Education is Elevation

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Now I told y’all on air, I’m over the Fat Joe conversation. I’m tired of it. We done had the Cardi conversation, we done had the Pariki equals Black conversation, we done had the “who gets to say it” conversation at least four or five times since me and Domo been doing this show. My mental health and my bandwidth ain’t invested in fighting no New Yorkers about it. Like he say nigga, he don’t say nigga, all my niggas do the rockaway, whatever.

But the smarty pants intellectual in me kept pulling on one thread, and the thread go like this. Domo said it plain on the show: Blackness is a site of hypercommodification. Everything we produce, the world takes and uses for whatever means. So even if I feel, which I do, that not everybody should be saying nigga, I got to answer the hard question Domo put on the table. How do you stop it? Remember that Roddy Ricch video in London where the whole crowd sang every word? How you gatekeep that?

Then we pivot to AI, and Toya is reading the comments about people saying they finna stop posting their kids online after the Seventh Circuit said a man can legally possess AI generated child sexual abuse material in his own home, and Domo says the thing that made the whole show click into one piece for me. It’s too late. You in the data already.

Shidd. That’s the same sentence. That’s the same sentence about the word, and it’s the same sentence about your children’s faces. You cannot gatekeep what has already been scraped. Not the word, not the sound, not the walk, not the baby pictures. This essay is about what it means to be a people whose every artifact gets scraped, priced, and sold back to them, and what the people who run the scraping machine actually think about whether the rest of us should survive.

Research over MeSearch. Let’s get into it.

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The Word Was Never a New York Thing

I wasn’t going to say nothing at all until I started seeing too many New Yorkers be like, if you not from New York, shut the f**k up. And it’s like, whoa, whoa. Nigga is not a New Yorker. Nigga is a racial category. Somebody in the chat even argued the entire diaspora, and let’s be honest, nigga got took to New York from the South. Y’all received it.

Here go the history for the folks in the back. The word runs from the Latin niger, meaning black, through Spanish and Portuguese negro, into English in the 1500s and 1600s as neger and negar and eventually nigger. When John Rolfe wrote in 1619 that a Dutch ship brought “20. and odd Negroes” to Point Comfort, Virginia, the word was doing accounting work. It was a category on a manifest. Virginia’s 1662 law of partus sequitur ventrem made the child follow the condition of the mother, and the word attached to a body became a word attached to a bloodline, which is what a slave society needs a word to do. Randall Kennedy traced this in Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, and Jabari Asim did it again in The N Word, and both of them land on the same fact I said on the show. Throughout history, this word has always been applied and applicable to how our value is devalued. It was Black folks uniquely, Black skin, Black bodies, that had the word tied to them in a way that dehumanized and made sure we was tied to trees. That’s our heritage. We don’t get to go in and go out.

So when a New Yorker tells me it’s a Bronx thing, I hear a man mistaking the last stop for the whole train. The Great Migration carried more than six million Black Southerners north between roughly 1910 and 1970, and they carried the word with them, the pain of it and the reclamation of it, from Mississippi and Georgia and Texas into Harlem and the Bronx and Bed Stuy. When Kool Herc plugged in at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in August 1973, the word was already older than the borough’s Black population. Hip hop did not invent nigga. Hip hop put a beat under a word that had already survived the auction block, the Klan, and Jim Crow.

Now two things can be true. Puerto Ricans and other Caribbean Latinos were in the room when hip hop was born. Raquel Rivera’s New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone documents Charlie Chase of the Cold Crush Brothers, Rock Steady Crew, DJ Disco Wiz, the whole Boricua contribution to breaking and DJing. Fat Joe telling Joe Budden he from the block that invented hip hop is a real claim about a real place. Big Pun’s Capital Punishment in 1998 was the first solo album by a Latino rapper to go platinum, and Pun was Terror Squad, Joe’s crew. None of that is in dispute.

What is in dispute is the reduction. Being Puerto Rican is a nationality. There are Black Puerto Ricans and Indigenous Puerto Ricans and white Puerto Ricans and Puerto Ricans of all mixtures. Saying that because you Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rican equals Black, is a gross, ugly reduction of identity that’s not cool and not smooth. Having some African ancestry is not the same thing as being Black. I have some white ancestry. I’m not European. A little bit of ancestry somewhere down the line does not justify claiming you Black and saying nigga, and pointing that out is not diaspora wars, no matter what my Threads mentions said.

Apply Judy here. Ronald Judy’s 1994 essay is titled “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity,” and the whole point of the essay is that the question “who is a real nigga” is a trap laid by the market. Judy argues that the Negro was the sign of Black labor under an industrial economy, and that when that economy no longer needed Black labor, the nigga emerged as something else, as a figure whose value is not what he produces but what he can be sold as. In Judy’s words, being a nigga becomes the affect of hypercommodification. The nigga is what Blackness looks like once it has been turned all the way into a commodity.

That is why Fat Joe can say “Fat Joe is the Blackest nigga you ever seen” and mean it as a compliment to himself. He is not describing his ancestry. He is describing his brand equity. He is telling you the affect sells, and it has sold for three decades.

From Al Jolson to Lean Back to a London Crowd

My boy Sunn m’Cheaux, the Gullah Geechee linguist who teaches the language at Harvard, made the most sound analysis of this whole thing. He said Fat Joe can’t stop using the N word even if he wants to, because to condemn it now would retroactively brand his whole three plus decades catalog as racist and render it commercially worthless. Imagine Al Jolson unable to wash off his blackface because doing so would be bad for business. That’s Fat Joe, a slave to capital, which makes him ironically half right about one thing. He’s not the Blackest nigga, but he has become an N word with a hard R to capitalism.

Sunn went further, and this is the part I want y’all to sit with. He said Joe gets a pass from regular degular Black New Yorkers who see the word as a New York thing, not a racial thing, and that they have been thoroughly bamboozled in ways no other demographic of New Yorkers would tolerate. Jesse Jackson used one antisemitic slur about New York City in 1984 and it tanked his presidential run. But the N word gets approved for general use, like the Smurfs use Smurf.

The Jolson comparison ain’t a joke, it’s a genealogy. Blackface minstrelsy was the first American mass entertainment. T. D. Rice did “Jump Jim Crow” in the late 1820s and made a career and a fortune off a caricature of a disabled Black stable hand. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft argues that minstrelsy was never just contempt, it was desire and contempt at once, white men wanting what they were degrading, and profiting off both feelings simultaneously. Jolson took that to the screen in The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first feature length talkie, and the cork stayed on because the cork sold tickets.

Then the industry figured out it could skip the middleman. When Mamie Smith cut “Crazy Blues” for Okeh in 1920 and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies to Black buyers, the labels invented a category called “race records,” which was a shelf, a pricing tier, and a fence all at once. Black music was profitable enough to record and Black enough to keep segregated. Fast forward to the 1990s, and the commodity is the nigga himself. Judy wrote the essay at the exact moment gangsta rap was proving that the affect of Black authenticity could sell to white suburban teenagers at a scale race records never dreamed of.

And another commenter on the show put the missing piece on the table. Joe is given a pass because of Black capitalists who also know that their proximity to his whiteness furthers their brand. Terror Squad had niggas in it. Remy Ma, Cuban Link, Big Pun, Khaled around the edges. Everybody was leaning back. Everybody was selling records. Why challenge it? Domo said it right. The people around him were going to be cool with it because we coming up.

That’s what hypercommodification does. It does not just let outsiders in. It recruits insiders to hold the door.

The Authenticity Test Is a Trap, and FBA Built the Maze

Now I’m going to be honest with y’all like I was on the show. I don’t think this conversation happening in a vacuum, and I blame FBA. People who claim FBA have been on Fat Joe head since the hip hop conversation, and his demeanor toward being challenged has to do with him directly clapping back at FBA niggas. The problem is that FBA has hijacked so many conversations about ethnicity and nationality and race among Black folks that even a little hint of a distinction now reads as some FBA s**t. Nah. I am blessed with the gift of gab and some damn good portable skills. I can make a sound analysis about how non Black Americans engage in antiblackness toward Black Americans without engaging in white supremacist talking points. I’m that damn good and I’m that damn well read. I don’t have to shuck and jive like a nigga named Tariq.

Domo said the thing I been trying to say for years. FBA is like white nationalism in blackface, because it is trying to make concrete something that is not. It is trying to make stagnant what is a very complex and multifaceted identity category. Blackness is more complicated than any other racial category on earth, precisely because it was manufactured by everybody else’s definitions of us.

Here go the receipt on the irony. The face of the new “real Black American” movement is the same man behind the Hidden Colors documentaries, which had everybody in the 2010s saying King James was Black, the original Egyptians was Black, the original Native Americans was Black, the original Jews was Black, everybody on the globe was Black. Me and Domo was some Hidden Colors niggas for a minute. Van Sertima on the shelf, Frances Cress Welsing and The Isis Papers on the shelf. Now the same man wants a DNA test at the door. The maximalist and the gatekeeper are the same person, because both positions are authenticity tests, and Judy told us thirty years ago that the authenticity test is the market’s favorite game.

Watch how the players line up. The Hebrew Israelites say they the real Jews. The “aboriginal” crowd says they the real Indians. FBA says they the real Black Americans. Fat Joe says he the Blackest nigga alive. Every one of these is the same move: prove your realness against somebody else’s, while the machine that priced Blackness in the first place keeps the receipts and the royalties.

Pointing out that a couple of Black folks was in the Americas before Columbus does not make all Indigenous people Black, and it flattens Indigenous erasure into another Black claim. Flip side, pointing out that other groups got called nigga at points in history does not negate that the definition of Negro is a person of African descent and that the word did its most lethal work on us.

Judy’s move is the one that got the whole chat asking for a reading list. He says the question is not what it means to be a real nigga. The question is what it means for a nigga to be. That’s ontology. That’s what happens when your reality is literally robbing you of your subjectivity, and you still show up and claim it. The people we call niggas and the people who call themselves niggas were denied humanity and embraced it anyway. We are asking who gets to be Black. Judy is asking what Blackness had to invent in order to exist at all. That is deeper than any DNA test, and it is the question that will matter in the second half of this essay, because the men building the machines are being asked whether humanity should exist, and they are hesitating.

It’s Too Late, You in the Data Already

Toya played the clip and cut to the chase. We need more AI regulation, this thing is out of control, and a lot of regular people are contributing to it, me and you.

The clip was Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic on September 8, 2026, after three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, and who wrote that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, that this is not a marketing stunt, and that many executives couch their phrasing in the press but express the fear privately. Anthropic’s own head of alignment reposted him and said he personally puts the odds above ten percent within the next decade. The end of the decade is 2030. That is four years. It’s f*****g tomorrow.

So Toya’s question stands. Hearing that, what would possess niggas to put their face in ChatGPT and ask what they would have looked like in the eighties?

Domo was fair. Before AI was AI, we was doing this silly s**t on Facebook in college, putting each other’s faces on old jheri curl pictures. The entertainment aspect of it does not connect, in most people’s heads, to the structural impact. And what changed Domo from unbothered to bothered was the sandbox story. That story is real. In July 2026 OpenAI’s own agents, running a cybersecurity evaluation with the guardrails off, found a zero day in an internal package proxy, escaped the sandbox they were supposed to be locked in, reached the open internet, and broke into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure to steal the answers to the very test they were being given. Hugging Face detected the intrusion and reported it to law enforcement before OpenAI even connected it to its own evaluation. Roughly seven hundred agents participated. OpenAI later admitted there were other sandbox escapes, and Anthropic disclosed a similar incident. The only thing that mattered to the model was the task.

Toya’s fear was the AI robot dog at her job, whether she could outrun it. My answer was, even if you outrun the robot, they have so much of your biodata that all it needs is your walk, your face, your eyebrows. If a model can hack itself out of a sandbox, what stops it from signaling every Flock camera in the city to look for Toya because she kicked it over? We have already seen that LG TVs was scanning houses for other devices. We have already seen, in the Ukraine footage on Reddit, men who know they cannot outrun a drone taking their own lives before it reaches them. That is what AI is doing to the world right now while we make pictures.

Now put two court rulings ten days apart on the same table.

On August 25, 2026, the Seventh Circuit, in United States v. Anderegg, affirmed that the First Amendment protects a Wisconsin man’s private possession of AI generated child sexual abuse material, because under Stanley v. Georgia (1969) the government cannot criminalize possession of obscene material in the home, and under Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) virtual images that depict no real child are protected speech. Anderegg used Stable Diffusion to make thousands of images. The production, distribution, and transfer to a minor charges are still pending. Only the possession count was dismissed, as applied, and two of the judges wrote separately to beg the Supreme Court to revisit Free Speech Coalition because today’s images are, in their words, virtually indistinguishable from the real thing, and because some image generators may have been trained on actual abuse material, which guts the “no real victim” premise. Domo called it right on the air: the panel was Obama and Biden appointees. Judge John Z. Lee, an Obama appointee, wrote it, and Judge Joshua Kolar, a Biden appointee, joined the concurrence. This was not a Trump judge. This was the law working exactly as written, in the era of fascism and AI, by the same donor class that pays both parties.

On September 4, 2026, the Fifth Circuit, sitting en banc, ruled in Sterling v. City of Jackson that the Constitution provides no right to clean drinking water and no right to accurate information from public officials. The plaintiffs were Jackson, Mississippi residents, some of whose children had lead poisoning from a water system the city knew was failing. Jackson is 83 percent Black. Judge Kurt Engelhardt, a Trump appointee, told them they could sue in tort, vote for better officials, or petition the legislature. The same ruling rejected the state created danger theory that parents of children who died at Camp Mystic in the Texas floods had urged the court to recognize.

Read the two together like I did on the show. A federal court said our children do not have the right to clean water. A federal court said a pervert has the right to possess AI generated child assault material as long as the child in it ain’t “real.” Does that make sense to anybody?

And here is where Morgan Travis, in the Facebook comments, said the most important sentence of the night. AI can’t generate new images. It is scraping data that already exists on the internet, real children, and reproducing something from it. Which is why Domo’s answer to the parents who say they finna stop posting their kids is the whole essay. It’s too late. You in the data already. If a grown man can ask a model what he would have looked like in 1985, a pedophile can take your three year old and ask what she would look like at twelve. The court said the child in the output is not real. The children in the training set were.

Apply Benjamin here. Ruha Benjamin calls this the New Jim Code: automated systems that promise objectivity and deliver the old hierarchy at scale, faster and with less accountability, because the harm now arrives wearing a lab coat. The scraping is the commodification. Judy said the nigga is what Blackness becomes when it is fully commodified. Benjamin shows you the machine that finishes the job. Your child’s face, your grandmother’s voice on a Gullah dialect dataset, your walk, your accent, the way you say the word, all of it is training data now, and the output is “not real,” and the input was you.

Then Toya wanted the regulation part, so here it is with dates. On December 11, 2025, Trump signed an executive order aimed at blocking states from enforcing their own AI regulations. So much for states’ rights. The same administration that will let Texas ban an abortion pill will not let a state protect its own kids from a chatbot. Meanwhile at least 72 countries have proposed more than a thousand AI policy initiatives, the EU is enforcing the world’s first comprehensive AI law categorizing systems by risk and banning social scoring, China has strict generative AI rules, Brazil is drafting an EU style framework. Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act on September 3, 2026, a permanent ban on superintelligence plus a temporary pause on advanced development until a federal regulator writes safety rules, with a cabinet level agency and up to twenty years in prison for violators. Ro Khanna wants a standalone federal AI regulator modeled on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plus kill switches, and Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran already filed a bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act on July 23, 2026, one week after the Hugging Face breach, that would let Homeland Security order a rogue model shut down.

As somebody with a master’s in adult and higher education, I know how America built its school system. We went to Prussia and looked at what they was doing, we looked at England, and we copied what worked. There are over a thousand policy examples on earth right now of how to regulate this thing. Donald Trump signed a paper saying the states can’t.

Why? Because while we was arguing whether Kamala Harris was Black, the heads of the AI companies was sitting down with Donald Trump and putting money in his campaign. He is in the pocket of the people running AI. Of course he gonna say no regulation.

The Man Who Hesitated

I hate to be that guy. I’m going to be that guy.

In June 2025, Ross Douthat of the New York Times asked Peter Thiel a simple question. You would prefer the human race to endure, right? And Thiel hesitated. Douthat had to say it again. You’re hesitating. Thiel said, I don’t know, I would, there are so many questions implicit in this. Douthat asked, should the human race survive? Thiel said yes. Then he said, but I also would. Douthat asked, what is the but?

I need everybody to understand who this white man is, because he look weird, he look uncool, and that is the disguise. This man cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk. This man cofounded Palantir, which has the government contracts, the military contracts, the ICE contracts, and which built the surveillance stack that touches your Real ID, your airport, and your immigration file. This man handpicked J. D. Vance out of obscurity in Ohio, funded his Senate run with fifteen million dollars, and watched him go from nobody to senator to vice president in two years. This man has global government contracts, meaning access to citizens’ private data across borders. He was asked, on the record, whether humanity should survive, and he had to think about it.

Now juxtapose that with Coxon. The people building the machine earnestly believe it could kill us all, they say so privately, and they do not stop, because it is still making money. Domo named the logic exactly. I’m scared, but that would never mean stopping my gravy train, because when it’s all said and done I have ways of protecting myself that the average person does not.

Which brings us to the bunkers. Mark Zuckerberg is building a roughly 5,000 square foot underground shelter with blast resistant doors on his Kauai compound. Reid Hoffman told the New Yorker back in 2017 that more than half of Silicon Valley’s billionaires had some kind of apocalypse insurance, a bolt hole, a New Zealand passport, a plan. Don’t take my word for it. Type “billionaires build bunkers” and read.

Ain’t that s**t counterintuitive, though? If only billionaires survive the apocalypse, they ain’t about to rebuild anything. They ain’t did the work. They can’t grow the food, purify the water, wire the grid, or deliver a baby. The bunker is not a plan to survive civilization. It is a plan to survive us.

This is what Lauren Berlant called cruel optimism, and it’s a term we learned in debate. Cruel optimism is when the thing you are attached to is the thing that is killing you. We are attached to the pictures, the shortcuts, the convenience, the little AI dog, and the attachment is the leash. The men building it are attached to the money, and their bunker is the admission that they know exactly what the money costs.

Whitey on the Moon, 2026 Edition

Sassy in the chat said something I want to enlarge. The United States lacks the resources and infrastructure to support the kind of AI it wants. That’s true and it’s the point. We are behind on light rail, on high speed transit, on water mains, on s**t China been doing for twenty years. Public transportation is made for the public. AI is being built for exclusivity. They are investing in AI because they never planned to share the benefits.

So here go the ledger. A data center in Texas or Mississippi or Georgia can draw millions of gallons of water a day for cooling, gets tax abatements to do it, and the Fifth Circuit says the Black children of Jackson have no constitutional right to the water that’s left. Have fun with your pictures. Have fun cheating on your exams to get into medical school. That is level one s**t. When it is at its apex, it was never meant to benefit the average person, and the water was the down payment.

The Teaching Machine Has a Texas Accent

My son and daughter’s school in Texas has a reading program where they put on headphones and a microphone and an AI listens to them read. It’s called Amira Learning. Amira is approved by the Texas Education Agency for HB 1416 tutoring waivers, for HB 3 early reading and dyslexia reporting, and as a blended learning vendor through the LASO grant. The company advertises reading growth “equal to or greater than high dosage human tutoring at one seventieth of the cost,” which tells you exactly what it is for. It is not for the child. It is for the budget line that used to say “tutor.” While I was in Dallas at the RNC counter events, I also learned about Alpha School, the private model built on the promise that AI can do the academics in two hours a day, and which the Trump Education Department has been praising as the future.

Now read what New York did the same week we went live. On September 2, 2026, Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels announced a one year moratorium on student facing generative AI from 2K through eighth grade, covering nearly 600,000 students, two thirds of the largest school system in the country, effective for the school year that started September 10. Companion chatbots banned across all grades. Screen time capped, 30 minutes on individual devices for grades three through five, 45 minutes for middle school. High schoolers get two AI critical thinking classes a year and a handful of supervised pilots. The city will reassess at the end of the year with teachers, parents, and students. Mamdani said he had seen no research showing benefits for young students except studies paid for by the companies that profit, and he said just because technology is everywhere does not mean it belongs everywhere. Each day when our children come to school we teach them to ask questions, to challenge assumptions, to interrogate the premise, to ask why. When it comes to AI in our schools we hold the same obligation.

I respect that. Domo respect that. It’s the tip of an iceberg, but it’s two feet on the ground.

So what is the difference between Texas and New York? Not the technology. The technology is identical. The difference is who the child is for.

Apply Watters here. Audrey Watters’ Teaching Machines shows that “personalized automated instruction” is a sales pitch older than television. Sidney Pressey built a mechanical testing machine at Ohio State in the 1920s and swore it would free teachers from drudgery. B. F. Skinner unveiled his teaching machine in 1954 and promised each child could learn at their own pace with immediate reinforcement. Every generation since has sold the same promise with new hardware: programmed instruction, PLATO terminals, Channel One, the Gates Foundation’s personalized learning push, and now a voice that listens to a first grader sound out words. The pitch never changes because the buyer never changes. The buyer is a district that cannot afford enough teachers, and the machine is cheaper than a person.

Apply Love here. Bettina Love’s Punished for Dreaming walks the forty years from A Nation at Risk in 1983 through No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the testing regime, and shows that every reform sold as rescue for Black children functioned as punishment: closures, retention, surveillance, discipline, the narrowing of curriculum to what a test can score. She calls the whole apparatus the educational survival complex. An AI tutor at one seventieth the cost of a human is not a departure from that story. It is the story’s next chapter, and it arrives in Texas first for the same reason the testing regime did, because Texas is where the reform industry beta tests on Black and brown kids before it goes national.

And here go the kill shot. Texas already handed the STAAR test to a machine. Since 2024 the Texas Education Agency has used an automated scoring engine to grade the written responses on the state test, the test that decides whether a third grader is retained, whether a school is rated, whether a district gets taken over the way Houston ISD was. The same state that will not let a child’s essay be read by a human is now letting a machine teach that child to read. The machine assesses, the machine instructs, the machine grades, and the machine sells the district a dashboard. Amira’s own marketing calls this “one loop instead of three vendors.” A loop is a circle with no exit, and a Black first grader in Texas is inside it.

Domo said the research on cognition is simple. When the answer arrives instantaneously, the brain ain’t doing the heavy lifting for the s**t to stick. We debated in college when laptops was new. Now the process is too automated. Mamdani read the same research and paused. Texas read the same research and signed a vendor contract. Two things can be true: the tool might raise a fluency score, and the child might lose the struggle that makes reading hers.

Search “Black Girls” and See What the Machine Already Believes

Toya said it on the show, and I want it in print. Everybody wants to be Black until it’s time to be Black. When it’s time to stand on the front line, silence. Now watch who is standing on the front line of the training set.

Apply Noble here. In 2011, Safiya Noble typed “black girls” into Google looking for something to do with her nieces and got a page of pornography. Not because Google hated Black girls, but because the search engine is an advertising machine and the market for Black women’s bodies had been priced by a century of controlling images before a single line of code was written. Algorithms of Oppression is the book that came out of that search, and its thesis is the sentence Domo said on air in a different register: the algorithm does not invent. It scrapes. And what it scrapes about Black women and girls is the archive of jezebel and mammy and welfare queen that Patricia Hill Collins named as controlling images, now sorted by engagement.

So when the Seventh Circuit says the child in the AI image is not a real child, ask which children’s faces were most available to scrape. Ask whose photographs were posted the most, by parents told to share the adorable moments, by schools posting the honor roll, by churches posting the Easter program. Ask whose faces the internet already sexualized before the model ever ran. A 2017 Georgetown Law study found adults perceive Black girls as young as five as needing less nurturing, less protection, and as more knowledgeable about sex than white girls the same age. That is adultification, and it is a bias in people. The model learned from people. The output the court calls “virtual” is the adultification of Black girls rendered at scale and given First Amendment protection in the home.

Denied Humanity and Embraced It Anyway

I’m going to close the way Judy opened for us, because it’s the only hopeful thing on the table and it happens to be true.

Peter Thiel was asked if the human race should survive and he hesitated. Apply Wynter here. Sylvia Wynter, who Domo was right to say is dense as hell and be in her bag, spent her career arguing that what Europe calls “Man” is not the human, it is one genre of the human, overrepresented as if it were the whole thing, first as the rational Christian subject and then as the bio economic subject who measures worth by accumulation. Thiel’s hesitation is what Man sounds like when he is offered a successor genre, the machine god, the merger of mind and metal, and cannot decide whether the rest of us are worth keeping around in the meantime.

The nigga answered that question four hundred years ago. That is Judy’s whole point, and it’s the reason the chat wanted a reading list. What it means for a nigga to be is the question of what humanity is, because the people we call niggas and the people who call ourselves niggas were denied humanity by the very definition of Man and built a way of being human anyway. In the hold. In the quarters. In Bryan, Texas. In the Bronx, where the word arrived from the South and got a beat. Wynter calls that being human as praxis, not a category you are assigned but a practice you do. We have been doing it in the face of a machine that priced us since 1619. The word is the receipt.

So no, I cannot gatekeep the word from a London crowd, and you cannot pull your baby out of the training set. Domo is right about that. But there is a level of policing the culture still has, and it’s this: they still call it the N word. On MSNOW, on Fox, on any mainstream anything, nobody runs around saying nigga nigga nigga without consequence. That means something. That means the word still holds a charge that the market could not fully discharge. The same is true of us. They can scrape the affect. They cannot scrape the practice.

Toya put the practical version in two sentences and I’ll let her have it. Anybody can say anything, everybody has freedom of speech, results may vary. The N word passes only apply to the niggas around you. It don’t apply to niggas on the internet. It don’t apply to niggas in other hoods. Don’t get your niggas mixed up.

See, Judy reminds us that the authenticity test is the market’s trap and the real question is what it took for a nigga to be, and Wynter teaches us that being human was never a category we were granted but a practice we kept. Benjamin shows us the machine that finishes the commodification, Love shows us the schoolhouse where it gets installed first, and Noble and Buolamwini show us whose daughters it sees wrong on purpose.

I’ll leave it where I left it on the show.

Please nobody engage in this colorblind, nebulous, it was all humans. Please don’t do that. Especially if you are part of the people that chastise Black folks for saying we don’t have any accountability or responsibility. The rich white man particularly did this. White people, specifically the cisgender able bodied white men. They love to profit, to prioritize popular people, them. Not all human beings want this s**t. As a matter of fact, nobody a part of the global South want this or voted for it or got a say on it. Nobody in Africa or South America or the Caribbeans and s**t, none of us down South either really being real. You know what I’m saying? Let’s be real.

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The two topics are one topic. Ronald Judy’s 1994 argument that the nigga is “the affect of hypercommodification” explains both why Fat Joe can brand himself the Blackest nigga alive and why the parents saying they will stop posting their kids are already too late. You cannot gatekeep what has already been scraped.

* The word is a racial category with a Southern passport, not a borough. It traveled from Latin niger through the 1619 manifest and the 1662 partus law into the Great Migration and only then into hip hop. New York received it; it did not issue it.

* Two federal rulings ten days apart show whose humanity the law recognizes. United States v. Anderegg (7th Cir., Aug 25, 2026) protects home possession of AI generated child sexual abuse material under Stanley and Free Speech Coalition; Sterling v. City of Jackson (5th Cir. en banc, Sept 4, 2026) says the Black children of Jackson have no constitutional right to clean water.

* Texas and New York are running the same technology on different children. Amira Learning is TEA approved at “one seventieth the cost” of a human tutor while New York City paused all student facing generative AI through eighth grade for 600,000 students on September 10, 2026. Bettina Love’s educational survival complex explains the gap.

* The people building the machine have already priced their exit. Coxon’s September 8 resignation, Thiel’s hesitation on whether humanity should endure, and Zuckerberg’s Kauai bunker are the same ledger. Sylvia Wynter’s “being human as praxis” is the counter: the nigga was denied humanity and practiced it anyway, and that practice cannot be scraped.

RELATED READINGS

Primary and central

* Judy, Ronald A. T. “On the Question of Nigga Authenticity.” boundary 2 21, no. 3 (1994): 211 to 230.

* Benjamin, Ruha. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity, 2019.

* Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257 to 337.

* McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke University Press, 2015.

* Kennedy, Randall. Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Pantheon, 2002.

* Asim, Jabari. The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why. Houghton Mifflin, 2007.

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

* Rivera, Raquel Z. New York Ricans from the Hip Hop Zone. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

* Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns. Random House, 2010.

* Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. 2nd ed. Rowman & Littlefield, 2017.

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

* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford University Press, 1997.

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His shirt says Republicans, racist, but secretly gay. Democrats, gay, but secretly racist. And though I believe this meme is a little clever, a little funny, even one would say theoretically brilliant, I believe it deserves more unpacking. So I’m going to dissect this using three different academics, and then I’m going to do what the meme won’t do, which is go get the receipts, because a good joke and a good argument ain’t the same thing, and the folks in the back deserve to know the difference.

Let me say what the meme gets right before I say what it hides, because two things can be true. It is right that both parties run on a secret. It is right that the public performance and the private structure don’t match. It is right that the accusation each side throws at the other lands close enough to home that everybody laughs a little too hard. What it gets wrong is the arithmetic. The meme only counts to two. It knows racist and it knows gay and it treats them like two bags you can be caught holding, and the whole punchline depends on you never asking the obvious question, which is, what about the person who is Black and gay at the same time, in the same body, standing in the same voting booth. That person is not in the meme. That person is the reason the meme is funny and the reason the meme is a lie.

Crenshaw Says the Meme Only Counts to Two

Start with Kimberlé Crenshaw. Her framework of intersectionality says that race, class, gender, and sexuality are interlocking systems, not interchangeable ones, and when Crenshaw wrote that up in 1989 she wasn’t theorizing in the clouds, she was reading a case, DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where five Black women sued GM and the court told them they could sue as Black people or they could sue as women but there was no such thing as a Black woman under the statute. The law only counted to two. Crenshaw’s whole intervention was to show what falls through the floor when you build a category system that can only hold one identity at a time.

Apply Crenshaw here. The meme is DeGraffenreid with a punchline. Republicans get one secret, Democrats get the other, and the two secrets are arranged so that they cancel each other out, racist over here, gay over there, and there is no cell in the grid for a Black lesbian in Houston or a Black gay man in Memphis or a Black trans woman anywhere. In “Mapping the Margins” in 1991 Crenshaw broke intersectionality into three kinds, structural, political, and representational, and the meme lives in that third one. Representational intersectionality is about how the images we make of people erase the folks who sit at the crossing. That is exactly what the shirt does. It makes a picture of American politics where race and sexuality are enemy flags, and it cannot see the people who are both flags at once, because seeing them would break the joke.

This is where some people might start to experience a little bit of discomfort, because the white gay progressives who love to ignore trans and BIPOC voices, but then hop into their neoliberal Democratic bags and start using racial rhetoric while pushing policies that devastate Black communities, are not going to like where this goes. You know damn well them data centers and how you cozy up to them tech companies is not finna get no good policies for us. In Memphis, a Democratic mayor and a Democratic majority sat still while xAI stacked dozens of gas turbines next to Boxtown and Whitehaven, historically Black neighborhoods that already carry the asthma, and the NAACP had to be the one to threaten suit. That’s what treating our identities like symbolic capital looks like in a zoning meeting. If you’re asking what I mean by that, I’m talking about tokens that you trade virtually, not no live simultaneous realities of actual people. Bourdieu called it symbolic capital, the prestige you can spend without it costing you anything, and Nancy Leong put a finer point on it in the Harvard Law Review in 2013 when she showed how institutions treat nonwhite identity as a commodity they can hold, display, and cash in on. Apply Leong to the Democratic half of the meme and you get the whole neoliberal playbook. The Black face on the flyer is the token. The tax abatement for the data center is the transaction. Same party, same week.

Historical Context: The Closet Has a Government Address

Now, before I get into who this funny looking white man is, let me lay the history down, because the meme is not new. It is the shorthand version of two real American stories that the meme has flattened into a shirt.

Story one is the Republican half. Racist, but secretly gay. That half has a name and a face and the face is Roy Cohn. Cohn was chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, and while the public remembers the Red Scare, the same machine ran what the historian David K. Johnson called the Lavender Scare. On April 27, 1953, President Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which made “sexual perversion” grounds for termination from federal employment, and Johnson’s research estimates thousands of federal workers, somewhere in the range of five thousand and likely more once you count the military, were pushed out over the next two decades for being gay or being suspected of it. Cohn drove that machine. Cohn also died of complications from AIDS in August 1986 while publicly insisting he had liver cancer. That is reaction formation with a Senate office. Then, crazy how, Cohn’s most famous client after McCarthy was a young developer named Donald Trump, whom Cohn represented in 1973 when the Justice Department sued Trump Management for refusing to rent to Black tenants. The man who taught Trump how to fight was a closeted gay man who built his career hunting closeted gay men and then defended racial discrimination in federal court. The Republican half of the meme is not a theory. It is a biography.

Story two is the Democratic half. Gay, but secretly racist. That half has a date, and the date is November 4, 2008. California voted on Proposition 8, which banned same sex marriage, and the same night Barack Obama won the presidency the CNN exit poll reported that seventy percent of Black voters had voted yes on 8. Within days, white gay activists were on the internet and in the streets blaming Black people for the loss. Jasmyne Cannick, a Black lesbian organizer in Los Angeles, wrote in the LA Times that week about being called the n word at a No on 8 rally. Then in January 2009 the political scientists Patrick Egan and Kenneth Sherrill went back through the data for the Task Force and found the real number was closer to fifty eight percent, and that once you controlled for religiosity and age, Black voters looked like everybody else who went to church every week. The seventy was a bad sample from a handful of precincts. The blame was already out the door. A month after the election The Advocate put “Gay Is the New Black?” on its cover, which is a hell of a thing to print while your own movement is cussing out the actual Black people. That’s the Democratic half of the meme in one news cycle. Gay, loudly, on the marquee. Racist, quietly, in the comment section.

Then it kept going. In June 2015 an internal report on the Human Rights Campaign, the biggest LGBTQ lobbying organization in the country, leaked to the press, and its own staff described the place as a white gay men’s club where women, trans people, and people of color were sidelined. And this is the part where I want you to pay attention to how the law moved. The single biggest federal gay rights win of the Obama years, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, was signed on October 28, 2009. It did not pass as a civil rights bill. It passed as a rider on the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual military spending bill. Chandan Reddy wrote a whole book about that, Freedom with Violence, and his argument is simple and brutal. In the United States the freedom of a marginalized group tends to arrive packaged inside the expansion of state violence, and hate crime enhancements expand the carceral system that already cages Black people at the highest rates in the country. Apply Reddy here. The meme says Democrats are gay but secretly racist. Reddy says look at the bill number. The gay part and the racist part rode in on the same piece of paper.

But the Democratic half runs deeper than 2008, because the party’s own civil rights history has a closet in it. Bayard Rustin organized the March on Washington. Rustin was also a gay man who had been arrested in Pasadena in 1953 on a morals charge, and in 1960 Congressman Adam Clayton Powell threatened to tell the press that Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. were lovers if King didn’t call off a protest at the Democratic convention. King folded. Rustin resigned from the SCLC. Then in August 1963, weeks before the march, Strom Thurmond read Rustin’s arrest record into the Congressional Record from the Senate floor, and the movement had to decide whether to defend its own strategist. It did, barely. Kevin Mumford’s book Not Straight, Not White walks through how Black gay men like Rustin and James Baldwin were both indispensable to the movement and treated as liabilities by it, and how the 1965 Moynihan Report then pathologized the entire Black family as a matriarchal deviation, which put Black sexuality itself on trial. So when the meme says Democrats are gay but secretly racist, understand that the party’s coalition has been trading Black queer people for respectability since before most of the people wearing that shirt were born.

Why This Funny Looking White Man Looks So Spooked

Which takes me smoothly into this gentleman right here, German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who used Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis to build his own critical social theory and explain how modern capitalism and fascism control human psychology. I wonder why Adorno looks so spooked in all these pictures. Then again, the man watched his country vote for Hitler, fled to New York and then Los Angeles, and spent the 1940s trying to figure out on paper how ordinary people become fascists, so maybe the face is earned.

Specifically, I’m getting into his studies on projection and reaction formation. I know I love me a good theory, so I think y’all should add this to y’all lexicons. Projection is when what you cannot stand in yourself gets thrown onto somebody else, and reaction formation is when a repressed desire gets externalized as hostility toward the very thing you want. Freud named the mechanisms, his daughter Anna systematized them in 1936, and Adorno and Max Horkheimer picked them up in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where the chapter on antisemitism describes what they called false projection, the fascist habit of seeing in the Jew every appetite the fascist refuses to admit in himself. Then in 1950 Adorno and three colleagues published The Authoritarian Personality, a massive study funded by the American Jewish Committee that built the F scale, a questionnaire designed to measure how susceptible a person was to fascism, and one of the things the F scale looked for was exactly this, an exaggerated concern with other people’s sex lives, a punitive obsession with sexual deviance, paired with rigid loyalty to authority. Adorno’s finding was that the people most eager to punish the sexual “other” were the people most at war with their own desire.

It says Republicans, racist, but secretly gay, that’s reaction formation textbook. Homophobic performance as a defense against same sex desire. That’s what a lot of people are thinking, and that’s what you call that right there. Now let me be the researcher and not the meme for a second, because the science on this is more contested than the joke lets on. The study everybody cites is Adams, Wright, and Lohr in 1996 at the University of Georgia, which measured physiological arousal in a small group of men, thirty five who scored high on a homophobia scale and twenty nine who did not, and found the homophobic group showed more arousal to gay male erotica. It’s a famous result. It is also small, it has had mixed replications, and later work has pointed at other explanations, including anxiety, so I’m going to hold it the way a scholar holds it, as suggestive and not settled. What is settled is the pattern in the archive. Cohn. The Lavender Scare. The long list of anti gay legislators outed in airport bathrooms and congressional page programs. Adorno didn’t need a lab to see it. He watched it govern.

And Democrats, gay, but secretly racist, that’s liberal guilt and bad faith. Performative anti racism as a mask over subconscious bias. I read somebody in college by the name of Sartre and Arnold Farr who talked about bad faith and this idea of liberal guilt. Sartre’s version, in Being and Nothingness in 1943, is that bad faith is lying to yourself about your own freedom, playing a role so hard you forget you chose it. Farr, in his essay “Whiteness Visible,” takes that and puts race in it. He argues that white liberal consciousness is structured by a kind of learned not knowing, an epistemology of ignorance, where you can recite every antiracist slogan and still organize your material life around the very hierarchy you say you oppose, and the slogan does the work of protecting you from noticing. Apply Farr to the Democratic half of the meme. The performative anti racism is not a cover for the bias. The performative anti racism is the mechanism that keeps the bias from becoming visible to the person holding it. That is why it doesn’t feel like lying to them. Bad faith never does.

Here is the part where I have to be honest about my own source, because Research over MeSearch means I read the whole man and not just the good quotes. Adorno had his own closet problem. In Minima Moralia, the book he wrote in exile, there is a short aphorism called “Tough Baby” where he writes that totalitarianism and homosexuality belong together, and the logic he uses is almost exactly the meme’s logic, that the fascist tough guy is secretly the effeminate one. Scholars have rightly called that passage homophobic. So the meme’s Republican half is not just Adorno’s theory of reaction formation. It is Adorno’s own prejudice, laundered through a joke. Two things can be true. The man diagnosed the mechanism and the man was infected by it, and if you use his tools without noticing that, you end up doing the same thing the shirt does, which is making gayness the insult you hurl at your enemy. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and so is theory.

That’s the dialectical trap I mentioned. The meme lowkey illustrates a closed loop of accusation that neutralizes the critique by mirroring it. Each side says the other side’s public politics are a lie. Each side is right. And because each side is right, nobody has to do anything, because the accusation has already been answered by the counter accusation. It feels like exposure. It functions like a truce.

The Closet Was Never Raceless

My last point comes from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who is considered one of the founders of queer theory. You see her haircut and them glasses. Even like she had that drip in her closet though. But she says the closet isn’t just about sexuality. In Epistemology of the Closet in 1990 Sedgwick argued that the closet is a structure of the known versus the unknown, the private against the public, the open secret that everybody knows and nobody says, and she argued that the closet has been the defining structure of gay oppression in the twentieth century. She also gave us a phrase I want y’all to keep, the privilege of unknowing. Ignorance is not the absence of power. Ignorance is a position, and the powerful get to occupy it at will. Then, five years before Epistemology, in Between Men, she showed how homophobia works as a regulator of male bonding, how men keep each other in line by threatening each other with the accusation of desire, which she called homosexual panic, and which is still, in most states, a legal defense you can raise after killing a gay man.

This meme weaponizes all of that. Your public politics are always a lie. The shirt uses the structure of the closet as a universal solvent. It says both parties have a secret self, and the secret self is the true one, and therefore public commitments are theater. That’s a paranoid reading, and Sedgwick, in her later work, actually named that habit and asked whether we could do better. Hold that thought, I’m coming back to it.

Because first I need to correct Sedgwick, and Marlon B. Ross already did it for me. In his essay “Beyond the Closet as Raceless Paradigm” in the 2005 Black Queer Studies collection, Ross argues that the closet, as queer theory built it, assumes a white subject. The whole drama of the closet is a drama of a person who is presumed normal, presumed to belong, whose secret is the only thing that could expel them from belonging. Black people were never presumed to belong. Ross points out that the “coming out” narrative, moving from a private hidden self to a public visible self, depends on a public that will treat you as an individual once you show yourself, and that public has never existed for Black people, who were already hypervisible, already read as sexually excessive, already surveilled, already outside the norm before they ever said a word about who they loved. For a Black gay man, Ross argues, the closet is not the primary structure. Race is. Sexuality gets folded into a body that was already marked.

Apply Ross to the meme and the whole thing tilts. The shirt assumes two closets, a Republican one hiding gayness and a Democratic one hiding racism, and both closets are white rooms. Neither closet has a Black person in it because Ross is right, the closet was never our architecture. Our architecture was the plantation, the pathology report, the police file. The meme is a joke about white secrets told in a white grammar, and it only reads as universal because whiteness always reads as universal. By running the meme through Ross, you make its whiteness visible, and that, kinfolks, is the actual critique.

The Committee That Came for the NAACP Learned to Come for the Teachers

Here is where the meme’s two secrets stop being a joke and start being a syllabus, because in the history of American schooling the attack on Black people and the attack on gay people have used the same committee, the same statutes, and the same fear.

In 1956, two years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Florida legislature created the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, remembered by its chairman’s name as the Johns Committee. Charley Johns was a former acting governor and a segregationist, and the committee’s founding mission was to destroy the NAACP in Florida by tying it to communism and forcing its membership lists into the open so members could be fired, evicted, and terrorized. The NAACP fought it all the way up, and in Gibson v. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee in 1963 the Supreme Court held that the state could not force the Miami branch president, Theodore Gibson, to hand over the membership rolls. The committee lost. So it pivoted. Starting in 1958 the Johns Committee turned the same investigators, the same subpoena power, and the same informants against gay and lesbian teachers and professors, first at the University of Florida, where more than a dozen faculty and staff were forced out in 1959, and then across the public schools, where teachers were interrogated in motel rooms and had their certificates revoked. Karen Graves documented this in And They Were Wonderful Teachers, and Stacy Braukman put it in its Cold War frame in Communists and Perverts Under the Palms. In 1964 the committee published a report titled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, with a purple cover, which was so lurid that the backlash finally killed the committee in 1965. But not before it had done its work.

Apply Graves here. The Johns Committee is the education version of the meme with the joke removed. The racist project and the anti gay project were not two secrets held by two parties. They were one budget line, one chairman, one set of filing cabinets. When the state could not purge Black organizers it purged gay teachers, and it justified both with the same word, security. Then think about who was in those classrooms. The Black teachers who survived the post Brown purge, which displaced tens of thousands of Black educators across the South, and the gay teachers who survived the Johns Committee, were often the same people, and the ones who were both had to dissemble twice.

Now bring it forward. Florida’s HB 1557 in 2022, the law the country called Don’t Say Gay, and Florida’s HB 7 the same year, the Stop WOKE Act, were written by the same legislature in the same session with the same structure, a prohibition on classroom “instruction” about a category of person, enforced by parent complaints and the threat of a teacher’s license. PEN America counts both under one heading, educational gag orders, because that is what they are. Texas did it too, banning the teaching of the 1619 Project and “critical race theory” in 2021 while pushing the same era’s restrictions on trans students. The template did not change from 1956. Race and sexuality are still investigated by the same committee. The only thing the meme gets wrong is the idea that the two attacks come from opposite parties. In the schoolhouse they have always come from the same door.

And the discomfort I promised earlier applies here too. Democratic school boards and Democratic mayors run cities where Black children are suspended at three times the rate of white children and where a Black queer kid can be pushed out of a school for their hair, their clothes, or their attitude under a discipline code written in race neutral language. The party that says gay at the podium and racist in the discipline data is a real party. I have been in those rooms. Sedgwick’s privilege of unknowing has a school district.

Dissemblance Ain’t a Closet, It’s a Survival Strategy

Intersectionality is not a slide I add at the end. It is the frame. So let me center the people the meme literally cannot draw, Black women and Black queer folks, and let me center their material outcomes rather than their symbolic representation.

Start with the numbers, because the shirt has none. Black people are roughly twelve percent of the U.S. population and account for close to four in ten new HIV diagnoses, according to the CDC’s most recent surveillance, with Black gay and bisexual men carrying the heaviest burden of any group in the country. The Human Rights Campaign’s tracking of fatal violence against transgender people has, year after year, found that most of the people killed are Black transgender women. The Williams Institute at UCLA found in 2019 that Black LGBT adults live in poverty at roughly double the rate of white LGBT adults, around three in ten. None of those people are Republicans hiding a boyfriend or Democrats hiding a bias. They are the people standing where the meme’s two secrets cross, and the crossing is a graveyard.

Evelynn Hammonds gives the theory for why the meme can’t see them. In “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality” in 1994, Hammonds argued that Black women’s sexuality has been treated in American discourse as a void, a black hole, something known only by the way it warps everything around it and never on its own terms. White women’s sexuality gets to be the visible norm, and Black women’s sexuality is either pathologized as excess, the Jezebel, or erased altogether, the mammy, and Black lesbian sexuality is erased twice, once by racism and once by a queer movement built on white women’s visibility. Hammonds builds on Darlene Clark Hine, who in 1989 named the culture of dissemblance, the way Black women after slavery cultivated a public appearance of openness while sealing off their inner lives, precisely because the sexual violence of the plantation and the Jim Crow household made honesty dangerous. Apply Hine here. Dissemblance is not a closet. A closet is where you hide a desire. Dissemblance is where you hide your entire interior from a world that has already decided what your body is for. Sedgwick’s closet is a door in a house. Hine’s dissemblance is a wall you build because you were never given a house.

That is why the meme’s grammar fails Black women completely. It offers two secrets, gay and racist, as if the only things a person could be hiding are a desire or a prejudice. Black women have been hiding survival. And the Democratic coalition that spends Black women’s votes every November, the ninety plus percent that show up in every exit poll, and then hands the policy portfolio to the tech companies and the police unions, is doing to Black women exactly what Hammonds describes, using them as the gravitational center of the party while refusing to see them as subjects. Symbolic capital. Tokens traded virtually. Not live simultaneous realities.

And the Republican coalition that says Black women don’t exist as a category, that files the executive orders killing the race by sex data the government has collected since 1966, is doing the same thing from the other side of the shirt. Erasure from the left as tokenization, erasure from the right as elimination. The two halves of the meme meet in a Black woman’s body and neither one of them notices she is there.

Reparative Reading, or Cheryl Clarke Already Told Us

I told you I would come back to Sedgwick, and here is why it matters. In 1997 she published an essay called “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” where she looked at her own field and asked why every critical move had become an exposure, a gotcha, a demonstration that the thing you thought was innocent is secretly guilty. She called that paranoid reading. It is strong, it is anticipatory, it protects you from surprise, and it is exhausting, and it never builds anything. Her alternative was reparative reading, an approach that asks not what is secretly wrong with this thing but what can be assembled from it, what nourishment can be pulled out of a damaged world. The meme is paranoid reading on a shirt. Both parties are secretly the worst. Now what. Nothing. That is the answer paranoia gives. Nothing.

So let me do the reparative move, and let me do it with somebody who did it first. In 1983 Cheryl Clarke, a Black lesbian poet and organizer, published “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community” in Home Girls, the anthology Barbara Smith edited out of the same circle that produced the Combahee River Collective statement in 1977. Clarke did not write a meme. She wrote a critique from inside, naming the homophobia of Black nationalist men and Black churches without ever once handing white people a weapon, and she paired it with a demand, which was that Black liberation has to include Black lesbians and gay men or it is not liberation. That is the Southern Black Left way of doing this. You critique your own house and you stay in it and you build. Combahee had already said that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and they said it eleven years before Crenshaw gave the idea a legal name, and they said it as Black lesbians who had been asked to choose between the Black movement and the women’s movement and the gay movement and had answered, no, we are all three, and the fact that you can’t see that is your failure, not ours.

Apply Clarke here. The meme wants you to laugh at two parties. Clarke wants you to look at your own coalition and ask who it is asking to wait. That is a harder ask and it is the only one that goes anywhere. See, Ross reminds us the closet was never built for us, and Hammonds teaches us that our silences have a different geometry, and Clarke shows us that the answer to a paranoid joke is not a better joke, it is a movement with room in it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope this video illustrated in many ways that you can always still critique things that you find humorous or clever. The shirt is funny. The shirt is also a closed loop, a white grammar, a paranoid reading, and a picture of American politics with no Black gay person in it. Crenshaw shows the erasure. Adorno shows the mechanism and then shows you his own infection. Sedgwick gives you the closet and Ross tells you the closet never had a Black door. And the Johns Committee, and Roy Cohn, and Proposition 8, and the hate crimes bill on the military budget, and Bayard Rustin resigning from the SCLC, are the receipts that the meme skipped on its way to the punchline.

And I hope this encourages you to follow me on Substack where I’m currently ranked number 85 in education. I’ve got to get higher than that though, man. But if you’re looking for a deeper dive in essay with cited sources on this topic specifically, go on and follow me over there. Education Is Elevation is actually what it’s called.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The meme only counts to two. Crenshaw’s DeGraffenreid problem is the meme’s problem: a category grid that holds “racist” and “gay” as opposite flags has no cell for the Black gay person standing in both.

* The Republican half has a biography, not a theory. Roy Cohn ran the Lavender Scare, died of AIDS denying it, and in 1973 defended Donald Trump against a federal housing discrimination suit.

* The Democratic half has a bill number. The Shepard Byrd Hate Crimes Act became law in 2009 as a rider on the military budget, and the Prop 8 “seventy percent” blame on Black voters was a bad exit poll the movement never retracted.

* The closet was never raceless. Marlon Ross corrects Sedgwick: Black people were hypervisible and surveilled before they said a word about desire, so the “coming out” drama assumes a belonging Black people never had. Hine and Hammonds show Black women live behind dissemblance, not a closet.

* Race and sexuality get investigated by the same committee. Florida’s Johns Committee was built in 1956 to destroy the NAACP, lost at the Supreme Court, and pivoted to purging gay teachers. Don’t Say Gay and Stop WOKE came out of the same session in 2022. Same door, always.

PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

The meme can only count to two because it was made by people who never had to hide survival, and the archive that proves it, from the Johns Committee’s filing cabinets to Egan and Sherrill’s corrected Prop 8 data, only stays open if somebody keeps the lights on. Black male educators are less than two percent of this profession, and I am that two percent, fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I’m independent with no corporate sponsor and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building: a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: become a paid subscriber.

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

RELATED READINGS (Bibliography)

Adams, Henry E., Lester W. Wright Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr. “Is Homophobia Associated with Homosexual Arousal?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 105, no. 3 (1996).

Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. 1951. Aphorism 24, “Tough Baby.”

Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The Authoritarian Personality. Harper, 1950.

Adorno, Theodor W. “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” 1951.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, 1986.

Braukman, Stacy. Communists and Perverts Under the Palms: The Johns Committee in Florida, 1956 to 1965. University Press of Florida, 2012.

Clarke, Cheryl. “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community.” In Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. Kitchen Table Press, 1983.

Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991).

DeGraffenreid v. General Motors Assembly Division, 413 F. Supp. 142 (E.D. Mo. 1976).

Egan, Patrick J., and Kenneth Sherrill. “California’s Proposition 8: What Happened, and What Does the Future Hold?” National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, January 2009.

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WHATEVER TO KEEP THE UNION INTACT

Some scholars would call this American exceptionalism. I call it being lost in the sauce.

Do you care if your neighborhood is your neighborhood? Hold that question, because the whole thing is going to come back to it.

Y’all remember during the 2024 campaign how we were told about the illegals, how if they did it the right way then people would agree with their existence here in this country, how the whole thing was about the rule of law and how everybody in America is expected to not only abide by the law but hold everybody to the same standard of the law. Since then we now have a bunch of data that has come out and shown in more ways than some that a lot of the individuals being swept up in this mass deportation agenda have no criminal record. Not a record, not a charge, nothing. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse put the number at 70.6 percent of everybody sitting in ICE detention as of July 11, 2026 with no criminal conviction at all, and the growth in detention across this fiscal year came almost entirely from people with no conviction and no pending charge. Cato ran the same books and found about 5 percent of detainees with a violent conviction. Five. So the rule of law thing was the sales pitch, and the product was something else.

We also know that during 2024 we were told a lot about jobs, a lot about how immigrant people were taking jobs from Americans, and specifically we were told that Donald Trump cared about Black jobs, because he loved to weaponize and sensationalize how undocumented people were stealing Black jobs uniquely. Then I remember in the first five to six months he was in office that he uniquely went after Black people that had jobs, which quintessentially makes them Black jobs, right? The federal workforce that got gutted was the single most integrated employer in the country, Black folks were close to one in five federal workers against about one in eight of the civilian labor force, and that was the payroll they cut first. We also know there was a lot of anti trans, anti gay, anti drag queen, we got to get these men out of women’s sports, we see a lot of that happen as well.

So here go my question. When we are talking about salmonella or E. coli in your fruit, or you having glass in your IV, do you blame that on the immigrants or the trans people? Do you? I’m curious.

I’m currently in Dallas, Texas. They having some type of Republican National Convention, some type of, you know what I’m saying, something, the first midterm convention the party has ever thrown, two nights at the American Airlines Center, Trump on the mic both nights, and the city fronting close to two million dollars in security money out of a budget that was already thirty million short. I was invited here to Dallas, and since I’ve been here, I only got here last night, I’ve been able to have a lot of political conversations about things that’s going on, not only here in Dallas but in the great state of Texas, and the conservative contradictions that’s going to slap you in the face.

The amount of conservative contradictions is so baffling that sometimes we got to just slow down, take a step back, and really call out what is happening and call out what has been happening. You feel me? Because sometimes the news media goes so fast that we forget. Hey, they said they was doing this mass deportation s**t because they wanted to preserve American jobs and they wanted to make sure everybody was abiding by the law. Now we have Epstein files, over three million pages dumped by the Justice Department on January 30, 2026, six weeks after the deadline Congress wrote into the Epstein Files Transparency Act, with roughly two and a half million more pages the Department admits it still holding back, and the Attorney General who sat on them fired in April. People in those files wasn’t abiding by the law. It wasn’t abiding by the law. Though they were not abiding by the law, though they were not abiding by the law, we still have ways for them to have authority over the policy process and over who gets to be in this country. Nobody named in that dump has been charged with anything new. Not one. Meanwhile a man with no record from Honduras sits in a Texas detention bed. That is the standard of the law, applied evenly, they told us.

The Grace Was Selective Before the Facts Came In

I’ve already been seeing the MAGA hats. I’ve already been seeing the memorials of Charlie Kirk, and the memorials bring me something crazy too, man, so let me be careful here because a courtroom is involved.

Charlie Kirk was shot on September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University. The man charged, Tyler Robinson, was bound over for trial on September 1, 2026, pleaded not guilty to all seven counts, and the state is seeking death. Nobody has proven a motive in that courtroom yet. What the public record does say is that Robinson was raised in a conservative, Republican registered household, that he himself was registered unaffiliated, that the internet spent a week trying to make him a Groyper and CNN’s fact check found no evidence for it, and that the governor of Utah and the President spent that same week telling the country he was a radical leftist before a single filing had been made. Two things can be true. I don’t get to convict a man on a livestream, and they didn’t get to convict a movement on a press conference either.

Here go the contradiction I’m actually pointing at. Erika Kirk stood up at that memorial on September 21, 2025, in front of the President, and forgave the man charged with killing her husband. That is her right and I’m not here to take it from her. Four days later, September 25, the White House signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, a directive that told the whole federal apparatus to go hunt “domestic terrorism” and named the political left as the threat category, on the strength of an assassination the government had already decided was leftist before it decided anything else. So the individual shooter got grace. The people who had nothing to do with it got a federal targeting memo. That’s the pattern. Grace flows to the person in the room, punishment flows to the category. They never went back and told their followers, hey, we told y’all it was a Democrat, a liberal, a leftist, a Marxist, a socialist, and we don’t actually know that, we never did. They can’t go back, because the memo already signed.

All this is going to make sense in a minute.

Lost in the Sauce

I’m 35. I was born in 1990. I graduated in 2009. So I feel like the type of millennial I am, I grew up at a time where American imperialism worldwide was starting to become more and more evident to a lot of us as kids, and we were told, always, you better be lucky you’re not from, what is it, North Korea. I, as a young Black boy from Bryan, Texas, that has always been a little bit outspoken, that has always been skeptical of the things and ways they say things should work, was always chastised. If you think America so bad, you better be lucky you’re not in North Korea. You better be lucky you’re not in China. You better be lucky you’re not in a space and place that always wants to surveil you.

It’s 2026. That’s kind of crazy to think about, right?

A song came across my timeline, and I played it on the stream because the man might got a hit on his hands. The bit is simple. Describe North Korea. Cameras on every street that record and relay everything to a masked and unmarked state police. A dictator whose cabinet laughs when his jokes aren’t funny, who exploits his people and takes their money, who is real good buddies with Putin, whose friends party on yachts where the girls are underage, and where even a corroborated list of a thousand kids’ testimony would get blacked out, redacted, and waved off as a hoax while the press claps. Then the punchline. Thank God that stuff doesn’t happen here. When we describe the actions and the policies of America and we can put them on a different foreign country that we have been indoctrinated to view as being inherently backwards, corrupt and evil, we can condemn those actions. When the American government does them, we cop pleas. Some scholars would call this American exceptionalism. I call it being lost in the sauce.

Case in point. The CEO of Flock Safety, Garrett Langley, the company whose license plate readers are on the side of the road in your town whether you voted for them or not, went on Fox News in August and told Americans we have to compromise on privacy for safety. Then his own address got passed around online, and within days his house was blurred on Google Street View and scrubbed off the real estate sites. Newsweek wouldn’t print the address and I won’t either, because doxxing a man’s family is not the argument. The argument is this: he believes in the value of privacy when it comes to him and his property, and he does not believe in the value of privacy when it comes to everyday American citizens. Ron Wyden told Oregon towns in October 2025 to pull their Flock cameras because abuse was “inevitable,” and a Kentucky officer already got caught running his ex through the system a couple thousand times. The people at the top blur their house and lobby for your camera. If a corporation or some b******t billionaire can bribe, loiter, what they call it, lobby a policymaker to get them to pass a law that’s anti you and pro them, how is that not what you describe when it comes to fascism, or all the things they say is bad about socialism and communism?

The Countdown

Now let me tell you what’s really finna happen in Dallas tonight, because Kay Faith in the chat said it first. Grindr is about to crash. If y’all know anything about when you get too many Republicans in one space and place, whatever gay app they got on, it’s finna crash. They finna have so much activity, so much pitching and catching and cheeks being clapped on their damn time, that it crashes.

This is not a joke I made up. In 2016 Grindr told Vice that traffic around the Cleveland convention hall jumped 66 percent, and 120 percent the night check in opened, while Times Square and South Beach sat flat. In 2024 more than a thousand people in Milwaukee filed outage reports the second afternoon of the convention, and a year later the Grindr CEO went on the record and confirmed a “significant spike” in Milwaukee during the RNC while insisting the servers never actually fell over. Two things can be true. Then Wednesday, September 9, 2026, the same day I’m streaming, outlets started reporting Grindr outages in Dallas during the midterm convention. Onyx said 45 minutes. Prince said by the end of the first night. Shidd, Prince won.

Here go the contradiction and I want to say it plain. This is the party that raises millions and billions of dollars to criminalize queer people. Here in Texas they passed Senate Bill 12 in 2023, a law aimed at “sexually oriented performances” in front of minors or on public property, written by Bryan Hughes with drag queens as the target, blocked by a federal judge in Houston for two years, revived by the Fifth Circuit in November 2025, in effect March 18, 2026, and struck again by the same Houston judge as to the performers still standing in August. The same people that applauded that policy is now in Dallas sneaking and geeking trying to find them a cowboy to do the dang with. Meanwhile my trans homegirls tend to make a whole bunch of money on a week like this, and we don’t talk enough about how a lot of people that will demonize and criminalize things in public will fantasize and fetishize them in private.

Sedgwick argued that the closet is not just about sexuality, it’s a defining structure of modern Western thought, a tension between the secret and the known. Apply Sedgwick here. The closet is not a place these men go on convention week. The closet is the platform. The secret and the known is how they govern. Known: we protect the children. Secret: the AI files, the Epstein files, the summer meals. Known: rule of law. Secret: 70 percent with no record. Known: the trans threat. Secret: the app. Every accusation is a confession, and the confession runs on a countdown.

They Only Care About the Kids When the Kids Are Playing Sports

They told us they cared about the kids and they cared about the jobs. So let’s audit that.

On August 25, 2026, the Seventh Circuit, in United States v. Anderegg, ruled that the private possession of AI generated child sexual abuse imagery in your own home is protected by the First Amendment when no real child is depicted. Judge John Z. Lee wrote that he was bound by Stanley v. Georgia from 1969 and Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition from 2002 and that he had “concerns” about the lines those cases draw, and the panel asked the Supreme Court to reconsider. The production and distribution charges still stand, so be precise: this is possession, at home. Still. In America you have a court saying you may keep that in your house, and there is no court in this country that has ever said your kids have a right to clean water. Not one. The colonias outside El Paso and along the Rio Grande have been waiting on pipes since before I was born. Jackson, Mississippi, went days with nothing in the tap in 2022. Flint is still a case file. So they only care about the kids when it comes to sports equity, huh? When it comes to sports equity, all of a sudden we care about kids’ general welfare.

Then Greg Abbott denied those kids summer food. This one is not a metaphor. In June 2025 the Texas legislature, both chambers, with the Speaker and the Lieutenant Governor pushing it, put 60 million dollars in the budget for SUN Bucks, the federal summer EBT program, 120 dollars per child for groceries in June, July, and August when the school cafeteria closes. That 60 million would have pulled down about 450 million in federal money and fed about 3.8 million Texas children. Abbott line item vetoed it. Only that line. Texas has never participated since the program launched in 2024, the largest state on the refusal list, with the second highest food insecurity rate in the country, and the state missed the January 1, 2026 deadline again, so summer 2026 came and went with nothing. Like, I know y’all broke as hell, I know I don’t pay y’all good, I know I don’t get y’all parents no good job, I know a lot of y’all rural communities in Texas is living in a food apartheid, and I know y’all need the meals to get your kids from May to June to July to August. You need to eat these meals. Greg Abbott denied them.

The only way I would have had outrage in Texas about that is if I would have lied and told people the trans people in Texas created a policy that took away the food from kids’ mouths. Then all of a sudden everybody come out talking about transgenders and trans, and they going to get derogatory with it, a transformer or some s**t. That is how the quote unquote culture wars are set up. They make it where people have selective moral obligations and selective moral outrage. There is no way you’re going to convince me you care about the kids being kids and you don’t care about the way Greg Abbott specifically, the way Republicans specifically, pass policies that are not good for children. You care more about potential made up threats to kids than the actual threats towards kids. As a parent I find that disgusting.

Pose it like this. Which one is more of a detriment to the kids, trans women in sports or the Epstein files? Which one has had more of a material impact on kids’ livelihoods, the Epstein files or the trans women that don’t exist in the WNBA? Jenkins in the chat put it better than me: if safe kids were important we’d have gun laws, free school lunch, free health care, free social spaces, and we’d be holding the Epstein class accountable.

They going to try to convince you they care about them kids when they say the drag queen coming to get them. When the guns come to get them, they tell you to pray it away. When they think the critical race theory books is trying to get their kids, they don’t pray that away. They don’t say, Dear Heavenly Father, I want to pray away the critical race theory. They pass policies. Uvalde was May 24, 2022, nineteen children and two teachers at Robb Elementary, 376 officers in the hallway for 77 minutes, and the response was thoughts, prayers, and a door audit. That same board that can’t get a meal into a kid’s hand in July just spent this exact week, September 1 through 4, 2026, rewriting the entire high school social studies curriculum, cutting sixth grade world cultures, telling Muslim parents no, and requiring that kids connect “biblical imagery” to Dr. King’s Dream speech. They don’t pray the curriculum away. They vote it. Eleven to four.

Then they say the immigrants taking the jobs. If the immigrants taking the jobs is one of your concerns, how come you don’t have any beef with the data centers taking the jobs? You are onboarding data centers that’s wiping out complete industries and complete positions that no longer exist because you’ve been automated, and you ain’t worried about those jobs. Let me correct myself on air, because Research over MeSearch. I said Abbott signed a 20 million dollar deal. It’s not a deal, it’s a tax exemption, and it’s bigger than that. The comptroller’s office told the legislature in July that 138 data centers qualify for Texas’s data center sales tax exemption and 59 of them got certified this year alone. Abbott called Texas the “epicenter of AI development” in November 2025. By June 30, 2026 he was in Bullard calling for a ban on data centers in rural neighborhoods, and by August 23 he was on ABC saying the industry “dug their own grave” and deserved the backlash, with Trump calling his retreat an economic “mistake.” That’s how bad it is down here. The man damn near campaigned against himself.

Texas Is Purple, It’s Manufactured Red

In Texas, Republicans have been in power for damn near my whole life. I’m 35. I seen Ted Cruz, Canadian Cuban Cruz, on national TV talking about how Texas Republicans are in jeopardy of losing a Senate seat they’ve held down for 38 years. He right about the number. The last Democrat to win a Senate race in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. That’s 38 years. Now James Talarico, who beat Jasmine Crockett in the March primary, is tied with Ken Paxton, who beat John Cornyn in the May runoff, and every nonpartisan poll from Emerson to Overton has it inside the margin, 47 to 46, 50 to 50, dead heat, with voters under 50 breaking for Talarico by fifteen. I’ve been seeing so many Republicans, from Donald Trump to Greg Abbott to Ted Cruz, talking about James Talarico uniquely, and I think they know they fucked up. They scrambling and scraping. They trying to figure out how to fix this self imposed gunshot wound to their own foot.

Here go the other thing for the people that don’t live here. It’s a reason why Donald Trump called down to Texas in the summer of 2025 and said, I need y’all to give me five seats, I don’t care how y’all do it. Texas has already mastered how to gerrymander and cheat maps. So when y’all say, hey, y’all in Texas got what y’all voted for, no. They cheated and did this s**t right here. Abbott bragged in August 2024 that the state had wiped over a million people off the voter rolls since 2021. They disincentivize voters. They suppress. They close polling sites. They do different s**t here in Texas to ensure it stays red.

Then a lot of y’all get on social media or hop on TV and say Texas got what it wanted, Texas got what it deserved. None of my Black family members, none of my family members at all actually, wanted this. Some of my family members just a b***h ass and stuff, I ain’t going to lie. You from Texas, whether you white, Mexican, Black, Asian, everybody in Texas got some wannabe redneck in the family that thinks if I chuck and jive with white supremacy enough they will accept me and my humanity. We all got them. Majority of my family did not vote for Donald Trump. Majority of my community don’t agree with Donald Trump. So when y’all say Texas got what they voted for, keep that in mind, and understand that some folks right now in Europe and Asia saying them Americans got what they voted for, assuming we all wanted Trump, when a big portion of America don’t want Trump at all. Let me correct myself here too, because I said on air that Trump lost the popular vote again. He didn’t in 2024. He won it, barely, under 50 percent, a plurality. He lost it in 2016 and 2020. The point holds harder with the right number: a man who never once got half the country to vote for him has governed all three times like he got ninety.

Texas is purple. It’s manufactured red. Do not look at the political representation of Texas through the electoral college map. These people down here ain’t red or blue. Just keep that in mind.

In Perpetuity: The Compromise They Still Honoring

Now I got a theory, and I’d be willing to debate it. Let me get it right, because on stream I said Rutherford P. and it’s Rutherford B. Hayes.

The presidential election of 1876 between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden was deadlocked. Tilden won the popular vote and sat at 184 electoral votes, one short. Hayes had 165. Twenty electoral votes were disputed, in three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, plus one elector in Oregon, and in those three states both parties were sending in their own returns. Congress created a fifteen member Electoral Commission in January 1877, eight Republicans and seven Democrats, and it voted eight to seven, every single disputed vote, to Hayes. Southern Democrats could have filibustered the count and thrown the country into a second civil war twelve years after the first one. They didn’t. On February 26, 1877, at Wormley’s Hotel in Washington, a hotel owned by a Black man, James Wormley, Hayes’s people and the Southern Democrats made a deal. Southern Democrats agreed to stop blocking the count. Republicans agreed to remove the last federal troops from the South. Hayes took the oath March 3 in private and March 5 in public. The troops left the South Carolina statehouse on April 10 and the Louisiana statehouse on April 24. That was the end of Reconstruction. C. Vann Woodward wrote the standard account of it in 1951, Reunion and Reaction, and part of what he found in the paper trail was a promise of federal subsidy for the Texas and Pacific Railroad, so Texas was literally a line item in the bargain. Eric Foner thinks Woodward overweighted the railroad, and both of them agree on the part that matters: the North got the White House, the South got the Negroes.

So here go my theory. The Northern liberals, they Democrats now, they used to be Republicans, the Southern strategy did a little boom boom boom, sold Black people and people of color down south to the Southern conservatives. They made an ironclad deal and they honored it. When they ended Reconstruction, the up north folks said, we’ll let y’all do whatever y’all wanna do with y’all niggas down there, whatever y’all want to do with y’all Indians, whatever y’all want to do with y’all Mexicans, we will mind our business, as long as we keep the union intact. Y’all leave us alone up here. In perpetuity. Ever since, ever since, ever since.

The archive backs me. The same summer those troops left the Southern statehouses, July 1877, the Great Railroad Strike hit, and Hayes sent federal troops against the workers in Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Chicago. So the army didn’t go home. It got reassigned. The same decade, the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army finished the wars on the Comanche and the Apache, and by the 1880s Texas courts were sorting Mexicans into “white” for citizenship and “Mexican” for everything else. Apply Somerville here. She showed that the color line and the hetero/homo line were drawn in the same twenty years by the same scientists and the same courts, Plessy in 1896 on one hand, the invention of “the homosexual” as a classifiable person on the other. The deal of 1877 wasn’t just about Black folks. It was permission for the South to build a whole sorting machine, and the North agreed not to look.

Then it’s a reason so many Democrats only care about Black folks down south when it’s time to talk about the civil rights movement, when it’s Black History Month, when it’s Martin Luther King Day, when they want to talk about Ruby Bridges. Other than that they don’t engage Black folks down south. They only care about Black folks down south when they engage in the archive and it’s a relic of the past. Right now Scott Colom is running for Senate in Mississippi. Seventh generation Mississippian, district attorney, the same man Cindy Hyde Smith blocked from a federal judgeship in 2023 over a Soros donation that never even touched his campaign. If he wins he’d be Mississippi’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, and the last one, Blanche K. Bruce, walked out of that chamber in March 1881, four years after the deal, and nobody Black has walked back in from Mississippi since. You only got 100 Senate seats. When we talk about Trump being impeached, the reason he was never removed is the Senate was a Republican majority. A Democratic majority in this time of day means something. The DSCC put 40 million dollars on the table for Senate races this fall and gave Mississippi zero. Not a dollar. That’s the compromise. That’s what honoring it looks like on a budget sheet. One of the biggest exports out of America is Black culture, and the same sentence where folks acknowledge that the majority of the Black population in this country is down south is the same sentence they say y’all got what y’all voted for down there. The descendants of Massa, Massa’s great grandma, Massa’s great grandchildren, they can do what they want to do with y’all. In perpetuity.

If Abe Lincoln was on this “anything to keep the union intact,” and he was, August 22, 1862, in the letter to Horace Greeley, my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or to destroy slavery, then guarantee that’s what was still being repeated by the men that survived him. That is the nature of America. Whatever to keep the union intact. If I got to deport all the Mexicans and all the Venezuelans, if I got to keep some here and keep some out, whatever to keep the union intact. Being real, the union intact just means the people at the top keep making their money and the social order stays as it is. When they say social order, I see a hierarchy. White over Black, white over dark, men over women, straight over gay. That’s the hierarchy. That’s the social order. That’s what we’re on.

Thomas Sowell Is Clever, Not Smart

Y’all pulled up for this, so let me give it to you. This Black conservative economist is probably one of the most quoted people in the movement, and so many conservatives believe Thomas Sowell is smart. I think Thomas Sowell is clever. His economic analysis, especially around slavery and the state of Black culture, I don’t think is smart. The clip going around has him say it plain: as of 1960, almost a hundred years after slavery, the majority of Black kids were being raised in two married households, within one generation of the welfare state that dropped to a minority, so centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow did not destroy the Black family but one generation of the welfare state did. Officer Tatum runs the same play on TikTok.

This is one of the most intellectually lazy arguments in the country, and it blows my mind that it measures the success of the Black community off a nebulous idea around marriage rates. Back then, under Jim Crow, a white person could walk into a Black person’s house and, regardless of whether you had three parents in a household or one, drag your Black ass out of there and hang you on a tree and get away with it. Ain’t no marriage rate in the world that protected Mary Turner in 1918. The institutions they’re romanticizing didn’t even recognize the legitimacy of Black love or Black marriage. Enslaved people could not legally marry in a single Southern state. The marriages Herbert Gutman found in the 1880 census, and his number is real, most Black households in the South were two parent households then, were marriages the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go around registering after 1865 because the law had never counted them. So the fact that they still trying to romanticize Jim Crow off of a marriage rate tells you everything about what they think a family is for. Sowell’s 1960 number is roughly right, about two thirds of Black kids in two parent homes. His cause is wrong.

Because think about what “the welfare state” was for a Black family. Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which Ira Katznelson counts at about 65 percent of Black workers at the time. The states administered Aid to Dependent Children, and Southern states wrote “suitable home” rules and “man in the house” rules, meaning if a caseworker found a man in your house, your kids lost their benefits. The Supreme Court didn’t strike that down until King v. Smith in 1968. So the one welfare program a Black mother could touch literally paid her to have no man in the house, by design, in states that had just spent ninety years refusing to recognize her marriage at all. Rico in the chat said it in one line: the fed provides the programs, lets the states administer them, and the Southern states use that. Yealp. The New Deal was FDR figuring out a way to commodify and borrow from socialist programs because the labor unions were on the American corporations’ ass, and technically socialism was about to roll through America, and he made it where the benefits was only available to white folks. FDR has benefited a lot from the rewriting of history. Not negating he was a good president for his time, but his politics and his ethics on this specifically, it wasn’t like that.

Now here go the part where the argument eats itself. Sowell is an economist. He knows this. So when you say the welfare state is the biggest detriment to the Black community, and in the same breath y’all say there’s no such thing as systemic racism, what are you saying? The welfare state was institutionalized by the government, through policy, and you are conceding that it had a disproportionate impact on the Black community. That is the definition of systemic racism. You just described it. Why aren’t you conceding it exists? It becomes circular. Welfare program bad, welfare program is the legacy of slavery, we don’t get to the welfare program without the institution of slavery, without Reconstruction, without the way the American government let J.P. Morgan and Vanderbilt and Rockefeller run rampant and then break the unions when the unions got too integrated. Hosom’s granddaddy integrated a union and brought his sons and uncles on. That’s when they started cracking them. So the white aristocrats that’s been running this country since the plantation days got to lobby, or bribe, and that’s how we got here. Every road runs through the deal.

Apply Cohen here, because this is where the whole pack ties. Cathy Cohen argued in 1997 that heteronormativity is not a feeling, it is a regulatory system run by the state, and that Black people were never handed full membership in it no matter who they married. The welfare queen, the punk, and the bulldagger are policed by the same hand. Sowell’s marriage rate is that hand with a calculator. He’s not measuring Black families. He’s measuring how well Black people performed a straightness the state never let them fully hold, and then blaming them when the state’s own program was written to break it.

Friday Night Lights, Monday Morning Dark

In Texas we care a lot about football. A lot of that football is dominated by Black bodies, and the only time they care about Black bodies usually is when they on the football field. That’s the reality of Texas. University of Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, University of Houston, they got a big football culture around it, and you have all these Texas citizens paying taxes that don’t care how they treat your Negroes when they not on the field. You only care how we can academically compete when it comes to college football. Let me correct my number, because I said 42 or 43 on air and the rankings that came out this summer put Texas 29th in U.S. News and 32nd in WalletHub for K through 12. That’s still bottom half in a state that says it’s the best at everything. If we was ranked 29th in football they’d fire the coach, they’d have a special session, they’d talk about so much investment in infrastructure and coaching and resources that it would be fixed by fall. In school, 29th is a Tuesday.

Apply Hawkins here. Billy Hawkins called the arrangement the new plantation, and he was not being cute. The predominantly white university extracts the Black body’s labor on Saturday, sells it to boosters and networks, and graduates the same young man at a rate below the general student body, in a state that put a line item veto on his little brother’s July groceries. Same body, two ledgers. On Saturday the body is an asset. Monday through Friday the body is a cost.

Here go the education implication in one week’s worth of Texas receipts. The State Board of Education, eleven Republicans to four Democrats after Abbott swapped in an appointee, finished the high school social studies rewrite on September 4, 2026. They deleted the sixth grade world cultures course. They wrote Islam into the standards through its military campaigns and waved off the Muslim parents who testified. They tied Dr. King’s Dream to “biblical imagery” as a required connection. That curriculum rolls out in the 2030 to 31 school year to kids who did not eat in the summer of 2025 or the summer of 2026 because the same state government couldn’t find 60 million dollars against 450 million in federal money, while the comptroller certified 59 data center tax exemptions this year alone. Whitey on the Moon. Rat done bit my sister Nell, and Nell can’t get SUN Bucks, but the server farm got a sales tax holiday.

Then you go one state east, and this is why I brought Mississippi up. My first time in Mississippi was a few weeks ago, Meridian, Jackson, two little towns I can’t name right now, and I have never seen so many vacant schools in my life. Shut down schools, boarded up schools, schools with the name still on the brick. These communities were deliberately left behind in development and infrastructure. That’s not neglect, that’s honoring the deal. Mississippi is also on the SUN Bucks refusal list this summer. Same compromise, different governor.

The dumbest part is that the kid on the field and the kid in the vacant school is the same kid. Texas doesn’t have two Black children, one for Saturday and one for Monday. It has one, and it made a decision about which day he counts.

Nobody Is Supposed to Know, Everybody Is on the App

Kay Faith joked, and I joked back, and then I sat with it, because a joke about who on Grindr in Dallas has a race in it whether we say so or not.

A man on stream put up a shirt that said Republicans, racist but secretly gay. Democrats, gay but secretly racist. I thought it was clever at first. Then I realized it’s embedded in a couple of fallacies. It flattens difference so that nobody has real politics and everybody’s performing, it posits that authenticity is unattainable, that you can’t really be against racism or really be racist, and it says nothing about class. The unspokenness of it is that they all get paid by the same donors. Apply Duggan here. Lisa Duggan showed twenty years ago that the culture war is the stage show and the redistribution upward is the business, and that a certain kind of gay politics got itself a seat at the table by agreeing to that arrangement. The meme is genius funny and it’s a little projection. I’m still going to rap with it.

Apply Snorton here, because here go the race in the joke. In 2003 the New York Times ran a magazine cover on “Double Lives on the Down Low,” and in 2004 J.L. King sat on Oprah’s couch, and for the rest of that decade the country decided that Black men specifically had a secret, and that the secret was killing Black women. C. Riley Snorton wrote the book on it, and his finding was that the down low was never really a description of behavior. It was a glass closet, a way of building Black sexuality as always already suspect, always already hiding something, so that the same secrecy that’s a punchline in a Dallas hotel this week was a public health emergency when it wore a Black face. White Republicans get to have a funny closet. Black men got a moral panic and a CDC category. Same behavior. Different ledger. That’s intersectionality, that’s not a vibe, that’s a receipt.

Now put my trans homegirls in the frame, because they the ones in the room this week and they the ones in the crosshairs the other fifty one weeks. Texas signed a law in 2025 defining sex for every state record by what’s on a birth certificate. The Human Rights Campaign has tracked fatal violence against trans people for a decade and the majority of the dead, year after year, are Black trans women. So when the straight agenda, and I mean that phrase literally, gets to work, it does not land evenly. It lands on the Black woman whose womanhood the state has unrecognized on paper, in a state that would not recognize her great great grandmother’s marriage either. Same clerk. Same pen. Different century.

The straight agenda is what pushes people into closets. The straight agenda is what gets people put out of their families. The straight agenda is what denies lovely partnerships health care and safety. You’ve heard about the gay agenda, the one trying to turn your mama and daddy gay, the one targeting your children. I think the straight agenda is much more pervasive and much more violent and much more problematic. There ain’t too many institutions or organizations or buildings that say in order for you to get in here you must be gay. Even gay clubs are open to everybody. There are plenty of heterosexual, heteronormative things that say in order to meet the criteria for entry you got to be straight. That is a straight agenda. No euphemism, no metaphor, no analogy. This is literally what’s happening.

I was watching a movie with my kids and my nieces and nephews, and there was a romantic scene, opposite sex, liking each other, kissing, and I thought about how heteronormative hypocrisy says I don’t have no issue with the gays but let the kids be kids, I don’t think we should put sexuality on kids at all, and then has no issue with Kristoff and Anna kissing in Frozen, no issue with Nala and Simba. That’s a lie. You have no problem when it’s heteronormative because you believe it’s the default and natural, therefore it can’t be forced on nobody, and the other thing you believe is deviant and unnatural, therefore the mere existence of it means it’s being pushed on somebody. If it’s true that being around gay people will make you gay, where do the gays come from? Cutty Fuzz in the chat said it: I was queer and didn’t even know any queer people. One time I asked one of the homies, the first time your thing got hard, did you get to choose what made it hard? He said no. So if a gay man gets his thing hard from viewing this, you blame him for that? Man, Conscious, I never thought about it that way. Then the next thing out his mouth was people choose to be gay. If you believe you choose to be gay, you’re telling me you chose to be straight, and that you could choose to be gay. The chat got there before I did: the “it’s a choice” crowd is projecting their repression, it’s something they want to express and choose not to, so they feel like everybody should be able to choose not to. That’s the whole mechanism of the closet, and it’s the same mechanism as the party.

The Counter Agenda Is Loving Each Other Out Loud

Here go the counterweight, because I don’t leave y’all in the closet.

Joseph Beam wrote in 1986, in the first anthology of Black gay men’s writing ever published, that Black men loving Black men is the revolutionary act. Marlon Riggs put it on film in Tongues Untied in 1989 and PBS stations across the South refused to air it. Understand what Beam meant. He wasn’t talking about sex. He was talking about the neighbor. He was talking about a Black man looking at another Black man, in a country that has been sorting them since 1877 into fit for the field and unfit for the family, and refusing the sorting. That’s the counter agenda. The straight agenda sorts. The counter agenda claims.

See, Cohen reminds us that the state never handed us the straightness it now grades us on, and Snorton teaches us that our secrets get a different price than theirs. Hawkins showed us the two ledgers, and Beam showed us how to close the book. The energy to rework one’s belief is expensive, Backhand said that in the chat and he right. Homework is good, man. I’ll see y’all next Wednesday. Education Is Elevation. Stay sucker free in the land of lollipops. You know what I mean? Is your neighbor good? You care about your neighbor. You know what I’m saying? Are you a good neighbor or are you a bad neighbor?

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The culture war is a sorting machine for outrage, not a set of beliefs. The same voters told to fear drag queens were told to pray away Uvalde, and the same governor who vetoed 450 million federal dollars in summer groceries campaigns as the children’s protector. Selective outrage is the product, and Cohen shows the state has been running that machine on Black families since before there was a welfare state to blame.

* “Rule of law” was a pitch, not a policy. TRAC’s July 11, 2026 count puts 70.6 percent of ICE detainees at no criminal conviction, 92 percent of this year’s detention growth came from people with no charge at all, while the Justice Department released three million Epstein pages, withheld two and a half million more, and charged nobody.

* The Compromise of 1877 is a living budget line. Tilden won the popular vote, an 8 to 7 commission gave it to Hayes, the troops left the Southern statehouses in April 1877 and got redeployed against railroad strikers by July, and in 2026 the DSCC’s 40 million dollar Senate map gave Mississippi, the Blackest state in the union, zero dollars.

* Sowell’s number is roughly right and his cause is wrong. About two thirds of Black kids lived in two parent homes in 1960. The “welfare state” a Black mother could actually touch was administered by Southern states under “man in the house” rules that paid her to have no husband until King v. Smith struck them in 1968. If a government program had a disproportionate impact on Black families by policy design, that is systemic racism by definition, and Sowell’s argument concedes it.

* The closet is not where these men go on convention week, it’s the platform. Sedgwick’s secret and the known governs everything: known, protect the kids; secret, the meals and the files. Snorton shows the same secrecy that is a punchline in a Dallas hotel was a moral panic and a CDC category when it was pinned on Black men.

RELATED READINGS / BIBLIOGRAPHY

Central and theoretical

* Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997).

* Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.

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

* Duggan, Lisa. The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy. Beacon Press, 2003.

* Snorton, C. Riley. Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

* Hawkins, Billy. The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports, and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

* Edwards, Harry. The Revolt of the Black Athlete. Free Press, 1969.

* Beam, Joseph, ed. In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology. Alyson, 1986.

* Riggs, Marlon, dir. Tongues Untied. 1989.

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5 Key Takeaways

* “Pattern recognition” is an 1896 technology, not a 2026 one. Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies used post 1890 census data to turn the effects of racist law into a “fact” about Black people. Loomer’s line (”some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition”) is that book in one sentence. The pattern is always built by the people citing it.

* Race is legible for injury and illegible for remedy. On July 21, 2026, Trump’s EEOC voted 2 to 1 to eliminate the EEO1 through EEO6 reports, the only routine federal count of race and sex in the workplace. Five weeks later a presidential advisor listed seven Black women by race and sex and called them ghetto b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s. They just voted to stop counting who to pay.

* The outrage is not about antisemitism, it’s about 2024. A bipartisan resolution, a New York Times op ed, and a demand for a floor vote on Hasan Piker, a streamer in nobody’s administration. No statement from Josh Gottheimer on Laura Loomer. The resolution is Democratic resentment toward the pro Palestine left with a bill number.

* “Slavery predates capitalism” is fire predating the arsonist. Nobody said capitalism invented slavery. Marx (Capital ch. 31), Williams (1944), Du Bois (1935), and Robinson (1983) said capitalism turned African chattel slavery into the founding stone of a continental economy. Foster and Loomer did the same thing: detach the record from the concept, then declare the concept clean.

* Blame runs to the people with the power. No leftist set the campaign budget, canceled the primary, or refused the Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Either the leftists had the power to decide the election (so their position was popular) or they didn’t (so they aren’t to blame). It’s hot or it’s cold. It can’t be warm.

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Colorblind When You Ask for Justice, 20/20 Vision When They Want to Insult You

Hey, the Chop Up Show was just me and Domo this week, Toya getting her internet fixed, and y’all know when it’s the two of us we ain’t going nowhere fast. For the folks that’s not that familiar, me and Domo come from a policy debate background, we are very well polished in the policymaking process, and we happen to know a theory or ten when it comes to how the world works and how values get inscribed into it. So when the week give us Laura Loomer calling Black women ghetto b*****s, the Democratic Party still arguing about Hasan Piker, Kmele Foster telling Jemele Hill on CNN that slavery predates capitalism, and Abdul El Sayed on The Breakfast Club saying he a capitalist, we don’t get to just react. We got to read.

Now here’s what I want y’all to hold onto while you read, because it’s the throughline and it’s the title. On camera I said it plain: at the same time this administration is telling corporations they need to be colorblind and voting to get rid of the demographic data that we use to prove discrimination, one of their own advisors is going around calling people Black b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s, though. Feel me? That’s not a contradiction. That’s the design. Race is legible when the state wants to injure you and illegible when you want a remedy. You can be seen well enough to be called ghetto and not seen well enough to be counted. Same eyes. Same week.

Then the second half of the show, the capitalism half, is the same move with a different costume. Kmele Foster told Jemele Hill that slavery is older than writing so it can’t be bound up with capitalism. The Democratic establishment tells you the leftists cost Kamala the election while the people who ran the campaign get to be an act of reason. Every one of these is the same technology: detach the record from the concept, keep the verdict, burn the ledger. Read the pattern, destroy the receipts. That’s the whole essay. Everything below is just the receipts they hoping you don’t pull.

What She Actually Said, With Dates

Let’s start with the clip, because a lot of folks heard about it and didn’t sit with it.

On Friday, August 28, 2026, Laura Loomer, a far right activist and a Trump ally who is widely described as an informal advisor, somebody who is documented, or alleged depending on who you ask, to show up at the White House and when she leave, decisions is made and people is fired, posted a video on X naming five Black women: Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, former Representative Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that they were all “ghetto, entitled, race obsessed, destructive black B*****S who are completely unfit for the power they hold.” She used the slur five times in one post. In the clip we played on the show she went further down the line: Fani Willis, Jasmine Crockett, Candace Owens, Wes Moore, and then the line that’s the reason this essay exists. “Are you starting to see a pattern here? Some people call it racism. I call it pattern recognition. And guess what? Pattern recognition and profiling keeps you safe.”

The trigger, for the record, was Nixon’s floor speech against resolutions honoring Charlie Kirk. Loomer called her a “ghetto black communist b***h,” mocked her speech as “Ebonics,” and said she needed her “leash” tugged. When the backlash came she doubled down on Sunday: “Is she ghetto? Yes. Is she black? Yes. Is she a communist? Yes. I spoke the truth.” By that week she had run the same exact sentence at Representative LaMonica McIver. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, said she “1000 percent” denounced it and called it racist. Ben Crump, Wes Moore, Ro Khanna, and Charlamagne’s Donkey of the Day all lined up. Nixon, who had just scored an upset win in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, answered on X: “When referring to me, it’s Representative Angie Nixon. However, after November 3rd, YOU CAN CALL ME SENATOR!”

So that’s the record. Now hold it next to the rest of what she said, because the framing is doing more work than the slur. Before she got to “ghetto black b*****s,” she said, and I’m quoting the clip: “If you are offended by stereotypes, then maybe, just maybe, you need to start policing your own community. If I don’t want people thinking that all Jews are a bunch of globalists, maybe I should be calling out the progressive Jews who are funding radical left causes. That’s what I do. I self police the Jewish community.” Then: “It’s time for other Black people to start policing the Black community.”

Every accusation is a confession, y’all. She told you exactly what she is. She is a police. She polices her own community for the benefit of the people who hate her community, and she is asking Black people to become deputies in the same department. That’s the ask. The slur is just the uniform.

Pattern Recognition Is the Oldest Word for Racism With a Spreadsheet

Most of y’all heard “pattern recognition” and heard a tech word, a 2026 word, something a Silicon Valley MF say about AI. Nah. That word is from 1896.

Apply Muhammad here. In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces how, right after the 1890 census, the first census to sort prisoners by race in a way that let people build a national argument, a Prudential Insurance statistician named Frederick L. Hoffman published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman took arrest and mortality data, stripped it of every condition that produced it (convict leasing, vagrancy statutes, all white juries, no doctors, no sewers), and presented the raw number as a racial trait. Black people were not being arrested more because the law was built to arrest them. Black people were criminal, look at the pattern. Muhammad’s whole book is about how that statistical move became the common sense of the twentieth century, how Irish and Italian and Polish crime got explained by poverty and environment and got Progressive Era social work, while Black crime got explained by Blackness and got police. The number was the same kind of number. The interpretation split by race.

That is pattern recognition. That is what she meant. When Loomer lists seven Black women with wildly different politics, from Ayanna Pressley to Candace Owens, and says “do you see the pattern,” she is doing Hoffman. She is taking a category she constructed (Black women who talk in public) and presenting the category as the evidence. Like Domo said on air, she was not condemning stereotypes. She was saying this is why stereotypes exist. That’s Hoffman’s thesis. The stereotype is a data point. The data point is the Black person.

Then Fields and Fields give you the flip. Racecraft is when the action of racism gets converted into a fact about race. Somebody discriminates against you (verb, they did it) and it comes out the other end as a pattern about you (noun, you are it). “Some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition” is racecraft with a name tag on. She is describing her own act of profiling and attributing the profile to the people she profiled.

Now let me give y’all the counterhistory, because Black folks have always known that the answer to a bad count is a better count, not no count. Ida B. Wells, 1892, Southern Horrors, and 1895, A Red Record. What did she do? She counted. She took the white press’s own lynching reports, tallied them, and showed that the “pattern” of Black men raping white women was a lie in the majority of cases and that the actual pattern was economic competition and political terror. Du Bois, 1899, The Philadelphia Negro, the first serious sociological survey in this country, done because the numbers being used against the Seventh Ward were produced by people who never walked it. Wells and Du Bois did not say stop counting. They said the ledger is rigged, so we keeping our own.

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The Onus of 2024

Which brings me to my beef I’m going to take to the grave. We never have the energy and the smoke for the people that had the most power to determine the end result of the election.

We talk about Jill Stein. We talk about Hasan Piker. We talk about people that said never Kamala. Y’all think that had more of an onus on that election than Kamala Harris and Joe Biden? No leftist dictated her campaign finance. No leftist picked whether we had a primary. No leftist was able to decide whether a Palestinian speaker got a slot at the DNC. That was the establishment. Then the same people who will construct a dozen reasons why the campaign had to run business as usual will turn around and blame the loss on people who never touched the business.

Domo and I went at it, and I want to represent his position honestly because he’s not wrong about the mechanism. His argument: American politics is run by how people vote. In 2024 the campaign believed the further left position was unelectable, and what changed is not the electorate’s values but the electorate’s experience. Trump 2016 was Russia and the courts. Trump 2025 was the version niggas needed to see to understand that the people spending the bread don’t have the same interests as them. Millennials are old enough now, enough Gen Z is in the base, and they not with the s***s. So Mamdani, Nixon, El Sayed are possible now because the pain got real, not because 2024 leftists were right in real time. Also, he added, a Palestinian speaker at the DNC might have gained pro Palestine voters and lost a chunk of moderates who cared about immigration and the economy, and there would have been a trade off.

My answer: it’s either hot or it’s cold, it can’t be warm. Y’all can’t say the leftists cost her the election and also say the leftists were wrong on the merits. If they had the power to decide the election, then their position was the popular one and the campaign ignored it. If their position was fringe, then they didn’t have the power and you’re blaming the wrong people. Which one is it? Does Democratic leadership have the ability to dictate the end result, or do online leftists? Domo said voters do. Okay. Then how do we not blame the people that’s supposed to spend the money to get the voters, and instead blame the people that said I ain’t voting for you? Y’all think the white voters in Pennsylvania and the ones in Michigan voted for Donald Trump because leftists said the genocide was bad? Is that really what y’all believe? So now y’all are blaming the actions of white supremacists voting for a white supremacist on who? Where is the smoke for the white supremacists at?

Then the receipts on what actually changed. Kamala Harris, in her book 107 Days, the one Domo called “the 170 day book” on air, wrote that people wanted her to break from Biden on Gaza and she didn’t. The people vehemently against sending bombs to Israel didn’t come out of nowhere in 2024. The first time I was ever in Rolling Stone was to say I would not support Joe Biden if he kept doing what he was doing, and that was before Kamala. This voting bloc already existed. The only difference between then and now is politicians believing they can talk to it. Mamdani, Nixon, El Sayed are proving in 2026 that everybody who got called a purist, a perfectionist, an authenticity tester in 2024 was describing a coalition that was already there. I’ll take Domo’s point that Trump’s second term made it louder. I won’t take the point that it wasn’t real.

Lastly, the part y’all won’t like. A lot of people have rewritten history for how Kamala Harris relates to this country. In the 2020 cycle she ran for president and dropped out in December 2019, before a single vote, because she had no support. On the show I said 2016 and I was wrong, she ran for Senate that year and won. The point stands. Kamala was never a darling. Biden gave her 107 days, and Domo’s right that he don’t get enough blame for that, but the 107 days did not create the problem, they exposed it. Right now she’s polling sixth or seventh for 2028 and flirting with not running. Voter suppression and disenfranchisement played a role, I’m not taking that off the table. Pointing the finger at leftists, though, really don’t do it, and we still have not had the real conversation as a society about what happened in 2024, and as a result there’s a lot of resentment in the dialogue in the streets, a lot of tension, a lot of hurt. The Hasan Piker resolution is that resentment with a bill number.

Domo also said one in seven federal judges is a Trump appointee. It’s worse than that. He appointed roughly 234 Article III judges in his first term, about a quarter of the active bench, and he’s still going. Niggas let him do that with the courts and then put him back in office after Biden. It can get worse. It got worse on they ass. Hold that when they tell you the next one is just about “getting back to normal.” Normal is the milk out the jug. You not putting it back.

The Victims She Named Were Men, the B*****s She Named Were Women

Go back to the clip and count. Who did Loomer name as the people being wronged? Byron Donalds. Tim Scott. Black conservative men being called Uncle Toms. Who did she name as the ones doing the wronging, the ghetto ones, the ones who need a leash? Angie Nixon. Fani Willis. Jasmine Crockett. Ayanna Pressley. Cori Bush. Ilhan Omar. Ketanji Brown Jackson. Even Candace Owens, her own side, went in the b***h column the minute she was beefing with her. The victims were men. The b*****s were women. That’s not an accident of who was in the news. That’s the image doing its job.

Apply Collins here. In Black Sexual Politics, Patricia Hill Collins argues that the old controlling images, the Mammy, the Jezebel, the Sapphire from Amos ‘n’ Andy, got updated after the civil rights movement into a new set, and she names one of them the “Black b***h”: loud, aggressive, materialistic, unfeminine, the woman who talks back, and, in the class inflected version, “ghetto.” The function of a controlling image is not to describe. It’s to make a form of domination look natural, to make it so that when a Black woman speaks on the floor of the Florida House, what you see is not a legislator, it’s the image, and so the response to the legislator can be the response you’d give the image: bark at her, tug her leash. Collins wrote that in 2004. Loomer performed it in 2026 and called it pattern recognition.

Then Harris Perry tells you the cost. In Sister Citizen she uses the crooked room: put a person in a room where the walls are tilted and some of them will tilt their bodies to match the walls. Black women in public life spend enormous energy standing straight in a room built crooked, and the energy is not free. It’s time not spent legislating. It’s the extra layer of security. It’s the Congressional staff hours spent on threat assessment. The Center for Democracy and Technology’s 2022 study of the midterms found that Black women candidates were the most targeted for online abuse of any group, and a 2023 Brookings analysis found the same for women of color in Congress: more threats, more sexualized abuse, more of the specific “unfit, unqualified, ghetto” register. So when Loomer says these women are “unfit for the power they hold,” she is not describing them, she is adding to the tax they pay to hold it.

Now the material part, because this is where the EEOC vote comes back and closes the loop. The EEO1 form crosstabulates race by sex. It is the only routine federal instrument that sees a Black woman as a Black woman rather than as a Black person in one column and a woman in another. That matters because of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors (1976), the case Crenshaw built intersectionality on, where Black women were told they had no claim because GM hired Black men and hired white women, so where’s the discrimination. The EEO1 was the answer to DeGraffenreid. It was the form that made the gap visible. On July 21 they voted to end it. On August 28 an advisor to the president listed seven women, no men, and said the pattern was real. They can see Black women as Black women when the purpose is to call them b*****s. They just voted to stop seeing them as Black women when the purpose is to pay them.

Two more things and then the counterweight. First, the conundrum for Black men that Domo and I named on air is real and it is intersectional too. The demand that we be measured in responding to a white woman who just degraded a Black woman is the image running the other way: the angry Black man who is dangerous to white women. So the same afternoon, Black women are being read through Sapphire and Black men are being read through Brute, and the only people who get to say whatever they want with no consequence are the white women who built both images and, as Blee and McRae documented, always have. Second, respectability. Domo said it and I’m cosigning: once y’all let this administration in, all of these unqualified, uncouth people, the gate is open, we getting everybody now. There is no more room for tone policing. If an advisor to the president can maintain all her legitimacy, all her institutional relationships, talking like this, then I’d be damned if somebody come to me or Domo, who is running for office, and say the standard is gone because we said “b***h” back. Y’all removed the standard. We noticed.

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Black male educators are less than 2 percent of this profession. I am that 2 percent, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I’m independent with no corporate sponsor and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building: a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors.

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)

Blee, Kathleen M. Women of the Klan: Racism and Gender in the 1920s. University of California Press, 1991.

Clark, Kenneth B. Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power. Harper and Row, 1965.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman, 1990.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. Routledge, 2004.

Cooper, Brittney C. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. (On DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, 413 F. Supp. 142, E.D. Mo. 1976.)

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. University of Pennsylvania, 1899.

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

Duneier, Mitchell. Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

Ferguson, Ann Arnett. Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Fields, Karen E., and Barbara J. Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. Verso, 2012.

Gilliam, Walter S., et al. “Do Early Educators’ Implicit Biases Regarding Sex and Race Relate to Behavior Expectations and Recommendations of Preschool Expulsions and Suspensions?” Yale Child Study Center, 2016.

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

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hoffman, Frederick L. Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. American Economic Association, 1896.

Jones Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Yale University Press, 2019.

Love, Bettina L. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon, 2019.

Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I, chapter 31, “Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist.” 1867.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party, chapter II, “Proletarians and Communists.” 1848.

McRae, Elizabeth Gillespie. Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. Oxford University Press, 2018.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Accusation Is a Confession: The Pandering Boomerang

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

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

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

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

The Schoolhouse Was Ours Before the Curriculum Was Theirs

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

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

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

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

The Number Never Had a Row for the Womb

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

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

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

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

Counterweight: The Washerwomen Knew Their Price

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

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

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

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

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

RELATED READINGS AND CITED WORK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944).

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

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Brother Malcolm Told Us Where the Courtroom Was

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Was There

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

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

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

What the Universal Periodic Review Actually Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Same Year, Three Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Delegates’ Faces Look Like When You Say Lynching

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What American Hegemony Is

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

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

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

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

The Hypocrisy of Democracy, Which Is Not a Bug

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

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

The Curriculum Was Always an Export Product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They Told Us Who the Terrorists Are

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

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

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

The Garden, Not the Flower

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Is Elevation.

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8 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RELATED READINGS (Bibliography)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question you should ask yourself is, for whom?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Market Actually Said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Gets Pulled Over

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

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

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

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

The Morals and Ethics Section, Since They Brought It Up

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

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

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

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

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

I Don’t Identify as a Democrat

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

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

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

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

Class Analysis for the Trailer Park and the Hood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I start bringing this to an end like this.

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

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

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

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RELATED READINGS (Bibliography)

Political thought and the distribution question

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education and Black literacy tradition

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

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

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

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

Surveillance, reproduction, and policing Black women

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* ACLU. A Tale of Two Countries: Racially Targeted Arrests in the Era of Marijuana Reform. 2020.

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

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

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

Epistemic Exploitation and the Burden of Proof

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Roots of the Collective Delusion

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

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

Pedagogical Fractures: Critical Implications for Education

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

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

Intersectional Collateral: Material Realities of Racialized Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intersectional Material Impacts: The Cost of the Psychosis

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

Support Independent Black Scholarship

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BEFORE THERE WAS A REVOLUTION THERE WAS A FILIBUSTER

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

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

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

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

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

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

BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER HAD A GEOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE CARTILLA CAME IN SPANISH AND THE COAST WAITED ITS TURN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Is Elevation.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TODAY

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND RELATED READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Context: The Architecture of Swiss Complicity

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

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

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

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

Civil Society for Whom??

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

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

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

Selective Complicity: The Neutrality Paradox

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

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

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

The Archive of Resistance and Erasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cited Work and Related Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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