Education is Elevation

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What Actually Happened, Because the Headline Lied to Me Too

The Lindsey Graham cake drama I thought was about some random professor at Indiana University. Come to find out, y’all, it’s about Elizabeth Booker Houston. I’ve been seeing these old headlines on my Facebook page off and on, and I did not read or pay attention after the headlines. Congratulations, lawmakers want all you professors fired over a Lindsey Graham cake. I thought, like, damn, that’s crazy. My homegirl posted this on social media, and some professor copied off of her, and now she’s about to get fired. Damn.

No. They calling her to be fired for this cake.

Let me tell you why that opening paragraph matters more than the joke inside of it. I am a person who reads for a living, who teaches for a living, who has spent years in adult higher education telling grown folks that the headline is a marketing instrument and not a finding of fact, and even I scrolled past this thing four or five times without ever clicking. That is not a personal failure. That is the design working exactly the way it was engineered to work. The headline says professor. The headline says Indiana. The headline says fired. The headline does not say lawyer, does not say public health professional, does not say adjunct making about five thousand dollars a year for one course in food and drug law, does not say Memphis, does not say the woman in question buried a brother who was killed in a shooting in the Edge District in December of 2017 and has been begging that particular chamber of Congress to do something about gun violence ever since. The headline gives you a category and lets your assumptions fill in the rest, and the category it gave you was professor, which in the current climate is a synonym for suspect.

Watch it run. Elizabeth Booker Houston holds a JD and an MPH from the University of Memphis. She teaches food and drug law at the IU McKinney School of Law. She is a lawyer, a public health professional, and a comedian, and she was hired by institutions that were entirely aware of her public presence, because she has been publicly loud for years and none of it was hidden. Now go read how she got described. A failed comedian. A stunt. Grotesque political theater. Tasteless. Somebody who should get mental health counseling as part of her severance, which came from a sitting member of Congress.

Here is the record. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on July 11, 2026, at the age of 71, of an aortic dissection. His sister, Darline Graham Nordone, was sworn in to finish out the term. On July 14, Elizabeth Booker Houston posted an Instagram video of herself and another creator setting a bakery sheet cake down among the flowers outside Graham’s former Senate office. The cake carried his Senate headshot, a cross made of blue frosted roses, and the word congratudolences, which is a mashup of congratulations and condolences. She then posted the photo to X with a message addressed to the sister now holding the seat. She said in the video that she would not be praying for his salvation.

Then came the calls. Congressman William Timmons of South Carolina tagged George Washington University, where she guest lectures, and asked about disciplinary action. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana said IU should fire her immediately. Representatives Marlin Stutzman and Erin Houchin joined him. Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith of Indiana went the furthest and said that if Indiana University did not fire her, the Indiana General Assembly should withhold state funding from the school, and he wrapped that threat in a complaint about why public education is failing and no longer respected.

A sitting statewide executive officer publicly instructed a public university to fire a lecturer for constitutionally protected political speech, and attached a funding threat to the instruction, while explaining that his motivation was concern for the health of public education. That is the whole ballgame in one sentence. That is a man pissing on us and telling us it’s raining.

II. Patterson Already Ran This Play

Now here is where I need you to sit up, because this is not new, this is not novel, this is not some unprecedented moment in the culture war. This is a rerun. This exact script was performed sixty six years ago and the state of Alabama held the pen.

In February and March of 1960, students at Alabama State College in Montgomery staged sit ins at the segregated snack bar in the county courthouse. Governor John Malcolm Patterson did not go after the students first. He went after the money. He leaned on the college president, H. Councill Trenholm, a Black man running a Black state institution that lived and died on an appropriation controlled by white legislators, and he made the terms plain. Purge the faculty or lose your job. On March 26, 1960, Trenholm announced he would clean out the disloyal faculty members. The Montgomery Advertiser ran it the next morning.

Who got caught in that net. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, chairman of the history department, a University of Chicago PhD, former curator of the Schomburg Collection, historian of the Montgomery Improvement Association, biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. He was fired in June of 1960. Olean Underwood was fired. And then there were the women. Mary Fair Burks, chair of the English department, founding president of the Women’s Political Council. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, the WPC president who mimeographed the leaflets that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott off a college machine in the middle of the night. Eleven faculty members resigned rather than wait for the axe. Burks and Robinson resigned at the close of the spring semester. Robinson had already had a rock thrown through her window by a police officer and acid poured on her car. State evaluators had been sitting in on classes to watch instructors, which is a beautiful euphemism for surveillance.

King wrote Trenholm’s actions off as cowardly, and said he had hoped the man would stand up to the governor and the board of education and refuse to fire eleven faculty members who had committed no crime and no act of sedition, and that if he had done so he would have gained support across the nation that he never dreamed of. The American Association of University Professors censured Alabama State for firing Reddick without due process. That censure sat on the institution for twenty years.

Twenty years. A Black college carried a professional stain for two decades because a white governor wanted a Black historian gone and used the appropriation as the crowbar.

Then, and this is the part that should make the hair on your arm stand up, that same Governor Patterson is a thread in the origin story of modern American free speech law. When the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King ran a fundraising advertisement in the New York Times in March of 1960 about the treatment of those Alabama students, Patterson and other Alabama officials filed libel suits. One of those suits, brought by Montgomery Commissioner L. B. Sullivan, became New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, decided in 1964, the case that gave this country the actual malice standard and made robust criticism of public officials survivable in court.

So here’s your through line. The free speech architecture that conservatives invoke every single day, the doctrine they wave around at every campus, was built in a courthouse out of white Southern officials trying to punish Black people for describing what Alabama was doing to Black students. Black speech under white state pressure is not a side plot in First Amendment history. Black speech under white state pressure is the load bearing wall. Apply Derrick Bell here. Interest convergence tells us that Black people get a legal victory when that victory happens to serve a broader white interest, and the press freedom the whole country enjoys today converged with a Black freedom struggle that needed a national newspaper to be able to print the truth about Montgomery without being sued into silence.

And now, in 2026, the descendants of the people who filed those suits are demanding that a public university fire a Black woman for a cake, and threatening the appropriation to make sure it happens.

Crazy how that works.

Go back further if you want. Ida B. Wells was running the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1892 when she wrote about the lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart at the People’s Grocery, and named the lie at the center of lynching. A mob destroyed her press and she could not go home to Memphis. Elizabeth Booker Houston is from Memphis. Ida B. Wells could not return to Memphis for describing how Memphis killed her friend. A hundred and thirty four years later a woman from that same city is being told her employment is contingent on how gently she speaks about a dead senator. The technology changed. The press was a printing press, now the press is an Instagram post. The instrument of punishment was a mob, now the instrument of punishment is a line item in a state budget. The logic never moved an inch.

III. The Law Is Not Ambiguous, They Just Hoping You Don’t Know It

Let’s do the law, because I am not going to argue vibes with people who claim to be the party of law and order.

Number one. Indiana University is a public institution. That means it is a state actor. That means the First Amendment binds it. This is not a debate. When IU acts as an employer against an employee for that employee’s speech, the Constitution is in the room.

Number two. The governing framework is Pickering v. Board of Education, decided in 1968, where the Supreme Court held that a public school teacher could not be fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing the school board’s handling of money. The Court set up a balancing test. Was the employee speaking as a citizen on a matter of public concern, and if so, does the employer’s interest in efficient operation outweigh the employee’s interest in speaking. Connick v. Myers in 1983 sharpened the public concern requirement. Garcetti v. Ceballos in 2006 carved out speech made pursuant to official job duties.

Now run Booker Houston through that machine. She was not on campus. She was not teaching. She was not speaking pursuant to any duty owed to Indiana University. The video never mentions IU. She was a private citizen standing on public property in Washington, D.C., commenting on the political legacy of a United States senator, which is about as close to the molten core of protected political speech as a human being can physically stand. Steve Sanders, who teaches constitutional law at IU’s own Maurer School of Law, said out loud that he found the video juvenile and that he would not want to associate with a person who behaved that way, and then said in the same breath that she almost certainly could not be fired for it, and that a court would very likely find retaliation against her to be a First Amendment violation, and that none of it bears on her competence to teach food and drug law.

That is what an honest person sounds like. He does not like it. He says he does not like it. He also says the state cannot touch her for it. Two things can be true.

Number three, and this is the one that should terrify anybody who has ever set foot in a public classroom. The Beckwith threat is not a lesser offense than the firing. It is a greater one. Threatening to strip the appropriation from an entire university unless it terminates one specific person for one specific instance of political speech is the state using the budget to accomplish what the Constitution forbids it to accomplish directly. Courts have a name for that family of moves. Unconstitutional conditions. You cannot make a public benefit contingent on the surrender of a constitutional right. And Keyishian v. Board of Regents in 1967, which finally killed New York’s Feinberg Law loyalty oath regime, said in plain language that academic freedom is a special concern of the First Amendment and that our Constitution does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

A pall of orthodoxy. In 1967 the Court was worried about a pall. In 2026 a lieutenant governor is standing on the quad with the light switch in his hand telling the whole faculty he’ll cut the power.

Number four. Her delivering that cake was, first, legally done on public taxpayer funded property. And number two, it’s protected speech. The Republicans are trying to say this is the worst thing they’ve ever said. I feel like it’s laughable considering everything they’ve done in their past and what they do.

IV. Every Accusation Is a Confession

The part that gets me is the volume of the free speech noise these same people have been making since 2015.

Let’s pull the September 2025 tape. After Charlie Kirk was killed at Utah Valley University, a wave of terminations moved through American higher education inside of two weeks. Darren Michael, a tenured theatre professor at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, reshared a two year old Newsweek headline quoting Kirk’s own 2023 remarks about gun deaths. He added no commentary of his own. Senator Marsha Blackburn publicly tagged the university and asked what they were going to do. Two days later he was fired. The university’s president called the post insensitive and disrespectful.

Now watch the ending, because this is the receipt that closes the argument. Austin Peay’s own Faculty Senate reviewed the matter and concluded by September 22, 2025, that the administration had not followed its own Policy on Academic Tenure and Termination of Faculty Members for Adequate Cause. No notice. No hearing committee. No formal determination. And in January of 2026, the university agreed to reinstate Darren Michael, pay him five hundred thousand dollars, reimburse counseling costs, and issue a statement acknowledging it had failed to follow its own procedures.

Half a million dollars of Tennessee public money, spent to buy back the mistake of firing a man for a post, because a United States senator wanted a scalp on a Tuesday.

That was not the only one. Iowa State fired a financial aid advisor. The University of Mississippi fired an administrator. Middle Tennessee State fired a staff member. East Tennessee State put two faculty on administrative leave. Clemson suspended a professor and pulled two more from teaching. The Iowa Board of Regents ordered every state university to investigate employee social media inside of two weeks and authorized presidents to fire on the spot. And Congresswoman Claudia Tenney demanded that Syracuse University fire two professors, Jenn Jackson and Farhana Sultana, or face the loss of federal funding.

Same play. Same funding threat. Same two week window. Different corpse.

So when Booker Houston pointed out that the halls of GOP offices are plastered with Charlie Kirk personas and that nobody mentioned free speech, she was not being cute. She was reading the ledger out loud. Nobody mentioned free speech, and I’m not surprised.

I’m not going to point out that the disrespectful freedom of speech warriors that always say it’s about their rights are quick to say they don’t matter as soon as they feel like you’ve done something disrespectful to them. I’m not going to point that out.

And I would be doing you a disservice if I did not put the funeral on the table, because the timeline is unkind to these people. On July 28, 2026, at Washington National Cathedral, at Lindsey Graham’s own funeral, in front of his own family, the President of the United States stood at the lectern, said that virtually everyone liked Lindsey, stopped himself, said well, not everybody, but it sounds good, and got a laugh. He recounted the story of reading Graham’s personal cellphone number out loud to millions of people in 2015 and then recited the number again from the pulpit for anybody who wanted to give it a shot. He joked about Graham and war, which Sean Hannity then had to get up and clean up in the very next eulogy.

I’m not sure if this was before or after he fell asleep, but they talking about vile behind a cake.

Nobody drafted a letter to a university. Nobody called for a job. Nobody threatened an appropriation. Because the rule was never about decorum. The rule is about who gets to be irreverent and who gets to be employed, and those two categories have a color and they have a gender.

Every accusation is a confession.

V. THE SYLLABUS IS WRITTEN IN THE APPROPRIATIONS BILL

What this actually does to education

I want to move off the personality and get to the part of this that is my actual field, because the individual outcome here is almost beside the point. Whether Indiana University fires Elizabeth Booker Houston or not, the damage to the institution is already done, and it was done the moment the lieutenant governor connected her name to the state appropriation in public.

Here is the mechanism, and it is not complicated.

American higher education has been quietly restructured over the past fifty years into a contingent labor system. The tenure line, which exists for exactly one reason, to make a scholar economically unkillable so that the scholarship stays honest, has been steadily replaced by adjunct and contingent appointments that carry no due process, no hearing committee, no notice requirement, and no security. Booker Houston teaches one course. She earns roughly five thousand dollars a year for it. She has said publicly that losing it would not be a financial hardship, and she is right, and that is precisely why she can talk. Now think about the tens of thousands of contingent faculty in this country for whom that five thousand dollars is the difference between the light bill getting paid and not.

Do you understand what I am telling you. The university does not need to fire anybody to win. The threat is the product. The firing is just the advertisement.

This is what the literature calls the chilling effect, and it does not show up in a lawsuit because the whole point of a chill is that the speech never gets made, so there is no plaintiff, no docket number, no ruling, no press release. There is only the syllabus that quietly loses a unit. The guest speaker who quietly does not get invited. The dissertation topic that quietly gets swapped for something safer. The junior scholar who quietly does not write the op ed. You cannot subpoena an absence.

Understand the funding lever ain’t not a new invention either. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 forced Southern states to either integrate their land grant institutions or establish separate ones for Black students, and every single Southern state chose separate, and then underfunded those institutions for the next hundred and thirty years, and we are still litigating that gap right now. Tennessee State University is owed somewhere in the neighborhood of two point one billion dollars in land grant matching funds that the state simply declined to send. The appropriation has always been the leash. Patterson knew it in 1960. Beckwith knows it in 2026. The only thing that changed is that the leash is now being yanked in front of cameras and called accountability.

Most of what gets called a free speech crisis on campus is actually a labor crisis wearing a free speech costume. You want faculty who will speak. Then you have to build institutions where speaking does not cost a person their livelihood. Everything else is theater.

VI. FUNGIBLE ON BOTH ENDS OF THE AISLE

The intersectional material impacts

Now let me get to the part of this that made me sit down and write instead of scroll.

Because the Republicans coming for her was predictable. The Republicans coming for her is a Tuesday. The part that is actually instructive is what happened on the other side.

Booker Houston has said that a caucus of both progressive, anti AIPAC Democrats and establishment Democrats cowered to MAGA and pulled her from an event because Republicans complained about a Lindsey Graham cake. Her framing is the one worth keeping. A conglomeration of progressives and establishment Democrats casting her to the side because y’all ain’t want no bad press.

I think it’s preposterous. And I think it’s clarifying.

This is why I roll my eyes at the DSA plus establishment plus progressive infighting. These people fight each other over what they feel safer on, but anytime they can come to a collective agreement about the fungibility of a Black woman, this is what happens. And I think it go both ways too. Either we talking about trying to use a Black woman to make sure you don’t get nothing, or throwing away a Black woman to make sure you don’t get nothing.

Fungibility is not my word. It is Frank Wilderson’s word, and Saidiya Hartman’s word before the term got its Afropessimist frame, and it means something very specific and very ugly. To be fungible is to be interchangeable. To be a unit of value that can be substituted, transferred, deployed, or discarded according to somebody else’s calculation, without your own interior life ever entering the math. Hartman writes about the enslaved body in Scenes of Subjection as available, as a vessel that can be filled with whatever meaning the observer needs at that moment, including empathy, including outrage, including entertainment. Hortense Spillers gave us the distinction between the body and the flesh, and the flesh is what remains when personhood has been stripped away and the thing that is left can be used.

Watch how cleanly the frame fits this week.

When the Democratic Party needs a Black woman, the Black woman is a credential. She is the proof of coalition. She is the face at the convention, the credentialed social justice influencer, the viral moment that demonstrates the party has range. That is fungibility as an asset.

When the Black woman becomes inconvenient, when Republicans complain, when the press might turn, the same body converts instantly into a liability and gets removed from the program. Same person. Same politics. Same commitments. The only variable that changed is somebody else’s risk assessment. That is fungibility as a write off.

Kimberlé Crenshaw named the structural version of this in 1989 with DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where five Black women sued and the court told them they could bring a race claim or a sex claim but not a claim as Black women, because there was no category for the specific place they were standing. That is the same problem here in a different costume. The Republicans are not disciplining her as a woman. The Democrats are not discarding her as a Black person. Both are acting on her position at the intersection, where she is simultaneously loud enough to be useful and expendable enough to be dropped, and neither institution has a line item that acknowledges the position exists.

Moya Bailey gave us misogynoir precisely for this texture, the specific way anti Black racism and misogyny fuse into a single mechanism directed at Black women. And here is the receipt that ties the whole bow. Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist, the same organizational ecosystem generating these firing campaigns, lists Moya Bailey herself. The scholar who built the vocabulary for this exact harm is on the list of professors targeted by the movement inflicting it. You cannot write that. That writes itself.

The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because our freedom would require the destruction of every system of oppression at once. Read it backwards and you get the diagnostic that matters here. The treatment of the Black woman is the tell. When a coalition wants to know what a coalition actually believes, it should look at what it does with its Black women when the room gets hot. Not what it says at the convention. What it does on the Thursday afternoon when a Republican congressman sends a tweet.

The material impact is not abstract. It is a lost booking, a lost fee, a lost audience, a lost professional relationship, a lost line on a bio. It is the two hundred and fifty thousand followers who now watch a person get quietly removed from a program and learn the lesson without anyone having to teach it. And most of all it is the Black woman scholar somewhere in this country reading this story right now, untenured, on a one year contract, in a red state, calculating whether the thing she knows is true is worth what it will cost to say.

That is the yield. That is what this operation is producing. Not one firing. A generation of qualified silence.

VII. Two Things Can Be True

Let me be responsible with you, because I do not run a church of convenient conclusions.

Two things can be true. You can find the cake tasteless. You can believe there is something corrosive in the public celebration of any human being’s death, that grief should have a perimeter around it, that a sister burying a brother should not have to see a sheet cake in her feed. You can hold that, sincerely, as a moral position, and I will not fight you on it, and Steve Sanders held exactly that position out loud while defending her rights.

And at the same time, all of that is a question of taste, and taste is not jurisdiction. The state does not get a taste veto. The instant a lieutenant governor attaches a university’s appropriation to a citizen’s opinion about a dead politician, we are no longer discussing manners. We are discussing whether the state can purchase silence with public money.

The other honest thing. She was not silent about her reasoning, and it is not what the coverage suggested. She has said her brother was murdered, that people were cruel to her family in the aftermath, and that people like Graham treated families like hers like dirt while they begged that body to meaningfully address gun violence. You do not have to agree with the cake to understand that the woman was not performing a bit. She was answering a decade of being ignored with the only instrument she had left, which was three minutes of attention and a bakery.

And her own assessment of the response is the sharpest line anybody produced in the whole affair. She said they are hypocritical, that they have been crying about censorship and free speech for years, and they could not handle a piece of cake.

They couldn’t handle a piece of cake.

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FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The funding threat is the constitutional violation, not the potential firing. Attaching a public university’s appropriation to the termination of one employee for protected political speech is the state doing indirectly what Pickering and Keyishian forbid it to do directly. The firing would be the symptom. The threat is the disease.

2. This is a 1960 rerun with a new cast. Governor John Patterson leaned on Alabama State College president H. Councill Trenholm with the same lever, the appropriation and the job, and got Lawrence Reddick fired and Jo Ann Robinson and Mary Fair Burks pushed out. The AAUP censure lasted twenty years. The technology of punishment updated. The logic did not.

3. The receipts from September 2025 already settled the legal question, expensively. Austin Peay fired a tenured professor over a Charlie Kirk post at a senator’s urging, its own Faculty Senate found the university violated its own procedures, and by January 2026 the school had reinstated him and paid five hundred thousand dollars of public money to close it out. That is what these campaigns actually cost taxpayers.

4. The real target is contingent faculty, not this one adjunct. She teaches one course for about five thousand dollars a year and has said losing it would not hurt her, which is exactly why she can speak. The chill lands on everybody who cannot say that, and a chill never generates a plaintiff, which is why it works.

5. Fungibility runs in both directions and both parties operate it. A Black woman used as a credential when useful and dropped as a liability when inconvenient is not two different failures. It is one mechanism with two settings, and the coalition that pulled her from an event ran the same calculation as the caucus that demanded her job.

RELATED READINGS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Theory and Black Studies

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

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

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

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

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

Jackson, Jenn M. Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism. Random House, 2024.

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

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

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987.

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

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

History and Primary Sources

Robinson, Jo Ann Gibson. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It. University of Tennessee Press, 1987.

Reddick, Lawrence D. Crusader Without Violence: A Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Harper, 1959.

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

Wells, Ida B. Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. Edited by Alfreda M. Duster. University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University. Encyclopedia entries on Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, H. Councill Trenholm, and John Malcolm Patterson.

American Association of University Professors. “The AAUP and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1955 to 1965.” Academe, Spring 2024.

Law

Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).

Keyishian v. Board of Regents, 385 U.S. 589 (1967).

Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U.S. 234 (1957).

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254 (1964).

Connick v. Myers, 461 U.S. 138 (1983).

Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006).

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

Contemporary Reporting

Odendahl, Marilyn. “Bitter Aftertaste.” The Indiana Citizen, July 24, 2026.

Indiana Public Media / WFIU WTIU News. Coverage of Steve Sanders’ First Amendment analysis, July 21, 2026.

Indianapolis Star and WBIW coverage of the lawmaker letters and the Beckwith funding threat, July 2026.

NBC News. “After Charlie Kirk’s Death, Teachers and Professors Nationwide Fired or Disciplined Over Social Media Posts,” September 12, 2025.

Duke Law Campus Speech Database. Incident records for Austin Peay State University, Iowa State University, and Clemson University, September 2025.

On Contingent Labor

Berry, Joe. Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. Monthly Review Press, 2005.

Bousquet, Marc. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation. New York University Press, 2008.

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According to the “As You Sow” report, a company that eliminates or substantially reduces its management diversity programs in response to political pressure, rather than financial analysis, is making a decision motivated by nonfinancial considerations.

Think about how wild it is to publicly announce you don’t want diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Not to quietly defund it. Not to let it wither in a reorg. To announce it. To put out a press release, to schedule the earnings call, to stand at a podium and tell the world that your company has decided, as a matter of strategy, that it would prefer a narrower pool of talent, a thinner set of perspectives, and a smaller share of the American consumer. Think about the confidence that takes. Think about what a person has to believe about the world, and about who is watching, before they decide that this is the announcement that will make them look competent.

I’m finna make you an evidence based argument that has nothing to do with politics or emotion. Straight data. Facts over feelings.

Here is the argument in one breath, and then I will spend the rest of this piece proving every joint in it. If the evidence links management diversity to financial performance, then dismantling diversity programs for political reasons might be considered a breach of fiduciary obligations. And if you’re claiming you care about fiduciary duty, that matters, because courts and state officials have spent the last four years arguing that putting ideology ahead of financial returns can breach fiduciary duty. That argument was built by the people running the rollback. That argument was built by conservative think tanks, by Republican attorneys general, by activist shareholders who sent threat letters to boardrooms. I am not inventing a new standard. I am picking up the standard they left on the table and turning it around.

Y’all know I was a professor of diversity, equity, and inclusion at a university, as well as having a master’s degree in human relations. I think I might not only be speaking from experience but also expertise.

Let me tell you what that expertise actually taught me, though, because it is not what you think. It did not teach me that the business case for diversity is the strongest case. It taught me that the business case for diversity is the weakest case that white institutions were willing to accept, and that the moment it stopped being convenient, they would abandon it and pretend they never signed. Two things can be true. The evidence can support the business case, and the business case can still be a trap. I am going to hold both of those at the same time for the next several thousand words, and I need you to hold them with me.

Before It Was a Business Case, It Was a Threat

Now let me give you the history, because you cannot understand why corporate America folded in 2025 unless you understand what corporate America agreed to in 1990, and you cannot understand 1990 unless you go back to 1941.

In 1941, A. Philip Randolph threatened to march one hundred thousand Black workers on Washington to protest exclusion from defense industry jobs. Franklin Roosevelt, who needed those factories running and did not need those cameras, issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Understand the mechanism. Randolph did not win 8802 by demonstrating that integrated factories were more productive. Randolph won 8802 by making segregation more expensive than integration at a moment when the state could not afford the bill. That is the origin story. The first federal fair employment policy in American history was a hostage negotiation.

Truman desegregated the armed forces with Executive Order 9981 in 1948. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 in 1961, and that order is where the phrase “affirmative action” enters federal law. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 in September 1965, which required federal contractors to refrain from discrimination and to take affirmative steps toward equal opportunity, and in 1967 Executive Order 11375 added sex to the covered categories. Then Nixon, of all people, expanded the Philadelphia Plan in 1969, imposing numerical goals and timetables on federally funded construction. People love to tell that story as Nixon the closet integrationist. Read the memos. The Philadelphia Plan drove a wedge between the building trades unions and the civil rights movement, two constituencies that were both aligned against him, and it cost him almost nothing. Crazy how the arithmetic works out.

And in 1966, quietly, with no march and no press conference, the EEOC created a form. The Employer Information Report, Component 1. Every private employer with a hundred or more workers had to tell the federal government how many people they employed by race, by ethnicity, by sex, across ten job categories. That form is the ledger. Everything I am about to argue depends on that form existing, and I need you to remember that, because it is going to come back at the end of this essay and it is going to come back with teeth.

Then came the turn.

In 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Powell wrote the controlling opinion, and Powell did something that reshaped the next fifty years. Powell rejected the remedial rationale. He would not accept “we are correcting societal discrimination” as a compelling state interest. What he accepted instead was diversity, framed as an educational benefit that accrues to the institution and to everyone in it. Read that again. The Supreme Court told America that repairing harm to Black people was not a good enough reason, but enriching the learning environment for everybody was. The justice frame died in 1978 and the benefit frame was born on the same day, in the same paragraph, by the same hand.

Corporate America learned that lesson faster than the academy did.

In 1987, the Hudson Institute published Workforce 2000 for the Department of Labor, projecting that white men would make up a shrinking share of net new entrants to the labor force. That report got misread across every boardroom in America as a demographic emergency. Then in March 1990, R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. published an essay in the Harvard Business Review titled “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” and that essay is the hinge. Thomas argued that affirmative action was a temporary intervention that had run its course and that what companies needed instead was to manage diversity as a competitive asset. Within a decade, the compliance officer became the diversity officer, the legal obligation became the strategic initiative, and the language of debt became the language of dividend.

Ellen Berrey documented this in The Enigma of Diversity. Lauren Edelman documented the mechanism in Working Law, showing how organizations construct symbolic structures that courts then accept as evidence of compliance, so that having a diversity policy becomes legally equivalent to not discriminating. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev spent thirty years showing that most of what companies actually built, the mandatory training, the grievance procedures, the diversity tests, did not increase management diversity at all, and sometimes decreased it.

So by 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and fifty billion dollars in corporate racial equity pledges hit the newswire in about ninety days, the whole apparatus was already built on a foundation of contingent value. Not owed. Not repair. Valuable. Useful. Good for the brand.

Derrick Bell told us exactly how that story ends. Interest convergence. Bell’s argument, laid out in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, is that Black people secure gains precisely and only when those gains converge with the perceived interests of white elites, and that when the convergence breaks, the gains are withdrawn without apology. Bell was writing about Brown. He could have been writing about the 2020 pledges and the 2025 press releases with the same pen.

Just admit what happened. The business case was never a floor. The business case was a lease. And in January 2025, the landlord showed up.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The fiduciary argument was built by the rollback crowd, and it points back at them. Conservative shareholder activists and state officials spent years arguing that boards which put ideology ahead of returns breach their duty. The federal workforce data associates management diversity with stronger performance and associates its absence with weakened performance and retention. Apply their standard honestly and the party exposed to a duty of care problem is the board that cut a program to please an administration without documenting any analysis.

* Association is not causation, and the argument survives that concession. The correct claim is materiality, not proof. Green and Hand’s 2024 replication failure against McKinsey is real and should be cited by anyone who is serious. It does not touch the mandatory federal compliance filings, which are standardized, audited, longitudinal, and were never assembled by anyone selling diversity consulting.

* The owners already voted, and they voted no. More than 98 percent at Costco, 97.3 percent at Apple, roughly 2 percent support at Goldman Sachs, under 1 percent at Levi Strauss. Boards that rolled back DEI overrode the near unanimous expressed judgment of their own shareholders. Target absorbed a demand shock its CEO acknowledged on an earnings call, slid from roughly $145 to $93 a share, posted eleven straight quarters of flat or falling comparable sales, and replaced its chief executive.

* The business case was a lease, not a floor, and it was signed in 1978. Powell’s Bakke opinion rejected the remedial rationale and accepted only the benefit rationale. Thomas’s 1990 Harvard Business Review essay carried that logic into corporate practice. Derrick Bell’s interest convergence predicted the ending. When value stops converging with white institutional interest, the gain is withdrawn without apology.

* The endgame is not the program, it is the instrument. On July 21, 2026, the EEOC voted 2 to 1 to propose rescinding the EEO1 through EEO6 reports, covering private employers, unions, state and local government, and public schools. The EEO1 is one of the only mandatory federal instruments that counts Black women as Black women, cross tabulated by job category. Killing it restores the DeGraffenreid condition by administrative procedure. The public hearing is August 11, 2026, and the comment period is open right now.

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They just voted to delete the only federal form that counts Black women as Black women, and the entire coverage of that vote fit into a handful of trade publications written for compliance officers. That is the void: the receipts exist, the rulemaking is public, the comment period is open right now, and almost nobody is translating any of it for the people it will actually cost.

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

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CITED SOURCES

Link to As You Sow Article Here.. Click here

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59a706d4f5e2319b70240ef9/t/6a615681aba7f2405edeeec4/1784764033335/AsYouSow2026_Diversity+Benefit_Final.pdf

History of affirmative action and the corporate diversity turn

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

* Anderson, Terry H. The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action. Oxford University Press, 2004.

* Berrey, Ellen. The Enigma of Diversity: The Language of Race and the Limits of Racial Justice. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

* Edelman, Lauren B. Working Law: Courts, Corporations, and Symbolic Civil Rights. University of Chicago Press, 2016.

* Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. Harvard University Press, 2022.

* Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. “Why Diversity Programs Fail.” Harvard Business Review, July/August 2016.

* Thomas, R. Roosevelt, Jr. “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity.” Harvard Business Review, March/April 1990.

* Johnston, William B., and Arnold E. Packer. Workforce 2000. Hudson Institute for the U.S. Department of Labor, 1987.

* Skrentny, John David. The Ironies of Affirmative Action. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

The empirical debate on diversity and firm performance

* Herring, Cedric. “Does Diversity Pay? Race, Gender, and the Business Case for Diversity.” American Sociological Review 74, no. 2 (2009): 208.

* Green, Jeremiah, and John R. M. Hand. “McKinsey’s Diversity Matters/Delivers/Wins Results Revisited.” Econ Journal Watch 21, no. 1 (2024).

* Bourveau, Thomas, Rachel Flam, and Anh Le. “Behind the Curtain of Workforce Diversity: Evidence from EEO-1 Reports.” Management Science 72, no. 2 (2026): 1699.

* As You Sow and Whistle Stop Capital. Workplace Diversity and Financial Performance: An Analysis of Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO-1) Data. November 2022.

* Columbia Business School. “Beyond the EEO Curtain: Strategic Data Sharing.” Research brief, 2023.

* Georgeac, Oriane A. M., and Aneeta Rattan. “The Business Case for Diversity Backfires.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 124, no. 1 (2023): 69.

Education

* Gershenson, Seth, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay, and Nicholas W. Papageorge. “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers.” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 2022.

* Fultz, Michael. “The Displacement of Black Educators Post-Brown.” History of Education Quarterly 44, no. 1 (2004).

* Tillman, Linda C. “(Un)Intended Consequences? The Impact of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision on the Employment Status of Black Educators.” Education and Urban Society 36, no. 3 (2004).

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Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist, sat across from the richest man on this planet at a Texas Gigafactory and asked him something plain. People say that you’re a racist. What is the motivation for doing that? And the man did not say no. The man did not say here is my record, here is my compliance data, here is the internal audit, here is the settlement history, here is what my companies did when Black workers filed complaints. The man said my partner, she’s half Indian, and I have four children with her, one of them was named after a famous Indian physicist, so I would say I’m not racist. Then he went to the second exhibit. If you look at the people that are employed at my companies, we have senior executives of all races. I don’t think there’s any racism there.

Now watch what just happened, kinfolks, because the sleight of hand is the whole trick. He was asked about a pattern of documented conduct and he answered with a family photo and an org chart. He was asked about structure and he answered with sentiment. He was asked about what his institutions do and he answered with who he sleeps next to and who he has lunch with. Farr taught us that white ignorance is not an absence of knowledge, it is a manufactured product, an achievement that takes labor to maintain, and you are watching the labor happen in real time on a video call. Apply Farr right here. That answer is not a lie in the simple sense. That answer is a machine for not knowing.

Then he got asked the follow up. Are you anti Muslim. And the man who had a rapid fire family alibi ready for the first question suddenly needed twenty seconds of silence. Twenty seconds. Count that out loud sometime. Then he said I am against, if people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that. I’m against rape and murder. I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West. And I said in the video and I will say it again in print, that was textbook Islamophobia, and everything that he correlated to Muslims is really a call coming from inside the house. It’s really you and your people, your South African, your English, your Dutch people, you feel me. Now go into a whole bunch of countries, you invade them, you colonize them, and then you impose your diabolical, antithetical views onto the population.

This essay is the receipts. Not the vibes. Not the screenshot of a screenshot. The docket, the agency findings, the peer reviewed studies, the man’s own posts under his own name on the platform he owns. Because two things can be true. A man can have children he loves and a company that a state civil rights agency says pays Black workers $1,533 less a month. Two things can be true. A man can name a son after a brilliant Indian physicist and still repost the demographic panic that has been the beating heart of white nationalism since before his grandfather packed his bags for Johannesburg.

The Alibi of Proximity: A Very Old American Technology

Here is the thing that made me put my hand over my mouth when I heard it. That defense is not new. That defense is not even original. That defense is roughly four hundred years old and it has a legal history in this country that is written down and citable.

Start in Virginia, 1662. The House of Burgesses passes the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, that which is brought forth follows the belly. English common law said a child’s status followed the father. Virginia flipped it, deliberately, so that a child born to an enslaved woman would be enslaved regardless of who the father was. Read that slowly. The colony wrote a statute whose entire economic function was to convert white men’s proximity to Black women into inheritable property. Intimacy was not evidence against the system. Intimacy was an input to the system. Spillers gave us the vocabulary for what that statute does, the theft of gender itself, the reduction of body to flesh, the ungendering that makes the Black mother a vessel of capital rather than kin. Apply Spillers to 1662 and you understand that closeness never once functioned as a defense. Closeness functioned as a production line.

Then you get to Monticello. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, a sustained argument that Black people were inferior in reason and in imagination, that the difference was fixed in nature, that emancipation would require removal. He wrote that. He published that. And Annette Gordon Reed’s archival work on the Hemings family established what oral history in Black communities had asserted for two centuries and what DNA analysis later supported, that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned, a woman who was the half sister of his deceased wife, a woman who could not consent in any meaningful sense because the law did not recognize her capacity to refuse. His own children by her remained his property. Some he freed. Some he did not. As I said in the video, Thomas Jefferson also had kids with a woman that was by half another race and he still thought they were subject to the plantation. Funny how that worked.

Then run it forward. Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform, filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for twenty four hours and eighteen minutes, the longest solo filibuster in Senate history, and fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams, with Carrie Butler, a sixteen year old Black woman working in his family’s home. He paid for her education quietly. He met with her privately. He never once let that relationship interrupt a single vote. Essie Mae only went public after he died in 2003.

Somebody tell Elon that just because you have all races on the payroll doesn’t mean they’re experiencing all the same thing. That is what I said and that is exactly the structural point. Bell’s thesis on the permanence of racism was never about individual hatred in individual hearts. Bell argued that racism is a stable, self replicating feature of the American legal and economic order that adjusts its surface presentation to survive. Apply Bell here and the family photo is not counterevidence. The family photo is the surface presentation.

Mills called it the racial contract, an agreement whose signatories do not need to be conscious of signing, whose primary requirement is not personal malice but structural benefit combined with an epistemology of ignorance that protects the beneficiary from having to know. Under the racial contract you do not need a hood. You need a payroll, a platform, and a plausible story for the interview.

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The Docket: What Black Workers Say Happened in Fremont

Now, receipts. The article I held up in the video was published two days before we recorded, and it says exactly what I said it says.

Marcus Vaughn filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court in 2017. Case number RG17882082. Vaughn alleged he heard the N word used at least a hundred times by coworkers. His complaint described the Fremont factory floor as a hotbed for racist behavior that Tesla had done nothing to stop. He complained repeatedly to management. One offending coworker was fired. The slurs continued. When his six month contract came up for renewal, a supervisor recommended against it on the grounds that Vaughn did not have a positive attitude at work and for the company, and he was let go.

That is not a random grievance. Vaughn’s case became the anchor for a legal avalanche. Hundreds of current and former Black workers filed sworn declarations to the court in the Vaughn matter. Of more than two hundred Black workers who provided statements, roughly two thirds reported seeing antiblack graffiti in the factory including nooses, racial slurs, and swastikas. About a quarter said higher ups called them the N word. A court filing catalogued more than fifty distinct antiblack slurs allegedly used or scrawled inside the plant. Nearly half said they complained to supervisors, managers, or human resources and got nothing. Dozens said complaining brought retaliation up to and including termination. Workers described being funneled into the hardest, most dangerous, lowest paid jobs on the floor. Workers, supervisors, and management alike, according to the state’s filings, referred to the facility as the plantation, with Black workers as the slaves.

Say that part again, out loud, for the folks in the back. Not a metaphor a plaintiff’s lawyer invented in a conference room. A term the state civil rights agency alleges was in circulation on the shop floor of the most valuable car company in the world, in California, in the twenty first century.

Owen Diaz was a contract elevator operator who worked at Fremont for roughly nine months across 2015 and 2016. Diaz was the rare plaintiff who had never signed an arbitration agreement, which is the only reason a jury ever heard him. In October 2021 a federal jury in San Francisco found for Diaz and awarded $136.9 million, one of the largest single plaintiff discrimination verdicts in American history. Judge William Orrick cut it to $15 million. Diaz refused the reduced sum and took a retrial. In April 2023 a second jury found for him again and awarded $3.2 million. He settled in March 2024 for undisclosed terms. Sit with that arc. Two separate juries, two separate years, both found Tesla liable. The number moved by ninety eight percent. The liability never moved at all.

In February 2022 the California agency now known as the Civil Rights Department sued Tesla after approximately three years of investigation and hundreds of complaints. Director Kevin Kish said the agency found evidence that the Fremont factory was a racially segregated workplace where Black workers were subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion. Here is the number that should end every dinner table argument you have about this. One analysis of worker pay data from June 2018 through June 2024 showed Black workers’ monthly compensation running $1,533 lower than that of white workers. Monthly. Multiply that by twelve. Multiply that by six years. Multiply that by thousands of workers. That is not a feeling. That is a spreadsheet.

In September 2023 the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed its own suit, EEOC v. Tesla, Inc., in the Northern District of California. The federal complaint alleged that since at least 2015, Black employees routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and epithets including variations of the N word, monkey, boy, and black b word, used casually and openly in high traffic areas and worker hubs. It alleged graffiti including nooses and swastikas on desks, in bathroom stalls, inside elevators, and on new vehicles rolling off the production line. New vehicles. Rolling off the line. It alleged that workers who objected faced terminations, transfers, and changed duties. In March 2024 Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley refused to dismiss it, finding the allegations sufficient to support the inference that harassment was severe enough to pollute the workplace.

Raina Pierce, who installed latches on car doors, alleged in federal court that a manager sometimes greeted workers by saying welcome to the plantation or welcome to the slave house, that the slur was scrawled throughout the plant including the bathrooms, that she was called a gendered insult, and that she was disciplined for conduct that non Black workers were excused for. Tesla settled with her.

And the news that prompted this whole conversation. In June 2026 Tesla reached a confidential settlement with Marcus Vaughn himself, along with Titus McCaleb and Monica Chatman, averting trials that had been set to begin that week in Oakland. An Alameda County judge ordered the parties back on September 11 to finalize. The company settled the man who started it while continuing to publicly deny wrongdoing. Meanwhile, in November 2025, a California judge decertified the class covering more than fourteen thousand Black workers, meaning the company now faces individual suits one at a time instead of one collective proceeding. On May 26, 2026, the court denied most of Tesla’s summary judgment motion in the state’s case and sent it to a jury trial set for July 20, 2026, in Alameda County Superior Court. And in January 2026, Tesla and the EEOC entered private mediation, with a Trump administration EEOC on the other side of the table from a man who spent north of a quarter billion dollars electing that administration.

Now, the disclaimer that actually strengthens the argument rather than weakening it. Most of these are allegations. Tesla denies wrongdoing, says it does not tolerate harassment, and says it has removed employees found responsible. Fine. Put that on the record. But two juries already found liability for Diaz. A state agency investigated for three years before filing. A federal agency investigated and filed. A judge found the state’s evidence sufficient for trial. A judge found the federal complaint sufficient to proceed. And the company keeps settling. That is not one disgruntled worker. That is a decade of parallel findings from independent institutions that do not coordinate with each other.

Crazy how the man had a twenty second pause ready for the Muslim question but had zero seconds of hesitation about a factory his own workers called the plantation.

The Platform Is the Confession

He said I don’t think there’s any racism there. Alright. Let’s leave the factory and go to the platform he personally owns and personally posts on, where there is no HR department to blame and no supervisor to scapegoat.

Peer reviewed research published in PLOS ONE by Daniel Hickey and colleagues at Berkeley, UCLA, and USC examined roughly 4.7 million English language posts on X from early 2022 through June 2023, covering ten months before the acquisition and eight months after. The finding was that the volume of posts containing overt hate speech, including racist, homophobic, and transphobic slurs, ran consistently about fifty percent higher after the takeover, and that likes on those posts rose by roughly seventy percent, meaning more people saw them. The number of bot and bot like accounts did not decline. The authors stated plainly that their findings do not support public claims from X that exposure to hate speech decreased after the purchase. Earlier work from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found the antiblack slur appearing more than twenty six thousand times in the week following the acquisition, roughly triple the 2022 average.

In November 2023 he responded to a post accusing Jewish communities of pushing hatred against white people by saying that the poster had said the actual truth. The White House condemned it as an abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate.

In September 2025 he posted that white people are a rapidly diminishing minority of the global population. In January 2026 he amplified a post asserting that white solidarity is the only way to survive and added his own commentary about one party states. On January 27, 2026, the Indian American venture capitalist Vinod Khosla accused him of promoting the idea that being white is under threat, that race matters more than merit, and that racism is being normalized, and encouraged nonwhite employees at his companies to leave. And the response, from the richest man on earth, on his own platform, was to call Khosla a pompous a hole, to use a slur for intellectual disability, and then to deploy the exact same alibi he would deploy six months later with The Economist. My partner, Shivon, is half Indian and my eldest son with her is named in honor of the great Indian physicist Chandrasekhar.

Same alibi. Two different accusers. Six months apart. When the defense is a script, the defense is not a defense. It is a press release.

Then there is Grok, the AI system built by his company xAI. On May 14, 2025, Grok began inserting claims about white genocide in South Africa into replies about baseball statistics, Medicaid, HBO’s name changes, and the new pope. It told users it had been instructed by its creators to accept the genocide as real. xAI blamed an unauthorized modification to the system prompt by a rogue employee and published the prompt afterward. In July 2025, after an update instructing the model not to shy away from politically incorrect claims, Grok began pattern matching Jewish surnames to leftist activism, deployed the antisemitic every damn time meme, named Adolf Hitler as the historical figure best suited to handle anti white hate, and called itself MechaHitler. The Anti Defamation League called the output irresponsible, dangerous, and antisemitic.

Here is the analytical point and it is not a small one. A car factory can be blamed on middle management. A social platform can be blamed on scale. A language model cannot. A language model is a document of what its owners chose to encode. Noble showed us with Algorithms of Oppression that search infrastructure reproduces racial hierarchy through design decisions, not accidents. Benjamin gave us the New Jim Code, the way discriminatory outcomes get laundered through the appearance of technical neutrality. Apply Benjamin here. When the model says the quiet part, the model is not malfunctioning. The model is reporting.

The Call Coming From Inside the House

Now let me finish the argument I started in the video, because this is the part the mainstream write ups will not touch.

He said he is against people coming to a country with antithetical views. He said he is against rape and murder. He said he is against the imposition of rules and laws contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West.

Every single item on that list is a description of European colonialism. That is not a rhetorical flourish, that is the historical record. Who arrived somewhere they were not from. Who imposed a legal architecture the population never consented to. Who wrote sexual violence into the operating logic of an entire economy through partus sequitur ventrem and the Immorality Acts. Who made law that governed where a person could sleep, who a person could marry, and what a person could own based on the color of their skin. Césaire’s thesis in Discourse on Colonialism is that colonialism dehumanizes the colonizer and that the techniques rehearsed on the colonized eventually come home, the boomerang effect. Apply Césaire to a man raised under apartheid who now describes other people’s presence as an imposition.

And the family record here is documented, not speculated. His maternal grandfather Joshua Haldeman led the Canadian branch of Technocracy Incorporated in the 1930s, a movement that wanted engineers and businessmen to displace elected government, and which took on such fascist trappings that Canada banned it after declaring war on Germany. Haldeman published material espousing antisemitic conspiracy theories, including claims drawn from the fraudulent Protocols. He moved his family from a comfortable life in Canada to South Africa in 1950, two years after the National Party formalized apartheid, and he wrote in defense of that system. His own reasons for moving are contested. Maye Musk’s memoir says missionaries told them South Africa was beautiful. Walter Isaacson’s biography says he thought Canada had gone soft. Errol Musk has said the draw was the apartheid government itself. Choose whichever version you want, kinfolks. The book defending apartheid exists either way.

Musk was born in Johannesburg in 1971 and raised, as the Guardian’s Chris McGreal put it, in what can only be described as a neocolonial life, the kind of white South African childhood where a family with any money at all lived with servants at their beck and call. Nobody chooses their childhood. Everybody chooses what they do with it at fifty five. And what this man has done with it is amplify the white genocide narrative about South Africa, a claim that South African courts have rejected as imagined, that the data does not support, and that traces directly back to nineteenth century Afrikaner ideology, into a United States refugee policy that opened a pathway for white Afrikaners while Haitian and African asylum seekers were being deported.

Then, in the same era, his DOGE operation was inside the federal government cutting the machinery that investigates the exact conduct his own companies stand accused of. A Trump executive order hollowed out the Labor Department office responsible for investigating federal contractors accused of workplace discrimination, and Tesla and SpaceX are federal contractors. The Social Security Administration closed its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity. The Justice Department dropped United States v. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the 2023 case alleging SpaceX discriminated against asylees and refugees in hiring. That case, before it was dropped, contained a number worth memorizing. Across more than ten thousand hires over nearly four years, SpaceX hired exactly one person who was an asylee and identified as such on the application, and that hire came about four months after the government told the company it was under investigation.

One. Out of ten thousand. And the man is on television telling you we have senior executives of all races.

Just admit what the record says. The dismantling was not incidental to the accusation. The dismantling was the answer to the accusation.

THE CHALK OUTLINE IN THE SCHOOLHOUSE

What this means for education, specifically

Y’all know I do not write a single piece that does not land in a classroom, because that is where the whole fight actually gets settled. So here is the education implication and it is material, not abstract.

Woodson wrote in 1933 that when you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions, that he will find his proper place and stand in it, that you do not need to send him to the back door because he will go without being told and if there is no back door his very nature will demand one. Ninety three years later the mechanism of thought control is not a segregated textbook committee in Richmond. It is a training corpus, a system prompt, and a search ranking. When a single owner can adjust a model’s instructions overnight and have millions of people receive a debunked genocide narrative as though it were reference material, and then have the company call it an unauthorized modification, we are not talking about media bias. We are talking about curriculum. The man has said openly that he intends to use his model to rewrite its own training data to reflect what he believes to be true. That is a textbook adoption process with no school board, no public comment period, and no state of Texas hearing you can show up and testify at.

Now stack it with what got destroyed on the public side while he had a badge.

DOGE cancelled roughly 169 contracts at the Institute of Education Sciences worth close to $900 million. IES is the arm that produces the disaggregated data by race, income, disability status, and language that civil rights organizations use to prove disparity exists at all. EdTrust said the sudden halting of those contracts jeopardizes the collective ability to identify inequities affecting students from low income families, students of color, English language learners, students with disabilities, student parents, and rural students. The Education Department laid off roughly half its workforce. The Office for Civil Rights lost at least forty three percent of its staff, and the entire staff of seven of its twelve regional offices was terminated, closing hubs in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. A Senate minority staff report put the number of students left without meaningful federal discrimination protection at more than forty six million.

Follow the logic all the way down, because this is the part that should keep educators up at night. If IES cannot collect disaggregated data, the disparity cannot be measured. If the disparity cannot be measured, the complaint cannot be substantiated. If the complaint cannot be substantiated, and the regional office that would have investigated it has been closed anyway, then the discrimination did not legally occur. Not because it stopped. Because the instrument that detects it was disassembled by the same man who says he doesn’t think there’s any racism there.

That is the same move as the interview, just at federal scale. Destroy the evidence gathering apparatus, then point at the absence of evidence.

And here is the assignment for every teacher, professor, librarian, and homeschool parent reading this. Teach partus sequitur ventrem next to the Fremont docket. Teach Query XIV next to the Economist interview. Teach the Immorality Act next to the white genocide narrative. Do not teach these as separate units four months apart. Teach them on the same day, in the same lesson, and let the students draw the line themselves. They will. They always do. Freire told us that the banking model produces students who receive and file, while problem posing education produces students who read the world. Apply Freire here. A young person who can identify the alibi of proximity in 1662 will identify it on a podcast in 2026 without you having to say a word.

THE LEDGER THEY NEVER READ AT THE SHAREHOLDER MEETING

Intersectional material impacts

Intersectionality is not decoration on this piece. It is the analytical engine, because the harm here does not distribute evenly across Black people and pretending it does will get you the wrong answer.

Crenshaw built the framework in 1989 out of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, where five Black women sued GM over a seniority system that erased them, and the court told them they could sue as Black people or as women but not as Black women, because there was no such protected category. GM had hired Black people. GM had hired women. Therefore, the court reasoned, no discrimination. Look at that reasoning and then look at the sentence we have senior executives of all races. It is the same argument. The presence of some people from a group is offered as proof that the group is not harmed. Crenshaw named that gap fifty years ago and the gap is still where Black women fall through.

Now put actual names in the gap. Raina Pierce alleged she faced both the racial slur scrawled through the plant and a gendered insult aimed specifically at her. The federal complaint lists black b word alongside monkey and boy, which is the linguistic fingerprint of misogynoir that Moya Bailey named, the specific compound of antiblackness and misogyny that lands on Black women and nowhere else. Monica Chatman was one of the three workers who settled in June 2026. When a workplace is described as a plantation, Black women are not experiencing the plantation the same way Black men are, because the plantation was never one machine, it was a gendered machine, and Spillers already explained why. The flesh that partus sequitur ventrem was written to capture was female flesh. The reproductive body was the asset class.

Then take it to the money, because the Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that the point of naming interlocking oppressions was material liberation, not a better seat at a conference. Combahee also told us that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because our freedom would require the destruction of all the systems. Apply Combahee to a $1,533 monthly pay gap. That gap is not a symbol. That gap is rent. That gap is a child’s braces. That gap is whether your mama’s Medicare supplement gets paid. Over six years, at that rate, a single worker is separated from more than a hundred thousand dollars, and Black women, who are more likely to be primary or sole earners in their households, absorb that gap for entire families. Then compound it. That is retirement contributions never made, credit never built, a down payment that never happened, a generation of wealth that does not exist because of a differential on a pay stub in Fremont, California.

Then the class decertification in November 2025. Fourteen thousand workers turned back into fourteen thousand individuals. Understand what that does in material terms. Collective action distributes the cost of litigation and the psychological cost of testifying. Individual action concentrates both onto the person least able to carry them, and the person least able to carry them is disproportionately the Black woman working a line job with children at home, no savings buffer, and no ability to take unpaid days for depositions. Decertification does not eliminate the claim. Decertification makes the claim too expensive to bring. That is a procedural ruling doing substantive antiblack work, which is exactly what Bell warned us the law does when the interest convergence runs out.

Then arbitration. Owen Diaz only got a jury because he was a contractor who never signed the agreement. Everybody else signed. Forced arbitration privatizes civil rights, moves the claim out of public court where a docket exists and a reporter can read it, into a closed proceeding with no precedent and no press. Which means the volume of harm you are reading about in this essay, drawn from public filings, is by definition an undercount. The public record is the small part.

Then class. Robinson’s central argument in Black Marxism was that capitalism did not become racial by accident or by later corruption, that it emerged from a European feudal order already organized by racial hierarchy, and that racialism is essential to its accumulation rather than incidental to it. Apply Robinson to Fremont and stop being surprised. A segregated assignment of the hardest, most dangerous, lowest paid jobs to Black workers is not a failure of the business model. Under Robinson’s reading it is the business model working. And Wilderson would push it further and say the gratuitous quality of the violence, the graffiti with no productive purpose, the nooses that make no one’s shift more efficient, indicates something structural rather than economic, an antagonism that exceeds exploitation. Hold both. Robinson explains the pay gap. Wilderson explains the noose. The pay gap makes money. The noose does not make anybody a dollar.

And then immigration status, because his own record crosses that axis too. One asylee out of more than ten thousand hires. The people most vulnerable to a hostile workplace are precisely the people with the least ability to leave it, and the Black immigrant worker, the asylee, the person on a status that can be revoked, sits at the intersection where a complaint can cost you a country. Byrd’s distinction between settler, arrivant, and Indigenous matters here, because the same administration that dropped the SpaceX case opened a refugee pathway for white Afrikaners while removing Haitians. Somebody is always allowed to arrive. The question is who.

Close the Loop

He was asked, people say that you’re a racist, what is the motivation for doing that.

The motivation, sir, is a 2017 complaint from Marcus Vaughn. The motivation is two federal juries who both found liability for Owen Diaz. The motivation is a state agency that investigated for three years and found a $1,533 monthly pay gap. The motivation is a federal complaint listing nooses on cars rolling off the line. The motivation is Raina Pierce being told welcome to the plantation on her way to install a door latch. The motivation is a peer reviewed study in PLOS ONE. The motivation is a post saying the actual truth. The motivation is a model that named itself MechaHitler. The motivation is one asylee out of ten thousand hires. The motivation is seven closed civil rights offices and forty six million students. The motivation is a book your grandfather wrote defending apartheid.

That is the motivation. Nobody made it up. It has case numbers.

See, Woodson reminds us that the most efficient form of control is the one that makes the controlled person do the work themselves, and Robinson teaches us that antiblackness is not a bug in the accumulation of capital but the engine underneath it. Put them together and you get the man in that chair. He does not need to hate anybody in his heart. He needs a payroll that includes some Black faces, a partner he can name, a son he can point to, a legal team that can decertify a class, an administration he helped buy that will close the offices that investigate him, and a model he can retrain to tell you it never happened. That is the whole apparatus. The children are not part of the apparatus. The children are the press release for the apparatus.

The baby is not an alibi. The baby was never an alibi. Ask Sally Hemings. Ask Essie Mae. Ask Marcus Vaughn.

Education Is Elevation.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Proximity has never been a defense, it has been a mechanism. Virginia’s 1662 partus sequitur ventrem statute converted white men’s intimacy with Black women into inheritable property. Jefferson wrote Query XIV and fathered children with Sally Hemings. Thurmond filibustered civil rights for twenty four hours and fathered Essie Mae Washington Williams. The half Indian partner defense is the newest version of the oldest alibi in the hemisphere.

* The Fremont record is not one worker’s complaint, it is a decade of parallel findings. Vaughn in 2017, two juries finding liability for Owen Diaz in 2021 and 2023, a California Civil Rights Department suit in 2022 documenting a $1,533 monthly pay gap, an EEOC suit in 2023 alleging nooses and swastikas on vehicles rolling off the line, a settlement with Raina Pierce, a June 2026 confidential settlement with Vaughn himself, and a state jury trial set for July 20, 2026.

* The platform and the model are the confession the factory can deny. PLOS ONE research found overt hate speech roughly fifty percent higher on X after the takeover with likes up seventy percent. He personally endorsed an antisemitic post the White House condemned. He personally posted that white people are a rapidly diminishing minority. Grok pushed the white genocide narrative in May 2025 and called itself MechaHitler in July 2025. A model is a document of its owners’ choices.

* The dismantling is the answer to the accusation. While facing federal and state discrimination cases, his DOGE operation was inside the government cutting the enforcement machinery. IES lost roughly 169 contracts worth nearly $900 million. The Office for Civil Rights lost at least forty three percent of staff and seven of twelve regional offices, leaving more than forty six million students unprotected. DOJ dropped the SpaceX case that documented one asylee hire out of more than ten thousand.

* Black women absorb the compound interest. Crenshaw built intersectionality out of DeGraffenreid v. GM, where a court said Black women could not sue as Black women. We have senior executives of all races is that same argument in a new suit. A $1,533 monthly gap is a hundred thousand dollars over six years, and class decertification in November 2025 turned fourteen thousand collective plaintiffs into fourteen thousand people who each now have to find a lawyer alone.

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RELATED READINGS (BIBLIOGRAPHY)

Foundational theory

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

* Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. 1997.

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

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

* Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America. 1997.

* Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. 1950.

* Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America. 1935.

Intersectionality and Black feminist thought

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

* Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement. 1977.

* Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987.

* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed. 2021.

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

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. 1981.

Education

* Woodson, Carter G. The Miseducation of the Negro. 1933.

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1968.

* Ladson Billings, Gloria. “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt.” Educational Researcher, 2006.

Technology, race, and algorithmic power

* Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression. 2018.

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

* O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction. 2016.

* Hickey, Daniel, et al. “Auditing Elon Musk’s Impact on Hate Speech and Bots.” PLOS ONE, 2025.

History: slavery, apartheid, and the alibi of proximity

* Gordon Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. 2008.

* Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV. 1785.

* Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. 2004.

* Washington Williams, Essie Mae, with William Stadiem. Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond. 2005.

* Dubow, Saul. Apartheid, 1948 to 1994. 2014.

* McGreal, Chris. Reporting on Musk’s South African upbringing, The Guardian, 2025.

* Benton, Joshua. “Elon Musk’s Anti Semitic, Apartheid Loving Grandfather.” The Atlantic, September 20, 2023.

Primary legal and agency sources

* Vaughn v. Tesla, Inc., Alameda County Superior Court, No. RG17882082 (2017).

* Diaz v. Tesla, Inc., N.D. Cal. (2021 verdict, 2023 retrial, 2024 settlement).

* Department of Fair Employment and Housing v. Tesla, Inc., Alameda County Superior Court (filed February 2022).

* EEOC v. Tesla, Inc., No. 3:23 cv 04984, N.D. Cal. (filed September 2023).

* Pierce v. Tesla, Inc., No. 22 03177, N.D. Cal.

* United States v. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., 18 OCAHO no. 1499b (filed August 2023, dismissed 2025).

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

* California Civil Rights Department statement on the order clearing the Tesla case for trial, May 27, 2026.

* U.S. Senate HELP Committee minority staff report on the gutting of the Office for Civil Rights, March 27, 2025.

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

Right now I’m standing on the largest earthen fortress in the United States, and it’s located here in the great state of Tennessee, about thirty five miles down the road from where a thousand mile walk to Memphis begins. It’s a part of Black history that has everything to do with the Civil War. You’ve heard of Gettysburg. You’ve heard of Vicksburg. The real turning point though, it wasn’t a battle, it was a betrayal.

Two hundred thousand enslaved people betrayed their enslavers by inserting their autonomy and inserting their humanity into a war that was never designed to hold either one. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole argument. Everything after this is receipts.

Stones River wasn’t won by Rosecrans. Stones River was won by men who had everything to lose and chose their freedom anyway, in the face of every law and every social norm that criminalized their autonomy. They did it anyways. Research over MeSearch, so let me show you the paper trail.

RECEIPTS BEFORE RHETORIC: WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON THIS GROUND

The Battle of Stones River ran from December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, right outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Union General William S. Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland against Confederate General Braxton Bragg and the Army of Tennessee. Proportionally it produced some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war. Bragg withdrew. Rosecrans held the field. Middle Tennessee went under federal control, and the road toward Chattanooga, and then Atlanta, and then the sea, opened up behind it.

Then came the fort. On January 23, 1863, Brigadier General James St. Clair Morton, chief engineer for the Army of the Cumberland, broke ground on what became Fortress Rosecrans. When it was finished in June of that same year it enclosed roughly two hundred to two hundred twenty five acres behind nearly three miles of earthen wall, with eight to nine perimeter lunettes, four interior redoubts, curtain walls, abatis, moats, magazines, sawmills, warehouses, and quartermaster depots inside. Union engineers designed it to shelter an army and to hold provisions for tens of thousands of men for up to ninety days.

It was the largest earthen fortification built during the American Civil War. Not the largest in Tennessee. The largest, period.

Here’s the part that gets left out of the placard. That fortress never came under attack. Not once. Which means its entire function was logistical. Fortress Rosecrans was the supply base that made the Tullahoma campaign possible, that made the drive on Chattanooga possible, that made the Atlanta campaign possible, that made Sherman’s March to the Sea possible. The Confederacy did not lose because somebody outshot them at a crossroads. The Confederacy lost because somebody out supplied them, and the base that did the supplying was raised out of Rutherford County dirt by Black hands.

Understand what an earthen fortress actually is before you skip past it. It’s dirt. It’s the natural land around you, cut, hauled, tramped, packed, revetted with wood and wire and brick and stone, sloped at angles that eat artillery shells instead of shattering the way masonry does. Masonry forts were already obsolete by 1862 because rifled artillery cracked them open. Dirt absorbed. Dirt held. The most advanced defensive engineering of that war was earthwork engineering, and the people whose intellect the state had criminalized were the ones executing it.

Sit in that contradiction for a second. It was illegal across the slaveholding South to teach an enslaved person to read. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Louisiana, all of them had statutes on the books restricting Black literacy, some criminalizing the teacher, some criminalizing the assembly. The same legal order that said these people could not be trusted with the alphabet handed them the geometry of the largest fortification on the continent and said build it by Thursday.

That’s not an oversight. That’s the design. Farr and Yancy would call this an epistemology of ignorance, a knowing that is organized around a strategic not knowing. The state did not actually believe Black people lacked capacity. The state needed the capacity and needed the story about the lack of capacity at the same time, because the labor was worth more when the humanity was deniable.

THE PROCLAMATION THAT SKIPPED TENNESSEE

Now let me correct the record on something, because I would rather be accurate than comfortable, and because the accurate version makes the point harder, not softer.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not take effect weeks after Stones River. It took effect on January 1, 1863, which was the middle day of the battle. Men were dying in the cedar brakes outside Murfreesboro on the exact calendar day the document went live.

Here’s the harder truth. That document did not free one single enslaved person in Tennessee.

Lincoln’s proclamation applied only to states and parts of states in active rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Tennessee was exempted. Not by accident, not by oversight, but by request. Andrew Johnson, then military governor of Tennessee and later the seventeenth president of the United States, lobbied Lincoln to carve Tennessee out, and Lincoln did it. On January 11, 1863, Johnson wrote to Lincoln applauding the decision and saying the exception in favor of Tennessee would be worth much to them. Worth much to whom is the question the archive doesn’t answer politely.

So when I say betrayal, I need y’all to understand the full weight of it. The Black Tennesseans who walked into Union lines at Murfreesboro in January of 1863 were not walking into freedom. Legally they were still property. The federal government they were running toward had just gone out of its way to say the freedom document does not apply to you. There was no legal category waiting on them. There was no proclamation with their name on it. They moved anyway.

Slavery did not legally end in Tennessee until February 22, 1865, by state referendum, and even that came after Johnson’s October 1864 proclamation and a constitutional convention engineered under military occupation. Two full years of Black Tennesseans building forts, burying dead, feeding armies, and enlisting in a war for a freedom the paperwork had explicitly denied them.

Just admit it. The freedom came first and the law came limping after. It always does. The law is a lagging indicator of Black insistence, not a leading one, and anybody teaching it the other way around is teaching mythology with footnotes.

THE GENERAL STRIKE NOBODY CALLS A STRIKE

Du Bois already told us this in 1935 and America spent ninety years pretending not to hear it.

In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois argued that what happened between 1861 and 1865 was a general strike of the enslaved. Not a rescue. Not a gift. A withdrawal of labor by roughly half a million people who walked off the plantations that were feeding, clothing, and financing the Confederate war machine, and then carried that labor across the line and handed it to the other side. The Confederacy did not lose its enslaved workforce to a battlefield reversal. The Confederacy lost its enslaved workforce because the workforce quit.

Apply Du Bois right here, on this dirt. Every man hauling earth into a parapet at Fortress Rosecrans in the spring of 1863 was a man not planting cotton in Rutherford County that same spring. Every woman cooking and washing in the contraband camps was a woman not producing value inside a household economy that underwrote Confederate credit. The transfer was double entry. The South lost the labor and the North gained it, in the same motion, from the same decision, made by the same people.

Then stack it. Robinson’s Black Marxism teaches us that antiblackness was never an aberration inside American capitalism, it was the engine. So when the engine walks off, the machine seizes. That’s not a moral victory story. That’s a structural one. Two hundred thousand Black men eventually served in the United States Army and Navy, roughly one hundred seventy nine thousand in the Army and around nineteen thousand in the Navy, which is somewhere near one in ten of the entire Union force by the end. Over half of them had been enslaved.

In Tennessee alone, 20,133 Black men enlisted in the Union Army. That was more than any other state that had joined the Confederacy. Let that number sit next to the exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation and tell me again that these people were waiting on permission.

Lincoln himself, in an August 1864 letter, said flatly that abandoning Black troops would mean the Union could not win in three weeks. He wasn’t being sentimental. He was doing math.

TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE: IMPRESSMENT AND EMANCIPATION ON THE SAME SHOVEL

I’m not about to hand you a clean hero story, because a clean hero story is just propaganda with better lighting.

Two things can be true. The people who built Fortress Rosecrans were exercising autonomy, and a whole lot of them were also impressed, conscripted, and worked under conditions that looked a whole lot like what they had just fled.

The precedent is up the road in Nashville. In the summer of 1862 the United States Army began seizing Black laborers, free and enslaved, off the streets, out of churches, and off nearby farms to build Fort Negley. Roughly twenty seven hundred to twenty eight hundred laborers went into that project. Estimates of the dead run into the hundreds, from exposure, disease, malnutrition, and the work itself. Many were never paid. The Union Army promised wages and rations and delivered inconsistently, and the promise of freedom that came attached was informal, revocable, and legally unenforceable in a state the Proclamation had skipped.

That’s the same army, the same theater, the same year, the same category of labor, thirty five miles up the pike from where I’m standing.

Apply Hartman here. In Scenes of Subjection, Hartman shows how emancipation reorganized captivity rather than ending it, how the transition from slave to freedman produced a subject who was newly burdened with obligation, contract, and debt without a corresponding transfer of power. The contraband camp is the textbook case. You are no longer property. You are also not free. You are a military asset with a ration card, housed inside a category the government invented specifically so it would not have to say the word citizen.

Apply Wilderson alongside it. The Afropessimist read isn’t that this was a bad policy outcome. The read is that Black positionality functioned as fungible, as available, as the thing that gets moved and used and expended, and that this availability didn’t require anybody’s malice. It was infrastructural. General Rosecrans did not have to hate anybody to put thousands of escaped enslaved people to work on a two hundred acre earthwork. The structure did the hating for him.

Now, Afropessimism is descriptive, not prescriptive. It tells us what the position was. It does not tell us what people did inside it. What people did inside it is the other half of this essay, and it is the half that Cemetery Community answers.

SERGEANT WILLIAM HOLLAND, COMPANY I, 111TH UNITED STATES COLORED INFANTRY

Let me put a name and a whole life on this, because abstraction is how erasure protects itself.

William Holland was born around 1834 on a farm in Todd County, Kentucky. He was enslaved as a young man in Maury County, Tennessee. He escaped. On March 1, 1864, he enlisted as a private in Company I of the 111th United States Colored Infantry.

Understand the timeline. March of 1864 is fourteen months after the Emancipation Proclamation that did not apply to him, and eleven months before Tennessee got around to abolishing slavery by referendum. This man enlisted in an army fighting a war about his status while his status was still legally unresolved in the state he was standing in.

His regiment was assigned to guard railroad blockhouses along the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, protecting the very supply line that Fortress Rosecrans anchored. Then, on September 23 and 24, 1864, at Athens, Alabama, roughly a thousand men of the 111th, Holland included, were captured by Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Read that again slowly.

Forrest. The same Forrest who commanded at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, on April 12, 1864, five months earlier, where surrendering Black Union soldiers were killed at rates that made Remember Fort Pillow a battle cry for USCT regiments for the rest of the war. The same Forrest who, after the war, became the first Grand Wizard of a Klan founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866.

Holland survived the capture. What happened next tells you everything about how the Confederacy understood Black soldiers. He was not held as a prisoner of war in any meaningful sense. He was assigned as a servant to Dr. James Cowan, Forrest’s chief surgeon, for roughly three to four months. A man who had escaped enslavement, put on a federal uniform, and taken an oath to the United States government was captured and immediately returned to the condition of a body that works for somebody else without pay or consent.

Apply Spillers to that. The distinction between the body and the flesh, between the culturally recognized subject and the ungendered, unprotected, seizable material underneath, does not get better because you put a uniform on the body. The uniform was supposed to be the transfer document. The Confederacy simply refused to honor it, and the international laws of war had no meaningful mechanism to make them.

Sometime after the Confederate defeat at the Battle of Nashville on December 15 and 16, 1864, Holland escaped a second time and returned to his unit.

Think about what that requires. This is a man who escaped enslavement once, chose the war, got captured, was re enslaved in fact if not in name, and then escaped again and went back to the war. That is not a person waiting on Abraham Lincoln to sign something. That is a person who had already decided.

THE GRISLY CONTRACT: THREE THOUSAND BODIES AND A STONE WALL

After Appomattox, the 111th USCT got the assignment nobody writes ballads about.

Under Chaplain William Earnshaw, who became the first superintendent of the new national cemetery, the Black soldiers of the 111th began disinterring the Union dead scattered across Middle Tennessee and reburying them at what became Stones River National Cemetery. They started with three known mass graves on the battlefield itself and worked outward, east through Murfreesboro, out to the old Union University grounds and beyond. More than three thousand bodies. Bodies that had been in the ground since the winter of 1862 and 1863.

They also built the stone wall. They kept at both jobs until the regiment mustered out in 1866.

I want y’all to hold the full shape of that assignment. Black men who had been legally defined as property in that state were given the task of gathering, identifying where possible, and honoring the remains of the men who died in the war over whether they were property. The nation could not be bothered to do its own grieving. It contracted the grief out to the people it had spent two hundred years refusing to grieve for.

Then it built a wall around the honored dead, and when Sergeant William Holland died in 1909, at roughly seventy five years old, his grave sat outside that wall. Not because he was denied. Because he asked to be buried on his own land. In 1867 he bought a small tract adjacent to the Hazen Brigade Monument. He got his veteran’s pension in 1897, thirty one years after mustering out. He farmed that ground for over four decades. When he died the federal government honored his request and set a national cemetery headstone on private property.

The man who reburied three thousand strangers picked his own plot. After a life that began as somebody’s inventory, he chose where his body would rest and the United States government complied. That is a small thing that is not a small thing.

His grandson William Harlan, who served as a corporal in the United States Army during World War One, is buried right behind him.

CEMETERY: A TOWN BUILT ON A BATTLEFIELD

Holland wasn’t by himself. He and a bunch of other veterans and formerly enslaved families built a thriving freedmen’s community right on the battleground, and they named it after the cemetery they had filled with their own hands. They called it Cemetery.

There were actually two adjoining settlements inside what people generally called Cemetery, one known as the Cedars and one known as the Bottoms. Between them there were three churches, a school, shops, and farms. By 1910 the community counted roughly eighty people across seventeen households, and at least seventy percent of those households owned the property they lived on.

Seventy percent land ownership. In 1910. In Rutherford County, Tennessee.

For context on how extraordinary that is: by 1870 approximately one in twenty two rural Black households in Tennessee owned land. Cemetery’s people did not just clear that bar, they lapped it, and they did it on the exact ground where the war had been fought over whether they could own anything at all, including themselves.

Nearby, in 1867, leaders from the Gay Street Colored Christian Church in Nashville, principally the ministers Peter Lowery and Samuel Lowery, chartered Tennessee Manual Labor University. It was the only freedmen’s college in Tennessee founded by African Americans themselves, without northern missionary sponsorship and against local white opposition. Classes began in January 1868 with one hundred students on land under cultivation in corn, cotton, and sorghum.

The next time you hear somebody who looks like us say man, that’s the reason why we can’t handle it, because we can’t work together, I want you to think about Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A community built by the very people who had once been property, transforming a killing field into farms and homes and churches and a school. We are able to take lemons and make lemonade, lemon meringue, lemon pie, all that.

Then I need you to keep reading, because the story does not end where the placard ends.

THE SHOVEL AND THE SPELLER: WHAT THIS GROUND TEACHES ABOUT ADULT EDUCATION

Here is the implication for education, and I’m going to take my time with it, because this is my actual field and I’ve got some things to say.

Cemetery School was built in 1874 on donated land. Donated. Not appropriated by the state, not funded by a county line item, not the product of a school board’s conscience. The people gave up their own acreage so their children would have somewhere to sit. Generations of children received their first through eighth grade education in that building until 1962. The final structure, built in 1940, is now on the National Register of Historic Places and is being developed into a museum and cultural center by descendants and community partners.

Ninety years of Black education in Rutherford County that began as a gift from people who had almost nothing to give.

Now here’s the part that matters for anybody who studies adult education, which I do. What happened in the freedmen’s settlements after 1865 was the largest adult literacy movement in American history and almost nobody names it as such. Grown men and women, forty and fifty and sixty years old, who had been legally barred from the alphabet their entire lives, sat down in Sabbath schools and night schools and church basements and learned to read as adults. They did it after full days of field labor. They did it while the same hands that had hauled earth into a parapet were learning to hold a pencil. In many communities the children and the parents learned in the same room, from the same primer, at the same time.

Adult education theory loves to talk about andragogy and self directed learning and the adult learner’s need for immediate application. Apply Freire here and it clicks all the way into place: literacy was never separable from the reading of the world. These were people who understood with total clarity that reading the word and reading the political order were the same skill, because the political order had already told them, in statute, that the two were connected. That is why it was criminal. The criminalization was the confession. Every accusation is a confession, and a law against Black literacy is a law admitting that Black literacy is dangerous to the arrangement.

Then look at what happened to the funding, because this is where the argument becomes contemporary.

Tennessee State University, this state’s public land grant HBCU, established in 1912, was underfunded by approximately 2.1 billion dollars over roughly three decades according to a September 2023 joint letter from the United States Departments of Agriculture and Education to the governor of Tennessee. Not stolen in a single dramatic act. Withheld, quietly, in the annual matching funds the state was legally obligated to provide under the second Morrill Act framework and its successors. Sixteen states got that letter. Tennessee’s number was the largest.

That’s the same mechanism as 1874, just running in the other direction. In 1874 the community had to donate the land because the state would not build the school. In the twentieth and twenty first centuries the state built the school and then declined to fund it at parity for thirty years. The through line is not a feeling. The through line is a ledger.

Woodson said it in 1933 in The Mis Education of the Negro, and it applies with no adjustment: when you control what a man thinks, you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not need a law against Black literacy anymore if you can simply ensure that the schools serving Black students are structurally starved, that the curriculum omits Fortress Rosecrans and Cemetery School and the general strike, and that the graduate leaves believing the freedom was given rather than taken.

So when Tennessee legislators fight over what can be taught about race in a classroom, when districts pull books, when the state debates whether discomfort is a legitimate reason to omit a chapter, understand what the actual stake is. Not feelings. The stake is whether the next generation knows that the largest fortification of the Civil War was built by people the law said could not read, and that their descendants owned seventy percent of the land in a town they founded, and that a federal statute took it. A student who knows that is unmanageable. That is the entire point.

Education Is Elevation is not a slogan I made up to sound good. It is a description of what William Holland’s neighbors did with a donated acre in 1874.

THE PAYROLL THAT NEVER CARRIED HER NAME: INTERSECTIONAL MATERIAL IMPACTS

Now let’s do the part that most Civil War content skips entirely, and let’s do it with rigor, because intersectionality is not a garnish you sprinkle at the end.

Crenshaw’s original intervention was not a vibe, it was a court case. In DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, Black women were told they could not sue as Black women. They could sue as Black people, and General Motors hired Black men. They could sue as women, and General Motors hired white women. The category that described their actual position had no legal existence, so their injury had no remedy. Hold that framework and now look at this battlefield.

Thousands of Black women fled to Murfreesboro after Stones River. They cooked, washed, nursed, hauled, nursed the wounded through gangrene and dysentery, buried the dead the men had not yet gotten to, and kept contraband camps functioning under conditions that killed people. Almost none of that labor generated a pay record. There was no muster roll for a laundress. There was no enlistment date for a cook. Glymph’s work on this is essential, both Out of the House of Bondage and The Women’s Fight, and what she demonstrates is that the war for Black women was fought in the household, in the camp, and over the terms of their own labor, and that the archive was built in a way that does not count it.

Follow the money forward and watch what that missing paperwork does.

The USCT pay scandal is the first layer. Under the Militia Act of July 1862, Black soldiers were paid ten dollars a month with three dollars deducted for clothing, netting seven dollars, while white privates received thirteen dollars a month with no clothing deduction. Nearly half. Regiments protested, some refused pay entirely for over a year, and Congress did not equalize it until June 15, 1864, retroactive only to January 1 of that year for most categories. Holland enlisted March 1, 1864. He spent his first months in uniform underpaid by statute for being what he was.

Now layer the gender. A Union veteran’s pension flowed to his widow after his death. To claim it, a Black widow had to prove a legal marriage. Slavery had made legal marriage between enslaved people impossible, because a contract requires two parties with legal personhood and the law had granted her none. So the Pension Bureau built a special evidentiary process for Black widows, requiring depositions, witnesses, affidavits from former enslavers, and testimony about cohabitation and reputation that white widows were never asked to produce. Women were interrogated about their sexual histories by federal special examiners. Claims were denied over inconsistencies in oral testimony about events from twenty years prior.

That is the material shape of the thing. The man’s service was underpaid by race. The woman’s survivorship was contested by gender operating through race. Neither injury is visible if you only look at one axis, which is exactly Crenshaw’s point, and it is happening on this battlefield within a generation of the shooting stopping.

Then there is Frances Thompson. In May of 1866, white mobs including Memphis police killed forty six Black people, burned churches and schools, and committed documented sexual violence during the Memphis Massacre. Thompson, a Black woman, testified before a congressional committee about being raped. Her testimony is part of the record that helped shape support for the Fourteenth Amendment. Ten years later, in 1876, Thompson was arrested and prosecuted for cross dressing, publicly humiliated, sentenced to the chain gang, and died shortly after. Historians today generally read Thompson as a Black trans woman. The state used her body first as evidence and then as a target.

Apply Moya Bailey here. Misogynoir is the specific location where antiblackness and misogyny fuse into something that is not the sum of its parts, and Thompson’s arc is the clearest possible demonstration. Her credibility was useful to the nation for exactly as long as the nation needed leverage against the South. When the leverage was no longer needed, the same nation criminalized her existence. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and that if Black women were free it would necessarily mean the destruction of all the systems of oppression. Thompson is what interlocking looks like with a name and a court docket.

Lastly, run it through land. When the federal taking came to Cemetery, it did not arrive as an eviction notice addressed to a person. It arrived as a title question. Land that had been passed down without wills, held collectively across siblings and cousins, farmed by widows and daughters whose names never made it onto a deed, became heirs property, which is the most fragile form of ownership in American law and the mechanism through which Black families have lost an estimated majority of their agricultural land across the twentieth century. Women hold the disproportionate share of that loss because women disproportionately outlive, inherit, and hold together the households whose paperwork the system was designed to reject.

The women built the community and the ledger recorded the men, when it recorded anybody at all.

1927: WHEN THE MONUMENT ATE THE TOWN

Here is where I need every single one of y’all locked in, because this is the part that makes the whole essay a different essay.

In 1927 the United States Congress authorized the creation of Stones River National Military Park. The War Department was the responsible agency at the time, and it selected roughly three hundred twenty five acres surrounding the existing national cemetery.

African Americans owned more than half of that land.

Between 1929 and 1932 the residents of the Cedars and the Bottoms were forced to sell and were displaced. The federal government purchased approximately three hundred acres including land belonging to Cemetery Community families. Many landowners objected to the government impounding land their forefathers had worked so hard to acquire. It happened anyway.

Now put the whole sequence together, in order, and do not look away from any step.

Black people were brought to this county as property. Black people escaped, walked into Union lines, and were put to work building the largest earthen fortress in the Civil War, largely without meaningful pay and often without meaningful consent. Black men enlisted from a state the Emancipation Proclamation had deliberately exempted. Black soldiers of the 111th disinterred and reburied more than three thousand Union dead and built the wall around them. Black families then bought that ground with money earned in freedom, founded a town on it, put up three churches, donated the land for a school, and reached seventy percent home ownership by 1910.

Then the United States government created a monument to the battle those same people had helped win, and took the land to do it.

Feel me? The commemoration of the war displaced the people who won it. The memorial required the erasure. Not metaphorically. Cartographically, by deed transfer, in the county register.

This is the two roles frame and it is airtight. What the National Military Park says it is doing is honoring the sacrifice at Stones River. What the National Military Park structurally did, in 1929 through 1932, was liquidate Black landownership on the site of that sacrifice. Both things are true. The second one is the one with a paper trail at the courthouse.

Apply Bell’s permanence of racism thesis and it stops looking like a tragic irony and starts looking like a pattern with a schedule. Apply Mills and the racial contract explains the mechanism: the formal agreement is universal, the actual operation is racially calibrated, and the calibration does not need anyone to say a racist word out loud. Eminent domain is neutral on its face. Eminent domain applied to a Black freedmen’s settlement in Jim Crow Tennessee in 1929 is a wealth transfer.

Then apply Robinson one more time. If antiblackness is the engine of racial capitalism rather than a malfunction in it, then this outcome is not a failure of the National Military Park. It is the National Military Park working. The land appreciates, the story consolidates, the descendants scatter, and eighty years later a family that owned acreage in 1910 is renting in a county where the median home price has passed four hundred thousand dollars.

That’s the compounding. That’s the whole ballgame. Not slavery as a closed chapter, but slavery, then impressed labor, then discriminatory pay, then contested pensions, then displacement, then disinvestment, each one handing off to the next like a relay, which is exactly what Hartman means by the afterlife of slavery.

And here is what survived it anyway: Cemetery School still stands. Descendants like the community members organizing around it are turning it into a museum. Three churches worth of institutional memory endured just beyond the park boundary. The National Park Service, to its credit, now partners with the African American Heritage Society of Rutherford County and with descendants to interpret the community it helped remove. That is not a resolution. That is a beginning that arrived about ninety years late.

WHY THIS MATTERS ON THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS

I’m walking a thousand miles to Memphis. Nashville to Atlanta to Birmingham to Jackson to the National Civil Rights Museum, thirty days, with a goal of registering one hundred thousand voters, because the Supreme Court in Louisiana v. Callais gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and somebody has to put a body on the road about it.

Murfreesboro is right there at the start of that route. Which means I walk past Fortress Rosecrans in the first days.

The rhyme is not subtle. In 1863 Black Tennesseans built the physical infrastructure of a Union victory while the federal government explicitly excluded them from the freedom document. In 2026 Black Southerners are the electoral infrastructure of American democracy while the federal judiciary strips the statutory protection that made their participation enforceable. Same posture. Build the thing, get excluded from the thing, keep building anyway.

Section 2 was the operational heart of the Voting Rights Act. Section 5 preclearance already got hollowed out in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013. Section 2 was what was left, and it was the tool that produced majority Black districts across the South, which is to say the tool that produced Black congressional representation in the region where most Black Americans actually live.

Crazy how the Southern Black Left has been telling everybody this for sixty years and got treated like the unserious wing of the movement. Ella Baker organized in these states. Fannie Lou Hamer built Freedom Farm in Sunflower County, Mississippi, on the theory that political rights without a land base and a food base are a rented freedom. SNCC field secretaries did voter registration in counties where doing so got you shot. Every one of them understood that the vote is downstream of material power, and that material power in the South means land, and that Black land in the South has been under continuous attrition since 1910.

Cemetery Community is the case study. They had the land. They lost the land to a monument. The monument commemorates their own victory.

So when I ask whether your narrative of freedom is made in opposition to Black people or with Black people in mind, I’m not asking a rhetorical question. I’m asking you to audit the actual curriculum you received. Did anybody teach you that the largest fortification of the Civil War was raised by people whose literacy was a crime? Did anybody teach you that Tennessee was carved out of the Emancipation Proclamation at the request of a man who became president? Did anybody teach you that a Black town on a battlefield reached seventy percent home ownership and then the federal government bought it out from under them to build a park?

If the answer is no, then the narrative you received was made in opposition. Not by accident. By curriculum.

FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

One. The turning point was a labor decision, not a military one. Du Bois called it a general strike for a reason. Roughly half a million enslaved people withdrew their labor from the Confederate economy and transferred it to the Union, and two hundred thousand Black men eventually served in the United States Army and Navy. Fortress Rosecrans, the largest earthen fortification of the war, never fired a shot in anger. Its entire value was logistical, and it was built by the people the Confederacy could least afford to lose.

Two. Tennessee was exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation at Andrew Johnson’s request, and 20,133 Black Tennesseans enlisted anyway. More than from any other Confederate state. Slavery did not legally end in Tennessee until a state referendum on February 22, 1865. The freedom preceded the paperwork, which means the paperwork was never the cause.

Three. Impressment and emancipation happened on the same shovel. Fort Negley in Nashville shows the pattern clearly: Black laborers seized off the street, hundreds dead, wages promised and frequently not paid. Two things can be true. Autonomy was exercised and it was exercised inside a structure that was still extracting. Hartman’s afterlife of slavery is not a metaphor here, it is a payroll record.

Four. The intersectional injury is the one with no paperwork at all. Black soldiers were underpaid by statute until June 15, 1864. Black widows were forced to prove marriages that slavery had made legally impossible, and were interrogated about their sexual histories by federal examiners to do it. Black women’s camp labor generated no muster roll. Frances Thompson’s testimony built the Fourteenth Amendment’s case and the same state prosecuted her a decade later for who she was. Crenshaw, Bailey, Spillers, and Glymph are not optional readings for this history. They are the only way to see half of it.

Five. The monument displaced the people it commemorates. Congress authorized Stones River National Military Park in 1927. African Americans owned more than half the selected land. Residents of the Cedars and the Bottoms were forced out between 1929 and 1932. A community that had reached seventy percent home ownership by 1910 was liquidated by a memorial to a battle its founders helped win. That is the clearest statement of the racial contract this ground has to offer, and it is written in deeds, not opinions.

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The people of Cemetery donated their own land in 1874 so their children would have a school, because the state would not build one, and fifty five years later that same government took the ground out from under them. I am asking you to fund the version of this that nobody can take the deed to.

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RELATED READINGS AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

Foundational Historiography

Du Bois, W.E.B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860 to 1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. The general strike thesis. The single most important reframing of this period and still the one most often assigned in excerpt rather than in full.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863 to 1877. Harper and Row, 1988. The standard synthesis. Read alongside Du Bois, not instead of him.

Hahn, Steven. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Harvard University Press, 2003. Essential for understanding rural Black politics, land, and community formation, which is exactly the Cemetery story.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press, 2001. On how national reconciliation was purchased with Black erasure. Directly relevant to the 1927 park.

Black Military Service and Emancipation

Berlin, Ira, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861 to 1867. Series II: The Black Military Experience. Cambridge University Press, 1982. Primary documents on pay, impressment, treatment, and the pension process. This is where the receipts live.

Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. Free Press, 1990.

Manning, Chandra. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War. Knopf, 2007.

Manning, Chandra. Troubled Refuge: Struggling for Freedom in the Civil War. Knopf, 2016. On contraband camps specifically, which is the Fort Negley and Murfreesboro context.

Black Women, Gender, and the Archive

Glymph, Thavolia. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Glymph, Thavolia. The Women’s Fight: The Civil War’s Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation. University of North Carolina Press, 2020. The indispensable corrective on Black women’s wartime labor and refugee camp experience.

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

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Source of the afterlife of slavery formulation.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987). The body and flesh distinction that makes Holland’s captivity legible.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1. Includes the DeGraffenreid v. General Motors analysis.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.

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

Rosen, Hannah. Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South. University of North Carolina Press, 2009. The definitive treatment of the Memphis Massacre testimony, including Frances Thompson.

Theory

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

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

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

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

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

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Herder and Herder, 1970.

Tennessee, Murfreesboro, and Cemetery Community

Conard, Rebecca. Historic Cemetery Community, Stones River National Battlefield, Rutherford County, Tennessee. National Park Service ethnographic overview. The primary scholarly documentation of the settlement, its land ownership, and its removal.

Lovett, Bobby L. The African American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1780 to 1930. University of Arkansas Press, 1999. Includes Fort Negley and Tennessee Manual Labor University.

Lovett, Bobby L. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Tennessee. Useful for the Johnson exemption and the 1865 referendum.

Ash, Stephen V. Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860 to 1870. Louisiana State University Press, 1988.

Cimprich, John. Slavery’s End in Tennessee, 1861 to 1865. University of Alabama Press, 1985. The authoritative account of why the Proclamation skipped Tennessee and what happened instead.

Tennessee Encyclopedia. Entries on Fortress Rosecrans, Tennessee Manual Labor University, and the United States Colored Troops in Tennessee.

National Park Service, Stones River National Battlefield. Interpretive materials on the Cemetery Community, Sergeant William Holland, and the 111th USCT.

Contemporary Policy Context

United States Departments of Agriculture and Education. Joint letters to sixteen governors regarding land grant HBCU funding disparities, September 2023. Tennessee State University shortfall figure of approximately $2.1 billion.

Louisiana v. Callais. On the current status of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). On the gutting of Section 5 preclearance.

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“Right now, education is trash.” That was the first thing out my mouth when I sat down with Gina Hinojosa, no warmup, no small talk, jumping right into it, because when your state is sitting at the bottom of the country in what it spends on a child and the top of the country in what it spends on a cage, you do not have time for pleasantries. She did not flinch, she did not spin it, she did not hit me with that consultant tested nothing talk, she said education in Texas is a reflection of our leadership, and then she started running down receipts like she been waiting on somebody to ask. Teachers walking away from the classroom because of disrespect, because they are policed in all sorts of ways now, because of underpay. More uncertified teachers entering Texas classrooms than certified teachers joining the profession, for the first time in the history of this state. A Central Texas school district where the human resources director told her most of his teachers come from Mexico on visas because he cannot find people here to work in the classroom.

Man, hold on, hold on, hold on. We are not even going to go past that. At a time where our state is criminalizing a bunch of individuals that is coming from Mexico, we also have a bunch of our students that is having a low quality education based on how much we are not funding it, and the population being criminalized for coming into our state is also the population trying to help our kids raise the quality of education in our state. Sit with that contradiction. Every accusation is a confession, y’all. The same state government that put razor wire in the river and buoys in the water is quietly stamping visas so Mexican educators can come save the classrooms that Greg Abbott starved. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a whole state pissing on our legs and telling us it is raining.

This essay is what happens when you take that sit down and run it through the archive. I am going to tell you who Gina Hinojosa is, I am going to lay out what she said, and then I am going to do what Education Is Elevation always does, put the present inside the history that produced it, because the curriculum fight in Texas did not start with Trump in 2016, it did not start with critical race theory panic in 2021, it started when Texas was still an idea inside a land deal, and both parties, hear me clearly, both parties have kept the machinery of forgetting well oiled ever since.

Who Is Gina Hinojosa

Gina Hinojosa is the 2026 Democratic nominee for governor of Texas. She was born and raised in Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley, a proud product of Texas public schools, a former civil rights and union side lawyer, and a mother who got into politics the way a lot of mothers do, because the state came for her child’s school. She ran for the Austin ISD school board when budget cuts threatened her son’s elementary campus, rose to school board president, and then won a seat in the Texas House in 2016, where she has served five terms representing central Austin, sitting on the Public Education Committee and becoming one of the loudest and most consistent opponents of Greg Abbott’s billion dollar private school voucher program. In 2021 she helped lead the quorum break, when Texas House Democrats left the state and flew to Washington to fight for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act after Republicans tried to ban Sunday morning voting and shut down souls to the polls. In March 2026 she won the Democratic primary with nearly sixty percent of the vote in a nine candidate field, and this November she faces Abbott, his war chest of more than one hundred million dollars, and a Republican lock on the governor’s mansion that has held since Ann Richards walked out of it in 1995. If she wins, she becomes the first Latina governor of a state that is about forty percent Latino, which she answered better than any consultant could when I asked her about it. Why wouldn’t we have one? We are Texan. Texas is all of us.

What She Said: Corruption Wearing a Culture War Costume

The spine of Hinojosa’s whole analysis is one sentence she kept coming back to like a broken record, her words, not mine: corruption is the source of almost all our problems, and the culture war is the costume corruption wears to the function. Everything is broken in this state, she told me. Government is broken. Our leaders, and Greg Abbott is mostly responsible because he is the governor, they just do politics all the time. They do not govern. Our schools have become ground zero for culture wars, and it did not used to be that way. When she was on the school board, before 2016, the hardcore fights were over which school got bond money for a parking lot. Then the machinery changed what schools are for.

Her receipts on the ground are brutal. One hundred fifty whole school districts in Texas are operating four days a week because they cannot afford to operate five. Not one campus, not one struggling charter, one hundred fifty districts. So I asked the question every working parent in rural Texas is asking, what are kids doing on that fifth day when their parents are at work? Money that should be flowing into classrooms is flowing into vendor contracts, and she said the quiet part with her chest, corrupt vendor contracts to Greg Abbott’s donors. She sits on the public education committee and told me they are not even allowed to vote on bills that are just about kids in the classroom. It is all vendor contracts. Her plan reads like a repossession notice. Fire Mike Morath, the Texas Education Agency commissioner, a tech guy, and put an educator in the seat. Give Houston its school district back to the people of Houston, because it is never the right answer to take schools away from parents and community, the people with skin in the game. Wipe clean the teaching to the test, the canned curriculum, the contracts, and use that money to pay Texas teachers among the highest in the nation. Then hold what she called an unsession, a whole legislative session dedicated to undoing the things the state has stacked on top of teachers, and just let people teach.

The part that should be taught in every civics class is her breakdown of the Bluebonnet curriculum. Pay attention to the sequence, because the sequence is the scam. The state curriculum that now has Christian nationalism baked into it did not start out as a theology project. It started out as a billion dollar vendor contract to Abbott’s donors, canned, timed, scripted lesson plans that teachers hated. Then everybody came out against it together, teachers, public school parents, even MAGA moms, all united in hating the same bill and calling out the corruption. So what did they do? They put the Christian nationalism in. It was not there before. They gave it a new name, Bluebonnet, and suddenly a united front against corruption became a culture war that splits neighbors down the middle. Hinojosa named the play perfectly: he is distracting you with one hand while he takes your money with the other hand. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Then the conversation went where Texas conversations always end up if you follow the money far enough, into the cages. She told me about the halfway house in Austin run by CoreCivic, a private prison corporation, where a man told her to his face that the state of Texas brought him to Austin from an out of state prison, released him onto streets where he knew nobody, and left him with nothing. Less than a third of the people in that facility were even from Travis County. They ship human beings to wherever the company has beds, because every bed is a billable head, and if people are not rehabilitated they reoffend and go right back into the machine that profits from them. She connected it straight to the ICE raids, to Texas being the only state that locks up little kids with their parents because Abbott built the licensing to allow what would be child abuse anywhere else, to the Texas National Guard staffing private detention centers on the taxpayer dime so the corporations can fatten their margins. I told her I was going to see if she would say the word, and she said it. Greg Abbott is trafficking. Trafficking ex offenders onto our streets, back in and out of the system. Shonda Rhimes could not have wrote this better, and I do not even look for this truth. It falls on my lap.

Both Sides of the Aisle, One Side of the Erasure

Now here is the structural critique, and I need y’all to hold two things at the same time, because two things can be true. Greg Abbott is uniquely corrupt, and the Texas curriculum was anti Black and anti Indigenous long before Greg Abbott ever touched it. The bipartisan beef, the red team blue team wrestling promo we watch every election cycle, functions as a mystification, because it teaches us to experience curriculum as a possession fight between two parties when the deeper truth is that both parties have administered a schooling system built on the same settler foundation. Charles Mills gave us the language for this in The Racial Contract when he described an epistemology of ignorance, a structured, socially produced way of not knowing that white polities require to see themselves as innocent. Apply Mills here. The Texas curriculum is not missing Black and Indigenous history by accident, the ignorance is the product, manufactured on schedule like any other deliverable in any other vendor contract. Arnold Farr and George Yancy push it further, whiteness maintains itself precisely by never having to examine the conditions of its own construction, and a seventh grade Texas history course with zero Black Texans in it is that non examination made mandatory and graded. Patrick Wolfe taught us that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, organized around a logic of elimination, and Sandy Grande reminds us in Red Pedagogy that the schoolhouse has always been one of settler society’s primary elimination technologies. So when Democrats governed Texas for a hundred straight years and wrote Lost Cause textbooks, and when Republicans governed Texas for thirty straight years and wrote critical race theory bans, the party changed and the erasure held its shape. Derrick Bell called that the permanence of racism, and Cedric Robinson would tell us why it holds, because antiblackness is not a glitch in the operating system of racial capitalism, it is the engine, and Texas schooling, from the cotton ledger to the STAAR contract, has always been an appendage of that economy. The culture war is not a fight over whether the machine runs. It is a fight over whose logo goes on it.

Hinojosa, to her credit, did not duck this when I pressed. I told her I am 35, and when I was in seventh grade Greg Abbott was not the governor, Rick Perry was, and we was not learning anything about Black history then either. The issue predates 2016. It is a structural issue within the curriculum that goes back, man, maybe back to the beginning of Texas. She agreed, and she went further than most Democrats will go on camera. Thirty year one party rule is real, she said, and there is one party responsible for where Texas is right now, but Democrats who have been elected have gone along. Too many elected Democrats have gone along with an economic model where government invests in corporations at the expense of people. She said young voters are sometimes reasonable to ask what is the difference, and that Democrats need to stop defending the indefensible. Just admit it, that is rarer than a snowstorm in Corpus. The question this essay asks is whether that honesty can survive contact with a curriculum apparatus that both parties built.

Critical Historical Context: From Come and Take It to Bluebonnet

Let me take y’all to school right quick, because you cannot understand the Bluebonnet fight without understanding that Texas was founded as a real estate transaction with slavery as the business model and Indigenous removal as the site preparation. In 1821 the newly independent Mexican government began granting empresario contracts, and Stephen F. Austin got the biggest one, authorization to settle Anglo families on land that was Karankawa, Tonkawa, Caddo, and Comanche land, land the settlers wanted cleared, in every sense of that word, so cotton could go in the ground and enslaved Africans could be forced to work it up. When Mexico moved against slavery, culminating in President Vicente Guerrero, a man of African and Indigenous descent, issuing an abolition decree in 1829, the Anglo colonists lawyered around it, rebranding enslaved people as ninety nine year indentured servants. When Mexico centralized and the loopholes started closing, Texans reached for their rifles and their flags, and yes, that includes the come and take it flag they print on truck decals today, a banner flown in a war that secured, among other things, the right to keep human beings as property. The 1836 Constitution of the Republic of Texas said it with no shame, Section 9 declared that all persons of color who were slaves for life shall remain in the like state of servitude, and it barred free Black people from even living in the republic without congressional permission. Then came Mirabeau Lamar, the republic’s second president, who announced an extermination war against Indigenous nations and drove the Cherokee and Comanche out with fire and cavalry. That is the founding. Not a footnote to the founding. The founding.

Juneteenth sits on top of that foundation like a truth the state cannot digest. June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger reads General Order Number 3 in Galveston, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because Texas had become the place enslavers ran to with the people they held in bondage, the last stronghold of the trade. Freedom came to Texas late, at gunpoint, and incompletely, and Black Texans turned that day into the mother of all freedom celebrations anyway. Crazy how the state that gave the world Juneteenth teaches a seventh grade Texas history course where, as I told Hinojosa directly, there is not one Black person within the curriculum. Santa Anna is there. David Crockett is there. The Alamo gets the full cinematic treatment. The people whose stolen labor the whole project was organized around get a blank page.

That blank page was manufactured, and we know the manufacturers by name. After Reconstruction was drowned, the United Daughters of the Confederacy ran a decades long campaign to control what Southern children learned, and Texas was a crown jewel. Mildred Lewis Rutherford published her Measuring Rod in 1920, an actual checklist instructing school boards to reject any textbook that called the Confederacy a rebellion or spoke ill of slavery, and pro Southern textbook committees enforced it. The same era threw up the Confederate monuments, and a second wave of monuments and school namings rolled out in the 1950s and 1960s, not as memory but as a message, aimed dead at Brown v. Board and the movement. So when I told Hinojosa the erasure runs through the Daughters of the Confederacy and the monument campaigns, that is not vibes, that is documented textbook procurement policy, and here is the bipartisan sting, all of it happened under Democratic state governments, because the Texas Democratic Party of that era was the party of Jim Crow. The jerseys flipped in the twentieth century. The playbook stayed in the locker room.

Fast forward and watch the structure persist under new management. In 2010 the State Board of Education rewrote social studies standards to soften slavery as a cause of the Civil War, listing it behind sectionalism and states rights, and it took until 2018 for the board to partially walk that back. In 2015 a McGraw Hill geography textbook used in Texas classrooms captioned the Atlantic slave trade as bringing millions of workers from Africa, workers, like they was on a shuttle bus to a shift, and it took a Black mother in Pearland, Roni Dean Burren, going viral to force a correction. In 2021 Senate Bill 3 gutted requirements to teach the history of white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan as morally wrong and chilled every classroom conversation about race under the banner of banning critical race theory. In 2023 House Bill 900 supercharged book removals, and the state seized the Houston Independent School District, the largest district in Texas, majority Black and Brown, stripping an elected board from the community, which is the takeover Hinojosa promised to reverse. In November 2024 the State Board of Education approved Bluebonnet Learning, the state authored curriculum salted with Bible content, with a financial incentive per student for districts that adopt it, which is how you get scripture into a classroom, not through a church door but through a budget line. Then in 2025 Abbott signed the billion dollar voucher program, draining public money toward private schools while public districts cut to four day weeks. Every era, same architecture. The curriculum protects the founding. The founding protects the money.

The Curriculum Is the Crime Scene: What Erasure Does to a Child

Now let me put my education degrees on the table, because this is the part where people think we are being sentimental about representation, and we are actually being clinical about learning science and power. Carter G. Woodson wrote in 1933 that if you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions, that when you make a man feel he is inferior you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, he will seek it himself. That is not a metaphor, that is a description of curriculum as an instrument. Paulo Freire named the mechanism, the banking model of education, where students are treated as empty vaults to be filled with deposits chosen by the powerful, and Texas has turned banking education into a literal banking relationship, canned, timed, scripted lesson plans purchased through vendor contracts, teachers policed into script readers, children processed through STAAR like inventory. Michael Apple would call the Texas history TEKS a textbook case of the hidden curriculum, the lessons underneath the lessons, and the hidden curriculum of a Texas history course with no Black Texans and no honest account of Indigenous dispossession is simple: this state was built by white men, belongs to white men, and everybody else is scenery. Erhabor Ighodaro and Greg Wiggan gave us the term curriculum violence, the deliberate manipulation of academic content that damages students psychologically and intellectually, and I want y’all to understand that a Latina child taught that Texas independence means her people were the villains, and a Black child taught Juneteenth in a course that never mentions a single Black Texan, are both experiencing curriculum violence on the taxpayer dime. Hinojosa said it plain in our conversation, if little kids cannot see in their history that people other than white men achieved great things, why would they believe in themselves? Feel me, this is why I am such a stickler on the curriculum, because if we cannot see ourselves in it, it is going to impact how we move and navigate. The classroom is where the state teaches children who is grievable, who is credible, and who is disposable, and then we act shocked when the graduates fund the cages.

Who Catches the Most Hell When the Schoolhouse Fails

Education Is Elevation does not do single axis analysis, so let us run this through Kimberlé Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective, who taught us that systems of oppression are interlocking and that the people standing at the intersections catch traffic from every direction. Start with Black women educators, because the profession Hinojosa wants to restore was partly built by them and then gutted at their expense. After Brown v. Board, tens of thousands of Black teachers and principals across the South, most of them Black women, were dismissed, demoted, or pushed out as white districts integrated students but not staff, a professional massacre scholars estimate at roughly thirty eight thousand educators, and Texas took its share. So when Texas classrooms today are staffed by uncertified emergency hires while Black women with education degrees carry student debt into other professions, that is not a pipeline problem, that is a repossession that never got paid back. Now look at the students. Monique Morris documented in Pushout how Black girls are criminalized in schools for the same behaviors white girls get grace for, and the Georgetown Law study on adultification found that adults perceive Black girls as young as five as needing less nurturing and less protection. Marry that to a Texas discipline apparatus and a curriculum that never shows a Black girl a single Black Texan woman worth studying, no Barbara Jordan in seventh grade, and Moya Bailey’s misogynoir stops being academic vocabulary and starts being a hallway experience.

Then follow the four day week home. When one hundred fifty districts cut Friday, the childcare gap does not fall on the state, it falls on mothers, disproportionately Black and Latina mothers working hourly jobs without flexibility, which means a budget decision in Austin becomes unpaid domestic labor in Nacogdoches, exactly the transfer Angela Davis has spent a career mapping, the state offloading its social costs onto the unwaged work of women of color. Follow the special education story, where the Houston Chronicle exposed that the Texas Education Agency had for years operated an effective cap steering districts to keep special education enrollment near eight and a half percent, denying services to tens of thousands of children, and know that disabled Black and Brown children sit at the sharpest point of that denial, more likely to be disciplined than diagnosed. Follow the ICE raids into the classroom, because Plyler v. Doe, a Texas case, is the reason undocumented children have a constitutional right to public education at all, and every raid, every detention of a parent, every child locked up with their family in a Texas licensed facility teaches immigrant children that the schoolhouse door and the cage door are closer than the law pretends. Follow the HISD takeover, where the state stripped an elected school board from the largest Black and Brown district in Texas, which means Black grandmothers who organized for decades to win school board seats, the most accessible rung of American democracy, watched appointed managers replace their votes. Rural white families on four day weeks, Latina mothers dodging checkpoints to make parent teacher night, Black girls pushed out, disabled kids denied, that is not a coalition of separate grievances, that is one machine billing different communities at different rates, and Cheryl Harris would remind us the machine still pays dividends to whiteness as property even while it shortchanges poor white kids on the material end. The evidence don’t support the culture war framing. The evidence supports the invoice.

The Magnifying Glass Clause: Allyship With Receipts

I want to close the interview portion with the exchange that mattered most to me, because it models something Black communities and Democratic leadership have needed language for. I told Hinojosa straight up, I am much more of the radical texture of Texans, I am further left than her, and I want her to win, I am advocating for her to win, and precisely because of that, when she wins she should not expect me to holster my critique. I would rather put my magnifying glass on her, to her face, than pretend, because there is not going to be no switch up. Some politicians hear that and get defensive, iMa bE honest, most politicians hear that and start reciting their record like a hostage video. She asked to respond, and what she said belongs in a political science syllabus. Real change does not happen in the Capitol. Real change happens in our communities and puts pressure on politicians, because politicians mostly do not act because it is right, they act because they will be held accountable by voters. Then the sentence I want carved somewhere: you have to hold me accountable, because I am powerless if you don’t. That is Ella Baker’s whole theory of social change coming out of a gubernatorial nominee’s mouth, strong people don’t need strong leaders, movements make leaders move. Whether she governs like that sentence is a different question, and it is exactly the question my magnifying glass exists to ask. But a candidate who invites the pressure instead of pathologizing the critic is already governing different than the emperor we got, because let us keep it real, we do not have governors in Texas right now. We have emperors in Texas, and it is us and like fifteen billionaire dudes at the top.

Five Key Takeaways

* The culture war is a costume corruption wears. The Bluebonnet curriculum began as a billion dollar vendor contract that teachers, parents, and even MAGA moms united against, and the Christian nationalism was added afterward to shatter that coalition. Distraction with one hand, extraction with the other.

* The erasure is older than the parties fighting over it. From the 1836 constitution that constitutionalized slavery, to Lamar’s extermination war, to the Daughters of the Confederacy’s textbook Measuring Rod, to SB 3 and Bluebonnet, Democratic and Republican governments alike have curated a curriculum that protects the settler founding. Bipartisan beef mystifies a shared architecture.

* Curriculum is material, not symbolic. A seventh grade Texas history course with zero Black Texans is curriculum violence with measurable downstream effects on belief, belonging, discipline, and civic participation, exactly as Woodson warned in 1933.

* The schoolhouse and the cage share a balance sheet. Four day school weeks, an eight and a half percent special education cap, a billion dollar voucher drain, private prison halfway houses, family detention with National Guard staffing, one racial capitalist machine billing different communities at different rates.

* Accountability is the price of the endorsement. Hinojosa is running on firing Morath, returning HISD to Houston, an unsession to unburden teachers, top of the nation teacher pay, and $1,500 checks to households, and she explicitly asked to be held accountable. The magnifying glass stays out either way.

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If this essay taught you more about the Texas curriculum in twenty minutes than seventh grade taught you in nine months, that is not an accident, that is the void I built Education Is Elevation to fill, because the state has proven, from the Measuring Rod to Bluebonnet, that it will not teach this history on purpose. Every paid subscription is a counter vendor contract, except the vendor is a Black educator and the deliverable is the truth they keep trying to repossess.

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

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

Related Readings: A Bibliography

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

Apple, Michael W. Ideology and Curriculum. Routledge, 1979.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.

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

Burrough, Bryan, Chris Tomlinson, and Jason Stanford. Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. Penguin Press, 2021.

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

Cox, Karen L. Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. University Press of Florida, 2003.

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

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. Random House, 1981.

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

Fenwick, Leslie T. Jim Crow’s Pink Slip: The Untold Story of Black Principal and Teacher Leadership. Harvard Education Press, 2022.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

Gordon Reed, Annette. On Juneteenth. Liveright, 2021.

Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

Harris, Cheryl I. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, 1993.

Ighodaro, Erhabor, and Greg Wiggan. Curriculum Violence: America’s New Civil Rights Issue. Nova Science Publishers, 2011.

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

Moreno Ramos, Rubén, et al. Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202 (1982), case history and commentary.

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Thank you Hilleary Z., Jill Branton, Alexis Godfrey, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Education Is Elevation. Today I got a nice, intentional conversation with y’all about Texas freedmen colonies, about the over 500 places where Black people started their own towns after emancipation, about the word colony and everything that word carries, about dancing and art and the safe communities Black people been building since before this country decided we was citizens, and about whether taking care of each other is socialism or just survival, because the answer, as we gone see, is both. This ain’t nostalgia. This is evidence. Research over MeSearch means we start with the receipts and not the vibes, so let me lay the foundation first.

A freedom colony, according to the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the scholarship and the brainchild of Dr. Andrea Roberts, is a historically significant community where Black people post emancipation were able to purchase land or were given land to start their own town. We are talking 1865 through the 1930s, Reconstruction through the Great Depression, and as of now 557 sites have been located in Texas alone, with the number still growing as descendants and researchers keep walking the county lines and reading the deed books. These communities carried a few key identifying markers: a school, a church, a cemetery. Sit with that for a second. The first three things our people built when they got a piece of ground was a place to learn, a place to worship, and a place to honor the dead, and that right there is a whole philosophy of life, authored by people who was one generation, sometimes one season, out of bondage. Some of these places are still very much active, and some have ceased to exist in their original form due to gentrification, environmental destruction, and displacement in general. The map is scarred, but the map is real, and you can read it yourself on the Project’s Atlas.

Now let me handle the language, because words is where the fight starts. When you hear freedmen and colony pressed together, it almost sounds oxymoronic, feel me, because colony evokes colonizer, colonization, settlement on somebody else’s land. Some folks say freedmen town, some say freedmen settlement, some reach back further and say maroonage, the tradition Beatriz Nascimento traces through Brazil and that runs through Africatown in Alabama and every swamp and hill where stolen people made themselves free. Town, though, invokes a certain level of colonial formality, a municipality, a charter, a mayor, a governance the state and federal apparatus may recognize. Colony, in Roberts’ usage, is an invitation to think more expansively, because self governance could be me, you, my mama, my cousin and my aunties holding a plot of land and making decisions together intentionally, with no post office and no city council in sight. Ahh, but there is a tension we cannot skip, and my debate training will not let me skip it: every acre our people built freedom on was land Indigenous nations was removed from first. There was people here before. Holding both truths at once, the maroon dream and the settler grid it had to grow inside of, is not a contradiction, it is the assignment.

Free in 1865, Building by 1866: The Critical Historical Context

You cannot understand the freedom colony without understanding what Texas is. Texas was its own country, and that is the reason the state flag flies at the same height as the national flag, for better or for worse. Mostly for worse, because Texas broke from Mexico primarily to keep our ancestors enslaved, after Mexico moved against slavery, and the treaties Native nations had negotiated was with the Mexican government, which means Texas independence was built on a double foundation of Indigenous erasure and the preservation of bondage. Then freedom came late and came walking. Juneteenth, June 19, 1865, arrived in Galveston two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, and Texas loves to celebrate being the home of Juneteenth while the seventh grade curriculum barely whispers the word slavery. Freedom from what, and from whom.

Then the state got busy making sure freedom stayed theoretical. The promise of forty acres and a mule never materialized. The Texas Black Codes and the 1866 Homestead Act specifically excluded African Americans from accessing public land, which means the government said out loud, in statute, that the people who had cleared and worked this soil for generations could not have any of it. So freedpeople bought land with cash wages, claimed land through adverse possession, and accepted the flood prone bottomlands at the edges of plantations and city boundaries, the swamps and county line margins white settlers did not want. The Texas State Historical Association will tell you that plainly. Our people took the land nobody wanted and made lemonade, lemon meringue, lemon pie, a whole way out of no way. Shankleville in Newton County. Kendleton in Fort Bend County. Barrett Station in northeast Harris County. Independence Heights and Freedmen’s Town in Houston. Givens Hill near Crockett, where Mary Allen College also stood. County Line communities scattered like seeds. In Panola County, a community my guest Stacey Allen’s own family comes from, called 1100, because eleven families pooled together and secured one hundred acres and started a community, and some of that family still owns their property there. Eleven families. One hundred acres. That is not folklore, that is a business plan, a mutual aid society, and a constitution, all spoken into a deed book.

Let me give you the one story that carries the whole era. Jim and Winnie Shankle were enslaved on a plantation in Mississippi when Winnie was sold to a plantation in Newton County, Texas. Jim decided he was not going to live without his wife, so he escaped, crossed the Mississippi River, foraged through swamp and forest, and found her. After emancipation, Jim and Winnie Shankle and their son in law Stephen McBride bought land and founded Shankleville, a community that built churches, schools, mills, and eventually McBride College. Michael Strahan’s people come out of Shankleville. Stacey’s own children are descendants through her husband’s line, which means when her dance company performs The Fairytale Project, the love story on that stage is their family history moving in real time. Crazy how they gave us Romeo and Juliet every single year of secondary school and never once gave us Jim and Winnie.

Then hold this too: Greenwood, the district y’all know as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, sits inside this same freedmen community tradition. It was not a miracle and it was not an exception, it was one node in a network of hundreds of Black towns and settlements across the South. When the 1921 massacre burned Greenwood down, other Black towns showed up and helped the survivors rebuild. The massacre gets taught, when it gets taught at all, as Black excellence destroyed. The rebuild, the mutual aid, the network, that part gets cropped out the frame, because the network is the blueprint, and the blueprint is the threat.

Taking Care of Each Other Is Anti Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Colony

Is this socialism, or is this just taking care of each other? Both. It is both. Capitalism is defined by private ownership and by the extraction of profit from other people’s labor, so once you have a community owned economy, once bartering happens, once resources are shared, once the harvest is distributed by need and the barn gets raised by everybody, you are already operating inside socialistic values and socialistic methodologies whether you ever read a theorist or not. The idea of I got mine so everybody got to get theirs is a very capitalistic, individual understanding, and the very structure of a freedmen community refutes it, because the community was organized around one collective question: how can we create a space of refuge and safety as a collective. Jessica Gordon Nembhard calls this collective courage, a whole hidden history of African American cooperative economics, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative carried the same DNA a century after emancipation. Apply Robinson here: racial capitalism has always needed Black labor to be extractable and Black cooperation to be unthinkable, which is exactly why the cooperative history stays untaught.

Now watch the material flip side, because this ain’t just philosophy. Over eighty percent of Black owned land from the Reconstruction era to now has been taken, through deeds and heirs and straight up theft, through urban development and urban renewal, and above all through heirs property. When land passes without a will, every heir owns an undivided share, and two or three generations down, a developer only has to buy out one distant cousin to force a partition sale of everybody’s inheritance on the courthouse steps. The system that allegedly rewards individual ownership is the same system that uses individual ownership to pick us apart, because people who walk into that arena with an individual mindset are more likely to be taken advantage of than a collective force. This is not a moral failure of Black families. This is a legal technology of extraction. Which means the freedom colony methodology, land in trusts, land in cooperative structures, decisions made together intentionally, is not sentimental history, it is defensive strategy for 2026.

The Seventh Grade Is a Crime Scene: Curriculum, Public Memory, and the Case for Reparations

As somebody with graduate training in adult and higher education, I need y’all to understand that curriculum is never neutral, curriculum is a decision about who exists. Seventh grade Texas history contains no Black people. We do not talk about Stephen F. Austin being a colonizer and a defender of slavery, we do not talk about slaveholding at the Alamo pantheon, we do not talk about why Texas wanted to be its own country in the first place, but then we turn around and market Galveston as the home of Juneteenth. That is not an oversight, that is a missing context engineered on purpose. Some folks want to make this uniquely Greg Abbott or uniquely Donald Trump, and giving them the benefit of the doubt, the boogeyman makes it easy to mystify how bad Texas history education already was. I was in seventh grade in the early 2000s. It predates Greg. It predates Trump. It goes back through the Daughters of the Confederacy and their textbook campaigns, all the way back to the founding lie itself. What is new in this particular timescape is the doubling down: the more people become aware of these origins, the more intentional the re erasure becomes.

Here is why the erasure is load bearing. Public memory jumps from the Civil War and emancipation straight to the Civil Rights Movement, and everything in between goes dark. But the freedom colonies live exactly in that gap. If you remove the history of over 500 places where Black people owned land, governed themselves, and built schools within a decade of bondage, then you can drop back into 2026, look at disenfranchisement and the redistricting that is stripping Black political power in real time, and shrug like nobody knows how it got this way. No ownership history means no theft history, and no theft history means no case for reparations in public memory. The gap is the argument. Apply Yancy here: the white gaze does not only watch us, it curates what the whole society is permitted to remember about us, and flipping the gaze means teaching the record it suppressed. Apply Freire too: banking model education deposits Texas mythology into children, while problem posing education would hand them the Atlas and let them find their own county. Which is why the fight cannot live in the schoolhouse alone. History gets carried in the house, in the church, in the community center, in the third places, and yes, on the dance stage, because artists illuminate these histories in spaces where formal schooling refuses to. When somebody leaves Stacey’s show and drives to the tax assessor’s office to check on their family land, that is adult education doing what the state will not. Then special shout out to everybody working with the State Board of Education in these turbulent times, trying to keep the little history that was there alive and propose new courses, because what we are watching right now in 2026 is an intentional re erasure, and the counter curriculum is us.

Winnie Held the Deed: Misogynoir, Gender, and the Women Who Made the Colony Possible

Intersectionality is not a garnish on this analysis, it is the analysis. Run the Shankleville story back and notice whose movement gets narrated: Jim escaped, Jim crossed the river, Jim found her. Winnie was sold, Winnie was moved across state lines as property, Winnie survived the market that treated her body as both labor and inheritance, and Winnie co founded the town. Apply Spillers and Hartman here, because under partus sequitur ventrem the plantation economy reproduced itself through Black women’s bodies, which means every freedom colony founded by a family was also a repudiation of that doctrine, a declaration that Black kinship would no longer be a ledger entry. Apply Crenshaw and the Combahee River Collective, because the colony’s institutions ran on Black women’s labor that the record keeps unnamed: the washerwomen whose wages bought acreage, the teachers in the one room schools, the granny midwives who caught every baby in the settlement, the church mothers whose fish fries financed the steeple. Apply Moya Bailey, because misogynoir is why the founding father gets the historical marker and the founding mother gets a footnote.

The material impacts run straight to the present. Heirs property dispossession lands hardest on elder Black women, the widows and grandmothers who hold land rich and cash poor estates and get targeted by partition speculators. Environmental racism began at the founding, because the flood prone bottomlands our people were relegated to in 1866 are the same geographies drowning first under climate change in 2026, from the Texas bottoms to Cancer Alley, so the colony’s location was itself an intersection of race, class, and environmental exposure. Class is in here too: that small town chip on the shoulder, where folks from Bryan and the rural routes caught disrespect from the big city, is a class hierarchy inside Blackness, and it is crazy how country roots got cool once the cowboy hat became an aesthetic while the actual land, the actual deeds, the actual rural communities stay neglected. Sexuality is in here: Alvin Ailey, a Black queer genius raised in East Texas freedom colony soil in Rogers, turned those churches and those baptisms into Revelations, one of the most performed works of dance on this earth. Zora Neale Hurston came up in Eatonville, an incorporated Black town, and wrote the interior lives of Black women the academy said did not matter. DJ Screw came out of Bastrop County, which is thick with freedom colonies, and slowed the whole world down. Black women, Black queer folks, Black country folks, the ones the record marginalizes twice, are the ones who carried the colony’s genius forward. Centering their material outcomes, land retained, wealth protected, histories named, is the difference between representation and repair.

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

Closing the Loop

The mere presence, the existence, the history of these Black towns proves that Black people are able to build in a way that does not center the white gaze. These communities were not organized around the question of how we can make white people respect us. These communities were structured autonomously, built to obscure racial terror and to refute the pathology that says Black people are backwards, lazy, and incapable of cooperation. A lot of us have internalized Black inferiority and let white supremacy do the work for us, repeating narratives that we cannot work together, and usually what I know as somebody that loves history is that just because you don’t know don’t mean it don’t exist. Just because you are ignorant to a phenomenon don’t make it not a phenomenon. That is the difference between research and MeSearch. See, Yancy reminds us that the gaze was never the measure of our building, and Roberts teaches us that the map of our self determination is still under our feet, five hundred fifty seven dots deep, waiting to be read.

Y’all know that here in Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has made it where Black history and Christian history are now in opposition to each other. He wants to take Black history out of the curriculum and add more about the Israeli Hamas conflict, as well as getting more into Bible history, Bible education. The reason why Education Is Elevation is a thing is to be able to preserve all of the history and all the education that they’re trying to erase. Shout out to all of my adult learners out there that is dedicated to being life learners, man. Nothing to it but to do it.

Five Key Takeaways

1. The scale is the story. At least 557 freedom colonies have been documented in Texas alone between 1865 and 1930, each typically anchored by a school, a church, and a cemetery, proof of mass Black self governance within one generation of bondage.

2. Exclusion was law, building was resistance. The Texas Black Codes and the 1866 Homestead Act barred African Americans from public land, so freedpeople bought or claimed flood prone bottomlands nobody wanted and built institutions on them anyway.

3. The land was taken, not lost. Over eighty percent of Black owned land from Reconstruction to now has been stripped through heirs property, partition sales, urban renewal, and outright theft, which makes land retention a present tense civil rights fight.

4. The memory gap is engineered. Curriculum jumps from emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement, erasing Reconstruction era ownership, and without the record of what was built and stolen, the public case for reparations collapses by design.

5. The colony is a methodology, not a museum. Cooperative economics, communal land structures, trusts over heirs property, and third place education, from the church house to the dance stage, are the working blueprint for defending Black futures in 2026.

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The freedom colonies survived because everybody put something in the pot, the school got built because eleven families would pool for one hundred acres, and this platform runs on that exact same cooperative technology. If this essay taught you something the state of Texas decided your seventh grader did not need to know, then become a paid subscriber and help keep the lights on in this digital freedmen schoolhouse we are building together.

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

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

Related Readings: A Working Bibliography

Roberts, Andrea. The Texas Freedom Colonies Project and Atlas. thetexasfreedomcoloniesproject.com

Sitton, Thad, and James H. Conrad. Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow. University of Texas Press, 2005.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America. 1935.

Gordon Nembhard, Jessica. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Penn State University Press, 2014.

Nascimento, Beatriz. The Dialectic Is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. Princeton University Press, 2023.

Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.

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

White, Monica M. Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. UNC Press, 2018.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Read alongside her anthropological fieldwork across the diaspora.

Dunham, Katherine. Island Possessed. 1969. Dance as diasporic research method.

Barrett Station descendants. Echoes of the River. Community authored freedom colony history.

Allen, Stacey. A Little Optimism Goes a Long Way and D Is for Dancing Through the Diaspora. Children’s books teaching movement and history.

Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund. Resources on heirs property, wills, and Black land retention.

Texas State Historical Association. Freedmen’s Settlements entry, Handbook of Texas Online.

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Now y’all already knew I was not gonna let this one slide. Lindsey Graham passed away Saturday night, July 11, 2026, at 71 years old, from an aortic dissection, and before the flags even finished dropping to half staff, Cory Booker hopped on camera Sunday morning talking about how stunned he was, telling a cute little story about approaching Graham on criminal justice reform, getting told to come back after the primary, coming back, rolling up sleeves, and passing the First Step Act. Booker called Lindsey Graham his most unexpected friend in the Senate. What we just saw there was Cory Booker illustrating his unnatural allegiance towards losers, even when it comes at the expense of his political agenda and its constituents. Lindsey Graham did everything in his power to make your life a living hell and our life a living hell, and now, somehow, Cory Booker found a respect for him in death that Lindsey Graham could not find for us while he was alive.

Stay with me y’all, because even in the story Booker told, Graham illustrated exactly who he was, a self serving man who put his own interests individualistically before everybody else as a collective. iMa bE fair and restate the man honestly before I dismantle him. Graham told Booker, I am in a primary right now, I am running against a guy who is batshit crazy, I cannot even so much as talk to you, come back after my primary. Booker tells that story like it is charming. Read it again. The man said your criminal justice, your Blacks locked in cages, your mass incarceration crisis, all of that can wait until my seat is safe. That is not friendship, kinfolks, that is a transaction, and Booker mistaking a transaction for a friendship is the whole diagnosis of a certain kind of Black liberal politics. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance, an agreement to misinterpret the world, to see cruelty and file it under charm. Apply Mills here. Booker is not lying to us in that video. Booker is performing the agreement.

The Receipts on Lindsey Graham: Three Decades of Documented Ways

We do not do vibes over here, we do receipts, so let us walk the record. Lindsey Graham entered the House in 1995 and made his name as one of the managers prosecuting Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1999. He entered the Senate in 2003 and became one of the loudest champions of the Iraq War, a war sold on weapons that were never found, a war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers, disproportionately working class, disproportionately Black and brown, and Lindsey Graham never stopped calling for more. More surge in 2007. More intervention in Libya. More war with Iran. His colleagues called him an unguided missile like it was a punchline. The people under those missiles never got to laugh.

Then there is the immigration record, which they gonna tell you was moderate. Two things can be true. Graham cosponsored the Gang of Eight bill in 2013, yealp, and in 2010 the same man went on television talking about birthright citizenship, saying folks come here to drop and leave, meaning babies, meaning the Fourteenth Amendment, an amendment written in Black blood after the Civil War to make citizenship real for the formerly enslaved, was something he wanted to gut because he did not like who was being born under it. Fast forward to 2025 and 2026, and Graham, as Senate Budget Committee chair, helped shepherd the reconciliation package that pumped historic tens of billions into ICE detention and removal operations, the largest deportation machine in American history, the same machinery filling facilities like Prairieland in Texas. Mass deportation and illegally locking people up is a criminal justice issue. You cannot eulogize the man as a criminal justice partner while he bankrolled cages. That contradiction does not resolve, it just hangs there.

The man’s word was also worthless, and I do not have to editorialize because he said it himself. In 2016, blocking Merrick Garland, Graham said, and I quote his energy, use my words against me, if a vacancy occurs in the last year of a Republican president’s term, we will wait. In 2020 he rammed Amy Coney Barrett through eight days before the election. In 2015 he called Donald Trump a race baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot, said if we nominate Trump we will get destroyed and we will deserve it. By 2017 he was Trump’s favorite golf partner and most loyal Senate soldier. After January 6 he stood on the Senate floor talking about count me out, enough is enough, then flew down to Mar a Lago within weeks to kiss the ring. In November 2020 Georgia’s own Republican secretary of state said Graham called him asking about tossing legally cast mail ballots, which got Graham subpoenaed in the Fulton County investigation. In 2022 he sponsored a national 15 week abortion ban. In 2022 he publicly called for Russians to assassinate their own president. In 2024 he went on national television and said Israel should level Gaza, comparing it to Hiroshima and Nagasaki like that was a moral instruction instead of a war crime with a body count. He voted against repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in 2010 and against the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022. That is the friend Cory Booker is grieving on camera. Frank Wilderson teaches that antiblack violence is gratuitous, it does not need a reason, it is the weather. Apply Wilderson here. Graham’s career was not a series of aberrations, it was the weather system, and Booker is out here eulogizing the storm.

Cory Booker and the Long Con of Bipartisan Capital

In my humble opinion, it is a bunch of Democrats like Cory Booker that will reach across the aisle proving they are so bipartisan, proving they can deal with everybody, at the expense of alienating their current base, because they feel like they already got their for sure capital, so they trying to get some more capital, and they ain’t tripping. Saidiya Hartman writes about the afterlife of slavery, how Black suffering gets absorbed into scenes that flatter everybody except the suffering. Apply Hartman here. Booker’s tribute video is a scene of subjection dressed up as grief, because the emotional labor of forgiving Lindsey Graham gets performed by a Black senator on behalf of a base that never got an apology, never got condolences, never got the grace now being handed out wholesale to the man who withheld it.

Let us think about this on an impact level. When our family members are passing due to not having health care, or being sent to some pointless war, or being disappeared into an ICE facility, we do not get any condolences from Lindsey Graham or his family talking about our loss. Ahh, but when the individual who cultivated policy in opposition to us passes, all of a sudden you got these respectability politics, all of a sudden everybody cares about humanity and decorum and standards. No. We are past the idea of you playing decorum and you playing standards. We passed that a long time ago. Every accusation is a confession, and when they call us ghouls for reading a public man’s public record out loud, what they are confessing is that the record cannot survive being read.

Grace Is a Rationed Resource: A Short History of Eulogizing Oppressors

This ain’t new, kinfolks, this is a genre. The United States Senate has a whole tradition of burying its monsters in marble. When Strom Thurmond died in 2003, a man who ran for president in 1948 on keeping segregation, a man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for over 24 hours straight, Joe Biden delivered a eulogy calling him a friend and the Senate wrapped him in ceremony, and it took his death for the world to learn he had fathered a Black daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams, whose existence he financed in silence her entire life. Richard Russell led the Southern bloc that strangled every anti lynching bill for a generation, and they named a whole Senate office building after him, so every senator, Cory Booker included, has walked to work under a segregationist’s name. John C. Calhoun, the intellectual architect of slavery as a positive good, stood in the Capitol as a statue for over a century. The institution’s memory is a monument program, and Michel Rolph Trouillot told us exactly how it works, silences enter the historical record at the moment the facts are created, at the moment the archives are assembled, at the moment the story gets told. Apply Trouillot here. The eulogy is where the silencing starts, live, on camera, with a Democrat narrating.

They do not praise gang members in our community when they pass, because of the destruction they caused, no matter how much money they gave out on the block, no matter which cookouts they showed up to. So why in the hell do we give so much grace to these political gang leaders when they have caused so much destruction, not only in our communities but worldwide? Frank Booker, excuse me, Cory Booker, is stunned by the senator’s passing. The man was 71 years old. He lived an amazing life, a long life, while he caused hell to a whole bunch of people, and I am wondering how far the apple falls from the tree when it comes to the people he was able to spine into this life, how much of his values, his morals, and his ethics did he leave behind in the folks now crying on camera.

The Hidden Curriculum of the Eulogy: What Sanitized Grief Teaches

Here is the specific implication for education, and I need my educators to lean in, because a eulogy is a lesson plan. Curriculum theorists call it the hidden curriculum, the stuff schools teach without ever writing it on the board, obedience, hierarchy, whose pain counts. Public commemoration is the hidden curriculum of the whole society, a mass open enrollment classroom where every adult in the country is a student this week, and the learning objective is simple, powerful men are complicated, their victims are footnotes. Paulo Freire named the banking model of education, where students are treated as empty vaults and the teacher deposits official knowledge into them. Apply Freire here. Every wall to wall tribute segment is a deposit. Every civics textbook that will one day summarize Lindsey Graham as a bipartisan dealmaker who helped pass the First Step Act, with no line item for Gaza, for the deportation machine, for the abortion ban, is a deposit. We already watched Texas approve a textbook in 2015 that called enslaved Africans workers, so do not tell me the curriculum cannot launder atrocity, laundering atrocity is what the curriculum was built to do, from the Lost Cause chapters to the one paragraph they give Reconstruction.

This is why my degrees are in adult education and human relations and not in vibes. Malcolm Knowles taught us that adults learn through experience and self direction, which means adults can be retaught, which means the counter curriculum is possible. Critical media literacy has to become a core adult competency, teaching grown folks to read an obituary the way a debater reads an opponent’s evidence, checking what got cut, checking who funded the telling, checking whose deaths did not make the segment. Carter G. Woodson warned us in The Miseducation of the Negro that if you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions, and a nation that teaches its people to grieve their oppressors on command has controlled the thinking at the root. The classroom answer is not to ban grief, it is to teach the full record next to the flag, so the student, whether they are 15 or 50, can hold the First Step Act and the leveled neighborhoods of Gaza in the same hand and decide for themselves what a legacy weighs.

Who Buries the Cost: The Intersectional Ledger

Intersectionality is not a garnish over here, it is the operating system, so let us run the ledger of who materially carries Lindsey Graham’s career, because the cost was never distributed evenly. Kimberlé Crenshaw taught us that single axis analysis erases the people standing at the intersections. Apply Crenshaw here. Graham sponsored a national 15 week abortion ban in 2022 in a country where Black women die of pregnancy related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, which means his ban was not an abstraction, it was a targeted transfer of risk onto Black women’s bodies, the exact population the Combahee River Collective said would free everybody if freed, because their freedom requires destroying every interlocking system. The deportation machinery he funded does not just sweep Latino communities, it disappears Black immigrants too, Haitian families losing protected status, Cameroonian asylum seekers shackled onto planes, and Black immigrants are detained longer and deported at higher rates relative to their numbers. His vote against repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and against the Respect for Marriage Act lands on Black queer and trans folks who already navigate what Moya Bailey named misogynoir, that specific contempt reserved for Black women and femmes, and you can watch misogynoir working in real time this week, because the same commentators calling Black women ghouls for citing Graham’s record are praising white senators for cussing and crying on camera. Angela Davis reminds us that prisons are a business model, not a public safety plan, and the First Step Act everybody is toasting touched federal prisons only, roughly a tenth of the people locked up in this country, while the state and county cages holding Black women, the fastest growing incarcerated population for decades, never felt it. The Medicaid cuts in the very reconciliation bill Graham shepherded will be counted in Black grandmothers, disabled folks, and poor rural white folks his own party keeps pissing on while telling them it is raining. That is the ledger. Symbolic representation got a tribute video. Material outcomes got a bill.

The Contradictions of Cory Booker

Let the contradiction hang for a second, because Cory Booker is a case study all by himself. This is the same Cory Booker who stood on the Senate floor in April 2025 for more than 25 hours, breaking Strom Thurmond’s segregationist filibuster record, warning us that the administration was a five alarm fire for democracy, and then turned around and filmed a loving tribute to one of that same administration’s most devoted enablers. This is the same Cory Booker who sat on the board of the Alliance for School Choice alongside Betsy DeVos before it was fashionable, who ran Newark’s schools experiment on a 100 million dollar check from Mark Zuckerberg that consultants ate before the children did, who in 2012 went on national television calling attacks on private equity nauseating while Newark residents were catching hell from the very financial architecture he was defending, who in 2017 voted against the Klobuchar and Sanders amendment to import cheaper prescription drugs from Canada while sitting near the top of the Senate’s pharmaceutical donation list. The pattern is not hypocrisy, hypocrisy is too small a word, the pattern is a theory of power, the belief that Black political survival runs through the approval of the people harming Black constituents. Derrick Bell named it interest convergence, Black interests advance only when they align with white elite interests. Apply Bell here. Booker has built an entire career inside that convergence, and the tribute video is what it looks like when the convergence grieves. This means the folks defending the video as basic human decency are wrong, because decency that only flows upward, toward power, over the bodies of the base, is not decency, it is deference wearing decency’s clothes.

Five Key Takeaways

* Eulogies are political technology. They launder a public record in real time, and the laundering starts before the funeral, in the tribute videos, the half staff flags, and the wall to wall coverage. Trouillot calls it silencing the past, and it happens at the moment the story gets told.

* Bipartisanship measured by proximity to power instead of material outcomes for the base is a con. Booker gained capital with people who despise his voters, and his voters gained a story.

* Two things can be true. The First Step Act released thousands of people from federal prison, and the same Lindsey Graham funded the largest deportation and detention buildout in American history. Holding both is the assignment. Choosing only the flattering one is the miseducation.

* Grace is rationed by race and by power. Our communities do not praise their destroyers at the funeral, the Senate does, and the difference between those two moral economies is the whole story of American memory.

* Critical media literacy around memorial coverage is a survival skill and an educational mandate. Teach students, and teach adults, to read the obituary against the record, because Research over MeSearch is a practice, not a slogan.

In Conclusion

Bring it back to where we started. Cory Booker told a story meant to make us admire Lindsey Graham, and the story itself, read honestly, showed a man who made Black suffering wait on his primary schedule, and a senator so hungry for elite belonging that he mistook the wait for a friendship. Mills gave us the name for the agreement to misremember, and Trouillot gave us the mechanics of how the silence gets built into the archive while the body is still warm, and both of them together tell you why this article exists. My prayers are genuinely with the man’s family, because grief in a household is real even when the grief on a flagpole is propaganda. On my Substack I wrote this article to document Lindsey Graham’s ways across his political career, and when you get at the end of this article i want you to ask yourself is this something that we should be praising and did he respect life when he was alive?? Education is Elevation.

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The same week every flagpole in America bowed for Lindsey Graham, nobody lowered anything for the folks his policies buried, and somebody has to keep the counter record when the ceremony ends and the textbooks start getting written. That somebody is this platform, kinfolks, and it only stands if the community holds it up.

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. Right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Become a paid subscriber today

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

Related Readings: A Working Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

* W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, Harcourt Brace, 1935.

* Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989.

* The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977.

* Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, NYU Press, 2021.

* Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Seven Stories Press, 2003.

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Two words that ruin your day: necro-politics. Stick around, because I’m about to prove to you that the United States don’t just manage life, they weaponize death. Peep game, first you got the scholars. In the 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced biopower, the state system for tracking, regulating, and optimizing population health, and if that sounds abstract, think census data, vaccine mandates, life expectancy charts, insurance actuarial tables, all that. Then in 2003, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe dropped the bomb. Mbembe said Foucault didn’t go far enough, that true power isn’t just about making life live, it’s about deciding who dies, and he called it necropolitics. This is one of the reasons why I fell in love with college policy debate, because it introduced me to new terms, new frameworks, whole new grammars for naming what my community had been living through without the vocabulary to indict it.

Just sprinkling some context of where we see biopower in America, we see it everywhere, we see it in the CDC tracking outbreaks, we see it in the FDA regulating food, we see it in insurance companies calculating the risk score of your life. Ahh, but here’s the catch, it’s a finesse. Biopower pretends to care about everybody, it’s sterile, it’s neutral, it’s scientific, except it’s not, because biopower collects data on everybody but it only protects some. The data on Black maternal mortality definitely illustrates what I’m talking about, because Black women have been dying at alarming rates for decades and nobody was listening. The spreadsheets saw them. The state just decided the numbers wasn’t worth acting on. That’s the two roles frame right there, what the system says it does versus what the system structurally does, and once you see that gap you can’t unsee it.

Now let’s bring back this other concept of necropolitics, because you do gotta figure some context in there. Mbembe says the state creates death worlds, social and physical spaces where survival ain’t guaranteed, not by accident but by design. They call it a trap because it’s a trap. Most of these tragedies and misfortunes in the system is not a glitch or an error but an actual part of the design. Take Flint, Michigan, the water was poison, officials knew, they did nothing, and that’s not negligence, that’s necropower. Take the southern border, migrants left in 110 degrees with no water, and that’s not oversight, that’s attrition. On my mama, I know it when I see it, because you cannot piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining while you’re also trying to claim to be the advocate for all of humanity over the globe while simultaneously being the leader in dehumanizing. Y’all never thought it was crazy that the land of the free has the biggest prison population in the world? Mass incarceration, prisoners denied basic health care while COVID ripped through cells, that’s not budget cuts, that’s a death sentence with a management plan attached.

See, Mbembe was building on Foucault’s concept of state racism and insisting that it ain’t colorblind, that these death worlds are racialized. Geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it bluntly in Golden Gulag: racism is the state sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Let that sink in. Premature death, by design. Who gets to grow old in America and who doesn’t is not a lottery, it’s a ledger. Apply Hartman here too, because when Saidiya Hartman describes the afterlife of slavery, she names skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, and premature death as the inheritance, which means Gilmore and Hartman are describing the same machine from two different rooms of the same house. This means anybody telling you these outcomes are just culture, just choices, just bad luck, is wrong, and their claimed neutrality is itself a position, because the view from nowhere is always a view from somewhere, usually somewhere with clean water.

Receipts from the Archive: Critical Historical Context

Crazy how none of this is new, because the plantation was America’s first death world and Mbembe says as much, naming the plantation and the colony as the original laboratories where sovereignty meant the power to expose whole populations to death while calling it order. Follow the receipts forward. After emancipation, convict leasing rebuilt the plantation inside the legal system, and in the Alabama mines and Mississippi levee camps the death rates ran so high that historians like Douglas Blackmon called it slavery by another name, because leased convicts was cheaper to replace than to keep alive. Then the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 hit, and Black men in Greenville was held at gunpoint on the levees doing forced labor while relief supplies got routed to white families first, which means the American disaster playbook, protect capital, abandon Black life, call it an act of God, was already written before FEMA was even a thought.

Keep going. From 1932 to 1972 the United States Public Health Service ran the Tuskegee syphilis study, watching Black men die of a treatable disease for forty years just to document the autopsy, which is biopower’s data obsession fused with necropower’s death sentence in one federal program. Through the 1930s, the Home Owners Loan Corporation drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and starved them of investment, and those same 1930s maps predict today’s asthma rates, heat islands, food deserts, and life expectancy gaps down to the block. Like clockwork, in 1968 Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker was crushed to death in a garbage compactor the city refused to repair, and the strike that followed, the one Dr. King was assassinated supporting, was at its core a fight over whose bodies could be treated as disposable waste alongside the waste they hauled. Every era got its own paperwork, but the ledger stays the same. The evidence don’t support the fairy tale of progress interrupted by occasional tragedy. The evidence supports design.

The Land Remembers: Environmental Justice as Necropolitics

In 1982 the state of North Carolina decided to dump six thousand truckloads of PCB contaminated soil in Warren County, a county that was poor, rural, and majority Black, and when residents laid their bodies in front of the dump trucks and over five hundred people caught arrests, the modern environmental justice movement was born, feel me, fighting toxic waste is Black history. Around that same time, sociologist Robert Bullard was down here in Houston mapping where the city put its garbage, and he found that from the 1920s into the late 1970s, the overwhelming majority of Houston’s landfills and incinerators sat in Black neighborhoods even though Black folks was only about a quarter of the population, receipts he brought into Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management in 1979, the first lawsuit in this country to charge environmental discrimination under civil rights law. Then his book Dumping in Dixie proved the pattern was national, that race, not income, not property values, race, was the strongest predictor of where hazardous waste landed. Stretch the lens to Louisiana, where the eighty five miles between Baton Rouge and New Orleans got so crowded with petrochemical plants that residents named it Cancer Alley, and peep the historical finesse, because many of those plants sit on top of former plantations, which means the same land that worked Black bodies to death in the nineteenth century is breathing cancer risk into Black lungs in the twenty first, Hartman’s afterlife of slavery written in air quality permits. Flint’s poisoned pipes, the Lower Ninth Ward left to rot after Katrina while wealthy neighborhoods was rebuilt, lead paint in the babies, refineries flaring next to the elementary school, all of it is Gilmore’s premature death mapped onto geography, all of it is Mbembe’s death worlds with a zip code. Two things can be true, America can pass environmental laws and America can decide, over and over, whose environment those laws actually protect, and having the luxury to never wonder what’s in your tap water is itself a sign of which side of the death world you live on.

Pedagogy of the Buried: What Death Worlds Do to the Schoolhouse

For the folks in the back who think this is just a public health conversation, let me bring it to education, because the schoolhouse is where necropolitics gets laundered into common sense. Start with the material. The same redlined neighborhoods that got the landfills got the underfunded schools, because property tax funding formulas guarantee that the children of death worlds inherit crumbling buildings, and in cities like Flint, Newark, and Baltimore, the lead wasn’t just in the neighborhood pipes, it was in the school water fountains, meaning children was being neurologically injured at the exact site that was supposed to elevate them. Then look at school closures, like Chicago shutting down roughly fifty schools in 2013, almost all of them in Black and Brown neighborhoods, hollowing out community anchors and calling it fiscal responsibility. Add the school to prison pipeline, where zero tolerance policies convert classroom behavior into criminal records and feed the same mass incarceration system where COVID ripped through cells, and you see that the pipeline is a conveyor belt between one death world and another.

Just as deadly is what happens to memory. Apply Trouillot here, because Silencing the Past teaches us that power operates in the making of archives and the telling of history, deciding which stories get sources, which get silence. When legislatures pass memory laws like Oklahoma’s HB 1775 that make teachers scared to teach Tulsa, Warren County, or redlining honestly, they are running necropolitics on the curriculum itself, killing the knowledge that would let young people name what’s killing them. Freire told us the oppressed must learn to name the world in order to change it, and Du Bois was doing this exact work back in 1899 when The Philadelphia Negro documented premature Black death block by block while the academy shrugged. This means the implication for educators is not optional, because an education system that teaches children inside death worlds without ever naming the death worlds is not neutral, it is a partner in the design. Teaching the vocabulary, biopower, necropolitics, premature death, environmental racism, is life saving pedagogy, and consciousness precedes transformation, always has.

An Intersectional Autopsy: Who the Death Worlds Land On First

Lastly, before anybody flattens this into one story, let’s run the intersectional analysis, because death worlds don’t land on everybody in the community the same way, and Crenshaw taught us that when systems of power intersect, the folks standing at the intersection catch traffic from every direction. Black women carry the sharpest edge of the maternal mortality crisis, dying from pregnancy related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women regardless of income or education, and when Serena Williams, with all her money and fame, nearly died because clinicians dismissed her own report of her own body, that’s Moya Bailey’s misogynoir operating inside biopower’s supposedly neutral hospital charts. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free it would mean everyone else would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires the destruction of every interlocking system, and the environmental data proves them prophets, since it is disproportionately poor Black women in Cancer Alley burying husbands, organizing against petrochemical permits, and breathing the flare stacks while pregnant.

Keep the lens moving. Disabled Black folks catch necropolitics from the medical system and the police at the same time, from care rationing frameworks that quietly score some lives as less worth saving to wellness checks that end in gunfire. Incarcerated women, disproportionately Black and poor, was shackled during childbirth in this country within living memory, and Angela Davis reminds us the prison itself is a gendered death world, not just a men’s story. Class cuts through all of it, because the Black professional in the suburbs and the Black grandmother next to the refinery are both inside Hartman’s afterlife, but they are not breathing the same air, and pretending otherwise is how liberal representation politics sells symbolic wins while the material outcomes for poor Black women stay flatlined. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. Centering the folks catching it worst is not a rhetorical courtesy, it is the only methodology that shows you the whole machine.

So This Is What We Do

I made this video and wrote this essay because I think it’s important to put language around the phenomenons we experience so we can have power over them, so I hope this gives you a little bit of clarity and a little bit of jargon to throw at this world that we experiencing. Right now we’re watching a hybrid regime, biopower tracks your steps, your sleep, your location, managing your life, but necropolitics decides that if you’re poor, Black, Indigenous, or undocumented, your life is worthless. Look at the opioid crisis, white communities got treatment centers and rehabilitation while our community got criminalization and pathology for crack, both of these are dealing with addiction but you see two different ways of managing it. Biopower, like I learned in college, simply means to make live and let die, while necropower means to let live and make die. Think about that.

See, Mbembe reminds us that sovereignty in this country has always included the power to build death worlds and call them policy, and Gilmore teaches us that racism is precisely the production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, which means naming is the first act of resistance. So this is what we do. First, we name it, we call it necropolitics, we call out the violence hiding behind policy jargon. Second, we demand accountability. Understanding who is expendable in this country, who’s deemed always already exposable and disposable, is what you need to understand this country.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Biopower is the state’s management of life through data, regulation, and public health, but it’s a finesse, because it collects data on everybody while only protecting some, and Black maternal mortality is the receipt.

2. Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe’s 2003 intervention, names the deeper power, the sovereign right to decide who dies, and it builds death worlds, spaces where survival ain’t guaranteed by design, from Flint to the southern border to the prison cell.

3. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism, the state sanctioned production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, connects to Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery, and together they prove premature Black death is a policy outcome, not a coincidence.

4. Environmental justice is necropolitics made visible on the map, from Warren County in 1982 to Robert Bullard’s Houston landfill receipts to Cancer Alley plants sitting on former plantations, race remains the strongest predictor of who breathes poison.

5. Naming is power, which is why memory laws and curriculum censorship are part of the death world design, and why teaching this vocabulary, in classrooms and on timelines, is life saving pedagogy. Consciousness precedes transformation.

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If this breakdown of biopower, necropolitics, and death worlds gave you language for what your community been living through, understand that this is exactly the kind of teaching public education media used to do before it got gutted. Naming premature death by design, from Warren County to Cancer Alley to the curriculum itself, takes research, receipts, and time, and paid subscribers are the only reason this classroom stays open.

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

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

Related Readings: An Annotated Bibliography

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003), expanded as Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019). The foundational text, where Mbembe extends Foucault to argue that sovereignty is the power to dictate who may live and who must die, introducing the concept of death worlds.

Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 to 1976 (Picador, 2003) and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976). Where biopower and state racism get theorized, the make live and let die formula that Mbembe flips on its head.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007). Source of the definition of racism as state sanctioned production of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death, grounded in the political economy of prison expansion.

Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (Westview, 1990) and Invisible Houston (Texas A&M University Press, 1987). The father of environmental justice documents how race predicts the placement of hazardous waste, starting with his Houston landfill research behind Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management.

Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Names the afterlife of slavery, skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, the throughline this essay leans on.

Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans (Doubleday, 2006). The definitive receipts on Tuskegee and centuries of medical necropolitics dressed up as science.

Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Doubleday, 2008). Documents convict leasing as a death world rebuilt inside the law after emancipation.

Taylor, Dorceta E. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (NYU Press, 2014). The scholarly deep dive on how zoning, housing markets, and siting decisions manufacture environmental sacrifice zones.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991). The intersectionality framework this essay’s autopsy section runs on.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). Black feminist blueprint proving that freeing those at the bottom of interlocking systems frees everybody.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021). Names the specific antiblack misogyny that shapes how institutions, including hospitals, read Black women’s bodies.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete? (Seven Stories Press, 2003). Connects mass incarceration to the plantation lineage and gender, essential for the prison as death world argument.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Beacon, 1995). Explains how archives and curricula silence the very histories memory laws now criminalize.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). Naming the world as the precondition for changing it, the pedagogical spine of this whole platform.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro (1899). The original data driven study of premature Black death by neighborhood, proof this analysis is over a century old.

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

This year marked the sixth annual Juneteenth on the East, our first time at the Zoo Amphitheater in Oklahoma City, Lupe Fiasco headlining, me cohosting once again with my folks Mandii B, my son Zane taking up space on that stage like the stage was built for him. On the surface, that’s a festival recap. Underneath the surface, Oklahoma City is a classroom, and the state of Oklahoma is one of the most instructive archives of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and Black freedom dreaming that this country has ever produced. Most of y’all was never taught this. That is not an accident. Trouillot teaches us that silences enter the historical record at four moments, the making of sources, the making of archives, the making of narratives, and the making of history in the final instance, which means the archive don’t just forget, kinfolks, the archive is manufactured to forget. Apply Trouillot to Oklahoma and the whole state starts talking.

Critical Historical Context: Resistance Was Rooted Here First

Start with this receipt. Oklahoma City’s Clara Luper, a Black public school history teacher, led one of the nation’s first lunch counter sit ins at the Katz Drug Store in August of 1958, two whole years before the famous Greensboro protests that the textbooks love to canonize as the beginning. Clara Luper walked her NAACP Youth Council, children as young as six, into that drugstore, sat them down, and asked to be served, and Clara Luper kept bringing them back until Katz desegregated lunch counters across dozens of stores in multiple states. The sit in that supposedly started in North Carolina in 1960 had already been run, tested, and won by a Black woman educator and a group of Black children in Oklahoma City. Oklahoma has always had roots rooted in resistance, and Oklahoma has always had a Black population that was already about the liberation and progression of Black folks before the cameras showed up.

Now let’s complicate it, because two things can be true, and Oklahoma is where multiple truths live on the same allotment of land. Many of the early Black settlers who built lives in Oklahoma were Freedmen of the Five Tribes, the nations most textbooks still call the Five Civilized Tribes, and I need y’all to sit with the layers here. The Five Tribes were themselves victims of removal, death marched out of the Southeast on what we call the Trail of Tears onto land the federal government swore was theirs forever. Portions of those same nations’ leadership also held enslaved Africans, carried plantation slavery into Indian Territory, and signed alliances with the Confederacy during the Civil War because they had a material investment in the antebellum order, which is why you had Native soldiers fighting alongside Confederate ones. After the war, the 1866 Reconstruction Treaties required the tribes to abolish slavery and, in most cases, to adopt their Freedmen as citizens with rights to land, and that is how thousands of Black folks came to hold land allotments across what became Oklahoma, building all Black towns like Boley and Langston that stood as receipts of Black self governance on the plains.

Jodi Byrd gives us the word arrivant for peoples who were forced onto someone else’s stolen land, and that word does work here that immigrant and settler cannot do, because Black folks in Indian Territory were neither the thieves of the land nor free choosers of it. Wolfe reminds us that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event, meaning the theft did not end when the wagon stopped rolling, the theft got institutionalized, notarized, and inherited. Hold both frameworks at once and the ground under Juneteenth on the East gets real deep, real fast.

Then there is the Osage. The Osage Nation was driven off their land in Kansas in the 1870s onto ground in northeast Oklahoma that white folks presumed to be so worthless, so uninviting, so uninhabitable, that they figured nobody would ever want it back. Ahh, but the punchline came in on a drill bit. That worthless land was sitting on top of some of the largest oil deposits in the United States of America, and because the Osage had negotiated to keep their mineral rights communally through the headright system, the checks came to the people, which made the Osage Nation, per capita, some of the wealthiest people in the world by the 1920s. White America could not stand it. Congress, under the pretense of enlightenment and protection, mandated that Osage individuals deemed incompetent be assigned white guardians to manage their own money, and one Osage veteran of the First World War said it plainly, that he fought for France and for this country and still was not allowed to sign his own checks. This is what I mean by benevolent racism, because Congress claimed it was helping Native Americans when in actuality Congress built the legal pipeline through which Native Americans got robbed. That is pissing on us and telling us it’s raining, codified into federal statute.

Since headrights could travel through inheritance, white men started marrying into Osage families, befriending Osage families, insuring Osage lives, and then Osage people started coming up dead. Shot. Poisoned. Whole houses blown up in the night. Historians call it the Reign of Terror, the systematic murder of Osage people through the early 1920s so that wealth would flow to white next of kin, and the case became one of the first major homicide investigations of the young Bureau that would become the FBI. So when folks brag on what federal law enforcement can do now, understand that the institution cut its teeth on a crime scene that white settler greed created, and understand something colder than that, kinfolks. To this day, a portion of Osage headright money still flows to non Osage heirs, meaning there are people alive right now collecting royalties because their people murdered their way into a family tree. The evidence don’t support calling that ancient history. That is a living inheritance of theft.

Hold the map in your head now. Osage County neighbors Tulsa County, and in the exact same decade that Osage people were being hunted for headrights, white mobs burned Greenwood, the Black Wall Street district of Tulsa, to the ground in 1921, killing as many as three hundred Black people, torching some thirty five square blocks, and leaving thousands homeless, with some of the same social networks of respectable white citizens implicated in both catastrophes. Robinson gives us racial capitalism to name how accumulation in this country has always moved through racial violence rather than around it, and Oklahoma in the 1920s is racial capitalism with the mask all the way off. Black wealth and Native wealth in the same decade, in neighboring counties, met the same response, which tells you the response was structural. Every accusation was a confession. They said Native people could not manage wealth while white guardians managed to steal it. They said Greenwood was a threat to order while the mob supplied the disorder.

If you want the intersection of indigeneity and Blackness compressed into one human life, let me tell y’all about Sarah Rector. Sarah Rector was born in 1902 to Black parents in Indian Territory, descendants of people enslaved by the Muscogee Creek Nation, and as a Creek Freedman child she received a land allotment, and let’s be real, it was the rocky, unwanted land that white folks did not want. Until it wasn’t. In 1913, oil came in on Sarah Rector’s allotment and turned an eleven year old Black girl into one of the richest Black females in the country practically overnight, and that is when America showed its true colors again, because suddenly officials decided a Black child could not possibly manage that wealth, appointed white guardians over her fortune, and, wildest of all, entertained legal efforts to reclassify Sarah Rector as white, because in their minds wealth and Blackness simply could not coexist in the same body. Hartman teaches us about fungibility, the way Black life gets treated as a flexible instrument for other people’s uses, and here was a little girl whose very racial classification they were willing to rewrite the moment her land produced value. Sarah Rector was not about to be played, though. Sarah Rector, with Black institutions and Black press applying pressure on her behalf, fought for control of her money, refused to be swindled, and grew into a woman running her own businesses with a mansion and a chauffeured car. She won anyway.

One more layer from the festival itself, because liberation talk in Oklahoma did not stop at land and money. Me and Mandii B got on stage and got into capitalism, got into sexual liberation, got into how pathology and rigid gender roles make a lot of men feel like they do not have the space to live in their truth, and I stand on what I said up there, that heteronormativity, the way we normalize heterosexuality as the only legitimate way to be, tells people that if you step outside the norm your humanity and your livelihood gotta be questioned. Johnson’s quare studies and Cohen’s work on punks and bulldaggers both remind us that the normal was never neutral, that respectability is its own form of guardianship over Black life, and a Juneteenth stage that can hold Lupe Fiasco, a history lesson, and a real conversation about sexuality is doing exactly what the Combahee River Collective taught, treating Black freedom as indivisible rather than single issue.

Reading, Writing, and Redaction: What This Means for the Classroom

Here is the implication for education, and I want my adult education folks to lean in with me. The sit in movement in Oklahoma City literally came out of a classroom, because Clara Luper’s students had written and performed a play about Dr. King, traveled to New York City, tasted what unsegregated public life felt like, and came home unwilling to accept less, meaning the curriculum produced the direct action. Woodson warned us in his study of miseducation that if you control what a people learns, you never have to worry about what that people does, and Freire named the banking model that treats students as empty vaults to be filled with the official story. Oklahoma is running that playbook in real time, because the same state that produced Clara Luper passed House Bill 1775 in 2021, a memory law so chilling that teachers reported being scared to fully teach the Tulsa Race Massacre inside Tulsa itself, and school districts saw accreditation threatened over how race gets discussed. Sit with that contradiction and let it hang. The state where children desegregated lunch counters now legislates what children can learn about why those counters were segregated.

This is exactly why the work has to move through every channel available, the festival stage, the vlog, the Substack, the carousel, because public pedagogy is not a substitute for school, public pedagogy is the freedom school tradition continuing by other means. Ella Baker and the citizenship school lineage teach us that ordinary people, given real information and real respect, will organize themselves, and Knowles reminds those of us trained in adult education that grown folks learn best when the learning connects to their lived experience and their immediate problems. A Juneteenth crowd in Oklahoma City hearing about Clara Luper, the Freedmen, and the Osage while standing on the very ground where it happened is andragogy at its finest, and a state legislature trying to redact that ground is Trouillot’s silencing operating at the moment of retrospective significance. Education is elevation precisely because miseducation is subjugation.

The Intersectional Ledger: Who Paid, Who Collected, Who Still Owes

Intersectionality is not a garnish on this story, intersectionality is the accounting method, so let’s read the ledger the way Crenshaw taught us. Gender sat at the center of the Osage terror, because headrights passed through family, which made Osage women the targets of strategic marriage, and Mollie Burkhart watched her sisters and her mother die one by one while married to a man participating in the plot against her own bloodline. Race and childhood sat at the center of Sarah Rector’s story, because misogynoir, the specific contempt Bailey names for Black women and girls, meant a Black girl’s wealth registered as a systems error to be corrected by white male guardianship rather than an achievement to be protected. Class sat at the center of both, because the guardianship system was not a few bad apples, the guardianship system was a wealth transfer machine, with lawyers, judges, merchants, and bankers all taking their cut of Native and Black money under color of law, which is what Mills means when he says the racial contract is not a deviation from the social contract, the racial contract is the operating system.

The material impacts run straight into the present tense. Descendants of the Freedmen of the Five Tribes have spent this entire century in courtrooms fighting for the citizenship the 1866 treaties promised, winning recognition in the Cherokee Nation in 2017 and still litigating for full belonging elsewhere into this decade, which means emancipation on paper without belonging in practice remains a live condition and not a historical one. Osage headrights still leak wealth to non Osage heirs. Black landowners across Oklahoma and the whole South continue losing ground through partition sales and heirs property loopholes that function as the polite grandchildren of the guardianship grift. Meanwhile the conservatorship logic itself never died, it just found new wards, and anybody who watched modern conservatorship fights play out should recognize the 1920s blueprint of declaring a wealthy person incompetent in order to manage their money for them. Wilderson would tell us the violence underneath all of this was gratuitous rather than merely economic, that antiblackness needs no profit motive to activate, and I hold Wilderson’s point alongside Robinson’s, because Oklahoma shows us the libidinal and the financial working the same shift. Black women and Native women paid the highest price in bodies and in acreage, and any liberation talk that does not center their material outcomes over symbolic representation is dump the juice trash. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

Second Home, First Principles

Let me land this where the vlog landed. What I love about being in Oklahoma City is that it was one of the first places that really embraced me and loved on me and believed I had something to give, back before Conscious Lee existed, back when I was just George at the University of Oklahoma, back when I was a ninth grade English teacher learning how to move a classroom. Hosting Juneteenth on the East for the sixth year, walking backstage, meeting folks I have known since undergrad, watching my son Zane dance and freestyle on that stage on Father’s Day weekend, hearing him tell me I’m his role model, all of that is what the history is for, because the archive is not an abstraction when your babies are standing on it. In my wildest dreams, the young me could not have imagined the things I get to do now.

I hope I have been able to teach you a couple of things about Oklahoma history, about Clara Luper and the Freedmen, about the Osage and Sarah Rector, about what the land remembers even when the legislature forgets. See, Trouillot reminds us that silence is manufactured at every stage of the archive, and Byrd teaches us that the arrivant carries a history that neither settler nor immigrant frameworks can hold, and both of them together demand that we keep receipts on this ground. I got married in Oklahoma. My kids was born in Oklahoma. Even though I’m a proud Texan, Oklahoma is my second home, and I will always be happy to go to Oklahoma. Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch.

Five Key Takeaways

1. The sit in movement did not start in Greensboro. Clara Luper, a Black woman history teacher, and the children of her NAACP Youth Council desegregated Katz Drug Store lunch counters starting in Oklahoma City in 1958, and the action grew directly out of her classroom.

2. The 1866 Reconstruction Treaties obligated the Five Tribes to abolish slavery and extend citizenship and land to their Freedmen, which is how thousands of Black families came to hold Oklahoma allotments, and Freedmen descendants are still litigating for that promised belonging today.

3. The Osage guardianship system was benevolent racism codified into federal law, a protection scheme that functioned as a wealth extraction machine, and it culminated in the Reign of Terror, the systematic murder of Osage people whose stolen headrights still pay out to non Osage heirs in the present day.

4. Sarah Rector’s story proves that Black wealth has been treated as a threat rather than an achievement, so much so that officials appointed white guardians over an eleven year old Black girl and entertained reclassifying her as legally white rather than accept a rich Black child.

5. The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Osage murders happened in the same decade in neighboring counties, which reveals a structure and not a coincidence, and Oklahoma’s modern classroom censorship law shows the silencing of that structure is still being actively produced.

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Oklahoma just showed you how a silence gets manufactured, from unopened Osage murder files to a censorship law that scared teachers out of teaching the Tulsa Massacre in Tulsa, and independent Black media is how a silence gets broken. Clara Luper turned a classroom into a movement with nothing but conviction and receipts, and your paid subscription is what lets me turn this platform into that kind of classroom, full time and unbought.

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

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

Related Readings: Research over MeSearch Bibliography

Luper, Clara. Behold the Walls. Jim Wire, 1979.

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

Debo, Angie. And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes. Princeton University Press, 1940.

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

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

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

Field, Kendra Taira. Growing Up with the Country: Family, Race, and Nation after the Civil War. Yale University Press, 2018.

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

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

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Zed Books, 1983.

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

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

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

Cohen, Cathy J. Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics? GLQ, 1997.

Johnson, E. Patrick. Quare Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly, 2001.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.

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

Woodson, Carter G. The Miseducation of the Negro. Associated Publishers, 1933.

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

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

Communal trauma. Y’all, let’s name it. It is a shared psychological and emotional wound experienced by an entire group of people, not just isolated individuals. It occurs when a catastrophic event shatters the core identity, the safety, the security, the social fabric of a community. Ahh, but our community knows that definition too well, so much so that we ain’t need the textbook to teach it to us, the textbook needed us to write it.

I really want to name it for us, y’all. There is a certain level of racial terror that we felt in our guts and our stomachs when we seen these images, when we heard about these stories. That feeling is not weakness, that feeling is not paranoia, that feeling is the communal trauma that we all experience. I see it all down my timeline, and it is very intergenerational and it is cross regional. Whether you from California, whether you in Virginia, whether you in Texas, whether you in Mississippi, you have seen this story before. As a matter of fact, it has been embedded in your memory and damn near your DNA, being retriggered by racial trauma that forces our community to go back and revisit wounds and scabs that ain’t even healed yet.

The sociologist Kai Erikson studied what happened to the people of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia after a flood wiped out their hollow in 1972, and he gave the academy the language of collective trauma, a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of community. Apply Erikson here. When one of ours goes missing off an island, when one of ours gets shot down in the street by soldiers, the blow don’t land on one family. The blow lands on the tissue that connects all of us. Then Ron Eyerman took it further and argued that slavery itself functions as a cultural trauma, a wound to collective identity that gets remembered, retold, and reactivated every single time the pattern repeats itself. This means the folks telling us we are overreacting are wrong. The evidence don’t support them. The pattern supports us.

One Holiday Weekend, Two Names

Nolan Xavier Wells was 18 years old. He was a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, a 2025 graduate of Ocean Springs High School, a young man his coach described as humble, respectful, and hardworking, a son his mama said was always willing to cheer and uplift others. On July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of this country, Nolan went out to Horn Island, a barrier island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, on a boat with a big group of his friends. He was last seen around 3 in the afternoon. His mother reported him missing that night. Two days later, on Monday morning, a park ranger found a body on the island, and his family confirmed the unthinkable. He would have turned 19 next month.

Now let me be precise, because Research over MeSearch means I hold myself to the receipts even when my stomach is in knots. As of this writing, no cause of death has been established, the coroner is awaiting autopsy and toxicology results, and no charges have been filed against anybody. Those are the facts of record. Ahh, but here is what the community watched happen in real time while the official record was still blank. Social media accounts connected to that trip started going dark one after another, deactivated, wiped, unfollowed. I seen that clip and it pissed me off. Deactivating an account is not a crime and it is not proof of one, I want to be clear about that. But our community got 400 years of pattern recognition in its bones, and coordinated silence that moves that fast lands on us heavy, because every accusation is a confession and every silence got a history behind it. Two things can be true. We can wait on the investigation to run its course AND we can trust the gut that our grandmothers gave us.

Tyrin Johnson was 20 years old. He was a young father who had welcomed his first child earlier this year. He was a former Tennessee State University student who had moved to Nashville, was working construction, and came back home to Memphis for the Fourth of July. In the early morning hours of July 5, around 4 am, after police say they were responding to reports of shots fired downtown, Tyrin was pursued on foot and shot by two Tennessee National Guard soldiers assigned to the federal task force occupying that city. His family says investigators told them he was shot twice in the chest. Police say he turned toward the soldiers with a weapon. His grandfather, a former correctional officer, disputes that his grandson would have done any such thing, and according to the United States Marshals Service the Guard members are not even outfitted with body cameras. So a United States citizen was taken out by military personnel, funded by his own tax dollars, on American soil, and the fullest account of it may never exist on film.

Then here go the part that is so poetic it will make you holler. Tyrin Johnson was killed steps away from a street named after Ida B. Wells, a Memphis woman who dedicated her entire life to documenting exactly this kind of racial terror, a woman who was run out of this very same city at gunpoint in 1892 for printing the truth about lynching. The woman who documented the terror got a street name. The terror itself got a federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office projects this occupation will cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars this year. Gil Scott Heron wrote a whole poem about how the rat keeps biting little sister Nell while the money flies off to whitey’s priorities. Apply Gil here. A billion dollars for soldiers on Beale Street, and they will still look you dead in the face and say there is no money for schools, for clinics, for grief counselors in the neighborhoods those soldiers patrol.

And it is so fitting, in the most bitter way, that all of this happened on the semiquincentennial. Because when I understood and learned that Crispus Attucks, the very first casualty of the American Revolution, gunned down in the Boston Massacre in 1770, was a Black and Indigenous man, it reframed everything. The first blood ever spilled for this country was Black blood. Two hundred and fifty years of fireworks later, we spent the anniversary weekend refreshing our timelines to find out if another Black boy made it home. We see right now, in real time, how the law and the institution respond to the death of a Black body, and it made me think about Afropessimism, about how our very existence gets rendered as socially dead.

Critical Historical Context: The Receipts Go Back 250 Years

Communal trauma stems from large scale catastrophic events or systemic issues that threaten the entire existence of a group, its survival, or its way of life. We know that well. Too well. Way too well. I’m getting flustered even writing it, so let me do what a researcher does and lay the timeline down flat, because the folks who call this paranoia are counting on you not knowing the chronology.

Start with the slave patrols. Sally Hadden’s research traces how the earliest organized policing in the American South existed for one purpose, controlling Black movement and Black assembly. Surveillance of Black leisure, Black travel, and Black gathering is not a glitch in American law enforcement. It is the founding job description. Then move to 1892, Memphis, Tennessee, where three Black grocers, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, were lynched for the crime of running a successful business. Their friend Ida B. Wells picked up her pen, published Southern Horrors, and proved with data that lynching was not punishment for crime, it was economic and social terror engineered to be witnessed by the whole community. That is the key insight, y’all. Lynching was never aimed at one body. It was a message addressed to every Black person in the county. Racial terror has always been communal by design, which is exactly why the trauma is communal in effect.

Keep going. The Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black communities in more than two dozen cities. Tulsa in 1921, when Greenwood was burned from the ground and the air. Rosewood in 1923, when an entire Florida town was erased. These were not attacks on individuals. These were attacks on the social fabric itself, on the churches and lodges and schools and businesses that made Black community life possible, which is precisely what Erikson means when he talks about trauma destroying the tissues of social life.

Then come to Mississippi, because geography matters here. In 1955, Emmett Till was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River, and his mother Mamie made a decision that turned private grief into communal witnessing. She opened the casket. She said let the people see what they did to my boy, and Jet magazine carried that image into every Black household in America. A generation of organizers, from Muhammad Ali to members of SNCC, testified that seeing that photograph changed them forever. That is communal trauma metabolized into communal purpose. In 1959, Mack Charles Parker was dragged from a Pearl River jail cell and lynched, and nobody was ever convicted. Then in 1960, on the same Gulf Coast where Horn Island sits, Dr. Gilbert Mason led Black families onto the sand at Biloxi Beach, and white mobs beat men, women, and children with pipes, chains, and bats while police watched, in what became known as Bloody Wade Sunday. Let that marinate. Within living memory, Black people were beaten bloody on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the act of touching the water. So when a Black boy goes out on those same waters with a group of friends and does not come home, and folks ask why the whole community felt it in their chest, the answer is that the water itself holds receipts.

Then bring it to the recent past. Tamla Horsford, Georgia, 2018, a Black mother found dead after a sleepover where she was the only Black person present, a case our community will never forget and never stopped questioning. Ahmaud Arbery, Georgia, 2020, chased down by citizens with no badge at all, and it took a leaked video and a national uproar before charges even happened. Badge or no badge. State actor or citizen vigilante. The throughline is not the uniform, the throughline is the rationalization that follows Black death like a shadow.

Social Death and the Violence That Needs No Reason

Seeing these images reminds me of what Afropessimists call social death, talking about how Black people are rendered in a subjectivity that is treated as nonhuman. Let me build this properly. Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death, identified the condition of the enslaved through three features, violent domination, natal alienation, and generalized dishonor. Frank Wilderson and the Afropessimist tradition extend Patterson to argue that this condition did not end with emancipation, that Blackness in the modern world remains structurally positioned outside full humanity, and that the violence directed at Black flesh is gratuitous, meaning it requires no transgression, no provocation, no reason. Gratuitous violence is violence that, just because it is unwarranted, is always still seen as rational when it lands on our bodies.

Here is the two roles frame, and I need you to hold both. What the law SAYS is equal protection. What the law STRUCTURALLY DOES is provide an endless menu of justifications whenever the body on the ground is Black. He reached. He fled. He fit the description. He should not have been out there. She should not have gone to that sleepover. He should not have gotten on that boat. It is showing you that whether you are a state actor or a citizen vigilante, if you do something that concludes in Black death or Black suffering, it can be justified, it can be rationalized. It does not give us the equal protection of the law, does it. The civil society that we live in hands out Black suffering like Oprah hands out cars. You get Black death, and you get Black death. Whether you have a badge or you don’t have a badge, if you accidentally lead to somebody who looks like me being hurt, or being underwater, or being shot, or being pushed off a balcony, this society might find some way to justify what you did, because accidents happen. Ahh, but notice how accidents only happen in one direction.

Dr. Saidiya Hartman wrote Scenes of Subjection to show us that terror is not just located in the spectacular events that we all rush toward and point at. The lynching photograph is not the whole archive. The racial terror is embedded in the social fabric of the everyday lives that we navigate, the routine traffic stop, the gas station run, the boat trip, the family holiday. Apply Hartman here. The spectacle is just the moment when the everyday becomes visible to people who had the luxury of not seeing it. For us there was never a curtain to pull back. And having the luxury to ignore the everyday terror is itself a sign of who that terror was never designed for. That claimed neutrality, that view from nowhere the pundits love to perform, is itself a position, and it is a position on the safe side of the water.

What the Body Remembers: Epigenetics and the Question Nobody Wants to Ask

When we see these images or we hear these stories, we embody and we internalize that identity threat. It attacks the group, but it also attacks our sense of self, our ontological position, making it where we feel threats to our very existence. I’m talking about you feeling it in your stomach, feeling it in your back, feeling it everywhere. It is why our community sometimes walks around so heavy, because the entire world be after us one way or another. Then they will turn around and say hey, stop being a victim, at the very same time they have figured out how to mobilize their own makeshift myths of being victimized, and that is on make it great again. The double standard is not a bug, it is the operating system.

The science is catching up to what the elders always knew. We always talk about how trauma can be intergenerational, passed down from generation to generation to generation. Epigenetics research, including Rachel Yehuda’s studies of trauma survivors and their descendants, suggests that experiences like trauma, diet, and chronic stress can alter how our genes behave, and that some of those alterations can potentially be passed down to future generations. Dr. Joy DeGruy gave this a name in our context, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, the accumulated multigenerational injury of slavery and the racism that followed it. Arline Geronimus calls the physical toll weathering, the way chronic exposure to racism accelerates aging in Black bodies and shows up as hypertension, heart disease, and a Black maternal mortality rate several times the white rate. Now, the epigenetics field is still young and I am not going to overclaim what the data shows, because Research over MeSearch applies to me too. But the direction of the evidence is clear enough. The gut feeling you had this week is not irrational. It is inherited data.

Now let me flip the question, because we always talk about the trauma and the pain, but what about the violence and the terror. If experience can mark a genome, if fear can be handed down, then what if, perhaps, epigenetics can also show how individuals can pass down the disposition of being a demonic monster. Perhaps being a racial terrorist can be inherited too. Perhaps being a colonizer can too. You see what I’m saying. Resmaa Menakem argues in My Grandmother’s Hands that unhealed, centuries old trauma carried in white bodies does not disappear, it gets blown through Black and brown bodies as brutality, and it gets institutionalized as policy. Crazy how the entire research apparatus lined up to study the inheritance of the wound, and nobody ever funds the study of the inheritance of the hand that made it. We inherited the flinch. Somebody else inherited the trigger finger. Only one of those gets a diagnosis.

The Classroom After the Casket: The Education Implication

Now let me put on my educator hat, because this is where communal trauma stops being an abstraction and starts being a Tuesday morning. Every single time one of these stories breaks, Black children get up the next day and go to school. They went to school after Emmett Till. They went to school after Dr. King. They went to school after George Floyd. Black students on the Gulf Coast are going to school this week carrying Nolan Wells in their chests, and students in Memphis are going to school having watched soldiers kill a young father downtown. And in far too many of those classrooms, the adults will act like it is a regular Tuesday, because nothing in their preparation taught them that grief walks through the door wearing a backpack.

Here is what the research tells us happens next. Communal trauma in students shows up as hypervigilance, and schools read hypervigilance as defiance. It shows up as numbness, and schools read numbness as apathy. It shows up as a short fuse, and schools respond with suspension, which is why the federal government’s own civil rights data has shown for years that Black students are suspended and expelled at multiples of the rate of their white peers. The child is having a historically reasonable response to a world that keeps proving it does not value her, and the institution responds by pushing her out of the one place that claims it can help. Paulo Freire told us that the banking model of education, where you just deposit content into passive students, was already a form of oppression. Ahh, but you really cannot bank information into a grieving child. Grief has to be named before algebra can land.

This is why Shawn Ginwright’s framework of healing centered engagement matters so much. Ginwright pushes us past the question of what is wrong with you, past even the trauma informed question of what happened to you, toward the communal question, what happened to US, and what do WE have that heals. Healing centered engagement treats culture as medicine, treats collective identity as an asset, and treats young people as agents in their own restoration rather than bundles of symptoms. That is the Southern Black organizing tradition wearing an education hat, that is Ella Baker’s group centered leadership, that is Septima Clark’s citizenship schools, that is the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools teaching Black children their own history in church basements while the state of Mississippi bombed and burned around them. Mississippi has already shown us what education as communal healing looks like, because Black Mississippians invented it under fire.

And peep the contradiction, because I need you to hold it. At the exact moment the research says naming racial trauma is the precondition for healing it, state legislatures across this country have been banning the very curriculum that would let students do the naming. They restricted the teaching of so called divisive concepts, they gutted African American studies courses, they pulled books by Black authors off of school shelves. Just admit it. You are not protecting children from discomfort, you are protecting a narrative from evidence. Having the luxury to ban a history is a sign that you never had to survive it. This means the curriculum bans are not adjacent to communal trauma, they are an active ingredient in it, because a wound you are forbidden to name is a wound you are forbidden to heal. That is why independent Black educational media is not a luxury or a side hustle. When the classroom door gets locked, the timeline becomes the classroom, and education is elevation because education is how a community metabolizes trauma into analysis, and analysis into action.

Who Carries the Casket: Intersectional Material Impacts

Intersectionality is not a garnish on this analysis, it is the load bearing wall, so let us be specific about who carries what, because communal trauma is shared but it is not shared evenly. Kimberlé Crenshaw taught us that oppression compounds at the intersections, and the Combahee River Collective taught us that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires the destruction of every interlocking system. Apply that here.

Start with Black mothers, because they always get handed the microphone at the worst moment of their lives. It was Christine Wonsley who reported her son missing and then had to narrate her own devastation to the public in real time. It was Mamie Till Mobley who opened the casket. It was Wanda Cooper Jones who fought for two months before Ahmaud’s killers were even arrested. The labor of Black mourning falls disproportionately on Black women, and then, this is the misogynoir Moya Bailey named, their grief gets surveilled, graded, and judged. Too loud and she is angry, too composed and she must not care. Meanwhile the material bill comes due in their bodies. Geronimus’s weathering research connects exactly this kind of chronic racialized stress to hypertension, to cardiovascular disease, to Black women dying in childbirth at several times the rate of white women. Erica Garner fought for her father and was dead of a heart attack at 27. Communal trauma is not a metaphor for Black women. It is a cause of death.

Now hold class in the same hand. Who gets to log off the timeline, take a mental health day, and call a therapist. Not the hourly worker who would lose a shift. Not the community where only a small fraction of American psychologists are Black and the waitlists run months deep. Not the neighborhoods of Memphis, the largest majority Black city in this country, where the federal response to poverty and disinvestment was not clinics or after school programs but 1,450 soldiers. The occupation itself is a class policy, because you will notice they did not deploy the National Guard to patrol wage theft in corporate suites. Then hold gender again from the other side. Tyrin Johnson was a young Black father, and Black fatherhood in this country gets criminalized in the public imagination even in death, which is why the first thing the coverage reaches for is a record instead of a baby picture. Black men’s grief, meanwhile, goes largely unnamed and untreated, because the same society that brutalizes them tells them feeling it is weakness. And hold the folks at the far edges of the safety net, Black queer and trans folks who mourn with less institutional cover and more added danger, disabled Black folks for whom every crisis response is itself a threat. The wound is communal, but the weight is stratified, and any analysis that centers only the symbolic, only the hashtags and the murals, while ignoring these material outcomes, is doing representation instead of liberation. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

Name It, Then Organize It

So where does that leave us. It leaves us where our people have always started, with the naming. You cannot treat a condition you refuse to diagnose, and you cannot heal a wound the curriculum forbids you to mention. Naming communal trauma is not wallowing, it is triage. Then comes what our tradition has always done after the naming. The homegoing and the repast, because we long ago turned mourning itself into a communal technology. The mutual aid networks, from the Freedom Farm Co op that Fannie Lou Hamer built in the Mississippi Delta to the church ladies who show up with food before you even call. The organizing, because Mamie Till showed us that communal witnessing can be converted into communal power, and Ida B. Wells showed us that documentation is a weapon, and the Biloxi wade in families showed us that even the beach can be a battlefield you win. Collective mourning and collective action are not opposites. In our tradition they have always been the same muscle.

Let me bring the scholars back around one time before I close, so the recap lives in your chest. Saidiya Hartman showed us that racial terror is not confined to the spectacle, it is woven into the everyday scenes of subjection we navigate, the traffic stop, the gas station, the boat trip, the holiday. Frank Wilderson and the Afropessimists showed us why the violence never seems to need a reason and why the justification always arrives anyway, because a society that renders Blackness socially dead can rationalize anything done to it, badge or no badge. Hold Hartman in one hand and Wilderson in the other, and this weekend stops being confusing and starts being legible.

Our community is experiencing a collective mourning right now. We have to name what we are experiencing in order for us to really deal with it, man. Education is elevation.

Five Key Takeaways

* Communal trauma is a documented sociological phenomenon, not oversensitivity. Kai Erikson and Ron Eyerman gave the academy the language, but Black communities wrote the case studies, and the shared gut reaction to Nolan Wells and Tyrin Johnson is 250 years of pattern recognition doing its job.

* Two deaths in one holiday weekend, one in a civilian context and one at the hands of soldiers, illustrate the Afropessimist point exactly. Badge or no badge, state actor or citizen, violence that concludes in Black death gets rationalized, which is what social death means in practice.

* Saidiya Hartman’s insight is the interpretive key. Terror is not just the spectacle, it is embedded in the everyday, the traffic stop, the gas station run, the boat trip, the family holiday, and the spectacle is simply the moment the everyday becomes visible to people with the luxury of not seeing it.

* Communal trauma is embodied and material, not just emotional. Epigenetics research, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and weathering connect racial terror to hypertension, maternal mortality, and shortened lives, which makes racial terror a public health crisis, and it raises the unasked question of what the perpetrators are passing down.

* Naming is the first medicine and education is the delivery system. Healing centered engagement, truthful curriculum, collective mourning traditions, and independent Black media are healing infrastructure, which is exactly why the same states experiencing these patterns keep banning the history that would let students name them.

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Related Readings

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

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

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

* Erikson, Kai. Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. Simon and Schuster, 1976.

* Eyerman, Ron. Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

* DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Uptone Press, 2005.

* Menakem, Resmaa. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Central Recovery Press, 2017.

* Yehuda, Rachel, and Amy Lehrner. Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 2018.

* Geronimus, Arline. Weathering: The Extraordinary Stress of Ordinary Life in an Unjust Society. Little, Brown Spark, 2023.

* Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. 1892. And The Red Record. 1895.

* Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

* Ginwright, Shawn. The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. 2018.

* Hadden, Sally. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press, 2001.

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.

* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color. Stanford Law Review, 1991.

* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021.

* Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement. 1977.

* Mason, Gilbert R. Beaches, Blood, and Ballots: A Black Doctor’s Civil Rights Struggle. University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

* Till Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. Random House, 2003.

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