Education is Elevation

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

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

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

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

Let’s get into it.

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

Argument One: Liberal Democracy as Mystification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now watch what happened in the same window.

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

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

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

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

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

Argument Three: Reform That Served White Women First

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Argument Four: The Gaze With a Price Tag on It

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Y’all bought one of them.

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession—I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I 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.

Related Readings (Bibliography)

Primary: bell hooks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Theory and Political Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welfare, Reproduction, and the Safety Net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SAME SHIPS, DIFFERENT STOPS

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

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

Read that again. Less than 4 percent.

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

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

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

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

THE RETENTION FIGHT AND WHY SCHOLARS WALKED AWAY FROM THE WORD

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

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

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

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

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

Every accusation is a confession.

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

Hold that. We coming back to it.

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

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

That is not an inventory. That is a technology.

THE QUIET WAS NEVER EMPTY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research over MeSearch.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

THE ASK

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

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

The book itself

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

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

The central frame

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

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

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

The archive and the retention debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jamaica, Woodside, and blackspace

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

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

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

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

Culture as survival technology

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

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

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

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

The severance and its theorists

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

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

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

The Black and Native question

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

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

Gender, motherhood, and the material ledger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Historical Context: The Long Shadow of Injustice

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

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

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

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

Classrooms as Battlegrounds

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

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

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

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

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

The Intersectional Material Weight of Misunderstanding

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

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

Related Readings

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

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

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

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

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

Become a Paid Subscriber

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A categorical exclusion is terra nullius with a form number.

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

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

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

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

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

Apply Voyles here.

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

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

They Over Police You Into a Discount

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Settler Colonial Legal Trickery

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

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

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

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

That is a real win. Take the win.

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

That is under THREE percent.

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

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

RELATED READINGS (BIBLIOGRAPHY)

Settler colonialism, land, and extraction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you EasyEdB, Suzie’s World, Kathryn Marsh, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I was sitting down with Angie Nixon, who is running for the United States Senate from the great state of Florida, and I started the conversation by doing two things. The first was making sure yall know who Angie Nixon is and the second was making sure yall understand what the hell the Senate even do. Because I feel like a lot of times we talk about people running for particular offices and it is like what do they do. What is the responsibility that you are campaigning for? And be clear, when I bring on any policymaker or any public figure, your opportunity in the comments section is to let them know exactly how you feel. All I ask is to keep it respectful. I am talking to a black woman so if I feel like it is some textbook mansplaining or textbook sexism, I am going to bash you out the s**t. You see what I am saying?

Angie Nixon is currently a state representative in Florida House District 13 located in Jacksonville, Florida, Duval County for all of those residents and everybody that don’t know about Duval. She is a community organizer, a former union organizer, and she opened up a banned bookstore. She wants to become the next United States Senator from the state of Florida where there is the second largest population of black people, nearly 4 million black people. A lot of folks forget about that. We are still in the South. And what the United States Senate does is we put a lot of checks and balances on the president. We do a lot of confirmation, we vote yay or nay in regards to his appointments to the different agencies and things like that. We also do the same when it comes to Supreme Court justices. And as you may know, we try to write legislation on a federal level.

She wants to push things like Medicare for all because medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy here in our country. And you got to think about it, literally people are dying or going bankrupt simply because they are trying to stay alive and they don’t have the money. So it is crazy right now and so she just wants to make sure that government is working for people and not against them.

I asked her about data centers and she was clear. She is not supportive of them right now. There is not enough information in regards to what they do. For sure they put a strain on our infrastructure. I asked her about PAC money and she said the only PAC money that she accepts are from organizations that work in black and brown communities. She received some money from Rashida Tlaib’s Leadership PAC and she does not accept money from AIPAC and she does not accept money from corporate PACs. She also pushed back against something important because you can say you do not accept money from those folks but if you are accepting money from billionaires that contribute or start PACs you are part of the problem too. Her primary opponent is someone who is accepting money from billionaires that contribute to corporate PACs and accepts money from billionaires that are supportive of the idea which is something she just cannot rock with. She only gets money basically from regular hardworking everyday people. She believes that hardworking everyday people should shape what our communities look like and what our economies look like and therefore she is only going to be beholden to them.

When I asked for specific examples of how this corruption plays out, she pointed to Unelected Ashley Moody. Ashley Moody was rewarded with this seat after she allowed 10 million of our dollars that was supposed to go towards the most medically needy kids here in the state of Florida for Medicaid. She allowed that money to be used to actually defeat two ballot initiatives that citizens put on the ballot here in the state of Florida. One would have allowed for recreational marijuana which we could have taxed to allow that revenue to actually go towards public schools or whatever it was that we wanted, maybe early childhood education. The second ballot initiative was getting political interference out of a woman’s right to choose. When she became the U.S. Senator, she decided to vote to end the ACA subsidies and the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Here in the state of Florida we are the number one enrollees on the marketplace. That knocked off basically 300,000 or so folks off of the ACA marketplace here in the state of Florida because they could no longer afford it. It also caused many of our private health insurance premiums to go up. She did this because she received money from healthcare companies and health insurance companies. It is really important to just really follow the money.

I also think it is important to know that here in the state of Florida Ron DeSantis did a really expensive political stunt when he was running for president. He opened up Alligator Alcatraz, which we like to refer to as the Everglades Detention Center. He offered no big contracts for Donald Trump’s campaign. The money that they used was our taxpayer dollars that were supposed to go towards ensuring that we had adequate infrastructure in times of natural disasters. They were trying to get reimbursed from FEMA and what we heard was there was a little back and forth and they told them no they were not going to get that money because it became this big spectacle. That is the problem with big money in politics. Not only do I want to overturn Citizens United but I also want to decrease the amount of campaign donations people can have in the first place. I believe that a custodian or a school bus driver should have the same amount of financial influence on a campaign as a billionaire has.

I asked her about the impeachment process specifically because the first time Trump was in office he got impeached twice but he didn’t get out of office. From my understanding of the policymaking process that is where the Senate was supposed to come in. The Congress vote to impeach him, they go through those trials and the fact finding and then the Senate vote to remove him. The problem is we didn’t have enough senators with the backbone to actually remove him. Her primary opponent is going around saying that he stood up to Donald Trump before and thank you for that. However he is now saying people asked him will he vote to remove Donald Trump and he said he needs to make sure he has all the information and do the research. Sir, it is right there. He has committed so many impeachable offenses. He has called for the assassination, he has threatened judicial Supreme Court justices, he has usurped power that is supposed to be in the hands of congressional members and senators. He has done so much stuff and so much corruption. It is all there. No one has to worry about whether or not Angie Nixon will vote to remove him because she in fact will.

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

The Schoolhouse Door and the War Chest: Education Policy as Foreign Policy

Now let’s get into a little policy. I happen to have a background in education. I have a passion for education. I have a master’s degree in adult and higher education. I know right now our country is experiencing a great assault on higher education and K through 12. As Senator, what type of policies would she put forward specifically in terms of pushing back against project 2025 and more importantly the funding they are taking away? She wants to end for profit prisons and the reason she wants to end for profit prisons is because they are incentivizing people to push our children into the school to prison pipeline instead of educating them at an adequate rate. She lost her cousins, two of them, to the school to prison pipeline and they are now dead as well, killed, even after going to jail and all the things. It is important that we get that WWE lady on up out of the Department of Education because how dare you allow someone who oversaw folks fighting gladiator style to be over the Department of Education.

We need to make sure that we are fully funding public education, not allowing these for profit corporate schools that actually oftentimes move to our communities to get money and then send our children back because they can discriminate against them based on their hair, based on disciplinary issues, whatever. They are sending them back behind one or two years behind. Public money should be going towards public schools unless a child has a disability or is in a really low income area. We should not be subsidizing billionaires and millionaires children’s education. We need to make sure that we are teaching true and accurate history. That is not happening in the state of Florida. Florida is ground zero for bad bills that have crossed across the country and then become federalized. We need to be teaching true and accurate history. We also need to be petty just as Donald Trump is when we take back the House and Senate. We need to hold up funding to some of these southern states or any state that decides they do not want to teach true and accurate history. The state of Florida is one of the largest public school systems in the country and our teachers get paid the least. We are the bottom, the 50th in the nation. Teachers need at a minimum all across this country to be getting $65,000 a year minimum. We need to make sure that we are fully funding childcare. She believes we need universal childcare so that we can start that foundation. For every $1 we spend, that puts $3 back into the economy. She believes in free public college or if folks do not want to go that route, we should have programs where we can provide them with trades, a certification. We need to make sure that we are producing the best and brightest and the folks who are actually going to help keep our economy going. She is fully supportive of more mental health providers in the school system. She has a son who is gay and she loves him so much. She has five kids between her and her husband, a blended family. COVID did a number on all of our children. They need a lot of mental health resources. We need to be actively recruiting and actively funding these types of programs for our children. We also need wraparound services and definitely more money into Title I schools.

And how are we going to pay for this? We are going to make sure that these billionaires pay what they owe. We are going to close these corporate tax loopholes. Did you know that 88 companies last year made over $105 billion and meanwhile they paid zero in federal taxes? Then we are going to hear from these Republicans and these corporate Democrats that some of them are the problem as well. We are going to hear we don’t have this money to do all of this stuff but you are spending a billion dollars on a ballroom that we can’t dance in. You are spending nearly $2 billion a day on a war that no one is asking for except Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son in law, who has a vested interest over in the Middle East instead of these defense contractors that donate to these campaigns. A budget is a moral document. It lets us know where our values are. The problem is our values are not on everyday Americans. Our values are only on these billionaire class folks as well as these campaign donors and these corporations. I want to put the priority back into the hands of the people.

From Gaza to the Classroom: The Epistemology of International Aid

A lot has happened in the world and because so many things has happened, a lot of us have not been talking about the Epstein files specifically and about how a lot of us are looking for accountability. I think the reason why it still should become a conversation is because we still see so many of our American brothers and sisters being ambushed at courtrooms because they, quote unquote, broke the law and not doing it the correct way. As Senator, what role would she have and what would she do specifically when it comes to taking accountability against everybody in the FBI? Calling for an investigation and holding them accountable. There are some people that need to be locked under the jail, period. She is running for U.S. Senate because she is tired of laying awake at night wondering the type of world, the type of country she is leaving to her children. It is not a good one with Donald Trump at the helm. This guy thinks he is above the law. He is not. He needs to go to jail. He is a 34 count adjudicated rapist. Here in the state of Florida they have renamed an airport after him and we had to spend $5 million to allow for that renaming. It is absurd. What better way to send a big forget about you to Donald Trump than to make sure that you elect Angie Nixon to become your next United States senator?

I asked about AIPAC money but I took it a little bit deeper because taking AIPAC money is one thing but the other thing is voting to send weapons to Israel. What is your position or stance as senator to do that specifically? Throughout her entire adult career she has fought for the safety, well being, and humanity of everyone. Back in 2023 in November when things were still going on hot and heavy, she was the only state lawmaker here in the state of Florida that filed legislation or filed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. When she did that she was demonized, ostracized by people not just Republicans but people within her own party. Even right now as she is running for office she is being called anti Semitic, being called anti Israeli by members of her own party. In regards to AIPAC funding she does not receive AIPAC funding and she does not support sending weapons or military aid to the state of Israel. That does not make her anti Semitic. That does not make her hate the folks in Israel. That makes her not want to bomb babies. That makes her not want to support Netanyahu who is a war criminal who also needs to be held accountable. She called out the issues and the atrocities that Hamas committed on October 7th. That does not make her anti Palestinian. That does not make her anti Muslim. She has stood up and spoke out against bigotry of all forms including racism including transphobia including everything. She just cares about people. She loves folks here in the state of Florida. This is the state she was born and raised in and she is going to work hard to make sure that we improve the quality of life for everyone but she is not okay with sending money overseas and we have people living homeless on the streets. We have people rationing their medication and then they have free healthcare over there in Israel. They have free college over there in Israel and we don’t have that over here so you are damn right she is going to fight for that.

I think that something that I have been thinking about out loud and sitting with is specifically how I talk about Hamas. When it comes to acknowledging the atrocities that Israel is committing against Palestine, I think about what it means for us to be humanitarians. I think about who gets to legitimately resist the atrocity. As somebody with a degree in African American studies, with Malcolm X behind me, I am sitting with what it looks like to condemn the resistance movement against something that we know is happening. When we see the Chinese man throwing a rock at the tank, we applaud that as being that man up there standing up. So when I see Palestinian children or who we always identify as Hamas, I am sitting with thinking about what does it mean for you to feel like there is always an instance for you to defend yourself but every time they defend themselves it is always viewed as terrorism. This impacts how policy is curated. It also impacts how we use morals and ethics to talk about what is happening in Palestine. I understand politically there is always like I don’t want yall think I am here to celebrate Israeli people being attacked but also what does it mean for me to sit with the resistance of Palestinians without making it where every iteration is terrorism? I think that is something that we got to sit with as a country, as policymakers. How do you think they should resist themselves or resist for them?

Angie added that there was a young man from Florida, 14 years old, who was over there visiting and he threw rocks and everything. They locked him up for a while and she wrote letters and she did videos in regards to it. It is important to make sure that we are supportive of folks not living in an oppressive state. Me being a Black woman, a direct descendant of slaves from this country, I do not even know necessarily where my people come from. I totally understand where you are coming from. That is why she was on the right side of history back then. She reached out to her Palestinian friends that she had in Jacksonville when she saw that Ron DeSantis was only calling a special session to address the issue that was happening because he was running for president at the time. At the end of the day, it is just about life for her, just protecting lives. She believes that we need to exhaust all diplomacy efforts as much as possible. She believes that the people in Palestine and the people in Israel need to work together to decide their fate and the U.S. needs to stay out of it. That is a lot of the problems. We come from this colonizing mindset. Tango Jordan said in the comments, colonizers gonna colonize.

The reason why I think that we have to speak to policymakers is because most of the stuff that we complain about politically, socially, economically is usually some type of policy or policymaker that is tied to the end of it. I cannot think of nothing in my life that is not directly impacted by electoral conclusions. When we start being critical of electoralism, we can talk about capitalism and corruption, people buying out and selling out, but I know Black people are going to be the most impacted by policy. I think that we should be uniquely invested in how policy is curated because we are going to be the most impacted.

Intersectional Material Impacts: The Body, The Vote, The Pocketbook

When I hear an official say that Medicare for all is unrealistic, you don’t think it is unrealistic for the Israelis? They have free healthcare over there and we do not have that over here. I find it preposterous that as an American citizen, as somebody that paid tax money in America, I got to fight another American to get taxed. I got to fight another American to get access to health care while both of our tax dollars goes to fund another country to get it for them. That s**t blow my mind.

Whether you are in the city, whether you are in the rural, whether you are in suburban America, all terrains of America is being impacted by data centers and big tech is coming. You smoking dope and dog food if you do not understand the relationship that these data centers have with surveillance, with AIPAC, with mass incarceration, with the prison school pipeline. If we are being told that they are going to make our world so technologically dependent that they are now going to be relying on machines to surveil us. I like to think about the concept of epistemology. Epistemology is a fancy word for knowledge production. How do you know what you know? The epistemology that these AI is being generated on is literally from a place of anti blackness. When they taking away our clean water and our clean air to do AI, they only doing it in perpetuating anti blackness and criminality. The more they throw up more data centers, the more they justify using technology to justify and rationalize it with demonizing black bodies. It is a clear line to it. Even the lithium, the cobalt, the coating that is being used to fuel a lot of this technology around us is being made with the blood and sweat and tears of Congolese people. As somebody with a degree in African American studies, as somebody that is a descendant of African slaves here in the Americas, I always wondered what was the character or what was the ethics of everybody else in the world that was storing on that cotton knowing that my people had to die for it. I used to really think like damn, I can’t imagine what they was doing in the rest of the world and they sipping on tea and my people having to die for that sugar. I used to really think like damn, I wonder what it was like in antebellum plantation times for an individual to consume or use a product that was made by blood, sweat and tears and they claim that you have humanity or claim you a Christian. And then I sat there and thought like, well, nigga, you sitting here trying to build a whole platform off of a technology that is made with the blood, sweat and tears of people that look like you. As a matter of fact, it is not far fetched to believe that you probably got some Congolese blood pumping through your body and you love to sit on the technology. Just because you are ignorant to something and how it impacts you does not mean it does not impact you. Just because you are ignorant to how something works, it don’t mean the s**t ain’t working.

At the beginning of the year, every fiscal year, our government gets a big annual budget. Most of that budget goes to the military. It don’t go for none of the s**t you want. So the next time you fix your lips to say I don’t care about what’s going on over there, I got to care about me first, I got to fix me first. If they don’t have $500 million to make sure your kids can eat food in school but they can fabricate $3 trillion overnight to go blow up Iranians. You don’t see that trade off. When yall talking s**t to poor people and you believe that a poor person shouldn’t be able to eat steak and lobster or shouldn’t be able to have a big flat screen TV or how dare they wear Jordans. You understand trade off then. At any time it comes to trying to chastise a poor person for how they spend their money, individuals can be very fiscally responsible. Well if you didn’t have them new Jordans on, maybe I wouldn’t have to give you no food stamps. How come yall don’t have that same energy when it comes to the United States federal government? How come you don’t treat them like you treat that poor person down the street from you? You get mad at that person for mismanaging $200, $300. They mismanaging $300 trillion over here. But you ain’t got nothing to do with that. That’s just politics huh.

Key Takeaways

* The United States Senate has real power over your daily life. The Senate confirms presidential appointments, votes on Supreme Court justices, and writes federal legislation. The impeachment process goes through the House for the vote to impeach and then the Senate votes to remove. When senators lack the backbone to remove a president who has committed impeachable offenses, the entire system of checks and balances fails.

* Follow the money to understand why your cost of living is so high. Ashley Moody voted to end ACA subsidies because she received money from healthcare companies. This knocked 300,000 Floridians off the marketplace and caused private health insurance premiums to go up. Ron DeSantis used taxpayer dollars that were supposed to go towards natural disaster infrastructure to fund a political stunt for his presidential campaign. When politicians accept money from billionaires and corporate PACs, they are beholden to those interests, not the people.

* Education policy is directly connected to foreign policy and the military budget. The same government that claims it cannot afford to fully fund public education, pay teachers $65,000 a year, and provide universal childcare somehow finds nearly $2 billion a day to send to Israel. A budget is a moral document. It lets us know where our values are. Right now, our values are not on everyday Americans.

* The school to prison pipeline is a profit driven system. For profit prisons are incentivized to push our children into the criminal justice system instead of educating them. For profit charter schools can discriminate against our children and send them back behind grade level. Public money should go to public schools. Period.

* Data centers and AI technology are built on the exploitation of Black and Brown bodies. The cobalt and lithium used to fuel technology is mined with the blood of Congolese people. The epistemology of AI is built on anti blackness. Data centers put a strain on infrastructure and are surveilling our communities. The same people pushing data centers are the same people pushing mass incarceration and the school to prison pipeline.

Become A Paid Subscriber

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

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

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

* Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880. The Free Press, 1998.

* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1963.

* Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.

* Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class. Free Press, 1994.

* Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Nation Books, 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you PJ Schuster, Digital Product Diaries, Tamibetcha, Freya Moon, Darnell Martin, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

8 Key Takeaways

* Men Are Often Trained to Suppress Emotions - Many men learn early that expressing emotions beyond anger is seen as “unmanly,” leading to emotional unavailability that persists into adulthood. This creates a cycle where men lack the tools to process feelings when they eventually need them.

* Touch Starvation Begins in Adolescence - There’s an abrupt shift where young boys go from receiving physical affection to being told “you’re too big for hugs now,” creating a deep longing for intimacy that many men struggle to articulate or fulfill in healthy ways.

* Men Practice Emotional Intelligence Differently - While men may claim not to “read the room,” they often subconsciously scan environments for threats from other men—showing they can be emotionally intelligent when survival is at stake.

* Homoeroticism in Homophobic Spaces - Men who express homophobia often relate to each other in deeply homoerotic ways, revealing how same-gender spaces (basketball, strip clubs, etc.) sensationalize male bonding while simultaneously policing it.

* The “Volcano” Effect - Many men bottle up emotions until they explode, but by then, they can’t articulate what brought them to that point. This pattern damages relationships, families, and personal well-being.

* Validation Is Often Conditioned - Men only normalize giving affirmation to other men in competitive contexts (sports, “dehumanizing s**t”) rather than offering genuine emotional support in daily life. Terms like “glazing” and “dick riding” feminize emotional expression.

* Misplaced Resentment - Many self-proclaimed “men’s advocates” direct anger toward women instead of examining how capitalism, patriarchy, and systemic structures actually harm men—keeping them trapped in transactional understandings of value.

* Healing Requires Honesty - Acknowledging emotional weaknesses (like the speaker’s ADHD and bipolar diagnosis) and investigating why we feel what we feel is essential. Emotions shouldn’t be weaponized against us when we own them.

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 & Resources

Books

* “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love” by bell hooks

* Essential reading on how patriarchy harms men and why embracing love is revolutionary

* “Iron John: A Book About Men” by Robert Bly

* Classic exploration of male initiation, father wounds, and emotional development

* “Manhood in America: A Cultural History” by Michael Kimmel

* Historical analysis of how American masculinity has been constructed

* “The Mask of Masculinity” by Lewis Howes

* Contemporary look at the “masks” men wear and how to remove them

* “Dying to Be Men: Psychosocial, Environmental, and Biobehavioral Directions in Promoting the Health of Men and Boys” by Will Courtenay

* Research-based examination of men’s health disparities and emotional well-being

* “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman

* Foundational text on understanding and developing emotional intelligence

Articles & Essays

* “The Miseducation of the Black Man” - Various authors exploring how Black boys are socialized

* “Toxic Masculinity: A Primer” - Academic and cultural critiques of harmful masculine norms

* “Men Are Struggling with Emotional Intelligence—Here’s Why” - Psychology Today pieces

* “The Case for Male Emotional Literacy” - Educational reform articles on boys’ emotional development

Digital Content

* Deontay Kyle’s video on touch starvation (referenced in the transcript)

* “The Red Pill” - Critical analyses of the men’s rights movement

* Lacanian Psychoanalysis - For those interested in the theory of the “master signifier”

* Content on ADHD and Bipolar in Black and Brown communities - Understanding neurodivergence and masculinity

Organizations & Communities

* Therapy for Black Men - Resources for mental health support

* Movember Foundation - Men’s health initiatives including mental health

* Open Path Collective - Affordable therapy options

* Men’s Emotional Support Groups - Local and online communities for vulnerable conversations

Podcasts & Videos

* “Education Is Elevation” - The original channel

* “Trey the Truth Teller” - Referenced panel discussion

* “The Man Enough Podcast” - Conversations about modern masculinity

* “Where Should We Begin?” - Relationship therapy sessions (insight into emotional patterns)

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

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

THE QUALIFICATION WAS ALWAYS A VALVE

The government is hiring gamers to run the sky.

Not metaphorically. Not as a recruitment gimmick that some intern cooked up and nobody approved. The Department of Transportation put out an ad on April 10, 2026 that opens on an Xbox logo, cuts into Twitch stream footage, cuts into towers and runways and aircraft, and tells you to level up. The application window opened at midnight on April 17. Twelve thousand people applied in less than two days. Sean Duffy, the man running transportation in this country, called it wildly successful. By August 2026 the FAA and Duffy are saying the campaign got them to 94 percent of their hiring goal for the year.

Now here is what I need y’all to sit with, because the internet is going to spend the next two weeks arguing about whether gamers can do the job, and that argument is a decoy.

The question is not whether a person who plays Fortnite can be trained to separate aircraft. The question is what happened to the standard. Because for a hundred years in this country, every time a Black person walked up to aviation and asked to be let in, this government produced a study, a questionnaire, a psychological profile, a temperament assessment, a business necessity, a passenger comfort concern, an operational burden. Something. Anything. The bar was never a fixed height. The bar was a valve, and the valve had a hand on it, and the hand knew exactly who was standing at the door.

Then the labor market got tight. Then the retirements outpaced the hires. Then the shutdown broke the pipeline. Then, all of a sudden, the same government that spent January 2025 telling America that Black people and disabled people had been let into aviation without merit stood up in April 2026 and said we are recruiting from Twitch.

That is not a contradiction. That is the mechanism working exactly as designed.

This means the people who told you it was about merit are wrong, and they proved it themselves, on camera, in an ad set to electric music.

THE MEMO THAT SAID WE COULDN’T FLY

Start where the argument starts, because the argument did not start with Sean Duffy.

On November 10, 1925, the Army War College produced a memorandum for the Chief of Staff titled The Employment of Negro Man Power in War. It was not a slur shouted from a porch. It was a staffed, sourced, institutional document, and it concluded that Black men had smaller brains, lacked physical courage, panicked under combat conditions, and were constitutionally incapable of operating anything as technical as an aircraft. One line held that the negro is a rank coward in the dark, that his fear of the unknown and unseen would prevent him from ever operating as an individual scout with success.

That memo was the qualification standard. That memo is why the Army Air Corps was closed. Not a hunch. Not a personal prejudice. A finding.

The NAACP fought it. The Black press fought it. Black organizations fought it for sixteen years, and in January 1941 a Howard University student named Yancey Williams, who already had a civilian pilot’s license and an engineering degree, sued the War Department to force it to accept him. Roosevelt overruled his own generals one day later and ordered a segregated flight training program at Tuskegee Institute. Between 1941 and 1945 Tuskegee trained 994 aviators. Four hundred forty five deployed. Sixty six were killed in action. Thirty two were shot down and taken prisoner.

Notice the sequence, because the sequence is the whole thing. The finding came first. The exclusion came second. The lawsuit came third. The war came fourth. And it was the war, the manpower need, the shortage, that moved the valve. Not new science about Black brains. Nobody at the War College published a retraction in 1941 saying we recalculated the skull data. The country just needed pilots.

They didn’t discover we could fly. They ran out of white men.

Eight years earlier, Bessie Coleman had already made the point without waiting for anybody’s permission. No American flight school would train a Black woman in 1920, so she learned French, went to France, and came back on June 15, 1921 with an international license issued by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. The skill was never in question. The gate was.

THE PART WHERE THEY SAID IT OUT LOUD IN COURT

Twenty two years after Tuskegee, Marlon Green applied to be a pilot at Continental Air Lines.

Green was born in El Dorado, Arkansas in 1929, son of a domestic worker. He flew for the Air Force. He logged more than 3,000 hours in multiengine aircraft, including B 26s. In 1957 he started applying to commercial carriers because the reporting said the airlines were finally going to hire Black pilots. Continental rejected him. He filed with the Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission, which held hearings and found that Continental had rejected him solely because of his race, and ordered the airline to put him in its next training class.

Continental fought it for six years. All the way up.

And I want y’all to hear the argument the airline made in front of the United States Supreme Court, because this is the part they leave out of the Black History Month post. Continental did not argue that Marlon Green couldn’t fly. They could not argue that. The man had three thousand hours in a bomber. Continental argued that having a Black pilot on board would be burdensome. That passengers might be upset. That they would not be able to find hotels for a Black pilot laying over in the segregated parts of the country.

Read that again. The barrier was not his qualification. The barrier was other people’s comfort, dressed up in the language of operational necessity.

On April 22, 1963, in Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, 372 U.S. 714, Justice Black delivered the opinion of the Court and the state commission’s order was reinstated. Continental hired Green in 1964. He flew for them from 1965 to 1978. He made captain in 1966. He later told Smithsonian Magazine that he could not remember a single incident dramatic enough to be memorable, that not one passenger and not one fellow pilot ever refused to fly with him.

Fourteen years of flying. Zero incidents. Six years of litigation to get in the door. He also told Smithsonian that the fight took a lot of life out of him and his family.

That is the accounting nobody puts in the ledger. The valve does not just delay you. It charges you.

RONALD REAGAN FIRED 11,345 PEOPLE AND WE ARE STILL PAYING FOR IT

Now let me get to the actual reason there is a shortage, because Duffy will tell you it is the pandemic and Trump will tell you it is DEI and both of them are pointing at the smoke.

On August 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went on strike. On August 5, Ronald Reagan fired 11,345 of them and banned them from federal service for life. PATCO had endorsed him in 1980. That did not save them.

The FAA has never structurally recovered from that. Everything you are watching right now grows out of that root. The union that exists today, NATCA, was built out of the workforce that replaced the strikers, and it was founded on a pledge never to strike. The staffing cliffs, the training bottlenecks, the fatigue, the sixty hour weeks, the six day schedules, the mandatory overtime, the retirement waves that come in bunches because the hiring came in bunches, all of it traces back to a single afternoon when this government decided that mass firing a technical workforce was an acceptable price for breaking a union.

Then the shutdowns. The 43 day shutdown that ran into November 2025 had controllers working without pay, retirements tripling, and the FAA ordering flight cuts at around forty major airports, starting near four percent with a plan to escalate to ten. Thousands of flights cancelled. Nearly a quarter of flights arriving late into sixteen of the busiest airports in the week after controllers missed their first check.

So when the transportation secretary tells you the answer is Twitch, understand what question he is answering. He is not answering how do we build a durable workforce. He is answering how do I fill 2,200 slots this fiscal year without touching the labor arrangement, the funding structure, or the forty five year old wound underneath it.

THE QUESTIONNAIRE THAT NOBODY PASSED

Here is where it gets sick, and here is where the right wing case falls apart on its own evidence.

Before 2014, the FAA hired most of its controllers out of the Air Traffic Collegiate Training Initiative. You went to a partner school, you did the coursework, you took the AT SAT aptitude test, and if you passed you went on a qualified applicant register. In 2013 the FAA convened a Barrier Analysis and then paused CTI hiring, and in February 2014 it replaced the front of the process with a biographical questionnaire. Roughly 4,000 CTI graduates took it. Fewer than 14 percent passed. The thing was reportedly designed so that 90 percent or more of applicants would fail. It was unproctored. You could take it at home.

Andrew Brigida scored a perfect 100 on the AT SAT and failed the questionnaire. Matthew Douglas Cook, who is Native American, scored a perfect 100 on the AT SAT and failed the questionnaire. They sued. In February 2022 Judge Friedrich certified a class of non African American CTI graduates who had passed the aptitude test and been screened out by the questionnaire.

Now watch what the right does with this, and watch what actually happened.

Congress banned the practice in 2016. Public Law 114 190 prohibited the use of biographical assessments as a first line hiring tool for air traffic controllers. That is nine years before the Potomac. The thing they blamed for January 29, 2025 was made illegal in 2016.

And here is the part that never makes the Fox chyron. That questionnaire hurt Black CTI graduates too. Black students who had put in the years and the tuition and the debt at a CTI school and passed the aptitude test also got purged when the register got wiped, because the tool was not a preference, it was a shredder, and a shredder does not read your face before it eats your paper. The plaintiffs’ own filings note that some qualified minority candidates got caught in it. Mountain States Legal Foundation says it out loud on their own case page.

Two things can be true. The 2014 process was a bad, unvalidated, indefensible instrument that hurt thousands of people who did everything right. And the story that instrument became, the story that a diversity push handed the tower to unqualified Black people, is a lie that a decade of receipts does not support and that the actual controller demographics laugh at. Roughly 71 percent of the people in this occupation are white. Around 8 to 9 percent are Black. About one in five is a woman, and that number has barely moved since the 1980s.

You cannot flood a workforce and simultaneously not be in it.

JANUARY 29, 2025

Sixty seven people died over the Potomac when an American Airlines regional jet and an Army Black Hawk collided on approach to Reagan National.

The next morning, before the NTSB had anything, the President of the United States stood in the briefing room and read a headline about the FAA hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities and said, and they can be air traffic controllers, I don’t think so. He said a group within the FAA determined the workforce was too white. He said they actually came out with a directive saying it’s too white. The Vice President said controllers were not being hired because of the color of their skin. Sean Duffy stood at the same podium and said we will not accept excuses, we will not accept passing the buck.

The FAA’s disability hiring language had been on its website since 2013. It sat there through Trump’s entire first term. In 2019, under Trump, the FAA expanded the effort and announced a program to hire twenty people with disabilities as controllers. The 2023 report on it states that participants must meet the same qualifications as any other applicant. When a reporter put that to him directly, the President said he changed the Obama policy and then Biden changed it back.

Meanwhile the preliminary reporting on the actual tower that actual night indicated staffing was not normal, and that one controller was working both the commercial traffic and the helicopter, a configuration that FAA staffing practice does not contemplate.

The controller was not too Black. The controller was too alone.

Fifteen months later that same administration is running Fortnite footage under a federal job posting that says no prior air traffic experience is required.

Every accusation is a confession. They told you the standard had been lowered. They were describing what they were about to do.

APRIL 2026: LEVEL UP

Let me lay the campaign out clean, because I want people to be precise when they argue about this.

The FAA is not hiring 2,000 gamers. The FAA is hiring 2,200 controller trainees in fiscal 2026, 2,300 in 2027, 2,400 in 2028, and it is using a gaming themed recruitment campaign to fill the applicant pool. It ran a version of this in 2021 too, also called Level Up, also aimed at eighteen to thirty year olds. The 2026 version launched April 10. Applications opened April 17 and closed at 8,000 submissions. They got over 12,000 in under two days. Duffy has said that when the incoming administration polled about 250 academy graduates before the 2024 election, only three of them said they were not gamers.

The job posting says no prior air traffic experience is required. The Department notes that only about 25 percent of controllers hold a traditional college degree and that around 65 percent of Americans regularly play video games. Average salary after the academy and on the job training runs about $155,000.

Here is what they do not put in the ad.

You have to be a United States citizen. You have to be under 31 years old. You have to pass a federal background check, a medical exam, a drug test, a psychological evaluation, and a three and a half hour cognitive assessment. Then you go to the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, which means you relocate on a trainee salary, and then you go to a facility for on the job training that can run two to five years depending on complexity. About two percent of applicants make it all the way through to certification.

Two percent. So the ad is not a lowering of the standard. The ad is a marketing funnel poured into a bottleneck that has been broken for four decades.

And that is the thing that should actually make you mad. They did not open the door. They just put a louder sign on it.

GAMERS AND BLACKNESS UNDERSTOOD

André Brock Jr. wrote Distributed Blackness in 2020, and the argument that matters for us is this: the default user is white, not because anybody wrote that down, but because every interface, every ad, every research design, and every marketing deck imagines a body before it imagines a behavior. Brock’s whole method, what he calls critical technocultural discourse analysis, is built to make that unstated body visible. He is not saying Black people are absent from the internet. He is saying the opposite, that Black digital practice is enormous and generative and constantly misread, precisely because the category of user was drawn around somebody else first.

Apply Brock to the word gamer.

Sixty five percent of Americans play video games. Black Americans play at rates at or above the national average. By any behavioral definition, gamer is one of the least white categories in American life. But gamer as a cultural identity, gamer as the thing the ad is invoking when it opens on an Xbox logo and cuts to Twitch, is not a behavioral category. It is a demographic picture with a headset on. That picture has a race and a gender before it has a skill.

Which is why the same political coalition can hold two positions that should be impossible to hold at once. It can say that hiring outreach aimed at Black candidates is an unacceptable dilution of merit, and say that hiring outreach aimed at gamers is innovative talent identification. There is no reconciliation available on the merits, because merit was never doing the work. The picture was doing the work.

Brock lets us say the quiet thing precisely. The problem was never that outreach existed. The problem was who the outreach was pointed at. When the arrow points at us, they call it a lowered standard. When the arrow points at them, they call it untapped talent.

And this is where I want to be honest in a way the dunk tweets won’t be. Recruiting gamers could genuinely reach Black applicants. It should. If the FAA wanted to build the Blackest applicant pool in its history it could not design a better funnel than Twitch and Discord and Fortnite. So watch what happens next. Watch the demographics of the 2026 and 2027 academy classes. Because if that pool comes back looking like America and the certification rate for Black trainees comes back looking like it always has, then the ad was never the bottleneck, and everybody who told you the ad was the story owes you an explanation.

Brock’s point is not that the recruitment is racist. Brock’s point is that we should stop pretending the category is neutral. Naming who the picture is drawn around is how you keep the receipts.

HOW YOU ERASE A SHORTAGE WITHOUT HIRING ANYBODY

May 15, 2026. Two months before the 94 percent victory lap.

The FAA released its 2026 to 2028 Air Traffic Controller Workforce Plan and quietly reset the definition of full staffing. The old forecast said the system needed 14,633 Certified Professional Controllers. The new plan says the system needs 12,563. That is roughly 2,070 positions erased on paper in a single Friday afternoon press release. The agency said the new number was based on forecast demand and a Transportation Research Board review. Administrator Bryan Bedford said we can’t continue to operate the same way and expect better results. The plan talks about modern staffing models, automated scheduling tools, reviewing facility hours of operation, and increasing the time controllers actually spend plugged in and moving traffic.

NATCA said it was not involved in developing the plan, that it was reviewing the document, and that it believes the revised model rests on faulty research that understates the real shortage and dumps the difference onto the people already burning out on six day weeks.

Now put the two announcements next to each other.

In May they lowered the target by about 2,000. In August they announced they had hit 94 percent of the goal.

That is not a hiring achievement. That is a redefinition wearing a hiring achievement’s jacket.

Same move as 1941. Same move as 2014. Same move as January 2025. The number is not a measurement of what safety requires. The number is a dial, and somebody’s hand is on it, and the hand turns it toward whatever the political moment needs it to say.

The qualification was never a thermometer. The qualification was always a valve.

THE ARTICLE I SAID I WAS WRITING

I told y’all on camera I was writing the piece on what Project 2025 actually says about aviation and privatizing transportation. Here it is.

The Department of Transportation chapter of Mandate for Leadership was written by Diana Furchtgott Roth. Around page 633 the document lays out separating the Air Traffic Organization from the FAA and from the department’s oversight, and around page 632 it moves aviation research and development responsibility toward private companies. Senate Democrats’ own August 2024 summary flagged both. Chapter 5, the Homeland Security chapter written by Ken Cuccinelli, states that until it is privatized, TSA should be treated as a national security provider and its workforce should be deunionized immediately.

Deunionized immediately. Write that down.

Now here is the receipt that turns this from a 2023 document into a live program. On December 4, 2025, three weeks after the longest shutdown in American history ended, Diana Furchtgott Roth published a commentary at Heritage titled How to Modernize America’s Air Traffic Control. Her argument, in her own framing: if the ATO were private, as in Canada, or a public private partnership as in parts of Western Europe, then payments would not be disrupted by shutdowns. She proposes user fees flowing directly to the ATO. She proposes that there could be multiple air traffic control providers as long as they met government performance standards. She lists four steps: separate the FAA from DOT or at minimum separate the ATO from the FAA, overhaul the funding model by privatization if possible, require the FAA to operate more like a business, and authorize the ATO to issue long term revenue bonds. She writes that the only reason America has a fully public system is union pressure and fear of job loss.

Understand the play. You do not privatize a functioning system. Nobody sells you a fire extinguisher while the house is fine. You need the crisis first. The shutdown produced the crisis, and three weeks later the author of the Project 2025 transportation chapter used the crisis as the argument for the thing the chapter already wanted.

That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a byline and a date.

To be precise, because precision is the point: the administration publicly stepped back from a privatization fight in August 2025, saying a governance battle would delay the urgent work of hiring and modernizing. The Senate Appropriations bill for fiscal 2026, S.2465, contains language barring any funds from being used to plan, design, or implement the privatization or separation of the FAA’s air traffic organization functions. NBAA, NATCA, and the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists all signed a joint letter opposing privatization in December 2025. In May 2026 the FAA actually took two towers back from private contractors.

So the wall is holding. For now. The wall is holding because a Senate appropriations rider and a coalition of aviation unions are standing on it, and appropriations riders expire every single year.

Which brings me back to the transcript. My man said this is an indictment of capitalism, that you prioritize profits so much you are willing to deprioritize the safety of constituents and consumers to make sure private entities get paid. Let me sharpen that rather than repeat it. The indictment is not that somebody wants efficiency. The indictment is the sequence. Break the funding mechanism through a shutdown. Point at the resulting failure. Offer the market as the cure for a wound the state inflicted on purpose. Then staff the interim with the cheapest available labor pool and call it innovation.

Two roles frame. What Sean Duffy says he is doing is solving a staffing emergency. What the position structurally does is keep an underfunded, understaffed, contract frozen public workforce limping along just well enough to avoid a reckoning, and just badly enough that when somebody finally says let the private sector run it, the public will be tired enough to say fine.

THEY WAS NEVER BEHIND

I am not ending on the diagnosis, because Afropessimism is descriptive, not prescriptive, and description is not a place to live.

In 2002 Alondra Nelson edited the Afrofuturism issue of Social Text and took apart the digital divide discourse that was choking Black technology conversation at the time. That discourse held that Black people were behind, that we were the analog remainder in a digital future, that the problem was our deficit and the solution was catching us up. Nelson’s intervention was to point out that this framing required ignoring an enormous archive of Black technological practice, invention, and speculation in order to work. The divide was real as an access story. It was a lie as an identity story. And the identity story was doing most of the political work.

Apply Nelson to right now.

They want you to argue about whether Black kids can read while a federal ad campaign recruits from the exact spaces Black kids have been building culture in for twenty years. Both halves of that are a deficit story, and neither half is true the way it is being told. Black players did not fall behind gaming. Black players built the vernacular, the streams, the tournament culture, the memes, the entire aesthetic register that ad was stealing from when it cut to Twitch. Black aviators did not fall behind aviation. Bessie Coleman had an international license in 1921 while American schools were still refusing to enroll her. Marlon Green had three thousand bomber hours while Continental was in court arguing about hotel rooms.

The deficit was never in us. The deficit was in the door.

So when they tell you the standard had to be lowered to let us in, you tell them the standard was never a standard, it was a valve, and the only thing that ever changed it was pressure. Yancey Williams filed suit and the valve moved. Marlon Green litigated for six years and the valve moved. A war came and the valve moved. A shortage came and the valve moved.

It has never once moved because somebody at the top had a revelation about our capacity.

Which means the entire history of this thing is proof that they knew. The whole time. They knew, and the finding was the cover story, and the cover story got a footnote and a letterhead.

SO WHAT DO WE DO

Watch the academy classes. Fiscal 2026 and 2027. Who applies, who gets seated in Oklahoma City, who certifies. If the pool diversifies and the certification rate does not, the bottleneck was never recruitment and everybody who sold you the ad as the story was selling.

Fight the count, not just the cut. The most dangerous thing in this whole story is not the Fortnite footage. It is that the statistical capacity to evaluate any of it got dismantled in 2025 and the forms that would let you see Black women at all are being rescinded in 2026. A country that stops counting is a country preparing an argument it does not want checked.

Watch the rider. Every appropriations cycle, S.2465’s privatization ban has to be renewed. That single sentence is currently the only thing standing between the Project 2025 transportation chapter and the tower.

And put your money and your mouth where the reading is. The kids in the ad are not the villains. They are the ones who got handed a controller because the country closed the library, and now the country is calling that a career pathway and taking a bow.

See, Brock reminds us that the word gamer was never neutral, that a picture of a body was drawn before a description of a skill was ever written, and that whoever holds the pen on that picture holds the door. And Thomas teaches us that a child’s imagination is not a private matter, that a nation funds the worlds it wants its children to inhabit and starves the rest, and that you can trace exactly what a country believes about a child by looking at which room it sent them to and which room it sent the money to.

The 5 Key Takeaways

1. The bar is not a measurement, it is a valve. From the 1925 Army War College memo through the 2014 biographical questionnaire to the 2026 Twitch campaign, the qualification standard for American aviation has moved with labor demand and political pressure, never with new evidence about anybody’s capacity.

2. They erased the shortage on paper before they announced they had solved it. On May 15, 2026 the FAA cut its full staffing target from 14,633 certified controllers to 12,563. In August it announced 94 percent of the hiring goal met. NATCA says it was excluded from building the new model.

3. The thing they blamed for the Potomac was banned in 2016. Public Law 114 190 prohibited biographical assessments as a first line hiring tool nine years before the January 2025 collision, and that assessment screened out qualified Black CTI graduates too.

4. The money did not disappear, the capacity did. Title I and the civil rights office came out level funded for fiscal 2026, but roughly $900 million in education research contracts got cancelled, the statistical agency got gutted, and adult literacy programs got shifted toward the Department of Labor.

5. The privatization argument is on a byline with a date. The author of the Project 2025 transportation chapter published a Heritage commentary on December 4, 2025, three weeks after the longest shutdown in history ended, using that shutdown as the case for separating and privatizing the Air Traffic Organization.

PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

I don’t have a network behind me. No corporate desk, no institution, no editor telling me which receipts are too spicy for the advertisers. What I have is y’all. I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, academic frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers. If everybody reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise.

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

CITED SOURCES

* Army War College. Memorandum for the Chief of Staff: The Employment of Negro Man Power in War. November 10, 1925.

* Colorado Anti Discrimination Commission v. Continental Air Lines, Inc., 372 U.S. 714 (1963).

* Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. “Marlon Green,” editorial feature, February 2023, and the Black Wings exhibition.

* Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “Marlon DeWitt Green (1929 to 2009).”

* PBS. “Who Are the Tuskegee Airmen?” January 28, 2022.

* Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971), on artificial credential barriers and business necessity.

* Heritage Foundation. Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, Department of Transportation chapter (Furchtgott Roth), approx. pp. 628 to 638; Department of Homeland Security chapter (Cuccinelli), ch. 5.

* U.S. Senate Democrats. “How Project 2025 will harm America’s transportation infrastructure,” August 2024.

* Furchtgott Roth, Diana. “How to Modernize America’s Air Traffic Control.” Heritage Foundation commentary, December 4, 2025, originally in The National Interest.

* AOPA. “Senate ATC modernization funding bill blocks privatization,” July 30, 2025, on S.2465.

* NBAA. “ATC Modernization, Not Privatization,” including the December 3, 2025 joint letter with NATCA and PASS.

* GAO 25 107917, December 2024, finding 51 of 138 FAA systems unsustainable.

* Brock, André, Jr. Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. NYU Press, 2020.

* Thomas, Ebony Elizabeth. The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. NYU Press, 2019.

* Gray, Kishonna L. Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming. LSU Press, 2020.

* Gray, Kishonna L. Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live. Anderson, 2014.

* Nelson, Alondra, ed. “Afrofuturism.” Social Text 20, no. 2 (Summer 2002).

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

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

Thank you Sara Willard, sandy walling, Sherell, Gretchen Lawyer, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

It’s Wednesday morning and I got three headlines open on the same screen.

Texas is putting a whole industry on a Schedule I list next to heroin on July 31. Tuskegee University is banning bonnets, durags, and bedroom shoes out the classroom and the cafeteria. Two congressmen from Indiana wrote a letter demanding a university fire a Black woman for putting a cake outside a dead senator’s office.

Three stories. Every algorithm in America will serve them to you as three separate arguments so you can go pick a side on each one and feel like you did something.

They ain’t three stories. They one story wearing three outfits.

Every single one of them runs on the same move. Somebody with power announces a standard. The standard gets described as neutral, natural, obvious, just how things are, just how the world works. Free market. Professionalism. Civility. And then, every single time, when you follow the money back to who wrote the standard and who gets paid when it is enforced, you find the same thing.

Professionalism is not a thermometer. Professionalism is a preference with a payroll behind it.

So is the free market. So is civility. And I’m finna show you the receipts on all three before I’m done.

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

They Only Call It a Free Market When They Winning

Let me get the definition in first, because I don’t want to just throw words around. Maybe we got some students watching. We ain’t going with the AI definition. We going with Merriam Webster.

A free market is an economic system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and are not controlled or regulated by the government.

Hold that. Now here go the receipts.

In 2019, Texas passed House Bill 1325 legalizing hemp with no more than 0.3 percent delta 9 THC by dry weight, tracking the 2018 federal Farm Bill. Businesses did exactly what the law told them they could do. Farmers planted. People signed leases. People bought inventory. People hired. The industry says it grew to roughly 4.3 billion dollars in annual sales and about 53,000 jobs in Texas, and I want to flag that those are the industry’s own numbers from the Texas Hemp Business Council, not an independent audit, so hold them accordingly.

Then in 2025 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 3, a near total ban. It cleared the House 87 to 54 and the Senate 25 to 6, mostly party line, in a chamber the Republicans control. Greg Abbott vetoed it just before midnight on June 22, 2025, and his stated reason was not that the ban was wrong. His stated reason was that it was, in his words, almost certainly unconstitutional, and that a law that gets immediately enjoined serves no one. He called a special session for July 21 to build a regulatory framework instead. The framework never got built. In September 2025 he issued an executive order restricting sales to adults 21 and over and pushed the rest to the agencies.

Now watch what happened next, because this is the part that matters.

The Legislature never passed the ban. The Legislature never passed a framework either. So the fight moved out of the room where you get to vote for somebody, and into the room where you don’t. The Department of State Health Services had quietly expanded its controlled substance definitions back in October 2021 to sweep in delta 8, delta 10, THCP, and other intoxicating THC variants. A Travis County court blocked it. That injunction held for nearly five years while the case moved. On May 1, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the agency in the Sky Marketing litigation and upheld its authority. The mandate issued June 5. DSHS published notice in the July 10 Texas Register. Effective July 31, 2026, more than trace amounts of any THC other than delta 9 is a Schedule I controlled substance in the state of Texas, sitting on the same list as heroin, LSD, and psilocybin.

Somebody explain to me which part of that is the free market.

The elected body could not pass it. So an unelected agency defined it into existence and a court blessed the definition. Small businesses across this state spent their hard earned money on inventory that a state agency made contraband by publishing a notice in a register. That is not competition among private businesses with prices unregulated by government. That is the opposite of the thing they say they love. That is the government picking who eats.

And here is the part I need y’all to sit in. When Abbott vetoed SB 3, the model he publicly recommended was to regulate THC the way Texas regulates alcohol.

The alcohol way. From the state that has been watching alcohol consumption hit record lows.

The hemp industry has been saying out loud for two years that lobbyists tied to Big Alcohol and to the licensed marijuana operators were pushing the ban. I am going to be honest with y’all about the evidentiary status of that: that is an industry claim made by an industry with a direct financial stake, and I have not seen a lobbying disclosure audit that nails it down, so I am putting it on the table as a claim and not as a proven fact. But you do not need the smoking gun to see the shape of the thing. The prison industrial complex loses volume when cannabis gets easier. The alcohol industry loses shelf space when cannabis gets easier. Both of them are old, both of them are organized, both of them have Austin on retainer, and both of them just watched their competition get delisted by definition rather than by vote.

That’s the call coming from inside the house. The same folks that spent my whole childhood telling me socialism is when a small group of unaccountable planners decide what gets made and what gets banned just described their own July.

The Word Was the First Branding Exercise

And do not let nobody act like this is a fresh fight either.

Anytime the pathology around cannabis gets warmed up, it has to borrow from the old archaic file. Criminalize Black people. Make you scared of the dark brown cartels south of the border. Add a little anti work moralism on top, it’ll make you lazy, it’ll make you unable to think.

The word itself was the first move. Cannabis had been in the American pharmacopeia for decades under the name cannabis. When the Federal Bureau of Narcotics went to work under Harry Anslinger in the 1930s, the word that got pushed into the newspapers and into the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was marihuana. Not a scientific term. A Spanish language term, selected because it sounded foreign and it sounded brown and it made a plant that had been sitting in tincture bottles at the drugstore feel like an invasion. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act put cannabis in Schedule I. The Shafer Commission that Nixon himself appointed came back in 1972 recommending decriminalization and Nixon threw it in the trash.

Then the outcomes. The ACLU’s 2020 analysis found Black people were 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession nationally, in a country where usage rates between the two groups are roughly equal. Same plant. Same behavior. Almost four times the handcuffs.

So when Texas tells me on July 31 that this is about intoxicating variants and public safety, I want to know why the word intoxicating is doing all that work and the word alcohol is not in the sentence. Drunk driving is one of the leading causes of preventable death in this country. Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of death, period. We got commercials for it during the game. We got it at graduations. We got it at the funeral after. If the concern was intoxication, the ban would have started somewhere else and everybody knows it.

Most of y’all know it and won’t say it.

And poetically, this is happening in the same state, in the same election year, where the whole pitch to working people is that immigrants are taking your jobs. You cannot blame an immigrant for the smoke shop closing. You cannot blame an immigrant for the grower shutting down. You cannot blame an immigrant for the shelf getting cleared by a register notice. Those jobs are getting taken by policy, in public, by people whose names are on a ballot in November, while they point at somebody who doesn’t have a vote.

Gina Hinojosa is running against Greg Abbott. James Talarico is running against Ken Paxton. There is a whole ballot underneath that. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to know who did what.

Bad Faith Is Not a Mistake, It Is a Job

Now let me bring in the framework, because I don’t want this to just be me pointing.

Lewis Gordon wrote a book in 1995 called Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Gordon takes bad faith out of the French existentialist seminar and puts it where it belongs, which is on the ground in an antiblack world. Bad faith, for Gordon, is not lying to somebody else. It is choosing to believe something you have the evidence to disbelieve, because believing it lets you keep your role, your comfort, and your innocence at the same time.

The key thing in Gordon is that bad faith is not an accident. It is not ignorance. It is a labor. You have to work to keep it going. You have to manage the evidence. You have to keep the file closed.

Apply Gordon here.

A Texas legislator who votes to schedule a legal product out of existence and then goes home and gives a speech about the free market is not confused about economics. He knows. A university president who has the retention data in his own institutional research office and announces a bonnet ban as the intervention is not unaware of the data. He has it. A congressman who spent a decade calling the left the cancel culture party and then writes a letter demanding a university fire a woman for a cake does not lack a mirror.

They are doing the work of not knowing. Gordon calls that work by its name.

And Gordon adds the part that gets left out. Bad faith is contagious, and its favorite recruit is the person who has already been harmed by it, because for that person the lie comes with a promise attached: comply and you’ll be exempt. That is the bridge from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, and it is where the second story starts.

Professionalism Is a Preference With a Payroll Behind It

We going to end this part with etymology, because y’all keep throwing the word professionalism around like it’s a thermometer.

Professionalism traces back to the Latin profiteri, to declare publicly, to make a vow. It moves through Middle English as the solemn vows a person took when entering a religious order. It secularizes into job based callings. It takes its modern form in the middle of the nineteenth century, right alongside the rise of the modern professions as organized bodies that controlled who got a license and who did not.

Read that again. The earliest English noun profession referred to the vows you took joining a religious order. A specific religion. A specific continent. A specific set of people with the power to say who had taken the vow and who was still out in the cold.

So when somebody tells me professionalism is neutral, that it is just standards, that it has nothing to do with culture, I know exactly what I am dealing with. Even at the root of the word, professionalism is a declaration of membership in somebody’s particular order. It never stopped being that. The vow just got a dress code and a hiring manager.

Karen Fields and Barbara Fields have a word for what happens next. Racecraft. Their argument is that racism, the practice, produces race, the appearance, and then hides its own tracks by pointing at the thing it just made. The ritual manufactures the evidence and then cites the evidence as the reason for the ritual. Professionalism runs the identical loop. A dominant group’s grooming habits get called the standard. Everybody else gets measured against it. The gap that measurement produces gets called a difference in professionalism. And then the gap is used to justify the standard that produced it.

That is not a thermometer. A thermometer reads a temperature that exists whether or not you show up with the thermometer. This thing manufactures the temperature and then charges you for the reading.

Tuskegee, 1895, and the Bill That Came Due

Now let’s get the receipts straight before the argument, because I do not do vibes.

Ahead of the 2026 to 2027 academic year, Tuskegee University President Dr. Mark A. Brown emailed parents of incoming students announcing a set of changes he framed as the first step in a period of transformation and renewal, with the university expecting its largest new student enrollment in 32 years. The policy prohibits bonnets, durags, bedroom shoes, and revealing clothing in classrooms, dining facilities, and official university events including Convocation. Students attending business meetings and professional events are expected to wear business suits and appropriate shoes. The package also tightens attendance requirements, limits cellphone use in lectures, and pushes internships and résumés.

Brown’s rationale, in his own words: the goal is not meant to restrict students from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare them with a solid foundation for the workforce they will enter once they leave Tuskegee.

Hold on to that sentence. The whole argument falls apart right there, and I am going to show you exactly where.

But first, the history, because Tuskegee is not a random campus and this is not a random policy.

Booker T. Washington preached the gospel of the toothbrush at Tuskegee. Literally. Personal grooming and hygiene as the road to acceptance. Industrial training as the price of admission. And in the 1895 Atlanta Compromise the deal got stated in public: cast down your bucket where you are, accept social separation, earn respectability through labor and presentation, and the rest will come.

That is the root of every dress for success argument in your comment section right now, whether the person making it knows it or not.

W.E.B. Du Bois answered him eight years later, in 1903, in chapter three of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Du Bois’ answer was that a program of submission and industrial training, purchased at the price of political rights and higher learning, would never deliver what it promised, because the terms were being set by people who had no intention of honoring them.

Du Bois was right, and the receipts came in fast. Jim Crow hardened. The vote receded. The lynching curve went the wrong way. And the toothbrush did not save a single person.

So when Tuskegee in 2026 announces that Black students must present a certain way in order to be received by the workforce, that is not innovation. That is a reissue of the Atlanta Compromise in new fabric. Same institution. Same theory of change. Same century old bet that if we manage the surface, the structure will relent.

The structure has never relented. Not once. Not one time in a hundred and thirty one years.

The Toothbrush Was Never the Curriculum, It Was the Invoice

The education section.

Kevin Gaines wrote Uplifting the Race in 1996 and it is the book that should be on every group chat right now. Gaines traces racial uplift ideology from the 1890s forward and shows the split inside it. Uplift started as a collective liberation claim, the whole race rising together. Then a Black elite took hold of it and quietly converted it into a class project. Uplift stopped meaning we rise together and started meaning we are the respectable ones, the evidence of the race’s capacity, and the problem is those other Negroes down there who have not learned yet.

Gaines’ point is the sharp one. That conversion did not just fail to protect Black people. It handed white supremacy a vocabulary. Once the Black elite agreed that the race’s condition was a matter of morals, manners, and hygiene, every structural argument got harder to make, because the terms of debate had been surrendered by the people with the credentials.

Apply Gaines here and you can stop calling people bougie and start naming a documented intellectual history with a class position attached. When a comment section fills up with lazy, ghetto, carry yourself better, pull your pants up, that is not an original thought and it is not a Black thought. That is uplift ideology in its degraded phase, and it has a bibliography.

Now the data, because Gaines gives us the why and the numbers give us the what.

Tuskegee’s own reported figures put first year retention around 81 percent and the four year graduation rate roughly in the 29 to 31 percent range, with six year completion somewhere around 57 percent depending on the cohort and the source. Verify the exact vintage before you quote it, and I will flag that again at the end.

Sit with the shape of it. Students show up. Students stay through year one at a high rate. And something between year one and year four is eating them alive.

Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres gave us the frame for reading a number like that in The Miner’s Canary. The canary in the mine does not die because the canary is weak. The canary dies because the air is bad, and the canary’s body is the instrument that tells you so. Read the graduation gap as a canary and it is a diagnostic of an environment. Read it as a defect and you end up regulating the bird.

The bonnet ban regulates the bird.

Here is what the research actually says, and I already said on the stream that no matter how much you disagree with how I am saying it, you cannot negate the data.

Brunsma and Rockquemore, 1998, in the Journal of Educational Research, took the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and pulled tenth grade data across public, private, and Catholic sectors to test the exact claims uniform advocates were making. No direct effect on attendance. No direct effect on behavior problems. No direct effect on substance use. The one association they found for academic achievement ran negative. That is 1998. Twenty eight years ago. And I want to be fair, there is a real methodological back and forth in that literature, Bodine published a critique in 2003, and I keep that caveat in the room because I am not doing what they do.

The GAO’s dress code report found that stricter and more restrictive dress code policies clustered in schools serving higher shares of Black students, and that enforcement fell hardest on Black girls, including through removal from class. Hold that one, because removal from class is the whole ballgame.

Now let me get specific, because as a debater I know specificity is the difference between an argument and a feeling. Everything I just cited is K through 12. So let me move it up to the level we are actually arguing about.

Terrell Strayhorn established sense of belonging as a basic human need in the college context and a direct predictor of persistence, and established that it operates most powerfully precisely for students who perceive themselves as marginal in an institution’s dominant culture. Which is to say, the students most sensitive to belonging cues are exactly the students this policy is aimed at.

Walton and Cohen, 2011, in Science, ran a brief social belonging intervention with college students. Not a dress code. A short exercise reframing social adversity as normal and temporary rather than as evidence that you do not belong here. African American students’ grade point averages rose across the following three years, the racial achievement gap in that sample was cut substantially, and there were measurable improvements in self reported health and wellbeing.

Read that against the policy. A message about belonging moves the number. A message about your bonnet is also a message about belonging. It is just pointed the other way.

Hurtado and Carter demonstrated that campus racial climate shapes sense of belonging, and that hostile climate perceptions in the first years predict weaker belonging later. Museus’ Culturally Engaging Campus Environments model operationalized the same insight into measurable institutional indicators, and two of the nine are cultural familiarity and culturally relevant knowledge. Meaning: the degree to which students encounter their own culture reflected back at them by the institution predicts belonging, and belonging predicts persistence.

Two of the nine indicators. And the policy runs directly against both of them.

Then there is the part about the market this is all supposedly preparing students for. Koval and Rosette, 2021, four studies out of Duke’s Fuqua School and Michigan State. Participants were placed in the role of recruiters screening applicant profiles. Black women with natural hairstyles, afros, braids, twists, were rated less professional, rated less competent, and recommended for interviews less often than Black women with straightened hair and than white women with either curly or straight hair. The penalty intensified in industries with strong dress norms.

Read Rosette’s own account of the mechanism. In a Western society where whites have historically been the dominant social group, the standard for professional appearance is the physical appearance of white people.

So you cannot train a student out of the trait being penalized, because the trait being penalized is her.

Which brings me to the thing nobody in this debate has put on the table, and it is the one that should end it.

Tuskegee sits in the Eleventh Circuit.

In 2010, Chastity Jones, a Black woman in Mobile, Alabama, was offered a job at Catastrophe Management Solutions. The offer was pulled when she would not cut her locs. A human resources manager told her they tend to get messy. The EEOC sued on her behalf under Title VII. In EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 852 F.3d 1018, the Eleventh Circuit held for the employer. The reasoning: Title VII protects immutable characteristics, and while Black hair texture is immutable, a Black hairstyle is a mutable choice. The court leaned on Rogers v. American Airlines, 527 F. Supp. 229 from 1981, which held that a grooming policy banning an all braided hairstyle was not racial discrimination because braids are the product of artifice. The Supreme Court declined to take it up.

The Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Tuskegee, Alabama is in Macon County, Alabama. The CROWN Act has been enacted in 27 states and the District of Columbia. Alabama is not one of them, and the federal CROWN Act passed the House in 2022 and has never become law.

Now put the whole thing together.

The president of a university located inside the Eleventh Circuit is telling students that a dress code will prepare them for the workforce they will enter. The controlling law of that circuit already told a Black woman from that same state, in that same decade, that her hair is a choice and therefore she has no remedy when an employer refuses to hire her over it. The state has no CROWN Act to fill the gap.

So the policy cannot possibly do what it claims. It cannot deliver protection because the protection does not exist in that jurisdiction. What it can do, and what it does do, is teach a student that the employer who penalizes her is applying a formality rather than an animus.

That is the injury. You are not building her armor. You are building her a translation dictionary in which the word that means antiblackness has been redefined to mean professionalism, and you are handing it to her before the interview so she blames herself in the parking lot afterward.

I care more about what I am putting in a student’s head than what she is wearing on her head, and this policy puts something in her head.

And a class analysis has to run through here too, because we are talking about an institution where families are scraping to make tuition. The GAO documented that dress code enforcement pulls students out of the room. If we can acknowledge our students is having a hard time getting the money together to be in the building at all, what does it look like to add a business suit to the list? Who does that cost? It does not cost the legacy kid. It costs the first generation kid whose whole financial aid picture is held together with tape. Every dollar in that policy is a regressive tax collected from the students the retention number is already failing.

The Bonnet Is a Timesheet

The intersectional section.

Everybody in the comments is throwing around respectability politics, and about half of them are using it wrong, so let me do this properly.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the politics of respectability in Righteous Discontent in 1993, studying Black Baptist women’s convention work from 1880 to 1920. And here is what gets flattened. Higginbotham did not describe it as simple self hatred. She described a both and. Those women used respectability as a genuine weapon against a white supremacist order that had declared Black women unrapeable, unchaste, and unfit, and they wielded it in a period of open racial terror where the stakes were survival. It was a strategy with teeth.

And Higginbotham documented the other half in the same book. That same strategy licensed the policing of poor and working class Black people by a Black middle class that had made itself the arbiter of the group’s public image. Two things can be true. Both of them are in the archive.

So when I critique this, I am not saying those women were stupid. I am saying the strategy had a documented cost, we have had a hundred and thirty years of data on whether the trade paid off, and the payment never arrived. Du Bois said the terms were being set by people with no intention of honoring them. The Eleventh Circuit proved him right in 2016.

Now the part about the bonnet itself, and the argument I keep seeing that a durag is not Black culture. If the durag was created specifically to protect our hairstyles, how is it not? If Blackness is not a monolith, how you gonna tell me what is not Black culture, especially when it is worn by that many Black folks?

But I want to go past culture, because framing it as culture lets people call it preference. It is not preference. It is labor.

Adia Harvey Wingfield’s research on Black professionals in majority white workplaces gives us the term racial tasks. Wingfield’s finding is that Black workers routinely perform an additional category of work that is nowhere in the job description and nowhere on the pay stub: managing white colleagues’ comfort, regulating their own affect, and absorbing the cost of being read wrong. Unpaid, unlisted, and mandatory.

Apply Wingfield to a bonnet and the whole conversation changes.

That bonnet is protecting a hairstyle that cost money and cost hours. Silk presses, braids, locs, twists, a set of braids that took six hours in somebody’s kitchen and has to hold for six weeks. The bonnet is the maintenance protocol for an asset. The Dove CROWN research found Black women are roughly one and a half times more likely to be sent home from work because of their hair, and roughly 80 percent more likely to change their hair from its natural state to fit in at the office. That is the market this student is being prepared for. The bonnet is what makes the compliance survivable and affordable.

So the ban does not remove an indulgence. The ban confiscates the tool and keeps the requirement. It is a timesheet nobody is paying, and now the equipment is contraband too.

One of my viewers wrote in during the stream: signed, a Black woman working from home today in her bonnet and slippers. And that is not a joke, that is a labor market fact. The rules being defended here were written for a workplace that in large part no longer exists in the form it is being described in. Meanwhile the person enforcing them is quoting 1895.

Now let me take this to the other end of the news cycle, because it is the same demand.

Elizabeth Booker Houston is a lawyer, a comedian, and an adjunct professor teaching food and drug law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. She is also my homegirl, and I want to be transparent about that, because I saw this headline scroll past my feed several times without realizing the IU professor in it was somebody I know.

Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, 2026 at 71. On July 14 she posted an Instagram video of herself and another creator setting a cake among the floral tributes outside his former Senate office. The cake had his photo, a cross of blue frosted roses, and the word congratudolences, a mash of congratulations and condolences. She posted commentary about his political record along with it.

For that, U.S. Representatives Marlin Stutzman and Mark Messmer of Indiana wrote a formal letter to IU President Pamela Whitten and the dean of the McKinney law school demanding she be fired for comments they described as vile and cruel and in violation of the university’s handbook. Their line: celebrating the death of anyone, regardless of political affiliation or ideology, is abhorrent and counter to the values of civility, respect, and basic human decency that Hoosiers hold dear. Senator Jim Banks, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, and Representative Erin Houchin joined the pile.

She did not break a law. She bought a cake and put it on public property outside an office. Steve Sanders, a constitutional law professor at IU who publicly said he found her conduct distasteful and would not want to associate with someone who behaved that way, also said plainly that this is protected speech and that a university retaliating against her for it would run straight into the First Amendment. He is right. Her cake has nothing to do with her competence to teach food and drug law.

And on July 28, at the National Cathedral, at the funeral itself, in front of the man’s family, the President of the United States stood up and said that virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsey, and then said, well, not everybody, but it sounds good. Not everybody. And went on. And nobody wrote a letter.

She sent a cake to an office. He said it to the family in the sanctuary.

Now watch the two roles here. What they say is that this is about decency for the dead. What the position structurally does is establish that a Black woman’s continued employment is contingent on a hostile audience’s emotional comfort. That is Wingfield’s racial task escalated into a firing condition. And when a member of Congress attaches federal appropriations pressure to a university’s personnel decision, decency is not what is operating. That is leverage.

And the last piece is the one that stays with me.

She told me she had been booked to speak at an event for a left leaning caucus, progressives, democratic socialists, establishment Democrats, the whole conglomeration, and after this hit, she got pulled from the event. That is her account and mine, and I am flagging it as such. But I have been making this argument for two years now and it does not get less true. The same officials who reach out to content creators to go to bat for them, who want us in the comment sections defending them when the harassment comes, went quiet when it was her turn.

If proximity to a Black woman brings criticism, they open the distance. If proximity to a Black woman insulates them from criticism, they close the distance. Both parties can disagree on almost everything and still agree on that.

The Republicans want her fired for the cake. The Democrats did not want to be in the room with her. Tuskegee wants the bonnet off her head. Every one of them is telling the same woman the same thing: your presentation is a condition of your access, and we will bill you for the maintenance and then confiscate the equipment.

Grandmama’s Ethics Don’t Need a Handbook

I don’t want to end on the diagnosis, because the diagnosis is not the whole record.

Katie Geneva Cannon wrote Black Womanist Ethics in 1988, and her whole project was to say that the dominant ethical tradition in the West was built for people who had real options. It assumes you have freedom, that you have self reliance, that you can choose a good and pursue it. Cannon’s argument is that Black women, historically, were handed a situation where those preconditions did not exist, and rather than having no ethics, they built a different one. A moral wisdom made out of what was actually available. Cannon went to the Black women’s literary tradition, to Zora Neale Hurston, to find it, because it was never going to be in a seminary syllabus.

That is what I see in the bonnet. That is what I see in the durag. That is what I see in the cake.

None of it is asking a handbook for permission. The bonnet is a woman protecting six hours of her own labor with something she can afford. The durag is a technology invented by us, for our hair, by people nobody was giving a grant to. The cake is a Black woman refusing to perform a grief she does not feel for a man whose politics she watched hurt people, and doing it with a joke, which is the oldest tool in the box.

That is not the absence of ethics. That is an ethics with a different author.

Booker T. Washington bet that if we managed the surface, the structure would relent. He put a hundred and thirty one years on that bet and it has not paid once. Antiblackness is not a bug in the labor market that better grooming can rattle loose. Antiblackness is the load bearing wall. The market did not accidentally develop a preference against Black hair and Black skin. The market was built on the ability to read and rank Black bodies, going back to the Negro Act of 1740 and forward through the Tignon Laws of 1786, which made Black women in Louisiana cover their hair by law because the hair itself was a problem for the social order.

They passed a law about our hair in 1786. In 2016 a federal appeals court said our hair is a choice. In 2026 a Black university put it in the student handbook.

You cannot dress your way out of an engine.

Whether I speak perfect diction English or I speak with Ebonics, I understand it is a Black skin that is going to make me deal with certain things. Whether my pants below my ass or they held up with a Gucci belt, I understand there is a certain level of antiblackness I am still going to have to deal with. And you smoking dope and dog food if you believe I am going to walk in with a 4.0 and a master’s and a record of never once wearing a durag in the cafeteria and come out more qualified than my white counterpart. The audit study literature is clear on it. Identical credentials, identical experience, and the white applicant still gets the call. There is something pervasive about the permanence of racism. That is Derrick Bell. That is the critical race theory right there.

So see, Gordon reminds us that bad faith is a labor somebody has to keep performing, which means every one of these standards is being actively maintained by people who have the evidence and choose the file. And Cannon teaches us that Black women have been building a moral life out of the materials actually available to them for four hundred years without ever getting a memo authorizing it, and they did not need the handbook then and they do not need it now.

Two things can be true. Tuskegee is an institution I would send my own children to before I sent them to a PWI. And this policy is a misdiagnosis dressed up as a plan. It is a picture of Malcolm behind me right now and it would be intellectually dishonest to say we cannot critique that man. Just like humans are fallible, institutions is too.

Who gets to dictate professional, and who gave them the jurisdiction.

Answer that one honestly and you’ll find the payroll every time.

As a former professor, I care more about what I was putting in my students’ heads than what they wore to class on their heads.

Amen. Amen.

I’m an acquired taste. Not for everybody. If you got an issue with anything I’m saying or doing, you got a few options. You can reject it. You can respect it or check it. You can block it or buck it. I’m still going to say what I want to say though.

I ain’t turning nothing down but my collar.

Education Is Elevation.

I’ll see y’all next Wednesday, 1030 Central AM. I even try to be on time. I try to be on time, man.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The free market claim collapsed in public and the vote never happened. Texas’ Legislature could not pass a hemp ban. It passed SB 3, the governor vetoed it as almost certainly unconstitutional, the promised regulatory framework never got built, and the prohibition arrived anyway on July 31, 2026 through an agency definition upheld by a court. Products that were legal under a law the same Legislature passed in 2019 became Schedule I by register notice.

* Professionalism has an etymology and it is not neutral. The word traces to profiteri, the vows taken entering a religious order, and takes its modern form alongside the professions organizing themselves as licensing bodies. A standard that begins as a membership vow does not become objective because it got a hiring manager.

* Tuskegee sits in the Eleventh Circuit, and the Eleventh Circuit already ruled. EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions held that a Black woman in Alabama has no Title VII remedy when an employer pulls a job offer over her locs, because a hairstyle is a mutable choice. Alabama has no CROWN Act. A dress code cannot deliver a protection that does not legally exist in its own jurisdiction.

* The bonnet is maintenance labor, not preference. Dove’s CROWN research found Black women are about 1.5 times more likely to be sent home from work over their hair and about 80 percent more likely to alter it to fit the office. The bonnet protects an expensive, hours long investment made to survive that market. Banning it confiscates the tool while keeping the requirement.

* The same demand shows up at both ends of the week. Tuskegee tells a Black woman her presentation is a condition of her education. Two congressmen tell a Black woman her employment is a condition of a hostile audience’s comfort. A left leaning caucus quietly removes her from a program. Different politics, identical instruction.

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary sources and documents

* House Bill 1325, 86th Texas Legislature (2019), establishing the state hemp program at 0.3 percent delta 9 THC by dry weight

* Senate Bill 3, 89th Texas Legislature (2025), House vote 87 to 54, Senate vote 25 to 6

* Governor Greg Abbott, veto proclamation on Senate Bill 3, June 22, 2025

* Governor Greg Abbott, executive order on hemp derived THC products, September 10, 2025

* Texas Department of State Health Services, Schedule of Controlled Substances definitions of tetrahydrocannabinols and marihuana extract, adopted October 2021

* Texas Department of State Health Services v. Sky Marketing Corp. d/b/a Hometown Hero, Supreme Court of Texas, decided May 1, 2026, mandate issued June 5, 2026

* Texas Register, notice of reinstated controlled substance definitions, July 10, 2026, effective July 31, 2026

* Marihuana Tax Act of 1937; Controlled Substances Act of 1970; National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (Shafer Commission) report, 1972

* EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 852 F.3d 1018 (11th Cir. 2016)

* Rogers v. American Airlines, Inc., 527 F. Supp. 229 (S.D.N.Y. 1981)

* CROWN Act state enactments (27 states and the District of Columbia as of 2026); Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, passed U.S. House 2022, not enacted

* Negro Act of 1740 (South Carolina); Tignon Laws of 1786 (Spanish Louisiana)

* Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address, September 1895

* Letter from U.S. Reps. Marlin Stutzman and Mark Messmer to Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and the dean of the Robert H. McKinney School of Law, July 2026

* Dr. Mark A. Brown, message to parents of incoming Tuskegee University students, July 2026

* Tuskegee University published retention and graduation figures

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

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

Black people in Tennessee have a unique story, and I mean that in the technical sense, not the greeting card sense.

Before I get into the analysis, let me tell on myself the way I told on myself on camera. As a millennial, the first person who made me think about the Black experience in Tennessee explicitly was Young Buck of G Unit, when he was putting on for Cashville. That is not a throwaway line. Hold onto it, because it is the whole method.

Look at how the state maps itself through Black music. Young Buck reps Nashville, which is Middle Tennessee, which is old plantation country dressed up in country music money. Anna Mae Bullock, who the world knows as Tina Turner, comes out of Nutbush in Haywood County, which is West Tennessee cotton land, and she was so specific about it she put the town’s name in a song title and told you exactly what the city limits felt like. K. Michelle comes out of Memphis, which is the Delta’s capital city sitting on a bluff in Tennessee. Three artists, three regions, one state, and if you line them up you have already drawn the map that the legislature spent May 2026 redrawing.

Clyde Woods called this the blues epistemology. Woods studied the Mississippi Delta and argued two things that MFs still are not ready for. One, that the plantation is not a period, it is a bloc, meaning a standing alliance of landholders, lenders, sheriffs, and lawmakers that survives every formal defeat by reorganizing itself under new paperwork. Two, that when the courthouse will not keep an honest record, working Black people keep it in the music, and the music becomes a system of explanation rather than a soundtrack. Apply Woods here. Nutbush City Limits is not nostalgia, it is a field report from a county that in the exact same decade was throwing Black families off the land for registering to vote. Anna Mae Bullock got out of Haywood County in the middle of the 1950s. In 1960, the people who stayed were living in Army surplus tents.

That is the pattern. Tennessee hands Black people a foothold early, earlier than most, and then Tennessee takes it back with a clean piece of paper.

The Last To Leave and the First To Come Back

Tennessee was the last state to secede. The legislature moved in May 1861 and the voters ratified it on June 8, 1861, which put Tennessee at the back of the line going out. That late departure is part of why Black Tennesseans got an early foothold in freedom. Union armies were in Middle and West Tennessee early, contraband camps formed early, Black men enlisted in numbers, and Nashville became a federal hub while the war was still hot.

That foothold did not last long. It got snatched.

Snatch one. The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, exempted Tennessee. Andrew Johnson, then the military governor and an East Tennessee man, wanted it that way, so the paper that freed people in Confederate territory skipped the state where the Union already had boots on the ground. Legally free in Mississippi. Still property in Murfreesboro.

Snatch two, and this is the one nobody teaches. Tennessee was the first ex Confederate state readmitted to the Union, on July 24, 1866, after being the first to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Sounds like a win. It was not. When Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and cut the South into five military districts, Tennessee was the only one of the eleven left out, because Tennessee had already been let back in. Read that again slowly. Every other former Confederate state got federal troops standing between Black voters and the men who used to own them. Tennessee got home rule back first, which means Tennessee got Redemption first, and it is not a coincidence that the Klan got founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in the winter after the war ended.

Being first in line to come home meant being first in line to be left alone with the people who wanted you dead. The reward for early loyalty was early abandonment. Two things can be true. Tennessee was ahead, and Tennessee was abandoned, and it was ahead precisely because it was going to be abandoned.

East Tennessee Was Not Your Friend, It Was Just Not a Planter

Now let me clean up something in my own video, because Research over MeSearch means I check me too.

I said East Tennessee was a Union stronghold where slavery was less common and many opposed secession. True. Then I need to finish the thought. East Tennessee is mountain country, and mountain country could not run a cotton plantation economy, so the white people up there had less use for large scale slavery. Less use is not moral opposition. Their unionism was mostly a class position against the planter class in Middle and West Tennessee, and the proof of that is a man named Andrew Johnson.

Johnson was East Tennessee. Johnson was a unionist. Johnson stayed in the Senate when his state seceded. Johnson also owned people, asked for Tennessee to be carved out of the Emancipation Proclamation, and then as President spent the back half of the 1860s doing everything in his power to make sure Reconstruction did not turn into Black political power. East Tennessee unionism and antiblackness lived in the same body, wore the same suit, and took the same oath.

This is the discipline the transcript needed and did not have. When you tell Tennessee’s story you cannot let the Union label do the moral work. Being against secession and being for Black freedom were two different positions, and Tennessee is where you can see the seam.

The Plantation Bloc Draws the Map

West and Middle Tennessee had the large plantations and the economies that ran on free labor from my ancestors. When the war ended, that land did not disappear and those families did not disappear. Woods would say the bloc did not die, it refinanced. Sharecropping was the refinancing. The debt ledger at the plantation store replaced the whip, the crop lien replaced the bill of sale, and the county courthouse handled the enforcement.

Which brings me to Fayette County, and I need to correct myself on air, because in the video I said Fayetteville County. It is Fayette County, Tennessee, and its neighbor Haywood County, both sitting between Memphis and nothing, both majority Black, both cotton.

Here is how it started, and the mechanism is beautiful and sick at the same time. In 1959 a Black man named Burton Dodson stood trial in Fayette County for a killing from decades earlier, defended by a Black Memphis attorney. Black folks packed that courtroom and watched an all white jury do what all white juries do. Then somebody did the math out loud. In Tennessee, jury pools came off the voter rolls. No registration, no jury. No jury, no chance. So a group of them founded the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League in 1959, and the whole thing started as a jury problem before it was ever a ballot problem.

They registered. Then they got locked out of the August 1959 Democratic primary anyway, so they sued the county Democratic Party in 1960 and they won.

Watch the retaliation, because the retaliation is the lesson.

The White Citizens Council put together a list. Registered Black voters and any white person helping them. That list went around to merchants, banks, insurance agents, wholesalers, and doctors. If your name was on it you could not buy groceries. You could not buy gas. You could not get a loan, could not renew a policy, could not get seen by a physician. A sheriff’s deputy sat at the county line to turn back gasoline trucks headed to John McFerren’s store, so McFerren drove to Memphis and hauled his own supplies back. A white wholesaler slipped him gas in the middle of the night and to this day nobody knows who that man was.

Then the cotton came in, and once the crop was picked and the labor was no longer needed, the evictions started. Over 400 families put out. Households on land their people had worked for generations, out on the road with their possessions in the ditch, in the winter, for registering to vote.

Two Black landowners, Shepard Towles and Gertrude Beasley, opened their property. Army surplus tents went up. They called it Tent City, and later Freedom Village, and families lived in canvas from late 1959 into 1962, some into 1963. One man who was evicted described a tent 16 feet by 14 feet holding him, his wife, and four children, cooking and sleeping and eating in the same square, mud to the knees when it rained. He also said he was never sorry he registered.

The Justice Department finally moved, and this was the first serious use of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. September 1960 they sued. November 18, 1960 they amended to add 36 more landowners. December 14, 1960 they filed against 45 landowners, 24 merchants, and a financial institution in Fayette County. On July 26, 1962, it settled by consent decree. Nobody admitted a thing. The landowners were permanently enjoined from evicting or refusing service in order to stop people from registering.

Now here is the part that should make the hair on your neck stand up.

After the consent decree, the evictions did not stop. They just changed the reason on the paperwork. The landowners started putting families off for mechanization. For poor work performance. For efficiency. Same eviction, same families, same road, brand new reason, and now the reason is race neutral and unreviewable.

Just admit what that is. That is not a loophole. That is the technology.

They Never Needed a Hood, They Had a Filing Cabinet

Once you see the swap, you cannot unsee it, and Tennessee is where the receipts stack the highest.

Receipt one. Memphis, 1940. Robert R. Church Jr. was the most powerful Black political operator in the South, the man who built the Lincoln League, the man whose family name was on a park. He backed the wrong presidential candidate against Boss Crump’s machine. The city came for his mansion and his real estate holdings over alleged unpaid back taxes. Church left Memphis and never got that power back. Nobody had to say the word. The word was on the tax notice.

Receipt two. Memphis, same year. Crump ran what the labor historian Michael Honey called a reign of terror against CIO organizing at Firestone. Police raids, beatings, street stops, Black organizers disappearing. It was not filed as racial suppression. It was filed as public order. Then Crump’s people blocked A. Philip Randolph from getting a venue to speak in Memphis, and when Randolph asked Eleanor Roosevelt to say something about it, she wrote back that she had been advised to do nothing because it might do more harm than good. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

Receipt three, and this is where I owe the transcript a correction. I said Highlander Folk School was in Montgomery, Tennessee. It was Monteagle, Tennessee, in Grundy County, up on the Cumberland Plateau. Highlander was founded in 1932, and by the 1950s it was one of the only places in the South where Black and white southerners could meet, eat, sleep, and organize in the same building. Rosa Parks spent two weeks there in the summer of 1955, a few months before she stayed in that seat. John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, Fannie Lou Hamer, Septima Clark, Stokely Carmichael, all of them passed through. Zilphia Horton taught Pete Seeger the song that became the anthem. So yes, Tennessee taught nonviolent direct action before the national movement adopted it, and Tennessee taught voter registration method before the Voting Rights Act existed.

So how did the state kill it? Not with a mob. In 1957 the Georgia Commission on Education printed a pamphlet with a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. at Highlander and called it a communist training school, and that image went up on billboards across the South. Then the state of Tennessee investigated, and when the subversion charge would not stick, they switched to something cleaner. Selling beer without a license. Violating the terms of a nonprofit charter. In 1961 the state revoked the charter, confiscated roughly 200 acres, padlocked the doors, and auctioned the property. Myles Horton’s answer is the line I want on a wall somewhere: you can padlock a school, but you cannot padlock an idea. They reincorporated in Knoxville, then moved to New Market, and they are still going.

They did not close Highlander for teaching Black people. They closed Highlander for a liquor license.

Receipt four. 1961 again. Fourteen students at Tennessee A and I, now Tennessee State University, rode into Mississippi on the Freedom Rides. They got beaten, arrested, and jailed, and while they sat in Parchman they got letters telling them they were expelled from a state HBCU under a rule the segregationist governor had just put in place. The stated ground was misconduct. Not activism. Misconduct. They sued and won readmission, but most of them never finished there, and TSU did not hand them degrees until 2008, 47 years later, three of them posthumously, after the Board of Regents first voted the honor down on the theory that an honorary degree should recognize a lifetime rather than one act of courage.

Receipt five. April 6, 2023. Two young Black lawmakers named Justin, Justin Jones out of Nashville and Justin Pearson out of Memphis, got expelled from the Tennessee House for standing in the well with a bullhorn after a school shooting. Gloria Johnson, who is white, did the same protest and survived by one vote. The stated ground was not politics and not race. The stated ground was decorum. Leadership said explicitly that race had nothing to do with it and pointed to the bullhorn. Both men were reappointed within a week by their local bodies and then won their seats back outright.

Receipt six, and this is the one that is live right now.

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court decided Louisiana v. Callais and gutted what was left of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Governor Bill Lee called a special session for May 5. By May 7, both chambers had passed a new congressional map and Lee had signed it the same day. Three days. They also repealed Tennessee’s own law against mid decade redistricting and suspended residency requirements for congressional candidates while they were in there.

The new map takes the state’s only majority Black congressional district, the Ninth, centered in Memphis, roughly 60 percent Black, and cracks Shelby County into three pieces, stretching Black Memphis voters out along the Mississippi line and into rural Middle Tennessee across media markets and time zones. It splits Nashville further into five. Target outcome, nine seats out of nine. Protesters filled the Capitol, some of them wearing Klan hoods to make the point, and troopers cleared the gallery.

Black Memphis voters, the Black Clergy Collaborative of Memphis, the Memphis A. Philip Randolph Institute, and The Equity Alliance sued, represented by the ACLU. On July 23, 2026, a three judge panel, two Trump appointees and one Obama appointee, denied the preliminary injunction and let the map govern the August 6 primary and the November general. The panel wrote that the road to a reliably nine to zero map runs through Memphis, and then said the quiet part all the way out loud: because the motivation was political, the dilution of Black voting power is explained. They said the plaintiffs lacked direct evidence of racial motivation.

Direct evidence. In a state where an essentially all white legislative supermajority took the one Black seat apart in 72 hours.

Line them up. Back taxes in 1940. Public order in 1940. Poor work performance in 1962. A beer license in 1961. Misconduct in 1961. Decorum in 2023. Political motivation in 2026. Every single time, the injury is identical and the paperwork is spotless. Woods said the bloc reorganizes. This is what reorganizing looks like when it has a court reporter.

So when the old folks heard me lay this out and said, Lil George, that just sound like you dealing with the same old s**t in a new toilet, they were not being cute. They were being precise. The plumbing is what changed.

The Literacy Test Was Never About Reading

Here is where Katherine Mellen Charron earns her keep.

Charron wrote the life of Septima Clark, and what she recovers is not a saint, it is a method. Clark was a South Carolina educator who got fired in 1956 for refusing to renounce her NAACP membership, and she landed at Highlander in Tennessee. What she built there, with Esau Jenkins and Bernice Robinson, was the Citizenship School.

Understand the problem they were solving. The literacy test was not a reading test. The literacy test was a discretionary weapon held by a white registrar who could pass a white man who could barely sign his name and fail a Black schoolteacher on the interpretation of a state constitutional clause. So Clark’s people did not teach reading in the abstract. They taught you to read and write the specific document that stood between you and the roll. They taught the state constitution, the registration form, the mail order catalog, the money order, the bank book. Politics through the paper you already had to handle.

Then look at who taught it. Bernice Robinson was a beautician. Not a certified teacher. Clark picked her on purpose, and Charron shows why. A certified teacher in that South worked for a white school board and could be fired for breathing wrong, which we just watched happen to Clark herself. A beautician’s clients were Black. Her shop was Black owned. Her income could not be revoked by a superintendent. Apply Charron here. The credential was not a qualification, the credential was a leash, and the Citizenship School worked because it was taught by people the state could not fire.

That is the education section of this entire pack in one move. Every time Black Tennesseans built a school the state could not control, the state took the school.

They took Highlander’s 200 acres in 1961 over a liquor license.

They expelled 14 TSU students in 1961 for misconduct, under a rule written by the governor, at a school the state funded.

And the state is still doing it with the checkbook. In 2023 the federal government told Governor Lee in writing that Tennessee had underfunded Tennessee State University by roughly 2.1 billion dollars across about 30 years, the largest gap of any Black land grant institution in the country, on top of a 2021 state legislative study that found the state had shorted TSU by hundreds of millions in land grant matching funds. Republican lawmakers in Nashville dismissed the 2.1 billion figure as, and I quote, a political number.

A political number. Political motivations readily explain the dilutive effects. Do you hear it? It is the same three syllables doing the same job in two different rooms 30 months apart. Call it politics and it stops being race, and once it stops being race there is no remedy, because there is no such thing as a remedy for losing an argument.

Meanwhile TSU has been sitting in a financial crisis, its board was cleared out by the legislature in 2024, and it has been reduced to repurposing capital money meant for buildings just to keep the lights on. Woodson told us in 1933 that if you control what a man thinks you do not have to worry about what he does. The 2026 version is simpler. If you control the appropriation, you do not have to control the syllabus.

The Women Were the Registration

Martha S. Jones wrote the two century account of Black women and the vote, and her core argument is the one that keeps getting flattened. Black women were the earliest and most consistent organizers for universal suffrage in this country, they fought white suffragists who wanted them in the back of the parade, they fought Black men who wanted them in the kitchen, and when the vote finally came they were the last ones actually able to use it. Vanguard in name, rear in access.

Apply Jones to Fayette and Haywood County, because the standard telling gives you John McFerren and stops.

Viola McFerren cofounded the League. When the trade ban hit, Viola McFerren was the one doing the arithmetic that kept people alive, because a boycott of a household is not an abstraction, it is somebody figuring out how to feed five people with no credit at the store, no doctor, no insurance, and no gas. She went on national speaking tours to raise the money that fed Tent City. She is the reason there is a historical marker on that ground today. Georgia Mae Turner, Minnie Jameson, and the other women in those tents did the cooking, the laundry, the childcare, and the nursing inside 16 by 14 feet of canvas through two Tennessee winters, which is to say they performed the entire infrastructure of a two year political occupation.

Then read the retaliation through gender. The eviction did not hit an individual, it hit a household, and the household ran on Black women’s labor. The trade ban did not hit a voter, it hit whoever had to walk into the store, and that was usually a Black woman. The doctor refusing care did not hit a candidate, it hit whoever was pregnant, whoever had a sick child, whoever was aging. White supremacy in Fayette County did not aim at the ballot. It aimed at the womb, the pantry, and the medicine cabinet, because that is where it knew the resistance actually lived.

Same story at Highlander. The method that changed the South was designed by Septima Clark and delivered by Bernice Robinson, and for years the public face of Highlander was Myles Horton. Same story in Nashville, where Diane Nash out organized and out strategized damn near everybody in the Nashville Student Movement and is still introduced as one of the students. Same state where Ida B. Wells built the entire evidentiary method of antilynching journalism out of a Memphis newspaper office before a mob destroyed the press and ran her out of town in 1892.

Tennessee has a habit. Tennessee lets Black women build the machine and then files the patent under somebody else’s name.

And here is the intersectional kill shot for 2026. The Memphis seat that just got cracked into three was the political home of a Black electorate in which Black women are the most reliable voters in the state. When you dilute Memphis, you are not diluting an abstraction called the Black vote. You are diluting the specific women who show up, who run the phone trees, who drive the vans, who feed the poll workers, and who have been doing it in that city since Julia Hooks was pushing folks to pay their poll tax so they could stay on the roll. The map does not know their names. It does not need to. That is the whole point of a map.

Whitey on the Moon, Nashville Edition

Let me do the resource allocation math out loud, because the contradiction is not subtle.

Tennessee could not find 2.1 billion dollars for a land grant university it starved for 30 years. Tennessee could not find matching funds for its own HBCU across multiple decades. Tennessee could not find money to keep TSU from raiding its building fund to make payroll. Tennessee called the federal accounting of its own debt a political number.

Tennessee found a special session, a full legislative apparatus, a legal defense team, and a statewide election administration retrofit in three days, in May, to redraw nine congressional districts, and then went and repealed its own law against doing that in the middle of a decade.

In 1960, when 400 Black families were living in tents in the American South in winter, Senator Estes Kefauver asked the Red Cross to help. The local chapters said there was no need.

No need. In the mud. In December. With the babies in there.

The money is never missing. The money is allocated. Just admit that scarcity is a decision, and Tennessee makes that decision the same way every single time.

The South Is Not the Past, The South Is the Practice

Now I have to give you the other half, because if I leave you in the ledger I have lied to you by omission.

Zandria F. Robinson is a Memphis sociologist who wrote about post soul Black southern identity, and her argument cuts against the whole national script about the South. The national script says the South is where Black people got hurt and the North is where Black people got free, so Black southernness is either a wound or a costume. Robinson says no. She says Black southerners built and keep building a distinct regional consciousness, that they claim the place rather than merely surviving it, and that the South is not the country’s past, it is where the country’s future keeps getting worked out first, in public, by Black people who never left.

Apply Robinson to every receipt in this piece.

They took Highlander’s land in 1961 and Highlander is still operating in New Market, Tennessee in 2026.

They evicted 400 families and those families did not leave the county, they pitched tents on Black owned land and stayed two years until the federal government had to come see about them, and the tent city forced the country to understand that you did not need a rope to stop a Black vote.

They expelled 14 students and those students sued and won readmission, and the university that expelled them eventually had to walk it back on its own stage.

They expelled two Justins and both of them were back in the building inside of a week and then won their seats outright at the ballot box.

They cracked Memphis into three and the ACLU case is still pending, the preliminary injunction is not the merits, and the plaintiffs said plainly they are continuing.

Woods gave us the bloc so we would stop being surprised. Robinson gives us the reason we keep showing up anyway, which is that this ground is ours, not because it treated us well, but because we made it. Nutbush is a song because a Black woman decided that county was worth naming. Cashville is a brand because a Black man decided Nashville was worth repping. Memphis is a sound before it is a market.

That is why I was out there. I was in Tennessee for a couple of days, three of them to be exact, and in two days I walked over 30 miles for the 1,000 Miles to Memphis campaign, the 30 day march that started in Nashville on July 27 and ends at the National Civil Rights Museum, built in direct response to Louisiana v. Callais, working toward 100,000 people registered. I went from Nashville to Smyrna, from Smyrna to Murfreesboro, and I will be back.

Understand what that route is. Murfreesboro is where the largest earthen fortification of the war was built by Black hands, and I said as much when I filmed there, and I said it without the context I just gave you. Nashville is where the Citizenship School method got taught and where the students who broke the lunch counters came from. The road from Nashville to Memphis is a road through Fayette and Haywood County, through Tent City ground, through the exact acreage where people got put out for registering.

We are walking to register voters through the counties where registering voters got people evicted. That is not symbolism. That is the same fight, on the same dirt, against the same bloc, with cleaner paperwork on the other side.

In my time of being there, I was able to be surrounded by this beautiful legacy of Black resistance from Tennessee, and I thought that I would share it with y’all, man.

Education Is Elevation.

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

5 TAKEAWAYS

* Being first back in the Union was a punishment, not a prize. Tennessee was the last state to secede and the first readmitted, on July 24, 1866, which made it the only ex Confederate state left out of military Reconstruction in 1867. Everybody else got troops between Black voters and the planter class. Tennessee got left alone with them, and the Klan got founded in Pulaski.

* The pretext is the technology. Back taxes took Robert Church out of Memphis in 1940. A liquor license took Highlander’s 200 acres in 1961. Misconduct expelled 14 TSU Freedom Riders in 1961. Poor work performance and mechanization replaced the illegal evictions after the 1962 consent decree. Decorum expelled two Justins in 2023. Political motivation upheld the map in 2026. The injury never changes. Only the form changes.

* Fayette and Haywood County started as a jury problem. Black folks watched an all white jury try Burton Dodson in 1959, learned that jury pools came off the voter rolls, and organized. Over 400 families got evicted, Tent City went up on Shepard Towles’ and Gertrude Beasley’s land, and the Justice Department’s suits against 45 landowners, 24 merchants, and a bank became the first real teeth of the Civil Rights Act of 1957.

* The literacy test was never a reading test, so Septima Clark never built a reading class. The Citizenship School taught the exact documents standing between you and the roll, and Clark chose a beautician, Bernice Robinson, to teach it, because a beautician could not be fired by a white school board. Credentials were a leash. She routed around it.

* A political number and political motivations are the same alibi. Tennessee lawmakers called the federal finding of a 2.1 billion dollar underfunding gap at TSU a political number. A federal panel called the destruction of the Memphis seat explainable by political motivations. Once you relabel race as politics, the harm stays and the remedy disappears.

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TODAY

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

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

Tennessee history and primary record

* Elizabeth Gritter, River of Hope: Black Politics and the Memphis Freedom Movement, 1865 to 1954

* Robert Hamburger, Our Portion of Hell: Fayette County, Tennessee, An Oral History

* Katherine Ballantyne, “We Might Overcome Someday: West Tennessee’s Rural Freedom Movement,” Journal of Contemporary History (2021)

* University of Memphis, Tent City: Stories of Civil Rights in Fayette County, Tennessee digital archive and timeline

* Tennessee State University Library, “Tent Cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties,” Linda T. Wynn

* BlackPast.org, “Tent Cities of Fayette and Haywood Counties (1960 to 1962)”

* Tennessee Bar Journal, “Tennessee’s Tent City: The 60th Anniversary of a Great Voting Rights Victory” (2022)

* SNCC Digital Gateway, Highlander Folk School entry

* Stanford King Institute, Highlander Folk School entry

* Tennessee Encyclopedia, “Crump, Edward Hull”

* Ben Hooks Institute, University of Memphis, “The Crump Era”

* Equal Justice Initiative, Reconstruction in America, Military Reconstruction sidebar

* U.S. Senate Historical Office, Reconstruction Act of 1867 and readmission record

* Andrew Johnson, “Message Restoring Tennessee to Former Status,” July 24, 1866

Present tense receipts

* Louisiana v. Callais, U.S. Supreme Court, decided April 29, 2026

* Tennessee Secretary of State, 2026 Congressional Redistricting, Second Extraordinary Session of the 114th General Assembly, May 2026

* Sherman v. Hargett, three judge panel order denying preliminary injunction, July 23, 2026

* ACLU of Tennessee press release, July 23, 2026

* Tennessee Lookout, coverage of the May 2026 special session and the TSU underfunding calculations

* NPR, NBC News, Associated Press, and UPI coverage of the May 2026 map and the July 2026 ruling

* Cardona and Vilsack letter to Gov. Bill Lee, September 19, 2023, on land grant underfunding

* Higher Ed Dive and WPLN reporting on the TSU financial crisis and operating agreement

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