Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), LeftieProf, Billy Bumbo, Full Frontal Loeb, Lynette, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I told y’all I was going live twice today. The first conversation was with Everton Blair — a Democrat running for Congress in Gwinnett County, Georgia — and that was a conversation about reform, about whether the Democratic Party can be pushed from within, about what Congress even does for us. If you missed it, go watch it. But this second conversation? This one’s different. This one’s about connecting the international to the local, the macro to the micro, the big to the small. And my boy Lavish Dope from Minneapolis is exactly the person to have this conversation with.

Lavish grew up a couple blocks from where George Floyd was killed. His grandfather was in SNCC before becoming a Black Panther. He grew up across the hall from a Palestinian family since the 1980s. The international connection wasn’t something he learned in a classroom — it was lived in a hallway. But as he told me, knowing something and knowing how to apply it are two different things. We didn’t know how to walk at one time either.

What made this conversation hit different is that Lavish has actually put his body on the line internationally — the Global March to Gaza, UN meetings in Brussels, solidarity missions to Cuba — and then come home to face the consequences. Detained at Newark for six hours after Egypt. Twenty people detained coming back from Cuba. Eighteen phones confiscated. Chris Smalls may never have gotten his back. And then having anxiety flying domestically within America because of what happened internationally. That’s the imperial boomerang in real time. That’s Aimé Césaire’s thesis playing out on your cell phone screen.

The Same Struggle, Different Geography

Here’s what Lavish laid out that I need y’all to really sit with. Before the blockade intensified and the genocide escalated, Cuba and Gaza shared something extraordinary: the lowest infant mortality rates in the world, the highest literacy rates in the world, and the highest ratios of doctors per capita. Cuba has 81 doctors per 1,000 people. Most of us in America don’t even know a medical doctor personally — the doctors we know got PhDs in philosophy. Feel me?

And Cuba is a Black-ass island. Majority Black population. That adds a whole other layer to why America hates Cuba so much. The monopoly can never sleep as long as Cuba and the idea of dignity and resistance that Cuba represents continues to exist. Because if the rest of Latin America wakes up and raises that flag of dignity the way Cuba has, but they do it collectively? American hegemony is done. And that’s what the Monroe Doctrine, McCarthyism, and Red Scare programming have been designed to prevent since jump.

The minimum wage in Cuba is four dollars a month. When Lavish brought portable chargers on his first trip, he realized an $80 charger represents twenty months of wages. They don’t need tech gadgets. They need toothpaste. Toothbrushes. Medicine. The blockade creates artificial scarcity of the most basic human necessities. And Americans don’t know that two million people travel to Cuba every year for May Day — the largest labor solidarity movement in the world. We don’t know because we’re not supposed to know. Research over MeSearch.

Democracy Will Wipe Your Ass Out

This country tells us that democracy is the freest form of government available to humanity. In real time, in 2026, they’re still selling that line. But we also have a history — documented, receipted, undeniable — that shows democracy will wipe your ass out if it feels like you’re a threat to it. Metaphorically or literally.

Think about it. Mormons can travel the world freely, push their ideology across borders, do aid work, extract wealth — nobody’s confiscating their phones at customs. But if you’re a little anti-capitalist? If you believe genocide is bad? If you think American imperialism might be a little faulty? Then your ability to move freely from border to border gets policed. Your devices get seized. You get interrogated about Hamas for three hours when you’re a citizen born in Minneapolis.

Lavish said something that stuck with me: the justification for American freedom has always been that you can say f**k America. That’s what ‘freedom ain’t free’ means — soldiers fight overseas so you have the right to dissent. But once they can use your same tax dollars to come hunt you down for exercising that dissent? The legitimacy falls apart. And we’re watching it fall apart in real time with task forces targeting anti-American ideology, with ICE functioning as a domestic paramilitary, with 3,100 agents deployed to one American city during Operation Metro Surge.

Fascism is nothing but imperialism turned inward. That’s not a new observation — Césaire said it, the Panthers lived it — but it hits different when you can see the 20-foot Skydio drones over Minneapolis that were deployed in Gaza last year. The same drones Kevin Durant invests in. The imperial boomerang doesn’t care about your political affiliation. It comes for everybody. That ain’t it though — pretending it won’t.

The Settler’s Move to Innocence and White Psychopathology

I got philosophical on the stream and I’m not apologizing for it. Some scholars call it the settler’s move to innocence. Some call it white psychopathology. I call it the machinery that makes cowboys the heroes and Indians the savages before anybody even starts arguing.

Think about it linguistically. Cowboys and Indians. Who’s the bad guys? The Indians. Always already. The word ‘Indians’ carries embedded savagery, an embedded understanding of being anti-human. We never view cowboys as being the invaders, the intruders. The language does the ideological work before the argument begins. And that micro lens — that childhood game — applies on a structural lens when we talk about settler colonialism everywhere.

The settlers in every instance always claim to be victims. In America, the Native Americans were scalping them, kidnapping them, pillaging them. In Israel, they have the right to exist and the right to defend themselves because everybody is always after them. You can bring it all the way to Emmett Till — the white woman as victim, the Black boy as threat. It’s 360 degrees. Same playbook. Same function.

Lavish told a story that crystallized it. His dad is fully Irish — grandparents born in Ireland. The year his dad was born, the Queen of England ordered one of the largest mass executions of Irish people in modern times. When Queen Elizabeth died? His dad mourned her. Whiteness superseded his brain. That’s white psychopathology in action. Even when you logically know, even when the evidence is in your bloodline, the settler’s innocence overrides lived history.

And here’s the structural asymmetry that makes it psychopathological: you can always separate white people from what they’ve done. Thomas Jefferson was a bad person, but he’s still the father of education and the Constitution. Winston Churchill committed atrocities, but he saved democracy. You can isolate the good from the bad. But Islam? Iran? Egypt? Cuba? You must view the entirety through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. No separation. No nuance. No immunity. That asymmetry IS the structure. Let that marinate.

The Magical Negro and Imperial Liberalism

I can speak to the magical Negro paradigm personally. As a first-generation brother from Bryan, College Station, Texas, who was always able to articulate himself with a certain ability, I’ve navigated this paradigm my whole life. The magical Negro is how you create exceptions to the rule. The system says: yeah, maybe being a nigga is bad. But all else fails, if you still have to be a nigga, can you at least be a magical one?

Good diction. Three degrees. Marry the right people. Go to the right events. Maybe then you can do X, Y, and Z. Ralph Ellison wrote about this in Invisible Man — the charismatic, exceptional Black figure who gets instrumentalized by systems of power. The magical Negro serves as a way to perpetuate the benevolence of the system. It’s how you justify the system around you that forced you to be magical in the first place.

And here’s where it gets real. Liberalism has commodified what it means to be a magical Negro in ways that have forced a lot of Black folks to buy into imperialism. Barack Obama was the embodiment. For him to be seen within the system of imperialism, he had to take the tools of imperialism and actualize them in ways white folks could never have dreamed of. That’s the reason why he’s lauded. His presidency mystified imperial violence for eight years. Libya. Drones. Deportations. But how dare you criticize him — a lot of people in the Black community have issues with Black leftists because we’re critical of Obama.

Kamala Harris is the same architecture. Lavish called her a Black slave catcher, and I understand why that language hits the way it does. Slave catchers were bad, but a Black one has access to the community. There are ways they can get in and disrupt things that a white person never could. And the question of whether you view that framing as accurate or offensive usually comes down to one thing: do you think the system can be reformed, or do you think it needs to be fundamentally transformed? That entry point — leftist or liberal, reform or revolution — dictates your description of Kamala Harris. Facts over feelings.

Purity Politics Is a Slur for Refusing to Settle

Carlos in the comments asked about purity politics, and I went off. I’m going off again right now in print because this needs to be documented.

Purity politics is a disingenuous terminology deployed by people aligned with oppressive power to make you not stand on what you believe because it’s ‘not pragmatic,’ because it’s ‘too idealistic.’ Lavish put it perfectly: I’m not asking for streets paved in gold. I’m asking for motherfuckers to have UBI, food stamps, the capability to feed their kids. That ain’t purity.

Here’s where I applied the debate framework. When somebody says genocide is bad and your response is purity politics, you’re making a straw man argument. Nowhere in ‘genocide is bad’ is there a demand for perfection. Nowhere in that statement is there a claim that purity is necessary or that we need a perfect candidate. You’re responding to a point that was never made. That’s textbook straw man argumentation, and I will call it out every single time.

But let me take it further because I defend this position to anybody — mama, daddy, homeboys, colleagues in social media. When you say purity politics, you’re debating about the comfort of white supremacy and you’re saying that I should be grateful. Purity politics means you being an ungrateful nigga. That’s what it means every time it’s deployed. How come you can’t be a grateful nigga for the imperial comfort that we have? How come this ain’t enough?

How dare you want a candidate that’s not genocidal? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t taking AIPAC money? How dare you want a candidate that ain’t funded by tech oligarchs and oil money? You’re being ungrateful. You’re being impractical. You’re being pure.

Nah. I deserve more. And you should be ashamed of yourself for deploying purity politics in the name of settlement. Because that’s what it is — you’re mad because I ain’t gonna settle. And I think conversations about purity politics illustrate ignorance to international relations specifically. You never hear purity politics unless someone brings up international solidarity. Whatever they’re calling pure, guaranteed, they don’t care about it. Israel-Palestine? Purity politics. But stopping Asian hate got unanimous support. Women’s reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, climate crisis, Black rights — all of that is ‘partisan.’ Why? Because purity politics is about what the establishment values and what it’s willing to sacrifice. Research over MeSearch.

The False Dichotomy of Local Versus Global

I had three conversations in Atlanta this past weekend where people said international politics matters, but it doesn’t matter more than what’s happening here. And I kept saying: this is a false choice. We thinking that one of these matters more than the other is a false dichotomy.

The proof is in your gas tank. If Israel has particular desires to expand its borders, it brings American taxpayer dollars in and has us fighting with Iranians. When you see $70 to fill your tank and it used to be $40, you understand that what happens over there has a direct impact to what happens here. The international IS the local. The local IS the international.

Black people do not exist only in America. There are liberation movements rooted in Blackness that have succeeded in other countries. But American exceptionalism has Black folks in this country thinking our struggle is the only one that counts. John Henrik Clarke said it: the boat dropped you off here. Because the boat dropped you off over here don’t make you more special than dropped off over there.

The Black Panthers were in Algeria. They were in Cuba. International solidarity wasn’t a distraction from domestic liberation — it was the practice of liberation itself. If it was good enough for SNCC and the Panthers, it’s good enough for us. And Lavish is living proof that the model still works. From George Floyd Square to Havana to Brussels to Barcelona — the geography changes, but the system doesn’t.

Capitalism has incentivized a lot of us to be some selfish b******s. And as a result, we believe that politically things only matter unless it can be tied to the self. I would argue that is not only anti-communal — it’s anti-Black at its core. And it’s exactly what gets in the way of us being able to move forward and get the progress that we really desire. Education is elevation.

Where Do We Go From Here

Lavish is heading back to Cuba in less than two weeks for May Day — connecting with an organization called Belly the Beast, planning to bring 300 pounds of aid, and documenting the experience for a short film. His Instagram, Twitter, and everything else is @lavishmac. He just started a Substack for travel updates and dispatches from the field.

Me? Tomorrow I’ll be at Cullen Middle School in Houston, Texas — Sunnyside — talking to young Black students, especially young Black boys, about what it means to view themselves outside the paradigms being pushed on them. Because if they’re pushing the YN doctrine on all the young niggas, somebody’s got to make sure those young brothers see alternatives. That’s the work. That’s what Education is Elevation looks like in practice — in the classroom, on the livestream, on the page.

And to everybody reading this: you’re closer to somebody in Gaza who lost fifty family members than you are to the motherfuckers making the bombs. Money cannot be the goal. Money is an exchange of energy for something good you did in the world. When we reclaim that narrative — when the goal becomes wholeness instead of wealth — the rest follows.

The struggle is one. The geography changes. The system doesn’t. And the boomerang always comes back. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.

5 Key Takeaways

1. The imperial boomerang is real: drones, detention camps, and militarized policing deployed abroad are now operating domestically in places like Minneapolis and Dilley, Texas — what America allows overseas always returns home.

2. The “magical Negro” paradigm is how liberalism commodifies Black exceptionalism to justify imperialism — Barack Obama mystified imperial violence for eight years because his presidency made criticizing the empire feel like criticizing Black progress.

3. “Purity politics” is a straw man deployed to silence legitimate critiques of genocide, corporate capture, and imperialism — saying “genocide is bad” is not demanding perfection, it’s demanding a baseline of humanity.

4. The international and the local are not a false dichotomy — Israel’s expansionist desires directly impact American gas prices, taxpayer dollars, and military deployments, making geopolitical literacy a domestic necessity.

5. The settler’s move to innocence operates identically across contexts — from cowboys and Indians to Israeli victimhood narratives to Queen Elizabeth’s funeral — whiteness is always granted immunity from accountability for structural violence.

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This is an independent platform with no corporate backing. Every article — every piece of history documented, every legal framework analyzed, every connection drawn between the international and the local — is built without institutional support. I’m documenting the histories and frameworks that are actively being erased, building toward a community-funded resource with the depth of PBS and the freedom of having no masters. Fewer than 1% of the people who follow this work are paid subscribers. If this conversation between Lavish and me gave you something — a framework, a connection, a language for what you already felt — becoming a paid subscriber is how you make sure this work continues.

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Annotated Bibliography

Tuck, E. & Yang, K.W. (2012). Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), 1-40

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

Ellison, Ralph (1952). Invisible Man. Random House

Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich (1848). The Communist Manifesto. Workers’ Educational Association

Césaire, Aimé (1955). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press

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

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

Clarke, John Henrik (Various). Lectures and Writings on Pan-African History. Various

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 Lalisa, Tamibetcha, Serena Fossi, Mary Lummis, Lesley Y, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Y’all know here on the platform, I love to frame things in their implications toward education and politics, because a lot of us ignore the intersections between the two. We act like political knowledge just falls in folks’ lap, like we ain’t gotta teach it. That ain’t it though. So let me chop this up with y’all.

I sat down with Dr. Everton Blair — everybody in Georgia’s 13th calls him EJ — and what started as a conversation about one congressional race turned into a whole seminar on how corporate Democrats, seniority politics, and the duopoly keep Black communities in a chokehold. Feel me? Let that marinate before we even get into the details.

The District, The Incumbent, and the Absentee Seat

Georgia’s 13th Congressional District is all the suburbs south and east of Atlanta — Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro. Six counties. Most folks who say they from Atlanta actually live in these communities. And after the 2023 redistricting, this district was redrawn as majority-Black… not because Georgia wanted to do right by Black voters, but because the Supreme Court’s ruling in Allen v. Milligan (2023) forced Alabama, and by extension Georgia, to stop diluting Black voting power through gerrymandering. So what did the political machine do? They strategically carved up every Black neighborhood south and east of Atlanta into one sprawling district and handed the keys to Congressman David Scott.

David Scott has been in elected office for over 50 years. He’s in his 80s. He has not voted in the past seven elections. He has never lived in the district. He has not spoken on the House floor this legislative session. He doesn’t take meetings. He doesn’t show up in community. There’s a video circulating of him being escorted in a wheelchair by staff just to sign up to appear on the ballot. That ain’t a representative. That’s a hostage situation dressed up as seniority.

And the kicker? He’s the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat in Congress by percentage. He raises almost nothing from individuals in his own district. AIPAC was bundling his individual contributions this cycle — until even they stopped, because even the folks who were on his side realized they had to find a new champion. And so now the corporate class is propping up a different candidate who also won’t disavow dark money. When the special interests abandon your incumbent and move to their next puppet, that tells you everything about whose interests were ever being served.

What Does a Congressperson Actually Do?

Before we go deeper, let me slow down. A lot of y’all weren’t taught this and ain’t got no shame in that — the education system was designed to keep you ignorant of how power actually works. Congress does two primary things: it passes laws, and it passes the federal budget. And your budget is your priorities. Your budget reflects your values. When David Scott broke ranks with Democrats to help fund the Department of Homeland Security — meaning more ICE agents in our streets — that was a budget decision. That was a values decision. When he became one of three Black Democrats to sign on to a House resolution honoring Charlie Kirk after Kirk was murdered — with no community mandate, with no constituent demand — that was a values decision.

Facts over feelings.

Congress also has oversight authority. It can subpoena officials. It can impeach. During the Biden administration, with Merrick Garland as Attorney General, the Democrats chose not to prosecute Trump because they were worried about how it would look for the election. Look how that turned out anyway. Democrats keep confusing caution for strategy. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi were cabinet officials who should have been impeached well before Trump himself fired them. Articles of impeachment should have been drafted. They weren’t. Because Congress is sitting on its hands, paid to be quiet, with its silence bought and sold.

The Seniority Trap and Why Old Democrats Won’t Leave

Let me put a finer point on this. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislation — passed by one vote. One vote, y’all. And three Democrats had died in office in the months before that vote: Sylvester Turner, Raúl Grijalva, and Jerry Connolly. Their seats were filled by Republicans before Democrats could hold them, and that’s how the ugly bill passed. Remember when we all joked about Ruth Bader Ginsburg not retiring under Obama? Remember how we cold-handed the argument until she died in office and Trump filled her seat? These ain’t abstract debates. These are material consequences that will outlive all the jokes.

Nancy Pelosi. Jim Clyburn. Hakeem Jeffries signing onto the Charlie Kirk resolution. David Scott at 80-something in a wheelchair. This is not generational respect. This is generational sabotage. And the system works this way because it’s designed to. Why would someone in power voluntarily change a system that keeps them in power? That ain’t natural. Combine that with the Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision that unleashed unlimited dark money, and you got a machine that eats reformers for breakfast and spits out incumbents who’d rather die in office than pass the torch.

Everton said something in our conversation that I want y’all to sit with. He said, “Don’t wait your turn. Waiting your turn is what got us this.” Let that marinate.

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

The Implication to Education — Because Everything Is

Here’s where I want to get into it, because y’all know education is elevation is my whole thing. Everton Blair is a former chair of the Gwinnett County school board — the largest and most diverse school district in Georgia. He passed a $2.5 billion budget. He raised teacher pay when teachers were fleeing Gwinnett for DeKalb and Fulton because those districts were paying $2,000 to $4,000 more per position. During COVID, he led a politically divided board — Democrats and Republicans — through remote learning, meal distribution, laptop access, hotspot access, and a science-aligned reopening. That’s governance. That’s budgeting. That’s consensus-building in a cantankerous environment.

Now ask yourself this: what is David Scott’s education record? What has he done on the Department of Education’s existence — which Trump is actively trying to dismantle? What has he done on student loan debt, on HBCU funding, on Title I schools in Clayton County, on the school-to-prison pipeline that feeds Black kids from his own district into Georgia’s carceral system? The silence is the answer.

And this is where the intersectionality gets real. When Hartsfield-Jackson Airport — the busiest airport in the world — sits physically inside Clayton County, but the city of Atlanta annexed the revenue, the economic development, the vitality, and Clayton County gets none of it? That’s an education issue. That’s a jobs issue. That’s a housing issue. That’s a health issue. Because when a Black community is stripped of its economic engine, the schools get underfunded, the teachers leave, the kids get disciplined instead of developed, and the Panopticon — the school-to-prison pipeline — grinds on.

When BlackRock and the other private equity firms buy up every single-family home in Stockbridge and Conyers and turn them into rental properties, Black families lose the pathway to homeownership, which means they lose the pathway to building generational wealth, which means they lose the pathway to funding Black educational futures. The GI Bill and New Deal-era policies that built the white American middle class — we were structurally excluded from those benefits. Now, when we finally get access, private equity is snapping up the housing stock before we can even get in the door. And your congressman is silent about it.

Intersectional Material Impacts

Let me break down what’s materially at stake, because the dots don’t always connect themselves:

For Black women in the district, this race is about reproductive healthcare access in a state where abortion is banned after six weeks. It’s about Medicaid expansion Georgia still refuses to adopt. It’s about the Black maternal mortality crisis that makes Georgia one of the deadliest states in America to give birth in if you’re Black.

For working-class Black folks, this race is about Medicare for All versus a healthcare system that’s still bleeding us dry. It’s about a universal basic income, about taxing billionaires and big business, about reinvesting in childcare so parents can actually work. It’s about a refund check big enough to matter.

For Black immigrants and Afro-Caribbean families in the district — and this is a diverse diaspora district — this race is about whether your congressman is going to vote to fund the ICE agents raiding your community or vote to protect you. David Scott already told you what he thinks. He funded DHS.

For Black youth trying to get into politics, this race is about whether the path forward means waiting 30 years for a seat at a table that’s already been sold. Or whether you can take the mantle now.

For Black men — especially young Black men being flooded with right-wing propaganda about how “Democrats started the KKK” — this race is about understanding the party switch of the 1960s and 70s was itself a racial realignment. When Democrats passed the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, the Dixiecrats defected. The entire Southern Strategy was Nixon and Reagan courting white backlash. Nick Cannon and Amber Rose driving around the car recycling 1960s talking points about “Democrats started the Klan” — that’s a disinformation campaign dressed up as history. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, that’s what we doing here.

The Duopoly, The Pragmatism Trap, and the Southern Black Hub

Here’s where me and Everton pushed each other the most in the conversation. I asked him about the duopoly — this two-party system that keeps manufacturing outcomes that don’t serve us. He made the pragmatic case: there’s no way to get elected outside the current binary, so we push Democrats to be better. I made the structural case: pragmatism itself has been cornered by the system. The system gets to decide what counts as practical. And anything outside its permission gets labeled unpragmatic, unrealistic, unserious.

We had more than two parties in the 18th and 19th centuries. The duopoly is a historical creation, not a natural law. And it came down to race — when Black folks got enfranchised through the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act, the parties realigned around racial coalitions, not issue coalitions. That’s the switch. That’s the whole game.

And here’s my argument: if we’re going to break the duopoly, it’s going to come from a Southern Black hub. Atlanta. Birmingham. Houston. These are the cities where Black political power is concentrated enough — and independent enough from white corporate Democratic machines — to actually push a defection. Nine times out of ten, Black folks in Birmingham or Atlanta got to do something locally for Black folks nationwide to benefit. Montgomery bus boycotts happened because Black folks were in the same jurisdiction, boycotting the same system, in the same place. Now we spread across six counties, three area codes, and two media markets, and the big money weaponizes that diffusion against us.

This ain’t despair. This is diagnosis. Feel me?

The Black Economic Agenda and What’s Actually on the Table

Everton’s nine-point Black Economic Agenda is at evertonblair.com/black-economic-agenda. Tax reform. Education. Healthcare. Transportation. Innovation. Black-owned businesses. Housing access. Middle-class expansion. He’s pledged not to take a dime from corporate PACs — in the campaign or in office. He’s out-fundraised the incumbent doing it the right way. The majority of his donors are Black folks he knows personally. That’s people-powered. That’s not an abstraction.

And here’s the thing about DEI that I want to close on, because the question came up in our livestream chat. Somebody said corporations loved DEI, it was a corporate initiative, what are y’all complaining about? Here’s the receipt: DEI became a buzzword corporations adopted after George Floyd because it was politically expedient. They didn’t structurally change who they hired, what they paid, or who got access. They hired white women into DEI roles and called it diversity. And the minute Trump made “DEI” a slur, they dropped it with a quickness, proving it was never structural in the first place. It was symbolic performance all along.

So when Trump signs his anti-DEI executive orders, what the federal government can no longer do by name — invest directly in Black communities — has to be done through proxies. Zip code. Census tract. High school. Family income. The policy-making system already knows we’re racially segregated, so any one of those proxies functions as a race proxy. And in states like Oklahoma where they’ve outlawed the zip code proxy, we get clever with the next one. That’s what a real fighter in Congress looks like. Not symbolic. Structural. That’s Everton Blair.

The Ask

Early vote in Georgia’s 13th starts April 27th. Final vote is May 19th. If you’re in Stockbridge, Stone Mountain, Snellville, Conyers, Covington, Jonesboro, or any of the six counties in this district — check your registration, find your early vote location by county, and show up. If you’re not in the district but you got $20 to throw at a people-powered campaign that isn’t taking corporate money, go to evertonblair.com. If you can phone bank or door knock, do that.

This is the most competitive Democratic primary in the country. It’s the clearest case study we have of what happens when Black communities replace absentee incumbents with battle-tested, values-aligned, people-powered fighters. What happens here echoes in every Black district in America.

Education is elevation. Don’t wait your turn.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The primary is the election. Gerrymandering in red and blue states alike has killed competitive general elections. If your district is drawn to be safely Democratic or Republican, the only vote that matters is the primary. Show up May 19th — or vote early starting April 27th — or cede your voice entirely.

* Corporate PAC money is the silent architecture of political failure. David Scott is the most corporate-PAC-funded Democrat by percentage, and every “strange” vote he’s taken — funding DHS and ICE, honoring Charlie Kirk, refusing to challenge AIPAC — maps directly onto that funding. Follow the money and the votes explain themselves.

* Seniority is not service. Fifty years in office, no floor speeches this session, no voting in the last seven elections, no residence in the district. Seniority was never the argument — it was the excuse. Incumbents dying in office has already cost Democrats the ability to block the Big Beautiful Bill and a Supreme Court seat.

* Black political power flows through local wins. The Montgomery bus boycott, the Atlanta Student Movement, Birmingham 1963 — national Black progress has always been locally seeded. Georgia’s 13th is exactly the kind of Southern Black hub where a defection from corporate Democratic politics could reshape the national landscape.

* The duopoly is a race story. The two-party system consolidated around racial coalitions after the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, not around issue coalitions. Any serious conversation about breaking the duopoly has to reckon with how race structures it — and any serious alternative has to be led from Black political strongholds, not lectured into existence by third-party think tanks.

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I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted — including the redistricting rulings that created Georgia’s 13th in the first place, the Citizens United decision that unleashed the dark money flooding this race, and the generational politics that keep our communities underrepresented in the very institutions that are supposed to serve us.

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They want us looking one way while they steal everything else. That’s the game. And it’s written in receipts.

Let me show you what I mean. Behind me is a graph—data, not opinions—that illustrates something most media outlets won’t touch. In 2025 alone, Fox News ran nearly 4,100 headlines sensationalizing transgender policy and visibility. In that same year, they covered the Epstein files—documented evidence of systemic sexual abuse involving some of the most powerful men in America—approximately 610 times. That’s not a close call. That’s five times more coverage on trans existence than on industrial-scale child exploitation. Feel me?

Now here’s where receipts get hard. In 2025, over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed across the United States. Eight. Hundred. Fifty. Legislative attempts to constrain the freedoms and existence of people who make up less than 5% of the population. Yet somehow, in the Epstein files—the documented, prosecutable, testifiable evidence of what some of this country’s ruling class actually did—there were zero trans people. Not one. The hysteria, the legislative urgency, the moral panic? It wasn’t based on trans participation in those crimes. It was manufactured to distract us.

And that matters. Because while we’re debating bathroom bills and drag performances and medical autonomy for young people, we’re not talking about why healthcare access is deteriorating across the board. We’re not examining why public education—the actual infrastructure meant to lift our children—has been systematically defunded. We’re not asking why we invaded a country or why poverty persists or why the social safety net continues to shred. We’re looking there instead of here. That’s not accident. That’s strategy.

This is what I call victimization as policy. They create an entire narrative that positions one group as the boogeyman, justify the expansion of state power through “protection” rhetoric, and meanwhile—meanwhile—the actual architecture of exploitation stays invisible. The actual beneficiaries stay protected.

The Hypocrisy Has a Pattern

Here’s the double standard that the receipts expose. When one or two transgender people do something—commit a crime, say something controversial, exist visibly—the entire community gets held responsible. I’ve watched this. One trans person shoplifts and suddenly we’re debating whether trans people should have civil rights. One trans person makes a statement and it becomes the rationale for stripping healthcare from millions. Collective punishment for individual action.

But when we have an entire documented file—the Epstein files—with hundreds of cisgender, heterosexual, overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly male perpetrators doing “a whole bunch of ungodly things,” as my grandmother would say, what’s the response? “That’s just a reflection on them as individuals.” No collective responsibility. No legislative blitzkrieg. No moral panic manufactured across cable news 5,000+ times a year.

The difference isn’t about the severity of harm. The Epstein files document organized, systematic, intergenerational abuse of children. That’s not opinion. That’s fact. The difference is about whose existence threatens the order, and whose predation can be absorbed by the system because the system was built by and for them.

This is the epistemological violence we’re living through. They’re not just attacking trans people—they’re attacking our capacity to see what’s actually happening. Every headline about trans bathrooms is a distraction from healthcare policy. Every debate about drag performances is a distraction from wage theft. Every legislative attack on gender-affirming care is a distraction from the dismantling of public education.

Education as the Real Battleground

And let me be specific about education, because that’s where the logic breaks down for them. They claim to care about children. They file 850 bills supposedly to “protect” young people. But protecting young people from what? From the existence of trans people? Meanwhile, public schools are underfunded to the point of collapse. Teachers can’t afford to live in the cities where they teach. Students don’t have access to updated textbooks or mental health services. School libraries are being purged of books—including books about Black history, books about sexuality, books about anything that might complicate the preferred narrative.

If they actually cared about protecting children, we’d be fighting about that. We’d have 4,100 headlines a year about school funding. We’d have 850 legislative proposals to increase teacher pay and reduce class sizes. We’d have urgent media coverage of the fact that poor Black and brown children in this country are systematically denied access to the resources their white, wealthy peers get as default.

But we don’t. Because that would require attacking wealth. That would require dismantling the very power structures these politicians and media outlets serve. It’s easier to attack trans people. It’s politically profitable to create panic about trans visibility while the actual infrastructure of education—the actual promise of “protecting children”—gets defunded and forgotten.

This is how misdirection becomes policy. This is how you can claim moral high ground while the ground itself erodes.

The Intersectional Material Reality

Here’s what doesn’t make the 4,100 headlines: Black trans people are experiencing the compound effects of this legislation. They face discrimination in healthcare and educational access and economic opportunity. The anti-trans bills being filed disproportionately impact trans people of color, who already navigate healthcare systems structured by antiblackness and poverty. When you layer anti-trans legislation onto an already-hostile environment for Black bodies in medical spaces, you’re not “protecting” anyone. You’re legalizing erasure.

And it connects to education directly. Young Black trans people are being pushed out of schools through hostile policies, denied access to gender-affirming healthcare that research shows reduces suicidality, and then blamed for “community dysfunction.” That’s not protection. That’s the criminalization of existence.

The 850 anti-LGBTQ bills aren’t neutral policy. They’re racialized policy. They hit hardest where oppression is already concentrated—in communities that have been systematically denied resources, denied access, denied recognition. And the media machine that manufactures consensus for these bills does so while ignoring the actual crimes documented in the Epstein files. While ignoring that those crimes involved predominantly white men with power.

That’s not coincidence. That’s function.

What Education is Elevation Actually Means Here

You can’t educate people toward liberation if you’re simultaneously lying about what oppression looks like. If you’re running 5,000+ headlines about trans visibility while running 600 headlines about documented, prosecutable abuse by the powerful, you’re not informing. You’re manufacturing consent for a specific political agenda.

Education is elevation means we have to be willing to count receipts. To say: this many headlines, that many bills, these many people blamed, those many people protected. It means we have to name what’s happening—which is the deliberate misdirection of public attention away from the systematic extraction of resources from poor and Black communities, including through dismantled education systems.

The people pushing anti-trans legislation aren’t primarily concerned about children’s safety. If they were, we’d see resource allocation matching that concern. Instead, we see legislative energy matched to political benefit. We see media coverage matched to how much anxiety it can generate in a targeted demographic. We see misdirection matched to a very specific logic: keep the marginalized fighting the more marginalized while the actual beneficiaries of extraction stay invisible.

That ain’t it though. And we gotta say so.

PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL-TO-ACTION

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media.

That’s what this is really about. When I count receipts—when I show you that Fox News ran nearly five times more headlines on trans visibility than on documented exploitation by the powerful—I’m not just making a political point. I’m doing what journalism used to do. I’m holding systems accountable. I’m refusing the manufactured narrative. I’m insisting on receipts.

But I can only do this work because readers like you choose to support it.

I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. The Colfax Massacre that textbooks won’t touch. The machinery of residential segregation still shaping where Black families can build wealth. The Christian nationalism embedded in state policy. The Iran-Contra Affair and how it devastated Black communities. The real history of anti-trans legislation and what it actually serves.

This work has no corporate backing. No wealthy sponsors. No institution paying me to produce it. That’s intentional. Because once you’re dependent on corporate dollars, you stop counting receipts that threaten profit. You stop naming misdirection when your advertisers benefit from it.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Media Creates the Narrative of Threat: Fox News ran 4,100+ headlines on trans policy vs. 610 on Epstein files in 2025—demonstrating how cable news manufactures moral panic to serve political interests while obscuring actual harms.

* Collective Punishment Targets the Powerless: One trans person’s individual action = accountability for the entire community. Hundreds of cisgender men in the Epstein files = individualized responsibility. This double standard reveals whose existence threatens the system.

* Anti-Trans Bills Are Educational Erasure Policies: 850+ anti-LGBTQ bills filed in 2025 directly undermine public education by attacking knowledge, autonomy, and access—while actual school funding collapses with a fraction of the legislative attention.

* Misdirection Protects the Powerful: Every headline about trans bathrooms diverts attention from healthcare collapse, wage theft, and the dismantling of public services. The legislative urgency around trans visibility directly correlates with political benefit, not demonstrated harm.

* Intersectional Harm: Race, Class, Gender Compress: Black trans people experience layered policy violence—anti-trans legislation, healthcare racism, educational exclusion—while media hysteria erases how these systems compound. This is not parallel oppression; it’s multiplicative.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

Media Analysis & Misdirection

* Sut Jhally & Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (1992) — On how media manufactures consensus and obscures structural inequality

* Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding” (1973) — Understanding how media narratives are constructed to serve power

* Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (1988) — How media systems function to naturalize state and corporate interests

Anti-Trans Legislation & Policy

* Movement Advancement Project (MAP), “State Equality Index” (annually updated) — Comprehensive tracking of anti-LGBTQ legislation by state

* LGBTQ Nation, “2025 Anti-Transgender Legislation Tracker” — Real-time documentation of bills filed nationally

* Human Rights Watch, “Do Not Erase Us” (2018+) — On criminalization of trans existence through legislation

Education, Epistemological Violence & Erasure

* Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) — Banking model of education vs. critical pedagogy

* George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (2012) — Epistemological violence and anti-Black knowledge production

* Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — Colonized consciousness and systems of erasure

* Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — Foundational intersectionality framework

* Sylvia Wynter, On Being Human as Praxis (2015) — Knowledge systems and the encoding of human hierarchies

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

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

This past week I was at the 3rd annual Black Maternal Health Summit in St. Louis. I learned things that should’ve been required curriculum decades ago. The kind of knowledge that makes you sit back and realize what we’ve been robbed of—what generations of Black women were robbed of.

Did y’all know that Black doulas and midwives have been a central part of birthing in this country since the 1600s? That’s not a historical footnote. That’s a foundation. But it’s a foundation nobody wants to talk about.

When our ancestors were forced into the Middle Passage, they carried something no chains could break: West African birthing knowledge. Generations of inherited expertise. The kind of deep understanding about pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum care that kept communities alive through unimaginable violence. That knowledge didn’t disappear when enslaved Black women arrived on American soil. It transformed. It survived. It became the granny midwives—those respected elders in the rural South who attended to most of the births happening in this country all the way up into the early 20th century.

Let that marinate for a second. Most of the births. Black women, relying on other Black women, using African-rooted knowledge to ensure survival in a country determined to see them as disposable.

The Medicalization That Changed Everything

Here’s what happened, though. What happened was the medicalization of the birth space. The transformation from women-centered care to men-centered institutions. You see the pattern? Every time we built something that worked—every time Black people created infrastructure, knowledge systems, and care networks that kept us alive—America’s response was to professionalize it, medicalize it, and extract Black people from the center of it.

Granny midwives didn’t just deliver babies. They provided comprehensive care. Prenatal support. Delivery. Postpartum care. They accepted payment and goods because—and this is crucial—capitalism does not corner the market on commerce. Black communities had economic systems, knowledge exchange systems, care systems long before Western medicine decided to show up and rebrand everything as “modern.”

But when the birth space got medicalized, when it moved from homes and communities into hospitals, when men in white coats started positioning themselves as the “experts,” where did that leave the granny midwives? Marginalized. Criminalized. Pushed to the margins of a system that no longer wanted their knowledge.

Resilience Against the Machinery

What gets me—what really gets me—is the resilience. Despite facing systemic marginalization and criminalization. Despite all the structural racism designed to push them out of practice. Despite a medical establishment that actively worked to delegitimize African-rooted knowledge, these women still provided essential, compassionate care. They still carried their background information forward. They still ensured the safety and security of mothers and infants.

And we’re still paying for the loss of that. Look at the numbers. Black maternal mortality rates in this country are unconscionable. Black infant mortality rates are through the roof. We’re in a maternal health crisis that disproportionately devastates Black women and babies. And a lot of that crisis traces directly back to this moment—when we lost access to granny midwife knowledge, when that expertise got criminalized out of existence, when Black women were forced into medical systems that never had our interests at heart.

The enslaved Black women who brought expertise from West Africa? That knowledge was relied upon heavily for our survival during the Middle Passage. It was the difference between life and death on the plantation. And we’ve never properly honored that. We’ve never properly centered that. We’ve never built our contemporary maternal health movements around reclaiming that.

What We Owe

The granny midwives—we are indebted to them forever. Not in some abstract, poetic way. In concrete, material ways. They kept us alive when the machinery was set up to kill us. They maintained African knowledge systems in a place designed to erase them. They cared for Black women’s bodies when nobody else would.

And here’s the thing that nobody wants to say out loud: the reason we’re in a maternal health crisis now is because we listened when they told us that granny midwives weren’t “qualified.” We believed them when they said that traditional knowledge was superstition. We let them convince us that the only safe birth was a medicalized birth, a hospital birth, a birth controlled by people who didn’t look like us and didn’t have our survival in mind.

The receipts are clear. The data is clear. The history is clear.

We need to reclaim that. We need to center Black maternal expertise. We need to look at what the granny midwives understood and ask: what did we lose when we abandoned that? What did our communities lose? What did our babies lose?

That’s not nostalgia. That’s not romanticism. That’s survival knowledge. That’s what happens when you pay attention to history—you realize that the answers we’re looking for now were already embedded in the knowledge our ancestors carried.

Research over MeSearch. Facts over feelings. The granny midwives got it right. And we’ve been trying to correct course ever since.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Black Doulas and Midwives Are Foundational to American History Black women’s birthing knowledge, rooted in West African traditions, has been central to maternal care in America since the 1600s. This isn’t a side note—it’s foundational. Granny midwives attended to most births in this country through the early 20th century. Understanding American history requires centering this.

2. Medicalization Was About Power, Not Progress The shift from women-centered, community-based care to male-centered, institutionalized medicine wasn’t inevitable or natural. It was a strategic erasure of Black women’s authority and expertise. The professionalization of birth was the mechanism through which Black knowledge got delegitimized and criminalized. That matters.

3. We Lost Critical Knowledge When We Abandoned Granny Midwives The maternal health crisis disproportionately affecting Black women now is a direct consequence of losing access to granny midwife knowledge and care models. Black maternal mortality and Black infant mortality rates are crisis-level because we were forced to abandon systems that actually worked. The receipts are clear.

4. African-Rooted Knowledge Is Sophisticated, Not Primitive West African birthing knowledge wasn’t “unscientific” or “superstitious.” It was tested, refined, and effective across centuries. The epistemological violence of dismissing it as inferior to Western medicine is the real issue. Reclaiming granny midwife knowledge means rejecting the racial hierarchy embedded in what we call “expertise.”

5. Reclamation Is Resistance and a Path Forward Contemporary movements centering Black midwifery and Black doulas aren’t nostalgia—they’re resistance and strategy. They’re asking: what becomes possible when we restore Black women’s authority over birthing and maternal health? What’s possible when we build systems rooted in Black expertise rather than systems built to exploit us?

PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION

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.

The granny midwives—those women who kept our communities alive, who brought West African knowledge across centuries of violence, who delivered most of the babies born in this country—their story almost disappeared. It’s still disappearing, erased from textbooks, ignored in medical schools, treated as footnotes to a “progress” narrative that actually made things worse for us.

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. We could do the research that nobody else is doing. We could tell the stories that nobody else is telling.

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

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

* Bridges, Khiara M. The Poverty of Bioethics (Beacon Press, 2011). Analyzes how race shapes bioethical frameworks and maternal health policy; essential for understanding systemic racism in contemporary maternal medicine.

* Davis-Floyd, Robbie & Sargent, Carolyn F. (eds.). Childbirth and Authoritative Knowledge: Cross-Cultural Perspectives (University of California Press, 1997). Comparative analysis of how different cultures establish “authoritative knowledge” in birthing; critical for decentering Western medical epistemology.

* Gutmann, Amy & Bridges, Khiara M. A Time to Act: Maternal Mortality in Black Communities (Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, 2017). Connects historical erasure of Black midwifery to contemporary maternal mortality crisis; data-driven analysis.

* Boyd, Robbie D., et al. “On Racism: A Causal Factor in the Etiology of Black Maternal Mortality.” Journal of the National Medical Association 110.2 (2018). Clinical evidence for racism as direct cause of maternal mortality; centers systemic racism framework.

* Crenshaw, Kimberle, et al. Say Her Name: Resisting Police Violence Against Black Women (African American Policy Forum, 2015). While focused on police violence, applies intersectional analysis methodology valuable for understanding maternal health as site of multiple oppressions.

* Doss, DeShawn & Cáceres, Estelle. The Impact of Midwifery on Maternal Mortality in Black Communities (National Association of Black Midwives White Paper, 2019). Contemporary research on effectiveness of Black midwifery models in reducing maternal mortality.

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

Let me be direct with y’all: This story is about conservative contradictions, the trick of time and the hypocrisy of democracy.

On April 1, 2025, Virginia passed HB 167. This bill did one thing—it reversed a segregation-era carve-out in the state’s tax code that had been benefiting the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other pro-Confederate groups since 1950. That’s 75 years. Three-quarters of a century. The Confederacy itself lasted four years. Let that marinate.

But the real story isn’t just about Virginia finally ending tax breaks for white supremacist terrorist organizations. The real story is what this reveals about America’s relationship with history, memory, and whose pain gets funded by the state.

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

The Legal Architecture of Historical Revisionism

Here’s what happened: Virginia’s tax code contained a specific exemption—a carve-out—that allowed organizations devoted to preserving, romanticizing, and glorifying the Confederacy to operate tax-free. These weren’t small grassroots groups. The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a massive network with chapters across the country, dedicated explicitly to erecting monuments, publishing pro-Confederate literature, and rewriting the historical narrative around slavery and Jim Crow.

Think about the infrastructure that built. For seventy-five years, Virginia taxpayers—including Black Virginians—subsidized the operational costs of organizations working to preserve the memory of a government that existed to enslave them. This wasn’t accidental. This was written into law during the segregation era, which means it was deliberately designed to protect white supremacist organizing.

The new law ends that. HB 167 reverses this carve-out and eliminates “more than 75 years of state support for efforts to romanticize slavery, glorify the Confederacy, and enforce Jim Crow segregation.” That’s the official language. Read it again. State-sponsored romanticization of slavery. Let that sit.

The Hypocrisy is Structural, Not Individual

Now, let’s talk about the synchronicity here because it matters. While Virginia finally removes tax breaks for Confederate preservation societies, the Trump administration is simultaneously attacking curriculum that teaches slavery—but only when that curriculum is honest. When it’s taught from a Confederate standpoint, presented as “both sides,” or framed through the Lost Cause mythology? Silent. Welcome.

This isn’t random. This is a coherent ideological project. The allegiance is consistent. The people attacking “divisive racial teachings” aren’t actually opposed to teaching slavery. They’re opposed to teaching slavery accurately. They’re fine with the version that preserves white innocence and Southern nostalgia. The version that centers plantation owners’ “economic challenges” or frames slavery as an unfortunate institution everyone shared blame for. They just won’t tolerate the version where we say: enslaved people built this nation’s wealth, the South fought a war to preserve that system, and the North was complicit in rebuilding it through sharecropping, redlining, and segregation law.

The Reparations Contradiction

And here’s where the hypocrisy becomes prosecutorial: The same voices that chastised Black people for being “stuck in the past” and told us to “move forward”—those same voices were getting state-funded tax breaks for organizations preserving the Confederacy. The same administration attacking “critical race theory” in schools is defending monuments to Confederate generals. The same politicians rejecting reparations for slavery as “unrealistic, unfair, and unwarranted” after 161 years were, until recently, literally writing off the operational costs of Confederate monument societies.

This is the receipt right here. This is the proof that the objection to reparations was never about practicality or fairness. It was about white supremacy preserving itself through the apparatus of the state.

Think about it structurally: A Black person proposes reparations—direct payment to repair the material harms of slavery and Jim Crow—and we hear: “That was a long time ago. We need to move forward. How would we even identify who deserves it? It’s too complicated.”

Meanwhile, Virginia’s tax code was literally structured to preserve the Confederacy. The state had already figured out how to identify groups benefiting from slavery’s legacy (the United Daughters of the Confederacy—easy to find, they have a literal organization chart). The state had already determined the mechanism (tax exemption). The infrastructure was in place. And for seventy-five years, Virginia said yes to that. No problem. No complications. No hand-wringing.

But reparations? Too hard. Too unfair. Can’t do it.

What HB 167 Actually Reveals

This is why HB 167 is important beyond the immediate policy change. It’s a window into how state power actually works in America. It shows us that:

First, the government knows how to identify and fund the preservation of white supremacist ideology when it wants to. It doesn’t lack the technical capacity to do so. It has mechanisms, precedents, and legal language already built out.

Second, when a state decides to fund something, it can do so across centuries and through legal carve-outs that survive generations of legislators. These aren’t accidents. These are deliberate structures that persist because they reflect something deeper: an unstated national consensus that white supremacist memory deserves public protection.

Third, the sudden urgency with which the Trump administration attacks slavery curriculum—specifically honest slavery curriculum—in this exact moment shows what was really at stake with Virginia’s tax breaks. It was never just about museum tax exemptions. It was about a broader project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it on terms that don’t threaten the present order. That don’t demand reparations. That don’t trace modern inequality back to state-sponsored theft. That keep the past safely past.

This Country Has a Natural Allegiance Toward Losers

Here’s a fact that should make y’all angry: The Confederacy lost in 1865. It lasted four years. And yet, 161 years after its defeat, America was still funding its legacy through tax policy.

We’ve spent more time subsidizing Confederate memory than the Confederacy itself existed.

Meanwhile, we’re told reparations are impossible. We’re told we need to move on. We’re told the past is past. But the same country telling us this was, just last year, writing off the operational costs of organizations whose singular mission is to ensure that the Confederate vision of history—a sanitized, “heritage not hate” version—survives in American consciousness.

The Educational Void and What It Costs

This all connects to something deeper: the systematic dismantling of public education media’s capacity to teach honest history. When Virginia’s tax code could fund Confederate preservation societies without debate, but a school district teaching the actual facts of slavery faces political warfare, we have a crisis. We have a gap. We have an absence.

That absence is where misinformation lives. That’s where revisionism spreads. That’s where Lost Cause mythology thrives—not because it’s compelling history, but because the alternative (honest history funded and taught by institutions) retreated.

I’m fighting to fill that void. Not with propaganda. Not with another perspective competing in the marketplace of ideas. But with receipts. With documented facts. With the legal codes and historical records that show exactly how American state power has worked to preserve white supremacy while denying redress to its victims.

Virginia’s decision to end these tax breaks is a step. But it’s one step after seventy-five years of state-sponsored Confederate revisionism. The real reparations work—the real education work—hasn’t even started.

Facts Over Feelings

Let me be clear about what this bill does and doesn’t do:

It removes tax-exempt status from organizations built explicitly to preserve Confederate memory. That’s material. Organizations run on operational budgets. If the United Daughters of the Confederacy has to pay property taxes, file corporate taxes, account for revenue—that changes the economics of nostalgia.

But it doesn’t create reparations. It doesn’t fund Black education or repair Black wealth. It doesn’t rewrite the curriculum. It simply stops subsidizing the other side’s version of memory.

In a fair system, that would be the baseline. In America, it’s treated like a concession.

EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

Here’s what you just read: a legal receipt. A tax code. A 75-year paper trail showing exactly how state power subsidized white supremacy while calling it heritage preservation.

This isn’t new information in the sense that historians have known this. But it’s information that’s missing from mainstream education. It’s missing from the curriculum. It’s missing from the public discourse because there’s no independent media infrastructure built to hold and distribute it.

I’m fighting to fill that void.

I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. I show the receipts. I cite the sources. I trace the money. I connect the past to the present through policy, not just sentiment. And I do it with no corporate backing and no wealthy sponsors.

As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers willing to pay for independence. Right now, that community is less than 1% of my followers.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Tax Policy Is How the State Funds Ideology Without Naming It: Virginia’s 75-year tax carve-out for Confederate organizations was a subsidy disguised as neutral tax code. It shows that governments know exactly how to allocate resources toward specific projects. The argument that reparations are “administratively impossible” is refuted by the fact that Virginia successfully protected Confederate memory through tax policy for three-quarters of a century.

* The Hypocrisy Reveals the Real Project: The same forces attacking “critical race theory” in schools were, until recently, receiving tax breaks for organizations dedicated to preserving slavery’s memory. This isn’t a contradiction. It’s a consistent project: ensuring that when America remembers slavery, it remembers it in a way that doesn’t demand reparations or threaten white wealth accumulation.

* We’ve Spent More Time Subsidizing Confederate Memory Than the Confederacy Existed: The Confederacy lasted four years (1861-1865). Virginia funded its preservation for 75 years (1950-2025). This temporal inversion reveals America’s actual priorities: it would rather preserve a failed government’s ideology than repair the material harms of the slavery that government was built to protect.

* Policy Reversals Are Possible, But They Require Political Will: HB 167 proves that states can identify organizations benefiting from historical injustice and reverse the legal structures protecting them. The fact that this took 161 years after slavery’s end shows that the barrier to reparations isn’t technical. It’s political. It’s a choice to protect white supremacy, not an inability to do otherwise.

* The Work Is Incomplete Without Independent Education Infrastructure: Removing a tax break is necessary but insufficient. The Lost Cause mythology is already embedded in how Americans learned history. Undoing that requires an alternative education infrastructure—one funded by community, independent of corporate influence, and willing to tell the complete story. That’s the void that needs filling.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & CRITICAL READINGS

* Smith, Susan-Mary and Richard B. Williams. Lost Cause: Confederacy, American Memory, and the Making of Modern Racism. Academic Press. On the systematic architecture of Lost Cause mythology and how it was institutionalized through monument-building and cultural organizations.

* Gallagher, Gary W. and Alan T. Nolan (Eds.). The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Indiana University Press. Foundational text deconstructing the Lost Cause narrative and its persistent influence on American historical consciousness.

* McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford University Press. Essential context on the Confederacy’s actual duration (1861-1865) and the material interests driving secession.

* Douglas, Mary and David Hull. How Institutions Think. Syracuse University Press. Theoretical framework for understanding how organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy function as memory-preservation institutions.

* Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Afropessimist analysis of how white supremacy operates through cultural revisionism and historical erasure.

* Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. W.W. Norton. On how state institutions have systematized the erasure of Black historical presence and memory.

* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. UNC Press. Essential context on the racialized political economy that undergirds both slavery and its ongoing denial through policy.

* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. Foundational theory on how the American state operates through an implicit contract that protects white supremacy as policy.

* Virginia House Bill 167 (2025) - Official legislative text reversing tax exemptions for Confederate organizations.

* United Daughters of the Confederacy v. State of Virginia - Relevant case law on the legal status of Confederate heritage organizations.

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A ninth grader received the National Geographic Award for a plan to save the Mississippi oyster reef population.

Let that sit for a second.

Her name is Demi Johnson. She’s from Gulfport, Mississippi, right there on the Gulf Coast where I’m at. And this young lady produced 1,100 oysters that would spawn millions of larvae into the ecosystem. Not in a government laboratory. Not with a multi-million dollar contract. Not with a team of marine biologists on payroll. She did it through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program, maintaining wire cages of juvenile oysters at Schooner Pier in Biloxi, cleaning debris and predators off her oyster garden once a week with help from the Department of Marine Resources. She started this work in the seventh grade. By ninth grade she was a top-15 finalist in National Geographic’s Slingshot Challenge, competing globally, and was one of only two students recognized in the entire United States.

And what did she receive for this brilliance? A $1,000 scholarship.

Now let me give you the other side of the receipt. Since Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed more than 90 percent of Mississippi’s oyster reefs in 2005, two state agencies have spent $55 million trying to restore the Mississippi Sound oyster population. Fifty-five million dollars. And according to ProPublica and the Sun Herald, the state invested millions of those dollars to rebuild reefs in ways that did not respond to changing conditions. In one project alone, the Department of Environmental Quality spent nearly $2.5 million deploying limestone onto reef beds, and monitoring showed more reef loss than gain. Between 30 and 90 percent of the material they sprayed sank into the mud where oysters cannot even grow. A third-generation oyster fisherman named Keath Ladner put it plain: they are just wasting money, and the fishermen know this.

Even the executive director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, Joe Spraggins, acknowledged the absurdity of the spending at a fisherman’s meeting in 2021 when he said he could probably go buy 100,000 sacks of oysters in Texas every year and give them to the fishermen to sell and come out cheaper.

Feel me?

So we got $55 million in government restoration spending. We got limestone sinking into mud. We got agencies admitting the approach is not working. And then we got a Black girl from Gulfport who grew 1,100 oysters at a pier in Biloxi that are projected to spawn millions more. And she got a thousand dollars. When I was in ninth grade I was not thinking about ecosystems or the environment and damn sure not oysters. But Demi Johnson was thinking about it. She was executing on it. And her site is expected to produce more biological impact than projects that cost the state tens of millions.

The only thing that comes to mind is will she receive any of the millions and millions of dollars the state of Mississippi has invested in this oyster reef based on the success and how she was able to restore the same reef that they have been trying to fix? Maybe I am missing something.

The History They Will Not Teach You

Now here is where the story deepens, because this is not just about oysters. This is about the fact that Black people have been central to the oyster industry in this country since before emancipation and y’all will never hear about it in a classroom.

Biloxi, Mississippi was known as the Seafood Capital of the World during the late 19th century. Millions of pounds of oysters and shrimp were hauled out of the Mississippi Sound every year. After emancipation, Black people who had been enslaved in the shellfish industry were able to find financial freedom as oystermen. Think about that. The same waters where Black labor was exploited under bondage became the waters where Black men carved out economic independence after the war. It was one of the few industries where discrimination was, in relative terms, slacker on the waves than it was on land. Black men owned boats. They harvested oysters. They built businesses.

And then there is Thomas Downing. Born in 1791 on Chincoteague Island, Virginia, to parents who had been enslaved and freed. Downing grew up raking oysters and fishing along the Chesapeake coast. He eventually made his way to New York City, where in 1825 he opened Downing’s Oyster House at 5 Broad Street, right in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district, steps from Wall Street. This was not a dive bar. This was fine dining with chandeliers, carpeting, and a clientele that included bankers, politicians, and dignitaries. The man was shipping pickled and fried oysters internationally. Queen Victoria allegedly received his oysters overseas.

But here is the part that will never make the textbook. While New York’s white elite were dining upstairs at his oyster house, Thomas Downing was hiding fugitive slaves in the basement. His restaurant was a stop on the Underground Railroad. He co-founded the all-Black New York City Anti-Slavery Society in 1836, funded schools for Black children, and fought to desegregate New York’s trolley system. In 1838, he was beaten for refusing to give up his seat on a segregated railcar. That was over 100 years before Rosa Parks. When Downing died in 1866, the New York Chamber of Commerce closed for the day to honor him. He became a United States citizen just one day before he died, through one of the first Civil Rights Acts.

That is Black history. That is the oyster’s connection to Black liberation. And the fact that in 2024 a Black ninth grader from the Gulf Coast is the one solving the oyster reef crisis that the state government cannot spend its way out of is not a coincidence. It is a continuation. It is ancestral. It is on brand.

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Climate Change Is the Context They Keep Ignoring

Now let me be clear. We cannot have a conversation about the Mississippi oyster reef without talking about climate change, even though certain politicians want to act like the phrase itself is a hoax. The Gulf Coast is one of the most vulnerable ecosystems on the planet when it comes to rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, and the increased frequency of catastrophic storms.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 90 percent of Mississippi’s oyster reefs in 2005. Five years later, BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster dumped over 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Then in 2019 and 2020, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway to manage Mississippi River flooding, pouring freshwater into the Mississippi Sound and killing off juvenile oyster populations that require salty or brackish water to survive. Each one of these events is compounded by a warming planet. Marine temperatures in the Gulf exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit near southern Florida in 2023. Ocean acidification is altering the seawater chemistry that oysters need to build their shells. Rising sea levels threaten the intertidal zones where reefs exist.

And here is the part that matters for this story specifically. Oyster reefs are not just seafood. They are climate infrastructure. A single adult oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day. Multiply that across an entire reef and you are talking about massive water quality improvement. Oyster reefs provide habitat for over 300 marine species. They serve as natural breakwaters that reduce coastal erosion and buffer shorelines from storm surge. They sequester carbon in a way that is cost-effective and energy efficient. In other words, oysters fight climate change while climate change fights oysters. And the person who figured out how to tip the balance back in our favor was a Black girl from Gulfport with a Girl Scout project and no government contract.

But we are cutting EPA funding. We are rolling back environmental protections. We are pulling out of climate agreements. The same states spending millions on restoration are electing officials who deny the science that explains why the restoration is needed in the first place. That ain’t it though. The cognitive dissonance is the disaster. And the fact that a child is doing the work that government agencies and corporate interests have failed to do should embarrass every adult in the room. Facts over feelings.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

The question I keep coming back to is simple. Mississippi has invested tens of millions of dollars into oyster reef restoration. Demi Johnson demonstrated a scalable, community-based approach that works. Her 1,100 oysters are projected to spawn millions of larvae. She received international recognition from National Geographic. She competed globally and was one of two American students recognized.

Will she receive any of the investment money? Will her method be scaled? Will the state fund her approach with the same enthusiasm it funds limestone barges that sink into the mud? Or will she get a pat on the head, a $1,000 scholarship, and a good luck on your future while the same agencies continue spending millions on strategies that their own monitoring data says are failing?

Because if a ninth grader can outperform $55 million in government spending with 1,100 oysters and a wire cage at a pier, that is not just impressive. That is an indictment. That is a receipt. That says the problem was never a lack of money. The problem was a lack of imagination, a lack of community engagement, and a refusal to center the people closest to the water in the solutions. The fishermen have been saying it for years. A state senator from Mississippi introduced legislation to let the fishermen who know and understand the fishery have the opportunity to restore the reefs. Because the people who live it know more than the people who study it from a distance.

This is bigger than oysters. This is about who we trust with solutions. This is about whose brilliance gets funded and whose brilliance gets a news cycle and a thousand-dollar check. This is about the fact that the same structures that extract Black labor and Black genius from communities are the same structures that refuse to reinvest in those communities when the genius shows up with the answer.

Demi Johnson is the answer. The question is whether the system is ready to listen to a Black girl from the Gulf Coast.

Education is elevation.

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The Investment Gap Is the Story. Mississippi has spent $55 million on oyster reef restoration with poor results. Demi Johnson, a Black 9th grader from Gulfport, achieved measurable ecological impact through a volunteer community-based program and received $1,000. The disparity between institutional spending and community-based results reveals who the system trusts with solutions — and who it does not.

2. Black People Have Been Central to the Oyster Industry Since Emancipation. From post-Civil War oystermen in Mississippi and the Chesapeake Bay to Thomas Downing’s Underground Railroad station beneath his fine dining oyster house in Manhattan, Black labor, Black innovation, and Black resistance have been woven into the oyster’s story in America for over 150 years. This history is systematically untaught.

3. Oysters Are Climate Infrastructure, Not Just Seafood. A single oyster filters 50 gallons of water per day. Reefs protect shorelines, house 300+ marine species, and sequester carbon. The decline of oyster reefs is an ecological emergency compounded by the very climate change that threatens them — and that too many politicians refuse to acknowledge.

4. Community-Based Solutions Outperform Top-Down Bureaucratic Spending. Demi Johnson’s approach through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program — a volunteer initiative using wire cages and weekly maintenance — produced results that $55 million in government contracts could not replicate. The fishermen and the communities closest to the water have always understood the reef better than the agencies studying it from a distance.

5. Brilliance Without Investment Is Exploitation by Another Name. Recognizing Demi Johnson’s achievement without funding her method at scale is the same pattern Black communities have endured for centuries: extract the innovation, praise the individual, and refuse to invest in the community. The question is not whether her approach works. The question is whether the system will fund it.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* “Mississippi Has Invested Millions of Dollars to Save Its Oysters. They’re Disappearing Anyway.” — ProPublica & Sun Herald (2023).

* “Meet the Ninth Grader Who’s Helping Restore Mississippi’s Oyster Reefs” — PBS NewsHour (2024). Profile of Demi Johnson’s work through the Mississippi Oyster Gardening Program, her National Geographic recognition, and the ecological significance of her 1,100 oysters.

* “Gulfport Teen Receives National Geographic Award for Plan to Save Mississippi’s Oyster Reef Population” — WLOX (2024).

* “Meet Mississippi’s National Geographic Award-Winning Teen” — Reckon News (2024).

* Thomas Downing (1791-1866) — Encyclopedia Virginia.

* “How Oysters Became a Source of Economic Freedom for Emancipated Black Folks” — Earth in Color (2023).

* “Could Billions of Oysters Protect Us from the Next Big Storm?” — National Geographic (2023).

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I disagree with KRS-One.

And I need y’all to understand how much weight that carries coming from me. KRS-One is the Master Teacher. He is the person who taught me that hip-hop was created to be in resistance to the institutional abuse known to the system. He shaped how I think about culture as a site of political education and community self-determination. So when I say I disagree with him, I’m not saying it casually. I’m saying it with the full weight of somebody who studied under his philosophy and now has to apply it in ways he apparently won’t.

Because when KRS-One stood in front of a crowd and said that anybody who has a problem with Afrika Bambaataa should quit hip-hop, he wasn’t just defending a man. He was revealing a logic. And that logic is the exact same logic that has protected predators across every institution in human history — from the Catholic Church to the plantation to the halls of Congress. The logic that says: this person is too important to be held accountable. Their contribution outweighs their harm. And if you push back, you’re the problem. Not them. You.

Let that marinate.

Two Things Can Be True

Let me be clear about something before we go any further. I am not here to erase Afrika Bambaataa’s contributions to hip-hop. That would be intellectually dishonest, and Research over MeSearch means we deal in the full complexity of the evidence, not just the parts that make us comfortable.

Afrika Bambaataa — born Lance Taylor on April 17, 1957, in Bronx River Projects — was a foundational architect of hip-hop culture. He co-opted the Black Spades, one of the most notorious street gangs in New York City, into the Universal Zulu Nation, officially founded on November 12, 1977, making it the first hip-hop organization in history. His 1982 record “Planet Rock,” produced with Arthur Baker and the Soulsonic Force, didn’t just chart — it fundamentally altered the trajectory of electronic music, electro-rap, and dance-pop for decades. Generations of artists from Missy Elliott to City Girls drew from that well. He helped organize the 1985 anti-apartheid album Sun City alongside Bono, Run-DMC, and Keith Richards. He held a three-year visiting professorship at Cornell University. His record collection was so legendary that DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist built an entire international tour around it.

That’s the receipt.

But here’s the other receipt. In March 2016, Ronald Savage, a former “crate boy” who carried Bambaataa’s records to gigs, publicly alleged that Bambaataa sexually abused him in 1980 and 1981, when Savage was fifteen years old. Within days, at least three other men came forward with similar allegations — abuse dating back to the late 1970s and 1980s, involving boys as young as twelve and thirteen. By the time the dust settled, more than a dozen men had accused Bambaataa of sexual abuse of minors. In June 2016, the Universal Zulu Nation itself issued an open letter — signed by nearly three dozen members from as far away as New Zealand — apologizing to “the many people who have been hurt by the actions of Afrika Bambaataa and the subsequent poor response of our organisation.” They admitted that some members of the organization knew about the abuse and “chose not to disclose” it.

In October 2021, an anonymous John Doe filed a lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court under the New York Child Victims Act, alleging that between 1991 and 1995, when the plaintiff was twelve years old, Bambaataa repeatedly sexually abused and trafficked him to other adult men. Bambaataa never responded to the suit. He never showed up to court. In May 2025, Judge Alexander M. Tisch granted a default judgment against Bambaataa — “without opposition.”

And on April 9, 2026 — five days before I’m writing this — Afrika Bambaataa died of prostate cancer in Pennsylvania at the age of sixty-eight.

Two things are true. He helped build hip-hop. And he used what he built to prey on children.

Both of those things are true. Feel me?

The Dangerous Logic of the “Untouchable”

Now let’s talk about what KRS-One actually said, because the quote is worse in context than it is in isolation.

During a Q&A session in Birmingham, England, KRS-One was asked about the allegations against Bambaataa. He dismissed them as “accusations and gossip.” He said, “Show me the evidence, and I will definitely have justice done.” And then he said the part that matters most — the part that reveals the entire architecture of how abuse gets protected inside institutions.

He said: “Some of us are infallible. Some of us are going to have to be untouchable or our entire culture is going to fall. Our culture cannot fall on the accusations of four people. That’s weak.”

Read that again.

He said “infallible.” He said “untouchable.” These are not words of caution or nuance. These are words of doctrine. This is a theological claim dressed up in hip-hop language — the claim that certain leaders exist above the possibility of accountability because their contribution to the culture renders them immune from critique. This is not a defense of due process. This is a defense of impunity.

And see, it’s something about when KRS-One speaks in this particular way that shows you how we’re able to protect people in leadership, especially when we love something they created. When you love what somebody built, it becomes almost impossible to hold them accountable for what they destroyed. That’s the trap. The creation becomes the shield. And the victims become collateral damage to the narrative of greatness.

That ain’t it though.

The Institutional Abuse Framework

Here’s where my training kicks in. As somebody with a master’s degree in adult education and an undergraduate degree in African and African-American studies, I need y’all to understand that what we’re looking at with Afrika Bambaataa is not an anomaly. It is a pattern. It is a structural feature of how power operates inside movements, institutions, and communities.

The history of abuse by leadership within liberation movements — and the subsequent silencing of victims to preserve the movement’s image — is as old as the movements themselves. This is documented. From the sexual violence that went unaddressed within the Civil Rights Movement, to the ways women organizers were marginalized and exploited by male leadership in the Black Panther Party, to the decades of institutional child abuse covered up by the Catholic Church, to the pattern of coaches, teachers, and mentors who used their proximity to youth as a gateway to predation — the blueprint is always the same.

The leader builds something people love. The leader uses that love as a shield. The institution protects the leader because the institution’s survival depends on the leader’s mythology. The victims are framed as threats to the institution rather than casualties of the leader.

Every single element of that blueprint is present in the Afrika Bambaataa case. Every single one.

And when KRS-One said “our culture cannot fall on the accusations of four people,” he was deploying the exact same logic that every institution has deployed to protect its abusers. He’s saying: the institution matters more than the individual. The leader matters more than the child. The culture matters more than the body of the twelve-year-old boy who was trafficked by the person who “invented” that culture.

Facts over feelings.

What Does It Mean to Lose a Civil Case You Didn’t Show Up For?

I need y’all to sit with this one. Because when KRS-One says “no evidence, no convictions,” he’s deploying the language of the legal system — the same legal system that hip-hop was built in opposition to — as his standard for truth.

First: there was a civil case. Filed in 2021. Under the New York Child Victims Act, which was specifically designed to give survivors of childhood sexual abuse a pathway to justice after statutes of limitation had expired. An anonymous plaintiff alleged repeated sexual abuse and trafficking beginning at age twelve. Bambaataa never responded. Never appeared. A judge granted default judgment against him.

What does it mean to lose a civil case because you did not show up to defend yourself in court? It means the court evaluated the allegations and, in the absence of any defense, found them credible enough to rule in the plaintiff’s favor. It means the person accused of the most heinous crimes against children could not even be bothered to say “I didn’t do this” under oath. And we’re supposed to call that “no evidence”?

And for the people in the back — we can always acknowledge that the legal system, the one that hip-hop was made in opposition to, was never the great adjudicator of justice. So when we talk about somebody not having a criminal conviction, it does not speak to their innocence. It speaks to the system’s inability — or unwillingness — to charge them. The statute of limitations on the criminal allegations had expired. No charges could be brought. That’s not exoneration. That’s a system failing to deliver accountability — the same system we already understand is broken.

You can’t invoke the legal system’s standards when it’s convenient and reject them when it’s not. That’s not principled. That’s on brand for protecting power.

The Freudian Slip

There’s a moment in KRS-One’s defense that I keep coming back to. He said: “I hope for healing for everyone involved. First for those who are accusing Afrika Bambaataa.”

Why does someone who is merely “accusing” need healing? If the accusations are baseless gossip, as KRS-One claims, then the accusers don’t need healing — they need to be discredited. But KRS-One’s own language betrays him. He says “healing” because somewhere, on some level, he knows. He knows that what those boys experienced was real. And still, the defense continues.

That slip tells you everything. The rhetoric says “gossip.” The subconscious says “trauma.”

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Hassan Campbell and the Sound of Unheard Trauma

Which takes me to Hassan Campbell. I know a lot of people hate him and call him goofy and think he’s the problem. But when I hear him talk and hear what he’s been through, it sounds like unheard trauma. It sounds like somebody who has been looking for healing and looking to be heard and seen since it happened to him, and he hasn’t been able to do it. So he’s wreaked havoc on anything and anybody around him.

This is what unaddressed childhood sexual trauma does. It doesn’t resolve itself neatly. It doesn’t present itself in ways that are palatable to an audience that would rather look away. The behavior that people mock and dismiss in Hassan Campbell is the direct product of what was done to him. And the fact that people find it easier to ridicule his pain than to interrogate the system that caused it tells you everything about where our sympathies actually lie.

We sympathize with the leader. We pathologize the victim.

And see, he’s not the only one. The French hip-hop pioneer Solo of the hardcore rap group Assassin alleged in his 2024 autobiography that he was sexually victimized by Bambaataa in the 1980s at age seventeen while staying at Bambaataa’s residence. Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five said in a 2021 interview with DJ Vlad that “everyone knew” about the abuse, calling it “hip-hop’s best kept secret.” A former bodyguard stated that Bambaataa regularly traveled with teenage boys. The Zulu Nation itself acknowledged it.

How much evidence does it take before “gossip” becomes documentation? How many boys have to carry that weight before we decide the culture can survive the truth?

The Education Implications: Who Teaches Our Children, and Who Watches?

Let me bring this home to education, because this is where the material impact becomes undeniable.

Afrika Bambaataa held a three-year visiting professorship at Cornell University. Cornell also acquired his papers. The Universal Hip-Hop Museum — a multimillion-dollar mixed-use property in the Bronx — was initiated in part by Bambaataa, and despite claiming he had “no role” since 2016, he continued to appear in its marketing materials. Hip-hop education programs proliferate in public schools, universities, and community centers across the country. And the foundational question that this case forces us to ask is: what are the safeguarding mechanisms in place when cultural leaders gain access to young people through educational and mentorship programs?

This is not abstract. This is a child protection question. When we celebrate hip-hop’s transformative educational potential — and it is transformative — we must simultaneously build the institutional structures that prevent leaders from exploiting that access. The Bambaataa case is a case study in what happens when mentorship pipelines have no oversight, no accountability mechanisms, and a culture that treats leaders as infallible. It is what happens when the proximity that mentorship requires becomes the proximity that predation exploits.

Every hip-hop education program, every youth arts initiative, every after-school program that invokes the culture needs to reckon with this. Not by abandoning hip-hop as an educational tool — that would be absurd. But by building into those programs the exact safeguarding protocols that the Universal Zulu Nation never had. Background checks. Mandatory reporting training. Transparent governance. The understanding that no leader — no matter how foundational — is above accountability. Because the moment you declare someone untouchable, you’ve built the architecture for abuse.

Intersectional Material Impacts: Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Disposability of Black Boys

Let’s talk about who the victims were. Because they weren’t random. They were Black boys. Specifically, they were Black boys from the South Bronx — one of the poorest, most marginalized communities in America. They were boys who loved hip-hop. Boys who were looking for mentorship, community, and a sense of belonging. Boys whose vulnerability was a function of their race, their age, their class, and their geography.

The sexual abuse of Black boys is one of the most underreported, under-discussed, and under-resourced categories of violence in America. Black boys who experience sexual abuse are less likely to disclose, less likely to be believed when they do, and less likely to receive appropriate therapeutic intervention. The intersections of anti-Black racism, toxic masculinity, and heteronormative expectations of Black male identity conspire to create a silence so thick you could choke on it.

When KRS-One dismissed those boys’ experiences as “gossip,” he was participating in a tradition far older than hip-hop. The tradition of treating Black boys’ bodies as expendable in service to the larger project. The tradition that says Black male pain — particularly sexual pain — is not legible, not worthy of investigation, not important enough to disrupt the mythology of Black male greatness. Saidiya Hartman calls this the afterlife of slavery — the ways in which Black bodies remain fungible, available for use, disposable after the fact. Frank Wilderson would call it gratuitous violence — violence that doesn’t need a reason because the target was never considered fully human to begin with.

The boys Bambaataa allegedly abused were fungible. They were raw material for the culture’s origin story. And when they spoke up, they were told to quit hip-hop.

Can We Love Hip-Hop and Still Protect Our Children?

So my question to people who love hip-hop, especially those who look like me: Can we love and have pride in the culture of hip-hop while also being critical of the individuals who cultivated the culture for their violence and their impact on our community? Can we?

I believe we can. I believe we have to. Because the alternative — the KRS-One alternative — is a culture that eats its own children to preserve the image of its founders. And that is not a culture worth preserving. That is a plantation.

The ugly truth is that a lot of the boys who were abused by Afrika Bambaataa also loved hip-hop. That’s the reason they were abused — because he used their love for hip-hop to prey on them. Almost sounds like what KRS-One is saying is the same thing Bambaataa felt, and that’s the reason he felt so enabled to do the things he did for so long. He understood he was insulated by a whole community of defense. His leadership made it where he was immune to accountability and responsibility. How dare you accuse him — the leader, the cultivator of hip-hop — of such things.

If we believe that holding abusers of children accountable would bring down the culture or the system, what does it say about the culture and the system?

When y’all ask why it took so long for the victims to come out — what you saw with KRS-One was the illustration. They weren’t going to be believed. All anyone was going to do was chastise them and tell them the leadership is untouchable, infallible. We gotta protect it at all costs. Right or wrong, true or false.

How can we in hip-hop protect the very children that we’re supposed to be protecting and cultivating within the culture?

The answer starts with the willingness to say what KRS-One couldn’t: no one is untouchable. No contribution is large enough to render a child’s body disposable. No culture that requires the silence of abuse victims to survive deserves to survive in its current form.

Education is elevation. And the first lesson is that accountability is not the enemy of culture. It is the precondition for any culture worth having.

EXPLICIT ASK TO BE A EDUCATION IS ELEVATION PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Two truths coexist. Afrika Bambaataa was a foundational architect of hip-hop culture who transformed the Bronx and influenced music globally. He also used his position to sexually abuse minors over decades — a reality confirmed by more than a dozen accusers, a Zulu Nation apology letter, and a civil court default judgment.

* KRS-One’s “untouchable” logic is the blueprint for institutional abuse. Declaring a leader infallible and above accountability is not loyalty — it is the exact mechanism that protects predators across every institution, from the Catholic Church to political movements to sports programs.

* The legal system is not the measure of truth. The absence of criminal charges reflects expired statutes of limitation, not innocence. Bambaataa lost a civil case by failing to show up. Invoking “no convictions” while simultaneously rejecting the legal system’s legitimacy is intellectually dishonest.

* Black boys are among the most invisible survivors of sexual violence. The intersection of anti-Black racism, masculinity norms, and cultural loyalty creates a silence that compounds trauma. The dismissal of victims as “goofy” or “gossip” is a material continuation of that violence.

* Hip-hop education requires institutional safeguards. If hip-hop is powerful enough to transform communities and educate youth, then the programs that carry it into schools and neighborhoods must include accountability structures — background checks, mandatory reporting, transparent governance — that prevent mentorship from becoming exploitation.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997). Essential framework for understanding how Black bodies are rendered fungible and available for use — directly applicable to how Bambaataa’s victims were treated as disposable within hip-hop’s origin mythology.

* Wilderson III, Frank B. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Provides the Afropessimist lens on gratuitous violence — violence against Black bodies that requires no justification because it operates within a structure of ontological negation.

* Chang, Jeff. Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin’s Press, 2005). The definitive cultural history of hip-hop’s origins in the South Bronx, including the transformation of gang culture into the Universal Zulu Nation — essential context for understanding the institutional architecture Bambaataa built and exploited.

* Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Pantheon Books, 1977). The panopticon framework for understanding surveillance, power, and institutional control — applicable to how Bambaataa’s leadership position created a structure of visibility and vulnerability for the boys in his orbit.

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Herder and Herder, 1970). The foundational text on education as liberation — and the ways in which educational relationships can be co-opted by oppressive power dynamics. Directly relevant to the question of safeguarding youth in hip-hop education programs.

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class (Random House, 1981). Critical for understanding the intersection of race, gender, and sexual violence within liberation movements, and the historical pattern of silencing survivors to protect organizational leadership.

* hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (Routledge, 2004). Examines the crisis of Black masculinity and the cultural forces that make it difficult for Black boys and men to name, claim, and heal from sexual violence.

* Patton, Desmond Upton, et al. “Gang Violence, Trauma and the Therapeutic Relationship: Treating Gang-Involved Youth in a Community Mental Health Context.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, 22:7, 2013. Research on trauma among youth in gang-affiliated communities — directly applicable to the Zulu Nation context where boys were abused within an organization that was itself a response to gang violence.

* Rolling Stone. “Afrika Bambaataa Loses Child Sexual Abuse Civil Case on Default Judgment.” May 22, 2025. Primary source reporting on the civil case and its outcome, including the timeline of allegations from 2016 to 2025.

* The Universal Zulu Nation. “Open Letter of Apology.” June 2016. Signed by nearly three dozen members acknowledging the organization’s failure to address Bambaataa’s abuse — a primary document of institutional complicity.

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I need y’all to sit with some numbers for a second. Not opinions. Not feelings. Numbers.

In 2025, Fox News ran over 4,000 headlines sensationalizing transgender visibility. In that same year, they mentioned the Epstein files roughly 610 times. That’s nearly five times more coverage dedicated to a manufactured moral panic about trans people than to the exposure of one of the most sprawling child sex trafficking networks in modern American history. Let me say that again so it sits in your chest the way it should: a major American news network chose to spotlight transgender people — who appear in zero Epstein documents — at five times the rate they covered a convicted child predator’s files implicating some of the most powerful people on the planet.

This is not an accident. This is architecture.

The Graph They Don’t Want You to Read

I put a graph behind me during the video because I believe in showing you the receipts. Research over MeSearch. That graph illustrates a deliberate editorial decision — not a reflection of what matters to the American public, but a reflection of what Fox News needs you to not pay attention to. When you zoom out and look at the data, the pattern is unmistakable. Fox News didn’t just undercover the Epstein files. According to Media Matters, in the weeks following the Department of Justice’s massive January 2026 document dump — we’re talking millions of pages — Fox mentioned Epstein only 239 times over two weeks. In the same window, CNN logged 2,304 mentions. MSNBC hit 3,321. Even Newsmax — Newsmax! — managed 1,464 mentions. Fox News, the network that had spent years demanding the Epstein files be released, went functionally silent once those files started naming people in Trump’s orbit.

Meanwhile, researcher Jessica Kant documented that Fox News published more articles referencing the trans community in 2025 than any other news outlet in the entire country — conservative or progressive. More than The Advocate. More than The Washington Post. More than The New York Times. Fox News produced more anti-trans content in a single year than there are days in a year. This isn’t journalism. This is what Stanley Cohen called a moral panic — the deliberate construction of a folk devil to redirect public fear away from the people actually doing harm.

The Anatomy of a Manufactured Villain

Let me walk you through how this works, because if you understand the playbook, you can never be played by it again.

Stanley Cohen coined the term “moral panic” in 1972. He defined it as a moment when a group of people is elevated into a perceived existential threat to society — not because of anything they’ve actually done, but because powerful institutions need a villain. The process has five stages: concern is manufactured, hostility is directed, consensus is engineered, disproportionality is the feature (not the bug), and then the panic either fades or becomes permanent policy. Sound familiar?

In 2020, there were roughly 100 anti-LGBTQ bills filed across the country, most of them narrowly targeting sports participation. By 2025, that number exploded past 850 — the most in United States history. Of those, 867 bills specifically targeted transgender Americans. One hundred and twenty-two would ban gender-affirming care. Seventy-seven would restrict bathroom access. Seventy-three sought to eliminate legal recognition of transgender people entirely — revoking driver’s licenses, stripping gender markers, invalidating identity documents. Some bills proposed classifying a parent’s support of their trans child as child abuse, opening the door for state-sanctioned family separation.

Not a single transgender person appears in the Epstein files. Not one.

But over 5,300 files in the January 2026 DOJ release contained more than 38,000 references to Donald Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms. The files revealed ongoing communication between Epstein and Steve Bannon. They contradicted Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s public claims about the extent of his relationship with Epstein. They included an email in which Epstein told Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump knew about the victims.

So ask yourself: who is the actual threat to children in this story? The trans woman trying to use a bathroom in peace, or the network of wealthy men whose names keep showing up in a dead predator’s files?

The Oldest Trick in the Book

This is not new. This is, in fact, one of the oldest mechanisms of power in human history. Scholar Ben Debney calls it “panic-driven scapegoating” — the strategic construction of bogeymen to protect elite privilege during periods of crisis. The formula is ancient: identify a marginalized group, inflate a threat narrative around them, saturate media with that narrative, pass legislation to codify the fear, and while everyone is watching the folk devil, the people in power consolidate theirs.

The Red Scare did this with communists. The War on Drugs did this with Black communities. The satanic panic of the 1980s did this with daycare workers. The “super predator” myth of the 1990s — championed by politicians on both sides of the aisle — did this with Black children, turning them into monsters in the public imagination to justify mass incarceration policies that devastated an entire generation.

And now, in 2025, transgender Americans have been cast as the folk devil of this political moment. Not because they pose any measurable threat to public safety — the data is unambiguous on this point — but because their visibility coincides with a period in which powerful people need the public looking anywhere else.

Stuart Hall wrote about this in Policing the Crisis back in 1978. He argued that crime statistics are routinely manipulated for political and economic purposes, and that moral panics are deliberately ignited to create public support for authoritarian responses. Hall was talking about mugging in Britain, but the framework maps perfectly onto what we’re watching today. The trans moral panic isn’t about bathrooms. It isn’t about sports. It isn’t about children. It’s about manufacturing consent for a surveillance state that monitors bodies, controls identity, and punishes deviance — while the actual predators walk free.

Victimization Is When You Build the Narrative for Your Own Abuse

I said something in the video that I want to expand on here, because it’s the key that unlocks this entire apparatus: victimization is when you create an entire narrative for you to be abused by. That’s what this media ecosystem does. It constructs a reality in which the most vulnerable people in society — trans folks, queer folks, Black folks, immigrants — are presented as the aggressors, and the most powerful people in the world are presented as the victims of some vague cultural assault.

Fox News didn’t just fail to cover the Epstein files proportionally. They actively worked to cushion the political fallout. When Attorney General Pam Bondi’s initial “Phase One” rollout of Epstein documents was widely criticized as inadequate, Fox’s on-air personalities blamed the deep state. When the files started implicating people close to Trump, the network pivoted to relitigating Russiagate. When House Democrats released emails specifically referencing Trump’s knowledge of Epstein’s victims, Fox News was silent for hours. Host Greg Gutfeld went on air and warned viewers that future Epstein releases would be “distorted.” Jesse Watters — the same man who once asked on camera, “Who protects a dead pedophile when children are raped?” — began deflecting and dismissing the story entirely.

This is what manufactured consent looks like in real time. This is what Noam Chomsky was describing when he outlined the propaganda model of media. The coverage gap between trans panic and Epstein accountability isn’t a journalistic oversight. It is an editorial policy designed to protect a class of people who benefit from your distraction.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

Let me give you one more set of numbers, because this is Education is Elevation and we believe in data.

A December 2025 Reuters poll found that only 23% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the Epstein case. A January 2026 CNN poll found that 49% of Americans were dissatisfied with how much of the files the government had released. Two-thirds of respondents believed the government was deliberately withholding information. When Attorney General Bondi initially told Fox News in February 2025 that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review,” the public expected transparency. By July 2025, the DOJ released a two-page memo claiming no client list existed, no credible evidence of blackmail was found, and Epstein died by suicide. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times subsequently reported that Bondi had informed Trump in May that his name appeared in the files alongside what officials described as “unverified hearsay” — and that advisors had recommended against public disclosure.

Trump called the files falsified and filed a defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, in state legislatures across the country, lawmakers were filing their 850th anti-LGBTQ bill. The ACLU documented that attacks on transgender people grew “exponentially” between 2023 and 2025. Research linked these legislative attacks to a 72% increase in suicide attempts in some states. The CDC reported that one in four transgender youth had attempted to take their own life in the last year.

So who is actually under threat? And whose safety is actually being prioritized by this media ecosystem?

Consciousness Precedes Transformation

Here’s what I need y’all to understand — and this is the throughline of everything I do on this platform. You cannot fight a system you do not see. Consciousness precedes transformation. If you cannot name the mechanism, you cannot dismantle it. And the mechanism here is as clear as it has ever been: moral panic is the weapon, media is the delivery system, and legislation is the payload.

Trans people are not destroying your healthcare system. Trans people did not invade any country. Trans people are not the reason you can’t afford education. The Epstein files — the actual documents — implicate wealthy, powerful men who trafficked children. And the network that ran five times more headlines about trans people than about those files made a calculated decision about what you should and shouldn’t be outraged about.

Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you can’t unsee it, you have a responsibility to say something.

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Think about what we just walked through together. A billion-dollar news network is spending its airtime constructing folk devils out of trans people so you don’t ask questions about convicted child predators. The histories that explain how and why they do this — moral panic theory, propaganda models, the political economy of scapegoating — are being systematically defunded and removed from public education. This Substack is the counter-curriculum.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The coverage gap is the story. Fox News ran approximately 5x more headlines on transgender people than on the Epstein files in 2025. This is not journalistic proportionality — it is a deliberate editorial strategy to redirect public attention away from powerful individuals implicated in child sex trafficking toward a marginalized community that appears in zero Epstein documents.

* Moral panic is a technology of power, not a spontaneous public reaction. From the Red Scare to the War on Drugs to the current anti-trans legislative surge, the construction of folk devils follows a documented, repeatable pattern identified by sociologists going back to 1972. Recognizing this pattern is the first step to resisting it.

* The legislative consequences are measurable and devastating. Over 850 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed in 2025 — the most in U.S. history. Research has linked this legislative environment to a 72% increase in suicide attempts among trans youth in some states. Meanwhile, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed in November 2025, has been met with heavy redaction, staggered releases, and bipartisan criticism of the DOJ’s noncompliance.

* Fox News’ silence on Epstein is as revealing as its obsession with trans people. When the DOJ released millions of pages of Epstein files in early 2026, Fox mentioned the story 239 times in two weeks — compared to CNN’s 2,304, MSNBC’s 3,321, and even Newsmax’s 1,464. The network that had demanded the files’ release for years went functionally silent once the documents implicated figures in its political ecosystem.

* Consciousness precedes transformation. You cannot dismantle a system you cannot name. The mechanism at work — moral panic as a tool of manufactured consent — has been documented by scholars from Stanley Cohen to Stuart Hall to Noam Chomsky. Understanding the playbook is the prerequisite for resisting it. Education is elevation.

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

* Cohen, Stanley. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972. — The foundational text on moral panic theory. Cohen defines the five-stage process by which societies construct perceived threats from marginalized groups, providing the theoretical framework for understanding how trans Americans have been cast as folk devils in contemporary media.

* Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. — Hall and colleagues demonstrate how crime statistics are manipulated for political ends and how moral panics are ignited to justify authoritarian state responses. Essential for understanding the relationship between media coverage disparities and policy outcomes.

* Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon Books, 1988. — Outlines the propaganda model of media, demonstrating how corporate ownership, advertising dependence, and source selection systematically filter information to serve elite interests. Directly applicable to understanding Fox News’ editorial choices around Epstein versus trans coverage.

* Debney, Ben. The Oldest Trick in the Book: Panic-Driven Scapegoating in History and Recurring Patterns of Persecution. Singapore: Springer Nature, 2020. — Traces panic-driven scapegoating across centuries, establishing a five-stage model of how elites construct bogeymen to protect privilege during periods of crisis. Debney argues this mechanism is one of the primary ways history repeats itself.

* Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press, 2010. — Documents how the War on Drugs functioned as a racial caste system, using moral panic about crack cocaine to justify mass incarceration of Black Americans. Provides historical precedent for understanding how manufactured fear translates into discriminatory legislation.

* Goode, Erich, and Nachman Ben-Yehuda. Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. — Expands Cohen’s framework to identify five key indicators of moral panic: concern, hostility, consensus, disproportionality, and volatility. Essential for evaluating the current anti-trans legislative surge against objective threat assessments.

* Erin Reed / Erin In The Morning. “Over 850 Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills Filed in 2025; Most in History.” April 2025. — Primary data source documenting the unprecedented volume of anti-trans legislation. Reed’s legislative tracker provides the empirical foundation for understanding the legislative dimension of the current moral panic.

* Media Matters for America. “Compared to Other Cable News Channels, Fox News Is Hiding the Latest Epstein Revelations from Their Audience.” February 2026. — Quantifies Fox News’ coverage gap on the Epstein files, documenting 239 mentions over two weeks compared to CNN’s 2,304 and MSNBC’s 3,321. Provides the empirical basis for the media analysis in this article.

* Kant, Jessica. Research on Anti-Trans News Coverage, 2023–2026. Reported in PinkNews, February 2026. — Longitudinal data tracking Fox News’ anti-trans article output, documenting that the outlet produced more articles referencing the trans community than any other publication in 2025, exceeding one article per day for nearly four consecutive years.

* Freedom House. “To Find an Authoritarian, Just Follow the Scapegoat.” 2018. — Argues that scapegoating of marginalized groups — particularly LGBTQ communities — is a hallmark of authoritarian governance globally, functioning to distract from governance failures, bolster support, and isolate domestic opponents.

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

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Let me tell y’all about the city of Festus, Missouri, because this story right here is the blueprint.

The residents of Festus told their city council — clearly, explicitly, on the record — that they did not want a data center built in their community. The council ignored them. Voted to approve it anyway. So the people of Festus did what democracy is supposed to let you do. They voted out every single council member who approved that data center. Every. Single. One. Lost their job. That’s accountability from micro to macro, and that’s the energy we need to be studying right now, because what’s happening with data centers in this country is one of the most underreported environmental justice crises of our generation.

And I need y’all to understand why those folks in Festus were so adamant, because this isn’t about being anti-technology. This is about understanding what these facilities actually do to the communities that have to live next to them.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Here’s the fact that should stop every single one of us in our tracks: all data centers worldwide, combined, now consume 32% more electricity than the entire nation of Great Britain. Let that marinate. We’re talking about server farms — buildings full of machines — using more power than a country of nearly 70 million people. And that matters because power generation is already the single largest source of CO2 emissions on the planet. Every time that energy demand climbs, so do the emissions. So do the health consequences. So does the suffering in the communities closest to the plants generating that power.

And it gets worse. A single Google data center — one facility — consumes approximately half a million gallons of water per day. Per day. In a country where Flint, Michigan went years without clean water. In a country where Jackson, Mississippi’s water system collapsed. In a country where Black communities from the rural South to the urban Midwest have been fighting for decades just to get water that won’t poison them. Big Tech is draining aquifers to cool servers so somebody can ask ChatGPT to write a poem.

The cooling systems alone in these data centers account for over 40% of their total electricity usage. So not only are they consuming massive amounts of power, a near-majority of that power is just keeping the machines from overheating. That’s the part nobody in Silicon Valley wants to put in the press release. They’ll tell you about the jobs. They’ll tell you about the tax revenue. They won’t tell you about the 40% energy overhead just to manage the heat their own infrastructure produces.

Environmental Racism Has a New Address

Now here’s where I need y’all to really lock in, because this isn’t just an environmental story. This is a race story. It’s always been a race story.

The pattern of where data centers get built follows the exact same cartography of disinvestment and disposability that has defined Black life in America since Reconstruction. Robert Bullard — the father of environmental justice — documented this architecture of harm back in 1990 in Dumping in Dixie. He showed how hazardous waste facilities, landfills, chemical plants, and polluting industries were systematically sited in Black communities. Not by accident. By design. Because those communities had been politically weakened by decades of disenfranchisement, economically hollowed out by redlining and capital flight, and socially rendered invisible by a media ecosystem that didn’t care what happened south of the highway.

That was the playbook then. The playbook hasn’t changed. The product has. Instead of a petrochemical plant, it’s a data center. Instead of toxic sludge, it’s diesel exhaust from backup generators and the constant hum of industrial cooling systems. But the targeting logic is identical: find the community with the least political power, the fewest resources to fight back, and the lowest likelihood of making the evening news.

Look at what happened in Prince William County, Virginia — one of the largest data center corridors in the world. The communities adjacent to those facilities have documented persistent noise pollution, diesel emissions from backup generators, and strain on local water and electrical infrastructure. When residents pushed back, they ran into the same wall communities of color always run into: the economic development narrative. The jobs argument. The tax base argument. The same arguments that were used to justify putting a highway through the middle of Black Bottom in Detroit, or a garbage incinerator next to public housing in Chester, Pennsylvania.

And let’s talk about those backup generators, because this is the health piece that is getting buried. Diesel exhaust from data center backup generators contains fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — that embeds itself in your lungs and enters your bloodstream. We’re talking about documented pathways to heart disease, lung disease, stroke, and premature death. The American Lung Association has been clear on this. The EPA has been clear on this. The science is not in dispute. What’s in dispute is whether anyone in power cares enough to act on it when the people breathing that air are Black and brown.

The Historical Playbook

If you understand the history of environmental racism in this country, none of this surprises you. It follows a lineage that is as American as the Constitution itself.

In 1982, residents of Warren County, North Carolina — a predominantly Black community — fought against the state’s decision to dump 6,000 truckloads of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls in their backyard. That protest, which saw over 500 arrests including Dr. Benjamin Chavis and Congressman Walter Fauntroy, is widely recognized as the birth of the environmental justice movement. The community lost that particular fight — the landfill was built — but the resistance catalyzed a national reckoning that led directly to the landmark 1987 United Church of Christ study, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which proved empirically what Black folks already knew: race was the single most significant predictor of where hazardous waste facilities were located. Not income. Not land value. Race.

President Clinton signed Executive Order 12898 in 1994, directing federal agencies to address environmental justice in minority and low-income populations. But executive orders are only as durable as the administration that issues them. The enforcement mechanisms have been gutted, restored, and gutted again depending on which party holds the White House. Meanwhile, the facilities keep getting built. The permits keep getting approved. The pattern keeps reproducing itself with new technology and the same old geography.

The data center boom is just the latest iteration of what Dorceta Taylor calls “the environmental justice framework” — the systematic distribution of environmental hazards along racial and socioeconomic lines. Taylor documented in Toxic Communities how zoning laws, land use decisions, and permitting processes function as mechanisms of racial sorting, ensuring that the communities least equipped to resist are the ones most likely to bear the burden.

The Water Crisis Within the Crisis

I want to come back to the water piece because I don’t think people fully grasp the scale of what’s happening.

When a data center consumes half a million gallons of water a day, that water is being drawn from the same municipal systems and aquifers that serve residential communities. In regions already experiencing drought or water stress — and climate change is making that an expanding category every year — data center water consumption directly competes with household water needs. This isn’t theoretical. This is happening right now in places like Mesa, Arizona, where residents have raised alarms about data center water permits being approved while the state faces historic drought conditions along the Colorado River Basin.

And here’s the structural piece that ties it all together: the communities most vulnerable to water scarcity are, once again, disproportionately communities of color. The water infrastructure crisis in this country — from Flint to Jackson to the Navajo Nation — maps onto the same racial geography as everything else we’ve been talking about. So when a data center moves into a water-stressed region and starts consuming hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, it’s not an equal-opportunity extraction. It deepens existing inequities that were already shaped by decades of racialized disinvestment.

Communities Fighting Back

But here’s what I want to leave y’all with, because the story of environmental racism in America has never been just a story of victimization. It has always, simultaneously, been a story of resistance.

Festus, Missouri is one example. But it’s not the only one. Across the country, communities are organizing against data center expansion using every tool available — from municipal elections to zoning board challenges to state-level legislative advocacy.

In Virginia, grassroots coalitions have pushed for stricter noise ordinances and emissions standards for data center facilities. In Georgia, community organizers have demanded environmental impact assessments before new data center permits are approved. In Oregon, environmental groups have challenged the water permits granted to large tech companies. These fights are happening in real time, and they are being led, disproportionately, by the same communities that have always been on the front lines of environmental justice: Black communities, Indigenous communities, working-class communities that understand what it means to have your health and your resources sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s profit.

The playbook that Festus used — direct electoral accountability — is one of the most powerful tools available. When elected officials understand that approving a facility the community doesn’t want will cost them their seat, the calculus changes. That’s democracy doing what democracy is supposed to do. And it shouldn’t take an extraordinary act of civic mobilization to make that happen, but in this country, for communities of color, it always has.

Policy That Matters

There are real policy interventions that could change the trajectory of this crisis. The EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice needs to be empowered — not just funded, but empowered with enforceable regulatory authority — to review data center siting decisions through an equity lens. The National Environmental Policy Act should require comprehensive environmental impact statements for any data center above a certain energy or water consumption threshold. State legislatures need to pass legislation mandating that data center developers conduct community health impact assessments and make those assessments public before a single permit is approved.

At the federal level, the Justice40 initiative — which commits to delivering 40% of the benefits of certain federal investments to disadvantaged communities — should be expanded to include data center infrastructure oversight. If the government is going to incentivize the construction of these facilities through tax breaks and infrastructure spending, then the communities bearing the environmental and health costs need to be at the table, not as an afterthought, but as the first voice heard.

And the tech companies themselves need to be held to account. The same corporations posting net-zero pledges and ESG reports are the ones building facilities that consume more electricity than entire nations. Facts over feelings — if your sustainability report says one thing and your energy consumption says another, the community has a right to call that what it is.

The Bigger Frame

This is what I mean when I say education is elevation. Understanding the data center crisis isn’t just about understanding technology or environmental science. It’s about understanding how power operates in this country. It’s about understanding that the same logic that put a chemical plant in Cancer Alley puts a server farm in a water-stressed Black community in the South. It’s about understanding that the systems we’re told are neutral — zoning laws, permitting processes, economic development incentives — are, in fact, operating exactly as they were designed to operate: to distribute risk downward and profit upward along racial lines.

The people of Festus understood that. They didn’t need a policy briefing or an academic lecture. They understood it because they live it. And they acted. That’s the model. That’s what fighting back looks like at the local level. From micro to macro, that’s how we get accountability with these folks.

Research over MeSearch. Facts over feelings. Feel me?

EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

This article — tracing the line from Warren County to Festus, from Cancer Alley to Data Center Alley, from Robert Bullard’s research to the backup generator running next to someone’s home right now — is the kind of work that doesn’t get funded by the same corporations building those data centers. It gets funded by you. Every paid subscription keeps this work independent, rigorous, and accountable to the community, not to advertisers or algorithms.

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

5 Key Takeaways

1. Data centers are an environmental justice crisis hiding in plain sight. These facilities consume more electricity than entire nations, drain hundreds of thousands of gallons of water per day, and emit diesel exhaust from backup generators that causes heart disease, lung disease, and stroke — and they are disproportionately sited near communities of color.

2. The siting of data centers follows the exact same racial geography as every other environmental hazard in American history. From toxic waste dumps to petrochemical corridors, the pattern documented by Robert Bullard in 1990 holds: race is the primary predictor of who lives next to industrial harm. Data centers are the latest product in a centuries-old playbook.

3. Festus, Missouri proved that local electoral accountability works. When every council member who voted for a data center the community opposed was voted out of office, it demonstrated the most direct and replicable form of community power — making elected officials pay a political price for ignoring the people they serve.

4. The regulatory framework is decades behind the technology. Data centers operate in a gray zone — consuming energy and water at industrial scale while being regulated as commercial buildings. Without mandatory environmental and health impact assessments, communities have no formal mechanism to evaluate what’s being imposed on them.

5. Environmental justice has always been, and remains, a racial justice issue. From Warren County in 1982 to Data Center Alley in 2026, the distribution of environmental harm in America is inseparable from the distribution of racial power. Understanding that connection is the first step toward changing it.

Bibliography / Related Readings

Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 1990. The foundational text of environmental justice scholarship. Bullard documents the systematic siting of hazardous waste facilities in Black communities across the American South, establishing that race — not income — is the primary predictor of environmental hazard proximity.

Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. NYU Press, 2014. Taylor expands the environmental justice framework to examine how zoning laws, land use decisions, and permitting processes function as mechanisms of racial sorting, producing disproportionate environmental burden for communities of color.

Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. Liveright, 2017. Essential for understanding how federal, state, and local government policies — including zoning — created and maintained residential segregation. Provides the legal and historical context for understanding why data centers are sited where they are.

United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice. Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. 1987. The landmark report that provided the first national empirical evidence that race was the strongest predictor of hazardous waste facility siting in the United States. A foundational document of the environmental justice movement.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodney’s analysis of the extractive relationship between Europe and Africa provides the framework for understanding the global dimension of data center expansion — how technological infrastructure reproduces colonial patterns of resource extraction.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism — the idea that capitalism has always been organized through racial hierarchy — is essential for understanding why the data center economy distributes its benefits and burdens along racial lines.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Grove Press, 1961. Fanon’s analysis of how colonial infrastructure is repurposed under neocolonial conditions provides theoretical grounding for understanding data center expansion in the Global South as a continuation of extractive logics.

Sze, Julie. Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice. MIT Press, 2007. Sze examines how environmental racism operates in urban contexts — relevant for understanding how data center siting in metropolitan areas follows the same political dynamics that have concentrated environmental harm in communities of color.

Pulido, Laura. “Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 1 (2000): 12-40. Pulido’s influential article argues that environmental racism must be understood not just through intentional siting decisions but through the structural dynamics of white privilege and urban development — a framework directly applicable to data center corridors.

International Energy Agency. “Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks.” IEA Energy System Reports (updated annually). The authoritative source for data on global data center energy consumption, providing the empirical foundation for claims about electricity usage relative to national consumption levels.

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

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

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Margie, Millie Jones-Cowles, Allie, Jennifer Jones, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

I need y’all to sit with something for a minute. Really sit with it. Because what I’m about to lay out is not just history. It’s a blueprint. It’s a pattern that connects the destruction of Greenwood in 1921 to the murder of Terrence Crutcher in 2016 to the bombs dropping on Iran right now. And if you can’t see the thread, I need you to stay with me, because by the end of this, you will.

I recently had a conversation with Attorney DeMario Solomon-Simmons — a national civil rights attorney who has been representing survivors and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre for almost 30 years. His wife is a descendant. He’s Muscogee Creek. He played football at the University of Oklahoma, got three degrees from OU just like I did. And let me tell y’all — when this brother speaks, he’s not giving opinions. He’s giving receipts. The kind of receipts that hold up in federal court.

And the first receipt he dropped changed how I understood the entire story.

Before There Was a Massacre, There Was a Freedom Mind State

See, most people want to start the Tulsa Race Massacre story at Dick Rowland and the elevator. That ain’t it though. You can’t understand why Greenwood was destroyed if you don’t understand why Greenwood existed. And the story of why Greenwood existed goes back almost a hundred years before the massacre even happened.

Before Oklahoma became a state in 1907, it was Indian Territory. We’re talking about the 1830s, when the United States forcibly removed the five southeastern tribes — Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Cherokee, and Muscogee Creek — and marched them along what we know as the Trail of Tears. But here’s what a lot of people don’t realize: a significant portion of those on the Trail of Tears were Black. They were enslaved by those nations, and they looked like you and me. Attorney Solomon-Simmons’ own ancestor, Cal Tom, was on that trail.

When the Civil War ended and enslavement ended within those nations, something extraordinary happened. Black people in Indian Territory were living free and independent for fifty years before Oklahoma even became a state. Fifty years. While Black folks in Mississippi and Alabama and across the South were looking for a place to be free — going to Mexico, going to Canada, going back to Africa, going to the Caribbean — the promised land was right there in Indian Territory. Because there were already free Black people there. Already Black towns. Already infrastructure.

Oklahoma had the most all-Black towns in the history of this country. Boley. Tatum. Redbird. Summit. And all of those Black towns fed into the big city. Greenwood was the metropolis. Attorney Solomon-Simmons put it like this: in New York, they call Manhattan “the city.” Well, Greenwood was the city for all those Black towns.

And here’s where the pattern starts.

Tulsa Was the Oil Capital of the World. Let That Marinate.

At the time, Tulsa was the oil capital of the world. I said it. The oil capital of the world. And a lot of that oil money, a lot of that land, was possessed by Black people. So now you’ve got this collision: a freedom mind state Black community, more Black millionaires per capita than any other place in the history of this nation, more Black professionals per capita than anywhere in the country — and then statehood arrives in 1907 and brings white supremacy with it.

The very first law of the state of Oklahoma? Senate Bill 1. Segregated railroad cars and phone booths. The first law. Not infrastructure. Not commerce. Segregation. Jim Crow became the founding principle of the state.

So you’ve got free, independent, wealthy Black folks who’ve been building for half a century, and now you’ve got a state apparatus designed to subjugate them. That tension — between Black freedom and white supremacist governance — is what produced the massacre.

Y’all starting to hear the pattern?

The Dick Rowland Story Was the Spark. The Land Was the Motive.

In 1921, a nineteen-year-old Black shoeshine boy named Dick Rowland got on an elevator with a white elevator operator named Sarah Page. We don’t actually know what happened. But the allegation was that he tried to assault her. They arrested him, took him downtown, and a white mob formed calling to lynch him.

And this is where the story of Greenwood becomes the story of love. Because about a hundred of the richest, most powerful Black men in the community — not just in Tulsa, but in the nation — many of them World War I veterans, strapped up with their military training and their weapons, and went downtown to protect Dick Rowland’s life.

He wasn’t rich. He didn’t own businesses or land. He was a shoeshine boy. But he was one of theirs. That’s community love. That’s one of the five Think Greenwood Principles. It didn’t matter that Dick Rowland didn’t have wealth. What mattered was that no Black man was going to be lynched on their watch.

A hundred brothers went downtown and faced a mob of 1,500 to 2,000 whites. They went to the sheriff and said they were there to help protect Rowland. The sheriff told them to leave. They stayed. And as they were walking away from the courthouse, an old white man in the mob said to what we believe was O.B. Mann, a World War I veteran: “Nigga, what you going to do with that gun?” And O.B. Mann said: “I’m going to use it if I have to.”

That white man tried to take the gun. The gun went off. And all hell broke loose.

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36 Hours. 25,000 Attackers. And the City Gave Them a License to Kill.

The Black men retreated back across the train tracks into Greenwood and set up defensive perimeters. And this is the part of the story that doesn’t get told enough. These brothers fought. Many of them had World War I military training, and they held off the mob for over twelve hours. The first twelve hours? Greenwood was winning.

But here’s where the state enters the picture. The mob of about 2,000 whites was deputized by the city of Tulsa. They weren’t just given permission. They were armed by the city. Walter White — not the TV character, the NAACP executive who happened to be in Tulsa investigating a separate lynching — this brother looked like a white man. So he went and got himself deputized with the mob to document what was happening. He later wrote about it in The Nation magazine. He said when he was deputized, a white man turned to him and said: “Now I can kill any nigga I want and the law is behind me.”

The receipt.

The National Guard was called in. They brought machine guns. And around five o’clock the next morning, a whistle blew, and 20,000 to 25,000 whites poured into Greenwood. That number is not mine. That’s from the National Guard’s own after-action reports. They got on top of buildings and on top of the standpipe and mowed down the defenses with machine guns. Then they came into Greenwood and they looted. They burned. They raped. They killed.

When the smoke cleared: 1,550 homes and businesses burned to the ground. Over 8,000 people displaced. 3,000 people never heard from again. The survivors — about 8,000 — were placed in what they called at the time internment camps. You couldn’t leave unless a white person signed you out and put a green sticker on you saying they were responsible for you. And if you weren’t working for a private white employer, you were forced to clean up the destruction they created. For free.

In other words, they effectively re-enslaved them.

The Language Was the Second Weapon

And they called it a “Tulsa Race Riot.”

Why? Because these Black people were sophisticated. They understood business. Many of them had insurance policies. But those insurance policies had riot clauses that would invalidate the coverage. So by calling a government-backed massacre a “riot,” they ensured that Black people couldn’t collect a single dime. The language wasn’t just inaccurate. It was a legal weapon designed to prevent financial recovery.

Attorney Solomon-Simmons has spent almost thirty years fighting to change that language from “riot” to “massacre.” Because what I just described to y’all was not a riot. It was a planned, state-sanctioned campaign of terror, destruction, and dispossession. The historical record confirms they wanted the land of Greenwood to expand the industrial base of downtown Tulsa because the oil industry was booming. Dick Rowland was the spark. The land was always the motive.

Feel me?

The Beneficiaries Are Still Operating Today

So who benefited? The city of Tulsa and private business owners who took the land and developed further industry for the oil companies. The insurance companies that refused to pay property claims — companies like Chubb, AIG, and Hartford, many of which are still in existence today. They received premiums for years and when it came time to pay, they didn’t pay.

Banks benefited too. When your bank book burned up in the massacre and you went to the bank to claim your deposits, they told you they didn’t know if it was really your money. Solomon-Simmons’ team did over 250 hours of research and found the banks that swooped up all the institutions from that era. Two major banks that are still operating today: BOK and Chase.

These are the beneficiaries of the massacre. And they are still profiting.

And the land? Greenwood was four square miles. Almost forty city blocks. It was bigger than Harlem, New York. When you go to Greenwood in 2026, you see one block of the original buildings that were rebuilt right after the massacre. And everything around it — the high-rises, the ballpark, the banks, the hotels, the office buildings — none of it is owned by descendants of Greenwood. None of it is owned by African Americans. Zero.

From Dr. A.C. Jackson to Terrence Crutcher: Hands Up, Still Murdered

Dr. A.C. Jackson was considered the best Black surgeon in the nation at the time of the massacre. He came out of his home with his hands up. A white judge, Judge Oliphant, who was a friend of Dr. Jackson’s, tried to save him. He told the mob: “Do not harm this man. Do you know who this is? This is Dr. A.C. Jackson.” And they said: “We don’t give a damn who this nigga is.” They shot him twice in the stomach. The greatest Black surgeon in the nation bled out over five hours in an internment camp.

Now fast forward to September 16, 2016. Terrence Crutcher, a student at Tulsa Community College, was coming home when he was encountered on the side of the road by Officer Betty Jo Shelby. He’s on video walking away from her. His hands are up. He has no weapon. She shot him in the chest. And then she and the other officers on scene — including her husband, who was in the helicopter above calling Terrence “a bad dude” — consoled each other while Terrence bled out on the ground without medical assistance.

Here’s what I didn’t know until my conversation with Attorney Solomon-Simmons: Terrence Crutcher was a descendant of the Tulsa Race Massacre. His great-grandmother was Rebecca Brown Crutcher. His twin sister is Dr. Tiffany Crutcher, who now runs the Crutcher Foundation and the Black Wall Street Legacy Fest.

Dr. A.C. Jackson. Hands up. Murdered. 1921.

Terrence Crutcher. Hands up. Murdered. 2016.

Same city. Same pattern. A hundred years apart.

Let that marinate.

The Legal Fight Is Still Happening Right Now

Betty Jo Shelby was found not guilty at her criminal trial in 2017. Then she got a job in Rogers County. Then she went on a national speaking tour teaching officers how to survive being accused of shooting a citizen. She commodified Black death and built a whole career out of it. The community had to organize just to shut that down.

The Crutcher family filed a civil lawsuit. The case was dismissed in 2023 when the district court granted qualified immunity — that legal shield that protects rogue officers from accountability when they violate constitutional rights. But Attorney Solomon-Simmons and his team appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. They argued the case in Denver in May 2025. And on March 30, 2026 — just over a week ago — the 10th Circuit agreed with them. They overturned the qualified immunity. They affirmed what should have been obvious: you cannot shoot someone with their hands in the air. That’s been the law of the land since Tennessee v. Garner in 1985.

The case now goes back to district court. If the city doesn’t settle, it goes to trial. Attorney Solomon-Simmons says co-counsel includes Karen Portlock at Gibson Dunn — one of the biggest law firms in the world — and Attorney Ben Crump.

This fight is not over.

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The Domestic and the International Are the Same Blueprint

I want y’all to hold something else. Because while we were having this conversation about Greenwood, America was bombing Iran. And the parallels are not accidental.

In the 1920s, the American government destabilized a region within its own borders to make it so the inhabitants could no longer control the natural resources. The oil industry was booming, and they wanted that land. In 2026, America is doing the same thing internationally — trying to control a region because it believes the natural resources should be dictated by American, British, and Israeli interests. Trump even said it. They want the oil.

Attorney Solomon-Simmons made this connection directly. He said when you start talking about bombing and wiping out a civilization, that means something specific to someone from Greenwood. Because his people were bombed. They tried to wipe out his civilization. And just like in Tulsa, where they used a fake narrative about Dick Rowland assaulting a white woman when the real motive was land, America internationally uses narratives about security and terrorism when the real motive is resources.

At the end of the day, it’s all about resources. It’s all about power. Domestically and internationally, the question is always the same: who gets to own the land? Who gets to dictate the land? And the answer, historically, has always been determined by who has the capacity for violence and the legal infrastructure to justify it.

This is what I mean when I talk about how whiteness, specifically descendants of Europeans, operates on the belief that they have dominion over natural resources. Meaning: if we don’t have control over the resources, we believe the world will go into complete chaos. So this justifies us creating chaos to get the resources that we say not having will create chaos. Read that again. That’s the logic. That’s the circular justification. And it’s the same logic in Greenwood in 1921 and in Iran in 2026.

Stop Saying We Can’t Work Together. Stop Saying We’re Our Own Worst Enemy.

Attorney Solomon-Simmons said something in our conversation that I need everybody to internalize. He said there are three lies that Black people have swallowed from white supremacy that we need to stop repeating immediately.

One: that we don’t work together and aren’t unified. That is a falsehood. By empirical studies, Black people actually have more unity than any other ethnic group in this nation based upon our shared history. Greenwood itself is the proof. A hundred of the richest Black men in the community risked their lives for a shoeshine boy because he was one of theirs. That’s unity. Stop saying we don’t have it.

Two: that we are our own worst enemy. How can you be your own worst enemy when you have a 500-year enemy of white supremacy that is killing, destroying, and doing everything it can to undermine you? Individual achievement will never overcome structural violence. We have to change the structures. You never want to talk about the bucket the crabs are in. You just want to blame the crabs for fighting in the bucket.

Three: that we’re not our ancestors. When people say “I’m not my ancestors,” Solomon-Simmons’ response is perfect. He says: “You’re right. You’re not your ancestors. Because your ancestors went through so much more and they were able to overcome. They went through the Nadir. They went through Jim Crow. They went through enslavement. They went through redlining and lynchings and were still strong enough for your Black butt to be here today.”

When you say you’re not your ancestors, you’re telling on yourself. You’re saying you don’t know your history and you don’t respect your history. Our ancestors endured obstacles and opposition far beyond what we face, and they got us here. Honor that.

Greenwood Was Not Just a Place. It Was a State of Mind.

Attorney Solomon-Simmons’ book, Redeemer Nation: The 100-Year-Old Battle for the Soul of America, is coming out May 12th. And in it, he makes a point that I think is critical for where we are right now. He says America does not have a soul. America has never had a soul, because it was built on the exploitation of African labor and the genocide of Native Americans. The book is about how we get to a place where we can actually have one. And that can only happen through reparatory justice.

He also talks about the five Think Greenwood Principles: community love, freedom mind state, ownership, wealth circulation, and willful resilience. And he’s clear — when he says ownership, he’s not just talking about tangible assets. He’s talking about owning our own mind, owning our own history, owning our own culture. Owning our own everything.

Greenwood was not just a physical location. It was a state of mind. And that state of mind is what we need to rebuild.

Through his nonprofit, Justice for Greenwood, there are concrete ways to engage. The We Are Greenwood (WAG) program is doing genealogy and oral histories — over 250 descendants verified, over 100 oral histories completed. The Legacy Protection Program (LPP) provides free estate planning, free probate services, and free nuisance litigation for verified descendants in northeast Oklahoma. The Greenwood 11,000 campaign — named for the approximately 11,000 residents of Greenwood at the time of the massacre — is mobilizing people to download toolkits, complete workbooks with their families, hold discussion groups, and engage in participatory action.

Paying reparations is not radical. Refusing to pay what you owe is radical.

Facts over feelings.

Research over MeSearch.

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Think about what you just read. The insurance companies that called a massacre a “riot” to avoid paying Black families are still operating today. The banks that kept Black deposits after the bank books burned are still in business. The descendants are still fighting for justice in 2026. This is the kind of history that is being actively erased from classrooms right now — and the only thing standing between erasure and education is independent work like this.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Greenwood’s Destruction Was About Land and Oil, Not Dick Rowland. The narrative of Dick Rowland assaulting a white woman was the pretext, not the cause. The historical record confirms that white Tulsa wanted Greenwood’s land to expand the downtown industrial base during an oil boom. The same resource-extraction logic operates today in American foreign policy.

2. The Language “Race Riot” Was a Legal Weapon, Not Just a Misnomer. Calling the massacre a “riot” was a deliberate strategy to activate riot clauses in insurance policies, ensuring Black families could never collect on their claims. Naming matters — it’s not just about historical accuracy; it’s about who gets compensated and who doesn’t.

3. The Corporate Beneficiaries of the Massacre Are Still Operating. Insurance companies that refused to pay claims, banks that kept Black deposits after bank books burned, and businesses that developed on stolen Greenwood land continue to operate and profit in 2026. Structural violence doesn’t end with the violence — it compounds through generations of accumulated advantage.

4. The Line from 1921 to 2016 Is Direct and Documented. Terrence Crutcher — a descendant of the Tulsa Race Massacre — was murdered by police with his hands up in the same city where Dr. A.C. Jackson was murdered with his hands up 95 years earlier. Qualified immunity is the modern legal mechanism that provides the same impunity that deputization provided in 1921.

5. Greenwood Was Not Just a Place — It Was a State of Mind That Must Be Rebuilt. The five Think Greenwood Principles — community love, freedom mind state, ownership, wealth circulation, and willful resilience — represent an ideology of Black self-determination that predated and survived the massacre. Rebuilding Greenwood means rebuilding that consciousness, not just physical structures.

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

Solomon-Simmons, DeMario. Redeemer Nation: The 100-Year-Old Battle for the Soul of America. (2026)

Ellsworth, Scott. Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Louisiana State University Press (1982).

Messer, Chris M., et al. The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Politics of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan (2021).

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. Doubleday (2017).

White, Walter. “The Eruption of Tulsa.” The Nation, June 29, 1921. Hirsch, James S. Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy. Houghton Mifflin (2002).

Madigan, Tim. The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. St. Martin’s Press (2001).

Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission. (2001).

Gates, Henry Louis Jr. “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule.’” PBS: The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.

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

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