. His fear did not count because the law has never been built to register Black fear as anything but Black threat. That is the whole machine in one sentence.

“A Jury of His Peers”: The Constitution They Claim to Conserve

How did the eligible jurors who looked like Karmelo get dismissed, and why is nobody who claims to love the Constitution asking? Here is the contradiction, and I am going to name it and let it hang. The same movement that wraps itself in the Constitution, that calls itself conservative, that swears it wants to preserve the founders’ design, spent this week celebrating that a Black child was convicted by a jury with not one of his peers on it.

The Sixth Amendment promise of an impartial jury was so routinely denied to us that the Court had to say it out loud in Strauder v. West Virginia all the way back in 1880, and the dodge was so persistent they had to come back in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986 to tell prosecutors to stop striking jurors for being Black, and here we are, generations later, watching the strike work anyway through a hundred race-neutral pretexts.

Apply the claimed-neutrality move here. When the defense and prosecution both announce that race had nothing to do with it, they are not removing race from the room, they are making whiteness invisible so it can operate without a witness, and by insisting on that invisibility they are, in fact, the ones making whiteness the loudest thing in the building. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and so is the conservatism that only discovers the Constitution when it can be used as a weapon against us, because these folks become fluent in the fine print whenever the defendant is Black and act functionally illiterate the second the defendant is one of their own.

Fungibility: Mourning Interrupted by the Cash Register

Then comes the part that told on everybody. Before Karmelo’s mother could leave that courtroom, before this family had a full hour to sit in the shock of a 35-year sentence handed to their child, there were people online already doing the math on how to take the house, how to convert the conviction into a civil judgment, how to extract the last dollar from a family that had already lost a son to a cage.

Apply Wilderson here, because this is fungibility in real time, the treatment of Black life as an interchangeable resource to be consumed, mourned over by us and monetized by them in the very same news cycle. The grief had not cooled and the cash register was already open.

Now do the Whitey on the Moon move with me, because Gil Scott-Heron gave us the perfect meter for this exact obscenity. A Black child is in a cell (but Whitey’s on the moon). The family raised half a million dollars just to afford a defense the system presumes they cannot have (but Whitey’s on the moon). And the same crowd that called that defense fund a grift is passing the hat to take a grieving family’s home (but Whitey’s on the moon). This is what racial capitalism looks like at the retail level, where, as Robinson taught us, anti-Blackness is not a malfunction of the profit motive, it is the engine of it, the place where surplus has always been wrung out of our flesh and our houses and our grief.

Where Are the Black Women in This?

We do not get to do this analysis and leave Black women standing in the hallway, because that is not how this house works and it is not how the harm works either. Look at who is carrying this. Karmelo’s mother on the stand asking a room full of strangers for mercy for her child. Cyrus’s mother, Nicole Carmack, saying her son bled out on the side of a road while strangers watched and the last face he ever saw was his killer’s.

Apply Combahee here, because they told us in 1977 that the most marginalized position carries the clearest view of the whole system, and it is Black mothers who are made to perform grief in public as a condition of being believed, who are expected to forgive on camera before they are allowed to be angry in private. Apply Moya Bailey here, because misogynoir is the specific machine that makes a Black mother’s pain into either a spectacle or a nuisance, never simply a fact.

The material outcome lands on Black women first and hardest, in the lost wages of court dates, in the cost of caskets and commissary, in the labor of holding a family together while the cameras decide whether your dead or caged child was sympathetic enough to deserve coverage. Center that, or you have not understood the case, you have only narrated the men in it.

What This Means for Our Schools

For the educators and the parents in the back, do not miss where this happened, because Cyrus was accused at a store and Karmelo was at a track meet, which is to say one of these children was killed in the ordinary commerce of childhood and the other will spend his childhood’s end in a prison for something that began at a school athletic event.

The adultification research that explains these verdicts is the same research that explains why Black students are suspended, expelled, restrained, and arrested at rates that have nothing to do with what they actually did and everything to do with how old and how dangerous adult eyes decide they are. Apply Crenshaw here, whose Black Girls Matter work documented how our daughters get pushed out of school and into the system through this exact perceptual pipeline.

The classroom is where the jury pool is raised, kinfolks, and a Texas curriculum that sands the Black Codes and convict leasing and Cruikshank down into a footnote is not neutral, it is producing the next twelve people who will deliberate for two hours and call it justice. Consciousness precedes transformation. A child who is taught the real architecture grows into an adult who can see the strike for what it is, and that is the long game, that is the only game that has ever actually moved us.

Close: We Were Not Surprised, and That Is the Indictment

So bring it back to where we started, to that philosophy class and that one durable lesson, the law is good at justifying Black death and criminalizing Black resistance, and this week proved it twice before most folks finished their coffee. We were not surprised, and our lack of surprise is not cynicism, it is data, it is the receipts of a people who have been reading this country accurately for four hundred years and getting told we are the ones who are paranoid.

Two things can be true at once. A young man lost his life and that is a real loss that deserves real grief, and the system that processed both of these deaths is a system that has never valued Black life and Black childhood at par, and refusing to choose between those truths is the whole discipline.

This ain’t a threat, it is a promise, that we are going to keep naming the architecture until naming it is not radical, just accurate. Do better. Teach the real history. Sit on the jury when they call you. And remember why we do this in the first place, because it has always been Research over MeSearch, and the research has never once been on their side of the story.

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Five Key Takeaways

* Two verdicts, one logic. A store owner walked for chasing and shooting a 14-year-old in the back, while a Black 17-year-old got 35 years for a fear the jury refused to register. Lay them side by side and you can read exactly how the law prices Black childhood.

* Adultification is a documented mechanism, not a feeling. Goff’s research and the Georgetown studies show Black children are stripped of the presumption of innocence and childhood, which is the perceptual engine that makes a Black child’s fear illegible and a Black child’s death excusable.

* Self-defense is a racial inheritance. Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Marissa Alexander prove the right to defend yourself is issued at birth to whiteness and revoked at birth from Blackness. A knife at a track meet was never going to read as protection.

* “Race had nothing to do with it” is the most racial sentence in the room. Claimed neutrality is a position wearing a lab coat (Mills), and an all-white jury convicting a Black child after a roughly two-hour deliberation is the Sixth Amendment’s oldest unkept promise (Strauder, Batson).

* Mourning got interrupted by the cash register. The immediate pivot to civil judgments and “taking the house” is fungibility in real time (Wilderson) and racial capitalism at retail (Robinson). The people raised to do that math were raised in classrooms that taught them none of this history.

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

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

Related Readings (Bibliography)

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York University Press, 2021.

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

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

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

Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda. Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. African American Policy Forum / Columbia Law School, 2015.

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

Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014).

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997.

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

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard University Press, 2010.

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

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

Stevenson, Bryan. Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Spiegel & Grau, 2014.

Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. 1892.

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

Cases: Strauder v. West Virginia, 100 U.S. 303 (1880); United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Batson v. Kentucky, 476 U.S. 79 (1986); Norris v. Alabama, 294 U.S. 587 (1935).

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Opening: Name the Villain

There is a man walking around this country who handpicked the judges deciding whether your grandmama can vote without standing in a four-hour line, whether your daughter controls her own body, whether your kids drink clean water, and whether your nephew gets a fair shot at the university your tax dollars built, and most of y’all could not pick this man out of a lineup. His name is Leonard Leo. Former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, current co-chairman of its board of directors, and the single most consequential unelected man in American law. I almost want to say his name backwards — Leo Leonard — because this man got the whole court moving backwards, and backwards is exactly the direction his investors paid for.

Let me put the receipt on the table before anybody accuses me of feelings. Leo was personally instrumental in placing the last three justices on the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett — and his fingerprints sit on six of the nine seats when you trace the Federalist Society pipeline back through Roberts, Alito, and Thomas’s confirmation defense operations. Then in 2021, a 90-year-old electronics mogul named Barre Seid handed Leo’s brand-new nonprofit, the Marble Freedom Trust, the entirety of his company Tripp Lite, which the trust promptly sold for $1.6 billion — the largest known political donation in American history, structured so slick that Seid dodged as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the way out the door. One political operative. One point six billion dollars. Zero votes cast by you. Feel me?

Some of y’all gonna say, iMa bE “the Supreme Court is too conservative is just your opinion.” Two things can be true. “Too conservative” is an opinion. “Leonard Leo controls a $1.6 billion war chest that he used to handpick and confirm the justices who delivered that conservative supermajority” is a documented, tax-filed, ProPublica-and-New-York-Times-verified fact. Facts don’t cancel feelings, kinfolks — facts sit right next to feelings and tell you your feelings been right the whole time. Public confidence in this Court has cratered to historic lows, hovering around one in five Americans in recent polling, and that ain’t because the people are confused. The people can smell capture.

The Maze: How Dark Money Stays Dark

Leo did not build one organization, because one organization can be tracked, subpoenaed, and shamed. He built a maze. The Judicial Crisis Network ran the attack ads against Merrick Garland and the defense ads for Kavanaugh; in 2020 it rebranded as the Concord Fund. The Judicial Education Project rebranded as the 85 Fund, which also operates under the trade name Honest Elections Project — the same outfit pushing voting restrictions and the independent state legislature theory. CRC Advisors manages the messaging. The Marble Freedom Trust sits on top holding the billion, organized as a trust specifically so it discloses less than a corporation would. Money moves from one pocket to another pocket on the same coat, and every transfer adds a layer of fog between the donor and the damage.

Crazy how the maze keeps renovating itself right when the watchdogs get close. After a complaint landed with the D.C. attorney general, the 85 Fund pulled up stakes and re-registered in Texas. Then in January 2026 — yes, this year — the Concord Fund filed articles of termination and dissolved, while new entities like the Lexington Fund and the Publius Fund, formed by the same Leo-network lawyers and carrying the old trade names in their back pockets, started steering millions into state attorneys general races and the 2026 midterms. The organization dies; the money never does. That’s not a charity, y’all. That’s a shell game with a 501(c) stamp on it.

Apply Mills here. Charles Mills taught us the racial contract depends on an epistemology of ignorance — a structured, manufactured not-knowing that lets the beneficiaries of domination claim clean hands. Dark money is the epistemology of ignorance with a bank account. The whole design is that you are not supposed to know who paid for the judge who just took your rights, so the ruling lands on you like weather instead of like policy. Naming Leo breaks the spell. The fog is the product.

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Critical Historical Context: This Court Was Never Neutral

Now let’s back this thing up, because the folks clutching pearls about “politicizing the Court” are running a tired playbook that depends on you not knowing your history. The Supreme Court has been a political instrument of racial order since before your great-great-grandmother was born. Dred Scott (1857) declared Black people had no rights the white man was bound to respect. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) took the Colfax Massacre — white paramilitaries slaughtering Black Republicans defending a courthouse — and ruled the federal government couldn’t protect Black citizens from private white violence, handing Reconstruction its death certificate. Plessy (1896) blessed apartheid for six decades. Du Bois called the destruction of Reconstruction a counter-revolution of property, and the Court was that counter-revolution’s law firm. The view from nowhere has always been a view from somewhere, and that somewhere has historically been the big house.

Here’s the part they really don’t teach, and for the people in the back I need you to hold this one: the Constitution does not set the number of Supreme Court justices. Article III is silent on it. Congress sets the number by simple statute, and Congress has changed it seven times in American history — six justices in 1789, five in 1801, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, back down to seven in 1866, and nine again in 1869, where it has sat ever since. Read that 1866 move again. Congress shrank the Court on purpose, specifically to stop President Andrew Johnson — the man busy strangling Reconstruction in its crib — from appointing justices. Court size has been a political tool wielded over questions of Black freedom since Reconstruction itself. So when somebody tells you expansion is some radical, unprecedented scheme, just admit you skipped the nineteenth century. There is no constitutional amendment required. It is an act of Congress. Senator Ed Markey and Representative Hank Johnson’s Judiciary Act would expand the bench from nine to thirteen — one justice per federal circuit, which is exactly how the number was originally pegged in the first place.

This means the “institutionalists” are wrong. The two-roles frame applies: what they SAY is that they’re protecting the Court’s legitimacy from politics; what the position structurally DOES is freeze in place a majority that one man’s billion dollars built, and call that freeze “neutrality.” Having the luxury to treat a captured court as settled furniture is a sign of who the capture was never going to hurt. Apply Bell here — Derrick Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis predicts exactly this: every formal gain gets a structural counterattack, and the counterattack always arrives dressed in procedure.

What the Supermajority Took: The Receipts

Just in case some of y’all still asking what the impact of this conservative supermajority has actually been, let’s run the receipts. They gutted the Voting Rights Act — Shelby County v. Holder (2013) killed preclearance and Brnovich (2021) sanded down what was left of Section 2, and polling places across the Black South started disappearing the very week Shelby dropped. They overturned Roe with Dobbs (2022). They came for your water and air — Sackett v. EPA (2023) stripped Clean Water Act protection from millions of acres of wetlands, and Loper Bright (2024) overturned Chevron deference, kneecapping every federal agency that stands between a polluter and your faucet. They took race-conscious admissions with SFFA v. Harvard (2023). They killed student debt relief for forty-three million borrowers in Biden v. Nebraska (2023). Then they handed presidents broad criminal immunity in Trump v. United States (2024). Every single one of those majorities was assembled, advertised, and defended by money moving through Leonard Leo’s maze. That’s not a court drifting right. That’s a return on investment.

Gil Scott-Heron got something for this moment. A rat done bit my sister Nell — but Leonard Leo’s sitting on $1.6 billion. Her face and arms began to swell — and the Concord Fund dissolved itself before the auditors called. I can’t pay no doctor bill, my kids’ school can’t pay no light bill — but one billionaire’s tax-dodged fortune is out here buying state attorneys general like trading cards. Whitey’s not on the moon this time, y’all. Whitey’s on the bench, with lifetime tenure, and your public school’s art program paid the launch costs.

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The Education Implication: This Is a Schoolhouse Story

I’m an educator, so let me bring this home to the schoolhouse, because court capture is an education story from top to bottom. SFFA tooken race-conscious admissions, and the first enrollment cycles after it showed Black student numbers dropping at selective institutions — the exact doors the Second Reconstruction pried open getting quietly re-locked by judicial decree. Carson v. Makin (2022) and Espinoza (2020) ruled that when states fund private education, they must fund religious schools too, accelerating the voucher pipeline that drains public school budgets in Black and brown districts — and remember, the modern “school choice” movement was born as massive resistance to Brown v. Board, with segregation academies cashing the first vouchers. Biden v. Nebraska kept the boot on borrowers, and Black borrowers — who hold disproportionate debt because our families were systematically stripped of the intergenerational wealth that pays white kids’ tuition — took the hardest hit. Loper Bright gutted the Department of Education’s regulatory muscle right as the department itself was being dismantled politically, which means Title VI civil rights enforcement, Title IX protections, and predatory-college accountability all got softer at once.

Then there’s the part nobody connects: the Honest Elections Project — a trade name of Leo’s 85 Fund — pushes the voting restrictions that decide who sits on your school board. The same money that picked your justices is shaping who bans your books. Court capture and curriculum capture are the same project wearing two different suits. Freire told us education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of conformity or as the practice of freedom. Leo’s network understood that better than most of our side did, and they spent three decades and billions acting on it while we were told to wait on the next election.

Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Carries the Weight

Intersectional analysis is not a garnish on this plate, it’s the plate. Apply Crenshaw here — these rulings don’t land on abstract “Americans,” they converge on bodies sitting at the intersection of race, gender, class, and geography. Dobbs lands hardest on Black women, who already die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, concentrated in the same Southern states that slammed clinic doors the moment the ruling dropped — states where Shelby had already made it harder for those same women to vote the policy out. SFFA lands hardest on Black women, who have been among the most consistent beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everybody would be free, because our freedom requires dismantling every system of oppression at once — flip it, and you see why a court built to re-entrench every hierarchy at once finds Black women standing at the center of the blast radius.

Class and disability sit in the wreckage too: student debt cancellation killed, agency protections for workers and disabled folks weakened, 303 Creative (2023) opening the door to licensed discrimination against LGBTQ people — and Black queer and trans folks catch that one twice. Environmental deregulation through Sackett and the death of Chevron deference is environmental racism with a gavel, because the fenceline communities breathing the benzene and drinking the lead are Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor — ask Flint, ask Cancer Alley, ask Jackson, Mississippi. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and the purest cut is believing a court can be “depoliticized” while its rulings redistribute life chances upward and whiteward every single term. Two roles, one bench: what they say is originalism; what it does is racial capitalism’s legal department — apply Robinson here, because antiblackness is not a glitch in the accumulation machine, it is the engine.

Closing: Convert the Read Into the Ask

So here’s where I close the loop on the cartoon villain I opened with. Leonard Leo matters as a name because abstract “court capture” feels like weather, and weather makes people passive — a name makes it personal, traceable, and fightable. The organization Court Defenders and the broader defend-our-courts movement got receipts we can all learn from, and the remedy is sitting in plain sight with two centuries of precedent behind it: Congress has changed the size of the Court seven times, expansion to thirteen justices requires nothing but an act of Congress, and the only thing standing between here and there is political will — which is to say, organized people outlasting organized money.

By insisting the Court is neutral, untouchable, and frozen at nine, the institutionalists are making the capture visible — they’re telling on the whole arrangement, because you only sanctify the referee after your team bought him. Every accusation is a confession: the same crowd that screamed “court packing” spent thirty years and $1.6 billion literally packing the court. Don’t let them piss on us and tell us it’s raining. Learn the history. Say the man’s name. Support the organizers doing court-reform work. The facts are sitting right next to your feelings, kinfolks, and they’re both telling you the same thing. Education Is Elevation.

Five Key Takeaways

* One unelected man, six of nine seats. Leonard Leo — former Federalist Society executive VP, current board co-chair — was instrumental in seating the last three justices and shaping the pipeline behind six of the nine, then took control of a $1.6 billion dark money war chest, the largest known political donation in U.S. history.

* Dark money is designed fog. The Judicial Crisis Network became the Concord Fund, the Judicial Education Project became the 85 Fund (a.k.a. Honest Elections Project), the Concord Fund dissolved in January 2026 while the Lexington Fund picked up the bag — the maze exists so you can’t connect the donor to the damage.

* The Court was never neutral. From Dred Scott to Cruikshank to Plessy to Shelby, the Supreme Court has repeatedly served as the legal department of racial order — “Reconstruction in reverse” is the pattern, not the exception.

* Court expansion is normal American history. The Constitution does not set the Court’s size; Congress has changed it seven times — including shrinking it in 1866 specifically to block Andrew Johnson — and the Markey–Johnson Judiciary Act (nine to thirteen, one justice per circuit) requires only a simple act of Congress, not an amendment.

* Education is the battlefield. SFFA, Carson v. Makin, Biden v. Nebraska, and Loper Bright form a coordinated judicial assault on educational access, public school funding, debt relief, and civil rights enforcement — while the same network’s voting-restriction arm shapes who controls your school board.

Become a Paid Subscriber: Fund the Counter-Curriculum

Let me keep it all the way real with y’all before you close this tab. You just read a piece that named Leonard Leo, traced $1.6 billion through a maze of dissolving nonprofits, pulled the 1866 receipt that your civics class never handed you, and connected the bench to the schoolhouse to your grandmama’s polling place. Leo’s side spent three decades and billions building an infrastructure to control what courts decide and — through vouchers, book bans, and school board capture — what children learn. The counter to captured infrastructure is independent infrastructure. That’s what this is.

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

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

Related Readings: The Receipts Shelf

Books

* W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — the counter-revolution of property, and the Court’s role in killing the First Reconstruction.

* Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992) — why every gain triggers a structural counterattack.

* Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997) — the epistemology of ignorance; dark money as manufactured not-knowing.

* Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) — racial capitalism as the engine, not the glitch.

* Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) — the donor infrastructure Leo plugged into.

* Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (2022) — the capture, mapped from inside the Senate.

* Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (2008) — how the Federalist Society farm system was built.

* Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2015) — the network’s intellectual supply chain.

* Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) — the post-Shelby landscape on the ground.

* David Daley, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections (2024) — Leo, the Honest Elections Project, and the election-law front.

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — the analytic for reading who carries the rulings’ weight.

* The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) — interlocking systems, and why Black women’s freedom is the measure.

Investigations & Primary Documents

* ProPublica — “We Don’t Talk About Leonard” series and the original reporting (with The Lever) confirming the $1.6 billion Seid-to-Marble Freedom Trust transfer (2022–2023).

* The New York Times — Kenneth P. Vogel & Shane Goldmacher, first report on the record-setting Seid donation (August 2022).

* OpenSecrets — ongoing reporting on the Leo network, including the 2026 reporting on the Concord Fund’s dissolution and the Lexington Fund’s midterm spending.

* NOTUS — 2026 reporting on the Leo network’s reorganization ahead of the midterms.

* Rolling Stone — Andrew Perez’s reporting on the 85 Fund’s Texas re-registration and the Publius/Lexington Fund formations (2024).

* U.S. Senate Democrats, “Captured Courts” report (2020) — the official map of the dark money judicial pipeline.

* The Judiciary Act (Markey–Johnson) — bill text and one-pagers via congressional offices.

* United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013); Dobbs (2022); SFFA v. Harvard (2023); Biden v. Nebraska (2023); Sackett v. EPA (2023); Loper Bright (2024); Trump v. United States (2024) — read the rulings, not just the headlines.

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