Education is Elevation

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Opening: Name the Villain

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

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

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

The Maze: How Dark Money Stays Dark

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

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

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

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Critical Historical Context: This Court Was Never Neutral

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

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

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

What the Supermajority Took: The Receipts

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

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

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The Education Implication: This Is a Schoolhouse Story

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

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

Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Carries the Weight

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

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

Closing: Convert the Read Into the Ask

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

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

Five Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

Become a Paid Subscriber: Fund the Counter-Curriculum

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

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

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

Related Readings: The Receipts Shelf

Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Investigations & Primary Documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A male daughter in precolonial Igbo society was a daughter who was socially accepted as a son. See, before there was a missionary, before there was a governor, before the priesthood, before the binary, Africa had more than two ways of being, and the people who lived those ways did not treat them as scandals or secrets or sins, they treated them as systems, rooted in kinship, spirit, and survival. Survival of our ancestors. Don’t you ever forget that.

Now before I go any further, I want to state this clearly: this is not me romanticizing the continent, this is me telling you what existed there before the Europeans showed up, with receipts, with citations, with the anthropological record sitting right next to the analysis, because the slogan around here is Research over MeSearch and I intend to keep it that way. Understand?

Here go the thesis, so ain’t no confusion later: the concept of the male daughter is central to deconstructing colonial gender norms because it reveals the historical flexibility of gender and exposes the way Europeans taught us that their gender roles were natural, when the record shows those roles were normalized over time, specifically by violence. Sit with that. If the binary was natural, they wouldn’t have needed missionaries, magistrates, warrant chiefs, and criminal codes to enforce it. You don’t pass laws against things that don’t exist.

What the Institution Actually Was

The history of male daughters in Nigeria is a documented example of precolonial gender flexibility, one that sits entirely outside the Victorian framework, and it was captured most rigorously by the Nigerian anthropologist Ifi Amadiume in her 1987 study of the Igbo town of Nnobi, titled Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Apply Amadiume here. She demonstrated that in Igbo social organization, gender was a social category that could be decoupled from biological sex, meaning a daughter could be socially repositioned as a son, and once that repositioning happened, the community treated it as real, because it was real.

A male daughter is not a metaphor. A male daughter is not a mistake. A male daughter was a social role in Igboland where a woman could become a son, inherit land, lead a family compound, hold ritual and political authority, and participate in lineage governance, which is everything the European said a woman couldn’t do. When a family had no surviving male heir, or when a daughter possessed exceptional leadership qualities, she could be designated to fill the structural position of a son, keeping the lineage, the land, and the ancestral obligations intact. Think about what that means. The role was strategic, it was flexible, it was contextual, and it answered a material question, which is who holds the land and who carries the lineage, with a social answer instead of a biological one.

Then there’s the related practice that often went hand in hand with it: the female husband. This was a position where a woman of means and standing could marry a wife, establish a household, secure children for her lineage with the help of a man in a procreative role, and exercise the full social authority of a husband. The marriage was the institution. The authority was the point. Amadiume documented women in Nnobi who accumulated wealth, took titles, married wives, and ran economic operations that colonial officers later refused to even recognize on paper, because their paperwork only had two boxes and African life didn’t fit in either one.

Gender as a Social Construct, Demonstrated

When we say gender is a social construct, we are literally saying that depending on which society and which moment in history you’re talking about, people built gender differently, and the male daughter illustrates that with precision. In this system, a person’s ability to perform a role, like managing a household, inheriting property, or carrying leadership, mattered more than their physical sex. The genitalia did not dictate the function. The function was assigned by the community according to need, capacity, and circumstance, which means the Igbo were operating a grounded, homegrown theory of gender centuries before a single Western feminist seminar ever convened.

Most of y’all been taught that the strict two-gender system is the neutral default of human civilization, the view from nowhere, just the way things are. Just admit that’s a position. Claiming the binary is natural is not the absence of an ideology, it is an ideology, one with a shipping date, a port of entry, and a paper trail running through mission schools, Native Courts, and the Criminal Code. Naming that claimed neutrality as a position is the whole ballgame, because once the binary has a history, it stops being destiny.

How They Dismantled It: Two Roles, One Confession

Watch the two-roles frame, because the colonizers had a script and a function and they were never the same thing. What they said: we are bringing civilization, salvation, and proper family order to a dark continent. What the position structurally did: it dismantled African systems of land tenure, lineage authority, and gender flexibility so that colonial administration and extraction could run smoothly through a single, legible, male head of household. Crazy how ‘civilization’ always seems to end with somebody else holding your land.

The mechanics were specific. Missionaries branded the male daughter and the female husband as primitive and demonic, which justified throwing the devil on us. Mission schools taught Igbo girls domesticity and submission while teaching boys administration and authority, manufacturing the Victorian household one classroom at a time. Colonial Native Administration appointed warrant chiefs, men, only men, handpicked for cooperation, to replace governance systems where women had held real institutional power through their own assemblies and organizations. Then the legal system finished the job: British-derived criminal codes criminalized intimacy ‘against the order of nature,’ and inheritance law was restructured around the male heir, which made the male daughter not just disfavored but legally illegible. These folks hoodwinked us. They finessed us into believing women were divinely subordinate, then they pointed at the wreckage of the systems they destroyed and called the wreckage ‘African tradition.’

Every accusation is a confession. They called African gender systems unnatural while running an empire that required guns, courts, schools, and churches to make their own gender system stick. If your ‘natural order’ needs that much artillery, it was never natural, it was enforced. This also proves the second thing: the closet itself was an import. The down low was an import. These roles were not secrets in precolonial Igboland, they were public institutions with names, rules, and ceremonies, and it took colonial violence to convert openness into shame.

This Means the ‘Un-African’ Crowd Is Wrong

Now let me address the folks who love to say queerness and gender fluidity are Western imports corrupting the continent. This means you are wrong, flatly, and the receipts are not close. Scholars like Marc Epprecht and the collection assembled by Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe have documented same-sex intimacy and gender diversity across the continent long before contact, from woman-to-woman marriage among the Igbo, Nandi, and Lovedu, to the mudoko dako among the Lango that I covered earlier in this series. What actually arrived on the boat was the criminalization. Political scientists Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney ran the comparative analysis and found that former British colonies are significantly more likely to criminalize homosexuality today precisely because Britain wrote those laws into colonial penal codes. Nigeria’s Criminal Code provision punishing ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ is British law in African clothing, and the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was built on top of that colonial scaffolding, not on top of Igbo cosmology.

So the next time you hear somebody declaring what’s African and what’s un-African, ask them if they picked up a history book or if they’re just regurgitating what the missionary taught their great-granddaddy. iMa bE: ‘we are defending traditional African values.’ Cool. Then defend the male daughter, defend the female husband, defend the women’s assemblies, because those are the traditions, documented and dated. What you’re actually defending is Victorian England with a Lagos zip code, and by calling that colonial residue ‘tradition’ while calling our actual traditions ‘Western,’ you are making whiteness visible, you’re just making it visible inside your own mouth. The ask is simple: read Amadiume before you legislate.

Western Feminism Doesn’t Own This Critique Either

This history also challenges the universality that Western feminist theory has tried to dominate us with, and I say that as somebody who has read the first wave, the second wave, and the third wave. Amadiume wrote her book partly as a confrontation with white feminist scholars who treated African women as a pile of victims waiting on European theory to rescue them. Apply Oyěwùmí here too: in The Invention of Women, she showed that among the Yoruba, seniority, not gender, organized social life until colonization translated everything into the European two-box system. María Lugones names the whole apparatus the coloniality of gender, meaning the binary and the racial hierarchy arrived as one package, installed together, enforced together. Operationalize that: you cannot decolonize race and keep the colonizer’s gender system, because they came off the same boat, signed by the same hands, blessed by the same church.

Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and one of its favorite highs is letting Western feminism critique patriarchy while leaving the colonial origins of that patriarchy unexamined, because examining them would implicate the same empires that funded the universities. African societies had their own grounded theories of gender, encoded in language, kinship, and social structure, and recovering them is not an academic exercise, it is a toolkit, one that supports present-day arguments for the rights and dignity of diverse gender and sexual identities across Africa and the diaspora, especially against folks who like to ordain oppression onto bodies that don’t conform.

The Women Fought Back

Lastly, don’t let the near disappearance of the male daughter read as passive surrender, because the resilience of Igbo women is equally crucial to this history. Igbo women had a practice called ‘sitting on a man,’ documented by Judith Van Allen, where women would mass at the compound of a man who violated community norms, singing, dancing, banging on his walls, and refusing to leave until accountability happened. Collective discipline, institutionalized. In 1929, when colonial Native Administration moved toward taxing women, tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women rose up in the Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women’s War, sitting on warrant chiefs across the southeast, and colonial forces answered organized, largely nonviolent women with bullets, killing dozens. Then there’s Ahebi Ugbabe, documented by historian Nwando Achebe, a woman in colonial Nigeria who became a warrant chief and then a female king, the only one in the colonial record, which tells you the older logic of flexible gender did not die quietly, it kept breaking through the concrete.

So let me close the loop where I opened it. A male daughter was a daughter socially accepted as a son, and that single sentence detonates the claim that the binary is universal, natural, or divine. The rigid dichotomous system of man and woman is not a universal, it is the result of a specific historical process that was pushed onto us by violence, and the people pushing it needed armies, courts, classrooms, and pulpits to make it hold. Africa had more than two ways of being. The record says so. Education Is Elevation.

Critical Historical Context

The timeline matters, so let’s lay it down clean. Precolonial Igbo society was decentralized, organized through lineages, age grades, title societies, and village assemblies rather than kings and standing armies, and within that structure women held institutionalized power: they ran market networks, held their own assemblies (the mikiri), took titles, and exercised collective enforcement through practices like sitting on a man. The male daughter and female husband institutions sat inside that architecture as lineage-preservation technologies, ensuring land and ancestral obligation could pass through a daughter when no son survived.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 carved the continent on paper, and Britain consolidated control over what became Nigeria through the early 1900s, formally amalgamating the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. Indirect rule arrived with it: warrant chiefs, Native Courts, and a colonial legal order that recognized only male authority, which meant women’s political institutions were not just ignored, they were structurally deleted from governance. Mission Christianity supplied the moral software for the operation, recasting flexible gender roles as sin and superstition, while mission education trained girls for Victorian domesticity. The Criminal Code transplanted British prohibitions on intimacy ‘against the order of nature’ into Nigerian law, where that colonial scaffolding still stands, reinforced rather than repealed by the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. The 1929 Women’s War was the loudest answer to all of it, and the colonial commissions that followed were forced to admit they had never understood, or cared to understand, the women’s institutions they had bulldozed. That admission is the whole case file.

Colonial Implication of Education

Here go the part where I put my educator hat all the way on. The erasure of the male daughter from curriculum is not an oversight, it is the maintenance phase of the same colonial project, because a student who learns that the gender binary has a shipping date can no longer be told it’s eternal, and students who can historicize power are harder to govern with myths. Mission schools were the original delivery system for Victorian gender ideology in Igboland, teaching girls submission and boys administration, which means schooling itself has always been a front in this fight, never a neutral bystander. The view from nowhere doesn’t run a classroom.

Map that onto right now. The same legislatures passing ‘divisive concepts’ laws, gutting African American Studies frameworks, and pulling books on African and queer history off library shelves are running the mission school playbook with updated branding: control what children can know about the construction of race and gender, and you control what adults will accept as natural. A curriculum that includes Amadiume next to the standard civics unit produces students who ask who benefits from the categories, and that question is precisely what the censorship is designed to prevent. This is why independent educational media matters, why I build full packages with bibliographies instead of hot takes, and why community-funded curriculum is not a luxury, it is infrastructure for intellectual self-defense. Teach the male daughter and you teach students that social arrangements are made by people, which means they can be remade by people. That’s the implication, and it’s also the threat, depending on which side of the desk you’re sitting on.

Intersectional Material Impacts

Intersectional analysis is the default around here, not a garnish, so let’s name who carries the material weight of this history. Apply Crenshaw: the colonial deletion of the male daughter was simultaneously a gender operation and a property operation, because when inheritance was restructured around the male heir, African women lost land, and land is wealth, and wealth compounds across generations. The Combahee River Collective taught us that systems of oppression are interlocking, and this is the textbook case: race, gender, religion, and property law moving as one machine.

* Land and wealth: Women who could once inherit as male daughters were converted into legal dependents, and across the continent today, women perform a massive share of agricultural labor while holding a fraction of documented land title, a gap with a colonial paper trail. Dispossession is not a vibe, it’s a ledger.

* Bodies and criminalization: British-derived sodomy provisions and their modern reinforcements expose queer Africans, and disproportionately poor and gender-nonconforming people who cannot buy privacy or exit, to arrest, extortion, mob violence, and exile. Apply Bailey’s misogynoir framework to who gets policed hardest at the intersection of Blackness, womanhood, and nonconformity.

* Authority and governance: The warrant chief system deleted women’s assemblies from formal politics, and the underrepresentation of African women in land boards, courts, and legislatures today is the long tail of that deletion, not a natural distribution of ambition.

* Diaspora echoes: Apply Spillers: the same colonial order that ungendered captive African flesh in the hold of the ship policed gender conformity on the continent, two arms of one body. Black women and Black queer folks in the diaspora inherit both operations at once, fighting respectability politics that are, at root, Victorian mission-school curriculum passed down as culture.

* Class and labor: Hold the Black Marxist frame alongside the Afropessimist one: dismantling flexible gender wasn’t just ideological housekeeping, it organized households into units legible for taxation, wage labor, and extraction. Antiblackness and patriarchy were not aberrations in the colonial economy, they were the engine and the transmission.

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5 Key Takeaways

* The male daughter was a real, documented Igbo institution, recorded by Ifi Amadiume in Nnobi, where a daughter was socially repositioned as a son to inherit land, lead the family, and carry the lineage. Not a metaphor, not a mistake, a system.

* Precolonial Igbo society decoupled biological sex from social function: capacity and circumstance assigned roles, not genitalia, which proves the rigid binary is a specific historical product, not a human universal.

* Colonialism dismantled these systems deliberately, through missionaries, mission schools, warrant chiefs, male-only inheritance law, and British-derived criminal codes, then rebranded the wreckage as ‘African tradition.’

* Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import: the criminalization arrived in British penal codes, the closet arrived with the shame economy of the church, and modern laws stand on that colonial scaffolding.

* Igbo women resisted, from sitting on a man to the 1929 Women’s War to Ahebi Ugbabe becoming a female king, which means this history is a record of fightback, not just loss, and recovering it is present-tense political equipment.

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Related Readings: A Working Bibliography

* Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Zed Books, 1987.

* Amadiume, Ifi. Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. Zed Books, 1997.

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

* Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007.

* Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. Palgrave, 1998.

* Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2008.

* Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Pambazuka Press, 2011.

* Van Allen, Judith. “’Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1972.

* Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Indiana University Press, 2011.

* Han, Enze, and Joseph O’Mahoney. British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality. Routledge, 2018.

* Ihejirika, Chidera. “F**k Your Gender Norms: How Western Colonisation Brought Unwanted Binaries to Igbo Culture.” gal-dem.

* 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, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987.

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

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A effeminate man in northern Uganda before the colonizers pulled up was called a Mudoko Dako, and that wasn’t a slur, that wasn’t a scandal, that wasn’t something whispered behind a granary — it was a recognized place in the community, a distinct gender status among the Lango people and their neighbors the Teso and the Karamojong, with rights, roles, and yes, marriages. A lot of y’all are lost in the sauce of Western heteronormativity, so let me say it plain before we go any further: there were men in precolonial Africa who wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, lived as women, and legally married men, and no elder raised a spear in protest. Let that marinate.

The word Dako in the Lango language means woman. The Mudoko Dako were assigned male at birth, understood by their communities to be womanized men, and they cooked, they cleaned, they cared for children, they worked the land — not in shame, not in hiding, but in full view of the village. Some so fully embodied their lived womanhood that they simulated menstruation. This ain’t me freestyling. This is in the colonizer’s own paperwork: British anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg documented all of it in The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda in 1923, describing how these men dressed in the manner of women, took on women’s traditional roles, and were folded into family life. Crazy how the same empire that wrote this down in its field notes turned around and wrote laws pretending it never existed.

Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale, former dean of the law faculty at Makerere University, puts the receipt in one sentence: “During precolonial times, the ‘mudoko dako,’ or effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, were treated as women and could marry men.” Treated as women. Could marry men. No social sanction. Tamale has spent her career documenting that gender across precolonial African societies was less a cage and more a landscape, and she calls the “homosexuality is un-African” line what it is — a tired fable that the historical record demands we bury. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (1998) stacks example after example across the continent. The scholarship is not thin. The amnesia is manufactured.

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Critical Historical Context: Gender as Spiritual Technology

Here’s the context your textbook skipped, and it matters because it explains what colonialism actually destroyed. Across a range of African societies, gender-crossing wasn’t just tolerated as a private quirk — it was often read as evidence of spiritual capacity. People who could move between masculine and feminine presentation were understood to live in more realms than just the human one, and that ability to transgress the boundary made them candidates for sacred work: spiritual healers, diviners, mediums consulted by chiefs, soldiers, and war captains, instrumental in politics and justice. Among the Lugbara, transgender mediums carried messages between the human and spirit worlds; the chibados of Angola were male diviners who lived as women; the Bunyoro of Uganda held religious roles for men who dressed as women. Feminine dress could signal that a healer was that day inhabiting the side of themselves that speaks to ancestors, open for the community’s problems. The only consistent grounds for sanction wasn’t the gender-crossing itself — it was using spiritual power for harm, cursing and tricking your neighbors instead of helping them. Feel me? The line wasn’t drawn at who you were. The line was drawn at what you did to the community.

Then comes the break, and the break happened twice. On the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South, enslaved Africans carried these understandings out of context — and when an enslaver saw somebody cross-dressing, somebody moving between genders the way their tradition sanctified, that person was punished, and the punishment did double work: it brutalized a body and it severed a chain of ancestral memory, oral storytelling, and tradition that could no longer be passed on. Back on the continent, the empire ran the same play with different personnel: enslavers and administrators left missionaries and priests behind to westernize the villages, teaching that indigenous gender structures were ungodly and demonic in the name of Jesus, while the law handled the hardware. In 1861 the British Empire wrote Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” — and then photocopied it across the empire, and Uganda got its version in the 1902 colonial penal code, which outlawed non-conforming gender expression and same-sex relationships as “gross indecency.” Some of y’all might be asking, what the hell is a penal code? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the moment a community’s memory becomes a crime scene. You don’t just outlaw the practice. You outlaw the remembering.

Now run the math. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates — the majority of these laws trace straight back to colonial penal codes. Britain decriminalized at home in 1967 and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code; it upgraded it, most recently with the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” Crazy how Robert Mugabe could call homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote and his own ancestors never needed. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease was never the queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute — and a generation of post-colonial leaders have continued to perpetuate it, pissing on us and telling us it’s raining, calling the eraser “tradition” and the tradition “foreign.”

Then Came the Penal Code

Then came 1902. The British brought they beans-and-toast colonial ways to the shores of the Nile and stamped the word “illegal” onto love, importing a penal code built from the same imperial template London had been rolling out since 1861 — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” “gross indecency,” the whole catalog of Victorian disgust dressed up as law. Missionaries handled the software while the penal code handled the hardware: one taught the village that its own traditions were demonic, the other made sure anybody who remembered different could be caged. That’s how you break a chain of ancestral memory. You don’t just outlaw the practice, you outlaw the remembering.

Now run the math with me. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and the majority of those laws are inherited directly from European colonial penal codes — more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates. Europe decriminalized at home and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code, it upgraded it: the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act carries the death penalty for what it calls “aggravated homosexuality.” Robert Mugabe called homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease isn’t queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute.

Who Wrote the “Gay Agenda”? (Hint: It Wasn’t Gay Folks)

When I first got into the conscious community as a youngster, I was told the “gay agenda” was an attack on the Black family, and it took me years to clock that the phrase itself has a birth certificate, and it’s white. The “gay agenda” as a political weapon was built by the white evangelical right: Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign cast gay people as predators coming for your kids, and in 1992 a religious-right outfit literally released a propaganda video titled The Gay Agenda that got mailed to members of Congress and circulated at the Pentagon to kill gay folks’ standing in public life. Then they exported the product line. In March 2009, American evangelicals — including Scott Lively, a man who built a career claiming gay people orchestrated the Holocaust — ran a conference in Kampala warning Ugandans about the “gay agenda” threatening their families. Months later, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill hit parliament, the one the world called the “Kill the Gays” bill, the direct ancestor of the 2023 law with death sentences in it. So when somebody Black repeats “gay agenda” talk, they are running white Christian nationalist software on Black hardware — using a script written by the same people whose ancestors wrote the penal codes, to push Black queer folks out of families, out of churches, out of organizing spaces, and into isolation that gets people killed. Two things can be true: you can have questions about anything you want, and you can refuse to let Anita Bryant’s ghost ventriloquize your mouth. Black queer people — and Black queer women and femmes catch the worst of it, like Bailey’s work on misogynoir keeps showing us — are not the agenda. They are the kinfolk. The agenda was always somebody else’s, and we were never on the committee.

If You Missed the Female Husbands Piece

This is the second entry in what’s turning into a Pride Month series, and if you missed the first one, go back and read the female husbandry package — women across African societies who took wives, headed households, and held lineage and property through marriages the community fully recognized, from the Igbo and Nuer traditions to figures like Njinga and the Kuria practice that continues today. Put the two histories side by side and the picture gets undeniable: women marrying women over here, men living as women and marrying men over there, both sanctioned, both ordinary, both older than the empire that called them deviant. Queerness and Black folks been together since before colonialism, feel me — the question was never whether queer Africans existed, the question is who profited from making you forget they did.

The Community Rises Again

So this Pride Month, when you raise a flag or speak a name, remember the Mudoko Dako — remember that before the code there was a community, and the community rises again. The creator does not make mistakes, and nature loves the variation, and the multiplicity of how we show up has always been ingrained in our humanity. You should really show this to somebody who still believes effeminate men in our community came from the European. Show them the 1923 field notes. Show them the 1902 statute. Then ask them which one came first, the queer Africans or the law against them. I’ll wait.

Happy Pride Month, y’all. Education is elevation. If you want the sources from this piece, they’re all linked below for the community. Shidd — if this work feeds you, become a paid subscriber and keep it independent.

The Implication for Education

This is where it lands in my lane, because the mudoko dako didn’t disappear from history by accident — they disappeared by curriculum. The same colonial project that wrote the penal codes wrote the syllabi: mission schools on the continent taught children that their grandparents’ gender traditions were demonic, and Western schools taught everybody else that Africa had no queer history at all, so two continents got educated into the same amnesia from opposite directions. Then look at right now: book bans pulling Black and queer history off shelves, “divisive concepts” laws making teachers afraid to say what Driberg published in 1923, state boards — including the one I just wrote about in Texas — overhauling curriculum to sand the edges off of exactly this kind of knowledge. When a Black child never learns that the mudoko dako existed, the “un-African” lie gets installed at the root, and when a Black queer child never learns it, school becomes one more institution telling them they’re a foreign object in their own lineage. Paulo Freire taught us that education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of liberation or an instrument of conformity — and a curriculum that erases the mudoko dako isn’t neutral, it’s the 1902 penal code still doing its job with a whiteboard instead of a courtroom. Restoring this history is not a niche Pride Month garnish. It is curriculum repair.

Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price Today

Let’s be clear that this is not an abstract debate about heritage, because the colonial inheritance bills somebody every single day, and intersectionality — Crenshaw’s frame, the Combahee River Collective’s lived analysis — tells us the invoice doesn’t get split evenly. In Uganda and across the 31 African countries still criminalizing, the laws don’t just threaten prison: they collapse HIV prevention and treatment outreach because showing up to a clinic becomes evidence, they license landlords to evict, employers to fire, mobs to act with impunity, and they hit queer women and gender-nonconforming people with a double exposure — criminalized for their sexuality, then disciplined again by patriarchal family structures that the colonial church helped harden. In the diaspora, the same “gay agenda” logic — a script literally authored by the white evangelical right and exported to Kampala by American preachers in 2009, months before Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill hit parliament — gets recycled in our own communities, and the material outcomes follow: Black queer youth pushed out of homes and overrepresented among the homeless, Black trans women facing some of the highest rates of violence in the country, Black queer women and femmes catching what Moya Bailey named misogynoir from outside the community and inside it at the same time. Two things can be true: anti-Blackness structures the whole terrain, like Wilderson would remind us, and within Blackness, gender and sexuality decide who gets the least shelter on that terrain. Centering Black women’s and Black queer folks’ material outcomes — housing, healthcare, safety, family — over symbolic representation is the whole assignment. A flag in June don’t pay rent in July.

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Five Key Takeaways

* The Mudoko Dako were a recognized gender status, not a tolerated exception. Among the Lango, Teso, and Karamojong of northern Uganda, feminine men lived as women, held women’s roles, and legally married men — documented in Driberg’s 1923 ethnography and affirmed by Sylvia Tamale’s scholarship.

* Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import. Uganda’s criminalization begins with the 1902 colonial penal code, built from Britain’s 1861 Section 377 template — there was no indigenous law against the mudoko dako to inherit.

* The erasure was a two-front operation. Plantation punishment broke ancestral memory in the diaspora while missionaries and penal codes broke it on the continent — same empire, two theaters, one amnesia.

* The “un-African” claim collapses under its own receipts. More than half of the countries still criminalizing same-sex relations are former British colonies; leaders defending these laws are defending London’s legislation, not Africa’s traditions.

* The material costs are intersectional and current. Criminalization collapses healthcare access, licenses eviction and violence, and lands hardest on Black queer women, femmes, and trans people — on the continent and in the diaspora alike.

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Related Readings (Bibliography)

Driberg, Jack Herbert. The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923. — The primary ethnographic documentation of the mudoko dako.

Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011. — Foundational collection on sexuality scholarship from the continent.

Tamale, Sylvia. “Homosexuality Is Not Un-African.” Political Research Associates / Al Jazeera America, 2014. — The essay containing her mudoko dako statement quoted above.

Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. — Continent-wide survey including the Lango material.

Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. — Igbo flexible gender; the companion text to the female husbandry piece.

Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. — Yoruba society before the Western gender binary.

Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. — How the myth of an exclusively straight Africa was constructed.

Human Rights Watch. This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism. New York: HRW, 2008. — The legal paper trail from Section 377 to the colonies.

Kaoma, Kapya. Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia. Somerville: Political Research Associates, 2009. — The documented export of the “gay agenda” playbook, including the 2009 Kampala conference.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. — For the education-is-never-neutral frame.

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Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because you been lost in the sauce of a homophobia that somebody handed you and told you was tradition. Let me say it plain so the folks in the back can hear me. The homophobia a whole lot of us carry around like it’s ancestral is not African. It’s imported. It came off the same boats, through the same missions, behind the same flags as the chains, and then it got rebranded as “our values” so we’d do the policing for free.

I. Before Europe Believed The World Was Round, Africa Already Knew Gender Was A Role, Not A Body

Long before Europeans set foot on the continent, back when a real lot of them still believed the earth was flat, woman-to-woman marriage was a mainstream, legally recognized institution stretching from the Nuer of South Sudan to the Igbo of Nigeria to the Kuria of Tanzania and Kenya. A woman of wealth and standing could pay the bridewealth, become the legal husband, control the lineage and the property, and her wives could bear children by a chosen male consort, the genitor, whose children belonged to her line and her name. This wasn’t done in secrecy. It was an entire institution, with rites and bride price and public recognition, sitting in the open.

Ifi Amadiume, in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, showed that in precolonial Igbo society gender was flexible and was not welded to the sexed body, so a woman could occupy the social role of husband and father, get addressed as such, and wield the authority that came with it. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women, pushed it further and argued that gender as the master category for organizing a whole society was itself a Western imposition mapped onto Yoruba life, which had organized power by seniority and not by what was between your legs. Operationalize that. This means the thing we fight over today, “man” versus “woman” as a fixed biological destiny, was never a universal human fact. It was one cultural arrangement among many, and Africa was running several others at the same time. So anybody who tells you the binary is “just biology” and “just how it’s always been” is wrong on the history. Flat. Two things can be true: bodies are real, and the meanings we stack on top of them are made up.

II. It Wasn’t A Footnote — Queen Njinga, The Azande, And A Tomb In Saqqara

Queen Njinga, who lived from around 1583 to 1663 and ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola, dressed as a king and not as a queen, led her armies in person, took women as wives, and — by the accounts of the very Portuguese who were scandalized by her — kept male concubines. I want to be honest about my sourcing, because that’s the whole brand: much of what we “know” about her intimate life comes filtered through hostile colonial chroniclers like the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi, so I read those accounts for what they reveal about European panic as much as for the facts they claim. The Portuguese were already horrified by her military genius. What disturbed them just as much was her gender and her sexual autonomy, and in their own writing they branded her “unnatural.” That word was load-bearing, because “unnatural” was the moral fuel that justified the whole civilizing mission.

Then peep the Azande of Central Africa, the warrior husbands. E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented that Azande warriors married younger men, paid bridewealth in spears to the boy’s family, and the union was socially recognized, not hidden in shame. The anthology that gathers all of this, Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, walks through dozens of these societies across the continent. And go all the way back to the Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, the resting place of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two royal manicurists buried nose to nose in the most intimate embrace canonical Egyptian art ever allowed, a pose otherwise reserved for husband and wife. Here’s my honest caveat, because Research over MeSearch means I don’t cook the books to win: scholars still argue whether those two were lovers or twins, and I’m not gonna pretend that debate is settled. But the fact that the most intimate iconography on the wall is two men is itself the data, and it’s data Europe never expected us to dig up.

III. Two Things Can Be True — And Pretending They Can’t Is The Colonial Filing System Talking

Now here’s where folks get lost in the sauce from both directions. One camp wants to wave female husbandry around like it’s ancient gay marriage, full stop. The other camp, the homophobes, want to say “see, it was never even sexual, so it proves nothing.” Both of y’all are wrong, and the truth is more interesting than either lie. The historians and ethnographers, Amadiume included, stress that most female-husband unions were not primarily erotic. They were kinship, labor, land, and lineage arrangements that handed women access to property and power a rigid patriarchy would otherwise deny them. Two things can be true: female husbandry was mostly about material power and lineage, and the same societies also held open, recognized space for erotic same-gender bonds, like the Azande and Njinga’s court. The thread tying all of it together was never modern “sexual identity.” It’s that gender was a social role you could occupy regardless of the body you were born into, and that domestic and erotic life had more than one legitimate channel to flow through.

So watch the move when somebody says “this was just economics, not gay.” That person thinks they’re being neutral and historical. They’re not. Choosing to read only the kinship and erase the erotic, and treating “economic” and “queer” as if they’re opposites, is itself a position. That’s not neutrality. That’s the colonial filing system still doing its job in your mouth, sorting human lives into the boxes Europe built and calling the sorting “objective.” Naming a position as neutral is how power hides.

IV. Colonialism Didn’t Just ‘Introduce’ Homophobia — It Installed A System With Three Moving Parts

Through the colonization and the enslavement of the continent, Europe didn’t just bring a bad vibe. It installed a system, and the system ran on three specific parts. One: the binary gender system, the one that says a man is a man and a woman is a woman, fixed at birth, no movement, no exceptions. Two: heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate frame, welding sexuality to reproduction and to property inheritance under European legal logic. Three: the criminalization of gender nonconformity, and this is the turn — once the female husband lost her legal recognition, she didn’t just lose a title, she became “deviant,” a criminal, a sinner to be saved or jailed.

Charles Mills, in The Racial Contract, gives us the frame: colonial power doesn’t just take land, it decides whose knowledge counts as knowledge, so African ways of organizing gender got reclassified from “wisdom” to “savagery” by people who couldn’t pronounce the names. Saidiya Hartman, writing on the archive, teaches us that the colonial record doesn’t neutrally “lack” evidence of these lives, it actively worked to erase them, so the silence in the archive is not an absence, it’s a crime scene. This also proves the so-called “African values” argument is running on European software. This also proves that the anti-gay criminal codes still on the books across the continent are, in a lot of cases, literally inherited colonial sodomy statutes with the colonizer’s fingerprints still on them. This also proves that when Europe left, it left the homophobia behind like a tenant who skips out on the lease but leaves all his furniture, and we been decorating around it for generations, calling his couch our heirloom.

V. Quare vs. Queer — Why E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Is The Theorist We Need For This

How you read this whole history depends on the theory you bring to it, so let me get specific about the lens. Queer theory — your Judith Butler, your foundational 1990s canon — did something necessary and I’m giving it its respect: it taught us that gender is performative, that the categories are constructed and can be denaturalized, that the binary is a costume the culture sews and not a fact God handed down. That is exactly the tool that lets me stand here and say the female husband proves gender is a role and not a body. Real talk. But two things can be true: queer theory, for all its brilliance, has a documented habit of floating up into abstraction, treating race and class as discourse instead of as material conditions, and quietly defaulting its imagined queer subject to somebody white, somebody with the luxury to theorize identity instead of the obligation to survive it.

Enter E. Patrick Johnson. In 2001, in an essay with the longest, most Southern title in the academy — “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother — Johnson takes “quare,” his grandmother’s Southern Black vernacular pronunciation of “queer,” and turns it into a theory. Quare studies is, in his own words, a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory built to hold racialized sexual knowledge, which means it flat-out refuses to talk about queerness as if it floats free of Black skin, working-class money, and grandmother kitchens. Here’s the comparison operationalized: queer theory deconstructs the binary, and quare insists you do that deconstruction while standing in the body, in the bloodline, in the material. And that is precisely the lens female husbandry demands, because female husbandry was never abstract. It was land. It was bridewealth. It was who inherits, who eats, who carries the name into the next generation. You cannot read it right through a theory that treats identity as a free-floating performance and skips straight past the property records.

Johnson channels Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, the Black feminist tradition that said the personal is material before it’s anything else, and that is the same intersectional floor I stand on every time I sit down to write. Kimberlé Crenshaw named it, Combahee lived it: you cannot separate the gender from the race from the class, and any theory that asks you to is asking you to read your own ancestors with one eye closed. So here’s the difference in one breath. Quare is queer that never left home. Quare is Southern. Quare is Black. Quare is the grandmother saying “that child is a little quare” with love in her mouth and no diagnosis in her hand. Queer tells you the category is constructed. Quare tells you who paid for the construction and who’s still paying. Feel me?

VI. We’re Not Importing Labels — We’re Subtracting The Lie

Just for clarity, because somebody always tries it: reclaiming this history is not about importing Western rainbow labels onto Africa and stapling 2026 vocabulary onto people who never asked for it. It’s the exact opposite move. It’s about subtracting the Western homophobia that got imported four centuries ago and dressed up as tradition the entire time. It’s about reclaiming a past that was more diverse, more flexible, and more free than the European archive ever wanted us to find out. So when you stand on a corner and yell “homosexuality is un-African,” understand what you’re actually doing: you are not defending African tradition, you are performing European Christianity, and by saying it out loud you make the whiteness of your own position visible to everybody in earshot who knows the receipts.

Every accusation is a confession. The loudest man in the room screaming that queerness is a “Western import” is confessing, without knowing it, that he has no idea his own homophobia is the actual import. So when I said up top that you been lost in the sauce, hear me right — that wasn’t an insult, it was an invitation, back to a history that was bigger, freer, and more yours than the colonizer ever wanted you to know existed. Happy Pride, y’all. Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch.\

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5 Key Takeaways

1. Female husbandry and woman-to-woman marriage were mainstream, legally recognized institutions across 40+ African societies — not secret, not marginal, not modern.

2. Precolonial African gender systems decoupled the social role from the sexed body. A woman could be a legal husband and father. “Just biology” is a colonial story, not a universal fact.

3. Two things can be true: most female-husband unions were kinship and property arrangements, and the same societies still made room for openly recognized same-gender intimacy.

4. Colonialism installed homophobia through three mechanisms — the fixed binary, reproduction-bound marriage, and the criminalization of nonconformity — and many of today’s anti-gay laws are inherited colonial statutes.

5. Quare theory (E. Patrick Johnson) reads this history better than queer theory alone, because it keeps race, class, and the material body in the frame instead of floating into abstraction.

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Works Cited and Related Readings

1. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed Books, 1987).

The foundational text on Igbo woman-to-woman marriage. Amadiume argues precolonial Igbo gender was flexible and not biologically fixed, so women could occupy male social roles. This is the spine of the “gender is a role, not a body” argument.

2. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997).

Argues that gender as the organizing logic of society was a Western imposition onto Yoruba life, which ranked by seniority rather than sexed bodies. Use to show the binary itself is culturally specific, not universal.

3. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (St. Martin’s Press, 1998).

The canonical survey gathering same-gender practices across dozens of African societies, including the Azande warrior husbands and female-husband institutions. The receipts for the “40+ societies” claim.

4. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970).

Ethnographic documentation of Azande warriors marrying younger men and paying bridewealth in spears. Read critically — it’s a colonial-era anthropologist — but it records a recognized, public institution.

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

The origin of quare theory. Johnson critiques queer theory’s neglect of race and class and grounds queerness in the body, vernacular, and material life. The lens for this entire piece.

6. Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke Univ. Press, 2005).

Reprints the quare essay and builds out the field. Use for the broader Black queer theoretical tradition that quare opened up.

7. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990).

The queer-theory anchor. Gender as performative, the binary as constructed. Necessary tool and necessary foil — quare theory is in conversation (and tension) with exactly this.

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

Bridges queer theory and Black radical politics, insisting queerness be measured against material power, not just identity. Pairs with quare to keep the analysis grounded.

9. Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011).

A pan-African corrective to outsider framings of African sexuality, written largely by African scholars. Essential for centering African voices over the colonial archive.

10. Reeder, Greg. “Same-sex Desire, Conjugal Constructs, and the Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep,” World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (2000).

The scholarly case for reading the Saqqara tomb as a same-sex pairing. Cited honestly alongside the twins counter-reading — the debate is live, and I say so.

11. Nwoko, Kenneth Chukwuemeka. “Female Husbands in Igbo Land: Southeast Nigeria,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 5, no. 1 (2012).

A focused account of the status, ritual authority, and gendered standing of Igbo female husbands. Detail for the property-and-power reading.

12. Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017).

The leading modern biography of Njinga, working both Portuguese colonial records and African oral tradition. Use to separate Njinga’s documented life from the hostile chroniclers’ spin.

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

On the violence of the colonial archive and reading its silences. The basis for treating archival erasure of these lives as a crime scene, not a neutral absence.

14. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997).

The epistemology of how colonial power decides whose knowledge counts. Explains how African gender systems got reclassified from wisdom to “savagery.”

15. Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977); Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989).

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Thank you Marcus Flowers, metamorphosic, Andrea Maria Romandini, Bluesin’ Bob, Kristen Morosky Day, and many others for tuning into my live video with Saadia Mirza! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Y’all want to know how Texas works? Start with the map, because everything else is downstream of the map. When the Republican-led Legislature redrew the congressional lines and the Supreme Court let it ride, they didn’t just shade a few districts redder for the midterms, they reached into a Houston seat that has sent a Black representative to Congress since Barbara Jordan walked through the door in 1973, the first Black woman from the South ever elected to that chamber, and they rearranged the furniture so that two sitting Black Democrats, Al Green and Christian Menefee, had to climb in the same ring and beat the brakes off each other just to survive. Green’s old Ninth got painted Republican, his house got drawn into the new Eighteenth, the new Eighteenth got stuffed with more of Green’s old voters than Menefee’s, and the runoff ended with Menefee taking it close to seventy-thirty. One Black seat. Two Black men. Cannibalism by cartography.

Cedric Robinson told us racial capitalism doesn’t need to hate you, it needs to use you, and the cleanest use of Black political power is to make it eat itself. Wilderson says the position of the Black is fungibility, interchangeable, swappable, and when you watch a state map two Black incumbents into one district like they’re the same line item on a spreadsheet, that’s fungibility rendered in ink. That’s the whole game, and the game got played before a single one of us touched a ballot.

So let me say the thing plain. Then I’ll come back to it.

Y’all Booing the Fans While the Coach Calls the Play

Here’s where the misdirection comes in, and I need the folks in the back to hear me. Soon as the Eighteenth got nasty, the timeline filled up with people screaming about AIPAC, about who’s “aligned” with who, about a post AIPAC put out congratulating Menefee like that settles something. Let me be clear for the record the way I was clear when we were live: I have not seen one receipt tying Christian Menefee to AIPAC, and I’m not accusing nobody of nothing. Two things can be true. I can be highly skeptical of every PAC that buys influence in this state, and I can refuse to convict a candidate off a tweet the PAC made about him, not one he made about them.

Because think about who actually made the play. You ever watch grown folks lose they whole mind booing the fans in the stands while the coach who called the timeout, drew up the play, and sent it in walks off the field clean? That’s the timeline right now. AIPAC made the post. The party takes the money. The donors set the table. And somehow all the smoke goes to some insufferable leftist with four hundred followers and zero dollars. Where is your smoke for the people with the infrastructure, the funds, and the power to pick who wins, where, and how? Every accusation is a confession, and a movement that spends its rage on the audience instead of the play-caller is confessing it doesn’t actually want to find the play-caller.

Texas is the country’s defense-manufacturing backyard, the same Fort Worth line that turns out the F-35, the same oil and gas money that builds the ninety-million-dollar high school football stadiums, and when this country sends “aid” overseas it sends it as weapons, which means whoever holds office in this state sits closer to that pipeline than a senator from Vermont ever will. I’m not telling you that’s a conspiracy. I’m telling you that’s a balance sheet. If you want investigative journalism, follow that money. Don’t follow the broke kid arguing on Threads.

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The Emperor Has No Map (He Has Yours)

Now let’s talk about the lie that’s doing the most damage, the lie of the emperor.

Folks really believe Greg Abbott is forever. They say it out they mouth, Abbott got it locked, Texas is red, why even show up. And I get where the feeling comes from, the primary turnout was abysmal, our own people stayed home, schools are closing, and people look at all that and conclude the fix is permanent. That feeling has a name. Berlant called it cruel optimism, except down here it curdled past optimism into something flatter, an internalized impossibility, a learned helplessness the GOP spent thirty years teaching on purpose.

So let me hit you with a double bind, the kind we used to run in policy debate. Texas has had exactly three governors since 1995. George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott. Abbott himself is chasing a fourth term that would make him the longest-serving governor in state history, and Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards left in 1995. So when your leadership turns around and blames Democrats for the state of this state, you’ve trapped yourself. Either the Democrats are so all-powerful that their phantom hand reaches through thirty unbroken years of total Republican control of every lever, or your leadership produced exactly the Texas it wanted and is now pissing on us telling us it’s raining. Pick one. Both can’t be true, and neither one lets Abbott off the hook. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but so is the conservatism that’s been driving this car since before some of y’all could vote and still wants the passengers blamed for the wreck.

Who has the power to manufacture voter apathy? The party that’s held the wheel for three decades. Not the broke leftist. Not the drag queen. Not the immigrant. Lost in the sauce is the whole electorate that’s been trained to look everywhere except the driver’s seat.

The Real Heist Is in the Curriculum

Here’s the part where I put my higher-ed degree to work, because consciousness precedes transformation, and they know it better than we do.

While y’all were watching the Senate race, the State Board of Education quietly moved a Bible-infused overhaul through a process most people don’t even know exists. Not the Legislature, the Board, the elected fifteen where Republicans hold the majority and the final vote lands this summer while your kids are out of school and you’re too busy keeping them fed to drive to Austin. That’s not an accident, that’s the calendar as a weapon.

What’s in it? A reading list that has third graders moving from Charlotte’s Web to the Road to Damascus, the New Testament conversion of Paul, alongside the Prodigal Son and the Golden Rule, lifted straight out of one particular sect of one particular religion and stamped onto every child in a public building. A social studies framework that deemphasizes world history and culture down to a Texas-and-Christianity lens. Then the tell, the part that should make every one of us stand up: when a Black board member moved a plain amendment saying enslaved people were held in bondage because they were Black, the Republican majority voted it down, and when the standards said the Civil War was fought over slavery, Republican members fought that too, floating tariffs and “states’ rights” like we ain’t read this script before. The historian advising the board had to sit there and correct them on the record.

Freire called it the banking model, where education deposits obedience instead of withdrawing thought. Sandy Grande and Red Pedagogy remind us the settler curriculum was always about erasing whose land and whose labor built the wealth. So understand what they’re really doing. My people were enslaved in this state. Stephen F. Austin fought to preserve slavery in this state. And the plan is for a Black child in Texas to graduate fluent in Scripture and illiterate about the cotton their great-great-grandmother was forced to pick three counties over. That’s not an oversight. Charles Mills called the racial contract an agreement to misrepresent the world, and a curriculum that can find room for Paul on the road to Damascus but can’t say out loud why a Black body was in chains is the racial contract printed on a syllabus.

Don’t sleep on the vouchers stacked right next to it. Abbott’s “Education Freedom Accounts” take public dollars out of the public school your kid actually attends and hand them to families already paying private tuition, and then they got the nerve to tell a small-town parent whose district went from five days a week to four that a trans woman or an immigrant did that to them. The drag queen didn’t drain your school budget. The voucher did. The man who signed it did.

For the record, the Ten Commandments mandate, SB 10, that one ran through the Legislature, got blocked by lower courts, then the Fifth Circuit turned around in April and upheld it. So they’re coming at the schoolhouse from both doors at once, the statute and the standards, and they’re betting you only watch one door.

Why Small-Town Texas Keeps Voting for the Knife

Now I’m from Bryan. I’m from the country. So when I say this I’m talking about home, not looking down on it.

Out here, white, Black, and Brown alike, a whole lot of folks already decided nobody’s coming to save them and learned to get it out the mud, and that resignation is the most fertile soil the GOP ever planted in. Republicans walk in and say at least I’ll keep your oil job, drill baby drill, at least I’ll make a man out of your son, while Democrats too often show up sounding like the uppity Yankee who flew down from up north, didn’t read the room, assumes you’re slow, and wants you to read a dissertation before you’re allowed to have dinner. That perception is doing more damage than any single policy, and Republicans have done a sarcastically great job convincing Texans that “the establishment” means Democrats while the actual establishment has run the entire state apparatus for a generation.

Same machine runs the good-immigrant, bad-immigrant, good-Negro, bad-Negro binary. Yancy calls it white world-making, the power to decide which version of you gets to be human this week, and a whole lot of folks of color buy the binary thinking they can token they way to safety. You can’t. In this state you will be spent and discarded the second you’re no longer useful, no matter how hard you voted to fit in.

Then I have to name what happened to Jasmine Crockett, because intersectionality is not optional in my house. Crockett ran a real race in a brutally short window and lost a primary where she had to fight through respectability politics that James Talarico never had to touch, because she speaks with a Black vernacular a lot of “well-meaning” Christian Texans coded as too loud, too Black, too much. Moya Bailey gave us the word misogynoir for exactly this, the specific contempt aimed at Black women that white women and Black men get to skip. Crenshaw built intersectionality so we’d stop pretending race and gender are separate lines. Talarico can quote Scripture in a sentence and that Bible fluency carries him a long, long way in a state seduced by Christian nationalism across Latino, Black, and white communities alike, and that’s a real advantage, and the structural reason it’s an advantage is misogynoir clearing the runway in front of him while it laid spike strips in front of her. Two roles. Same election.

What We Actually Do About It

So I’m not gonna leave you in the diagnosis, because diagnosis without prescription is just doom-scrolling with footnotes.

One. Show up to the Board of Education. You don’t need a law degree, you don’t need permission, you sign up and you testify in Austin against the curriculum before that summer vote, and you bring three people who never came before.

Two. Run the Talarico playbook for Gina Hinojosa. The man didn’t win moderates from a giant televised town hall, he won them in the itty-bitty rooms, in Latino communities, month after month, speaking the language the room actually speaks. We need a senator and we need a governor, and most of Texas still doesn’t know who Gina is. Fix that one conversation at a time.

Three. Meet people where they live, not where you wish they lived. Talk that oil job honestly. Talk the broadband that costs the same in my country town as it does in inner-city Houston and runs half the speed. Cookouts, quinceañeras, rodeos, trail rides, that’s the precinct. The tools have to go to the people, and Republicans criminalize socialism, criminalize Black thought, criminalize drag, criminalize independent anything precisely because they know consciousness is the only thing they can’t gerrymander.

Four. Vote down the whole ballot, every time, and stop waiting to fall in love. I’m not a vote-blue-no-matter-who person, I’ll tell you straight, we got folks down here wearing blue who govern red. But in Texas right now the menu is apples or the other thing, and abstaining is just letting somebody else order for your kids.

Now back to that map. They drew it so two Black men would fight over one chair. But a map is a prediction, not a prophecy, and Wilderson gives us the description of the trap while Afrofuturism gives us the imagination to walk out of it. The question isn’t whether Abbott is the emperor. The question is whether you can picture a Texas where he isn’t, because if you can’t imagine Gina in that mansion, you’ve already conceded the only ground that matters. Research over MeSearch, kinfolks. They’re betting you won’t do the work. Prove them wrong. Y’all be safe.

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5 Key Takeaways

1. The gerrymander, cleared by the Supreme Court, redrew Al Green’s district to lean Republican and forced him into the Houston seat with Christian Menefee — a seat held by a Black representative since Barbara Jordan in 1973 — making two Black Democrats fight for one chair. That’s racial capitalism and fungibility, not coincidence.

2. The “Abbott is the emperor” feeling is engineered apathy. Texas has had three governors since 1995 and unbroken GOP control, which means the only people with the power to manufacture hopelessness are the people who’ve held the wheel for thirty years — not leftists, immigrants, or drag queens.

3. The real heist is in the curriculum: a Bible-infused reading list and a slavery-minimizing social studies framework moving through the State Board of Education with a summer final vote, plus vouchers draining public schools and SB 10’s Ten Commandments mandate upheld by the Fifth Circuit. Watch both doors.

4. Misdirected outrage protects power. Beefing with broke leftists over an AIPAC tweet while ignoring the donors, PACs, and party structure that actually pick winners is confessing you don’t want to find the play-caller. Skepticism of money in politics is healthy; convicting candidates off a tweet is not.

5. The path forward is concrete: testify at the Board of Education before the summer vote, run the Talarico small-room playbook to introduce Gina Hinojosa statewide, meet rural Texans in their own language and spaces, and vote the whole ballot. A map is a prediction, not a prophecy.

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Annotated Bibliography

Houston Public Media / Texas Newsroom — “Gina Hinojosa wins Democratic nomination” (March 3, 2026)

Confirms Hinojosa as the Democratic nominee for governor facing Greg Abbott in November, and that a fourth Abbott term would make him the state’s longest-serving governor. Anchors the “emperor” framing and the no-Democratic-governor-since-Ann-Richards point. houstonpublicmedia.org

Ballotpedia — “Texas gubernatorial election, 2026”

Primary and general-election field for governor; used to verify the Abbott vs. Hinojosa matchup and margins. ballotpedia.org

NBC News — “Christian Menefee defeats Al Green in TX-18 runoff” (May 2026)

Documents that GOP-led redistricting redrew Green’s 9th to lean Republican and forced him into the 18th, where Menefee defeated him; notes the district’s Black representation dating to Barbara Jordan in 1973. nbcnews.com

Ballotpedia — “Christian Menefee” / NBC News — “Redistricting pits Democratic colleagues against each other”

Details on the redrawn 18th containing more of Green’s old voters, the Turner special election, and the Supreme Court clearing the map. Source of the “cannibalism by cartography” argument. ballotpedia.org; nbcnews.com

AP via CultureMap / Washington Post — “Talarico wins Democratic Senate primary over Crockett” (March 3, 2026)

Confirms Talarico defeated Crockett and the role his scripture-driven message played; basis for the misogynoir / respectability-politics analysis. Used only as framing, not attributed as candidate quotes. aol.com; washingtonpost.com

PBS NewsHour / Axios Austin — “Paxton defeats Cornyn in Senate runoff” (May 26, 2026)

Confirms Paxton as the GOP Senate nominee facing Talarico in November. pbs.org; axios.com

The Texas Tribune / Victoria Advocate — “Vikki Goodwin wins LG runoff over Marcos Vélez” (May 26, 2026)

Confirms Goodwin defeated Vélez for the lieutenant governor nomination and will face Dan Patrick. texastribune.org

The Spokesman-Review / Dallas Morning News — “Texas officials give early OK to revamped social studies curriculum, Bible-infused reading list” (April 10, 2026)

Primary documentation for the curriculum section: the Texas-centric overhaul, the Bible reading list, the voted-down amendment on why people were enslaved, and Republican members disputing that the Civil War was about slavery. spokesman.com

The Texas Tribune / Houston Public Media — State Board of Education reading-list coverage (Jan.–April 2026)

Confirms the mandatory reading list (Road to Damascus, Prodigal Son, Golden Rule), the optional Bluebonnet Learning curriculum with its per-student incentive, and the summer final-vote timeline. texastribune.org; houstonpublicmedia.org

KERA News / CBS Texas / ACLU of Texas / OSV News — SB 10 (Ten Commandments) coverage (2025–April 2026)

Documents SB 10’s passage, the lower-court injunctions, and the Fifth Circuit upholding the law on appeal in April 2026 — the “both doors at once” point. keranews.org; aclutx.org; osvnews.com

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His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was how the prosecutor opened the case, and the second I heard it I felt that déjà vu hit me in the chest, because we have been here before, kinfolks, we have been standing in this exact spot in the historical record looking at the body of a Black child who took nothing, who was owed an apology and got a bullet instead.

Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen years old. Fourteen. He walked into a convenience store on Parklane Road in Columbia, South Carolina, got accused of stealing water he never stole, and when he did what any scared child does — picked up his backpack and walked out — a grown man came out from behind that counter with a pistol and chased him. Cyrus ran so hard he ran out of his shoe. He dropped two cell phones, one his, one his mother’s, and didn’t even stop to pick them up, because you do not stop running when there is a man with a gun behind you. He fell. He got up. He fell again, busted his shin, kept going. They chased that child more than 130 yards off their own property, into a public road, and then the fatal shot. Over water he didn’t take. Let that marinate.

And if it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1991, a fifteen-year-old named Latasha Harlins walked into a store in South Central L.A. with money in her hand for a bottle of orange juice that cost a dollar seventy-nine. The store owner, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing, grabbed her, and as Latasha turned to walk away, Du shot her in the back of the head. Latasha had the money in her fist when she hit the floor. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the judge gave her probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. No prison. That verdict, sitting right next to the Rodney King acquittals, is part of what lit the fuse in 1992. Sophia Nahli Allison’s film A Love Song for Latasha sat with that loss and made us feel the size of it. Thirty-some years later we are watching the sequel, and the script has not changed.

So let me be clear about what I’m doing here. I’m not making a “see, them too” video. I’m doing the work I always try to do — research over MeSearch — which means following the structure all the way down instead of stopping at the feeling. Feel me?

Adultification Is the Murder Weapon

Here is the thing nobody wants to name directly: a fourteen-year-old does not read as a child to the person who shot him. That is not an accident, that is a technology. Wilderson writes about how the Black body functions as fungible — interchangeable, available, a thing to be acted upon rather than a person to be reckoned with — and you apply that here and you see exactly what happened. Cyrus was not seen as somebody’s baby running scared. He was seen as a threat, a suspect, a problem that a grown man with a gun got to solve on the spot.

The research on this has a name. Scholars at Georgetown documented how Black children, and Black girls especially, get adultified — perceived as older, less innocent, more responsible for their own harm than white children the same age. Latasha was fifteen and treated like a thief and a fighter instead of a child. Cyrus was fourteen and treated like an armed adult instead of a boy who ran out of his own shoe. And notice the gendered grammar of it, because intersectionality is not a decoration I sprinkle on at the end — Black girls get adultified into “grown” and “fast,” Black boys get adultified into “men” and “threats,” and both translations end with a body. Same machine, different gears.

The Model Minority Myth Was Never a Compliment

Now, here is where folks get uncomfortable, so stay with me. To understand how a shopkeeper becomes judge, jury, and executioner over a child, you have to understand the position that shopkeeper was handed.

The model minority image got manufactured in the mid-1960s — Petersen wrote a whole magazine piece in 1966 holding up Japanese Americans as the success story, the good ones, the ones who worked hard and didn’t make trouble. And the timing was the tell. That was the same decade Black folks were in the streets demanding the country pay what it owed. The model minority myth was built as a rebuke. iMa bE the example, the story said, and if Asians can make it, then Black complaint must be a character flaw rather than a structural fact.

Claire Jean Kim gave this its sharpest name: racial triangulation. Asian Americans get valorized relative to Black Americans — “look how well they do” — and simultaneously get marked as permanent foreigners relative to white Americans — “go back where you came from.” Two moves at once. You get held up as proof that the system works and held down as proof that you’ll never fully belong. And the function of being held up is to be aimed. A wedge has to be sharp on one end to do its job, and the job was always to be driven between Black people and everybody else.

Yellow Peril Supports Black Power — And Why That Doesn’t Cancel Anything

Now I need y’all to hold two things in your hand at the same time, because this is where the lazy analysis falls apart.

There is a real, documented, beautiful history of Black and Asian solidarity in this country, and it is not a fairy tale. In 1969, outside the Alameda County courthouse at a Free Huey rally, Asian American activists held signs that read “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” — taking the slur that had been used to make them a danger to white America and turning it into a banner of coalition. Richard Aoki, a Japanese American who’d survived the WWII concentration camps, became a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and helped supply some of its first weapons. Yuri Kochiyama built her whole life on this bridge — she organized alongside Black radicals in Harlem, she was in the Audubon Ballroom and cradled Malcolm X as he was dying, she understood that to be in solidarity meant to show up. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State and Berkeley put Black, Asian, Chicano, and Indigenous students in the same coalition fighting for ethnic studies. That history is real, and I will defend it.

And — both things can be true — that history does not cancel, excuse, or balance out anti-Blackness in Asian American communities, and it was never meant to. This is the move I need you to clock: solidarity is not a credit you bank and spend later to buy yourself out of accountability. Kochiyama and Aoki are not a hall pass for Soon Ja Du, or for whoever raised a child to see a Black fourteen-year-old as a threat first and a person never. Holding up the panther-and-tiger banner while refusing to name the anti-Blackness running through your own community isn’t solidarity, it’s nostalgia. The folks who built that solidarity built it precisely by naming the anti-Blackness in their own families, out loud, at the dinner table — that naming was the work, not a betrayal of it. So when I invoke “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power,” I’m not closing the conversation, I’m setting the standard those ancestors actually set, and that standard was accountability, not amnesty.

551 × 700

“People of Color” Is a Coordinate, Not a Coalition

This is why so many Black folks get skeptical when somebody waves the “people of color” umbrella around, and that skepticism is not divisive, it’s earned. Being shoved under the same term does not mean we have the same relationship to whiteness, and pretending otherwise mostly works to launder the gap.

Look at affirmative action. In 2023 the Supreme Court gutted race-conscious admissions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, and the legal vehicle they drove to do it was Asian American grievance — the claim that Asian students were being wronged by Black access. Having the luxury to be used as the friendly face on a project that strips opportunity from Black students is itself a sign of where you sit in the triangle. I’m not saying anti-Asian discrimination in admissions is fake — two things can be true. I’m saying when the remedy on offer is “so let’s end the thing that helps Black folks,” you should ask who wrote that script and who it actually serves, because every accusation is a confession, and that lawsuit confessed exactly whose interests it was protecting.

So here’s the two-role frame, the way I’d run it in a debate round. There’s what the model minority myth says — you’re being honored, you made it, you’re one of the good ones. And there’s what the model minority myth structurally does — it makes you the buffer, the weapon, the proof-of-concept that whiteness points at Black people to say “see, the problem is you.” This means the people clinging to that myth as a compliment are wrong about what it is. By accepting the role of the honored exception, you make whiteness visible — you become the instrument that lets it claim neutrality while doing its dirtiest work through your hands.

Back to the Water

A jury in Columbia is deciding right now what a Black child’s life was worth. As I write this the defense has rested and closing arguments are about to begin, and I want to be honest with you — the verdict is not the analysis. We have watched the courtroom version of this before. Latasha got a manslaughter conviction and her killer walked out the door. So I’m not going to tell you a verdict will close the wound, because the wound is older than this trial.

The wound is a country that built a hierarchy and then handed everybody a position in it — including positions that let one oppressed person stand over the body of a child and call it self-defense. Solidarity is not pretending that hierarchy isn’t there. Solidarity is what Kochiyama and Aoki actually did: name it, in your own house, out loud, and then move.

His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was the prosecutor’s line, and it’s an indictment — but not just of one man. It’s an indictment of every system that taught him to do the math that way. For the folks in the back: the water was never the point. Education is elevation. Let’s keep building.

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5 Key Takeaways

* Adultification is a murder weapon, not a metaphor. When a 14-year-old reads as an armed adult and a 15-year-old reads as a thief, the perception itself is the mechanism that ends the life — and it lands on Black boys and Black girls through different gendered channels.

* The model minority myth was built as a rebuke to Black struggle. Manufactured in the 1960s, it was never a compliment — it was a wedge, sharpened on one end to be driven between Black people and everyone else.

* Black-Asian solidarity is real history, not a hall pass. Aoki, Kochiyama, and the Third World Liberation Front are documented and worth defending — and that legacy does not cancel anti-Blackness; those ancestors set a standard of accountability, not amnesty.

* “People of color” is a coordinate, not a coalition. Sharing the umbrella doesn’t mean sharing a relationship to whiteness — see how Asian American grievance was the legal vehicle used to gut affirmative action in 2023.

* The verdict is not the analysis. Latasha’s killer walked on probation; whatever a Columbia jury decides, the wound is older than the trial and the math that valued a child below four bottles of water belongs to a whole system.

WORKS CITIED AND RELATED READINGS

Kim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society, 1999. The load-bearing framework for this piece: Asian Americans are simultaneously valorized relative to Black Americans and ostracized as foreign relative to whites. Explains how the “model minority” position functions as a wedge.

Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010); Afropessimism (2020). Source of the fungibility and gratuitous-violence framing — used descriptively to explain how the Black body is rendered available to be acted upon, not as a prescription for despair.

Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. The empirical backbone for adultification — documents how Black children are perceived as older and less innocent than white peers, foundational to the gendered analysis of Latasha and Cyrus.

Petersen, William. “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” The New York Times Magazine, 1966. The origin document of the “model minority” narrative — read it to see the rebuke to Black struggle baked in from the very beginning.

Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Beacon Press, 2001. Essential map of the long, entangled history of Afro-Asian exchange and solidarity — grounds the “both/and” refusal to flatten this relationship into either pure unity or pure conflict.

Fujino, Diane C. Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005). Definitive accounts of the two figures the solidarity history rests on — read alongside the critical reckoning with Aoki’s contested legacy rather than as hagiography.

Stevenson, Brenda. The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots. Oxford University Press, 2013. The most rigorous historical treatment of the Harlins case and its role in 1992 — indispensable for the gendered, intersectional reading of how a Black girl’s death was adjudicated.

Allison, Sophia Nahli. A Love Song for Latasha. Film, 2019 (Netflix). A memory-work documentary that restores Latasha’s humanity against the archive that flattened her — a model for refusing to let Black children exist only as case numbers.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. Anchors the claim that adultification and anti-Black harm hit Black women and girls through a distinct, compounded channel — keeps intersectionality operational rather than ornamental.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard / v. UNC, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). The case that ended race-conscious admissions using Asian American plaintiffs — the receipts for how grievance gets routed against Black access under a “people of color” banner.

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The Set Was Good, Though

I sat in my chair and I let Tony Hinchcliffe finish, the way I let everybody finish, and now I’m doing the thing this country keeps confusing for an attack: I’m giving a criticism. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from critique. No one is above criticism. Nothing is above criticism especially comedy. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from critique.

On May 10th, Netflix ran The Roast of Kevin Hart, and Tony Hinchcliffe, the same MAGA comic who got on a stage at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden and called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, looked out at the crowd and said the Black community was so proud of Kevin, and that George Floyd was, quote, looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He took a man’s dying words, the words a whole planet heard him cry out for his mama with a knee on his neck, and he flipped them into a punchline at a Black man’s celebration. Then weeks go by. George Floyd’s brothers, Terrence and Philonise, say plainly that real pain is not comedy to their family, that at some point y’all have to stop playing with us. And Kevin Hart, who attended George Floyd’s funeral, pulls up to The Breakfast Club and does the one thing that tells you everything.

He defended the white man.

Not with a fist. With a posture. “It wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” he says, and then in the same breath, “but Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set or one of the best sets.” “Y’all worried about the joke, but the set was good though. Remove me from it, I didn’t say it, we move on.” That’s not a defense of comedy. That’s a man with more energy and more effort for publicly protecting a white comedian’s craft, than for protecting the humanity of his own people. The people who bought your tickets, attend your shows, and made you visible from the beginning.

Two Things Can Be True

Now let me be fair, because two things can be true and I’m not here to do what they do to us, which is flatten a whole person into one bad night. Roast comedy is provocation. That’s the genre. Kevin caught it too: they joked about his dead mama, his dead father, put him on a slave ship in a bottle. I’m not pretending he was the only target or that he didn’t take his licks. The question was never whether Tony tells offensive jokes. We know what Tony does. Kevin himself said it: “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe, I don’t expect less.” The question is what do YOU do, Kevin, when the offensiveness stops being a bit about a celebrity and becomes a desecration of a murdered Black man whose family you sat in a pew with.

Because here’s the contradiction, and I’ll name it. Kevin Hart felt individually came for, so he came to his own defense, fast, fluent, and on the biggest Black platform in the country. So I have to ask: how come Kevin didnt feel came for when your whole community is being attacked and targeted by that orange man? The same orange man Tony Hinchcliffe campaigned for. The luxury to treat George Floyd as a joke you can “move on” from is a sign that the knee was never on your neck in the way it’s on the rest of ours. The view from the top of the comedy game is a view from nowhere, and a view from nowhere is always, secretly, a view from whiteness.

Racial Illiteracy: A Teaching Moment

If I was still in the classroom, I’d put Kevin’s interview on the projector and I’d write two words on the board: racial illiteracy. That’s when you lack the ability to read and write situations pertaining to race. Because there is a difference, kinfolks, and it’s the whole ballgame. There’s a difference between a racial joke and being racist. There’s a difference between defending the continuity of comedy and prioritizing humanity. Kevin can read a room for a laugh better than almost anybody alive, that’s his genius, but he could not read this room, this moment, this country, and that illiteracy is not a personal failing as much as it is a learned comfort.

Charles Mills called it the epistemology of ignorance, a whole social agreement to NOT know certain things, to misread the racial world in ways that keep the structure comfortable. Tim Wise says privilege costs you clarity. And when Kevin says “remove me from it, I didn’t say it,” he’s reaching for the most American defense there is, the bystander’s plea, the same logic that lets a country watch a murder on video and still ask what the victim did wrong. Pete Davidson put a Charlie Kirk joke in his set too, and Kevin shrugged at that the same way. Notice the pattern: the discomfort only ever flows one direction, away from the powerful and onto the dead who can’t clap back.

Every Accusation Is a Confession

“Don’t be too sensitive to take a joke,” they tell us. Every accusation is a confession. The people screaming loudest about freedom of speech turn into the most fragile beings on Earth the second the speech gets returned to sender. They’ll desecrate a man who called for his mother as he died and call it edgy, then clutch their pearls when a grieving brother says something vulgar back. They dish out cruelty for laughs and get real uncomfortable when the same energy comes home. They pissing on us and telling us it’s raining.

Where is the smoke for Tony, Kevin? You found a paragraph of energy to remind us his set was strong. You had a whole rebuttal ready about your dead parents. So where’s the equal-and-opposite force for the murdered man your industry made into a closer? That silence is not neutrality. Naming neutrality as neutrality is a hustle. Silence in the presence of power is a position, and the position your silence structurally took was Tony’s.

This Ain’t a Throwaway

And I want to be clear, because I critique from inside the community, not from the bleachers. I’m not throwing Kevin away. I’m not calling him irredeemable. As a matter of fact, I’d love a private conversation about the ways, politically, socially, economically, that a man with his platform and his pockets could pour into Black equality, Black freedom, Black liberation, instead of pouring his protective instinct onto a comic who’d campaign against all three. You a comedian. I’m a critic. I’ma stay in my lane, that’s my ministry. But the lane I’m in says this clearly: you can care about preserving the quality of comedy AND preserving the humanity of Black people. I’m not saying you can’t hold both. I’m asking which one you reached for first, fastest, and hardest. The tape answers for you.

By defending him, Kevin, you’re making whiteness visible, you’re showing us exactly whose comfort gets the bodyguard. So here’s the ask, the same one I’d give any of my folks: do better, bro. Pick humanity first next time. Because this ain’t the wrong side of comedy, this is the wrong side of history, and I don’t say that as a threat, I say it as a promise that the receipts keep.

Critical Historical Context

To understand why a single roast joke detonated the way it did, you have to understand that turning Black death into white entertainment is not a glitch in American culture. It is one of its oldest, most profitable traditions.

From the Auction Block to the Punchline

Long before Netflix, the spectacle of Black suffering was sold for amusement and instruction. The lynching postcard industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s mailed photographs of murdered Black people as souvenirs and Christmas cards; Without Sanctuary, the archive assembled by James Allen, documents how white families posed and smiled beside the bodies the way Hinchcliffe’s audience laughed beside a dead man’s last words. Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, calls this the spectacular character of black suffering, the way Black pain gets staged, repeated, and consumed until the horror becomes comfortable, even pleasurable, for the watcher. The roast joke is that lineage in a tuxedo.

The Minstrel Stage and the Comedy of Black Disposability

American comedy itself was, at its commercial founding, blackface minstrelsy, the most popular entertainment form in the 19th-century United States, built entirely on the premise that Black life was a thing to be mocked, mimicked, and made grotesque for white laughter. The genre survived emancipation, survived the cakewalk, survived into film with Birth of a Nation. The throughline from Jim Crow the minstrel character to Jim Crow the legal regime is not a coincidence; the laughter was always part of the machinery of dehumanization. When a modern comic stands on a stage and treats a police killing as a setup, he is not breaking taboo. He is reactivating the founding logic of the form.

George Floyd, 2020, and the Largest Protests in U.S. History

On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd said he could not breathe and called for his mother. His murder set off what historians have called the largest protest movement in American history, with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants across the country in the summer of 2020. The roast joke landed almost exactly six years later, in the same week as the anniversary of his death. Hinchcliffe did not pick George Floyd at random. He picked the single most recognizable symbol of the modern movement against anti-Black state violence and converted it into a closer. The joke was a referendum on whether that movement’s grief still counts.

Afropessimism: Why the Joke ‘Works’

Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism gives us the most uncomfortable but clarifying lens. Wilderson argues that anti-Black violence is gratuitous, not provoked, not economically required, not a means to an end, but a structural given. The Black body functions as fungible, an object available for the world’s use, including its enjoyment. The reason the audience could laugh is that, at the level of the libidinal economy Wilderson describes, George Floyd’s death was already available as raw material, already socially dead, already a thing rather than a person whose mourning is sacred. I hold this as descriptive, not prescriptive, alongside the Black Marxist reading that insists this structure can still be fought. But you cannot understand the ease of the laughter without it. The joke was not an aberration. It was the culture telling the truth about itself.

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The Implication for Education

I keep coming back to the phrase racial illiteracy, because it is, at root, an educational problem, and educational problems have educational solutions, which means they also have educational sabotage.

Reading and writing situations pertaining to race is a literacy, a teachable skill, the same way phonics and number sense are teachable. We are not born knowing how to locate ourselves inside a structure of power; we learn it, or we are prevented from learning it. The reason a brilliant, quick-witted man like Kevin Hart could read a comedy room flawlessly and misread a racial moment catastrophically is that the second literacy was never required of him to succeed, and may have been actively discouraged, because the more racially literate a Black entertainer becomes, the harder he is to sell to a crowd that wants its Blackness apolitical.

Now connect that to this exact moment in American schooling. Across the country, the machinery that teaches racial literacy is being dismantled on purpose. Anti-CRT and ‘divisive concepts’ legislation has passed in a wave of states, restricting how teachers can discuss race, racism, and history. Book bans have stripped Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and the lynching record itself out of classrooms and libraries. Advanced Placement African American Studies was politically gutted in multiple states before it ever reached the students who needed it most. The Department of Education’s capacity to enforce civil rights protections has been hollowed out. The federal retreat from public education media, the slow strangling of the PBS-and-public-broadcasting model that once made deep historical knowledge freely available, leaves a void exactly where racial literacy used to live.

So here is the implication, and it’s a verdict. A society that bans the teaching of why the joke is violent will keep producing audiences that laugh. The roast crowd and the school board crowd are the same project. You cannot defund the history of lynching, ban the books that name anti-Blackness, and dismantle the curriculum that builds racial literacy, and then act surprised when a stadium full of people can’t tell the difference between edgy and evil. The classroom and the comedy club are connected by a single wire: what a people is permitted to know about its own death.

Intersectional Material Impacts

Symbolic harm is never just symbolic. Crenshaw teaches us that the people who fall through the cracks of a single-axis analysis are the ones carrying the heaviest material weight, so let me name who actually pays when George Floyd’s death becomes a punchline and a celebrity shrugs.

Black Women and the Mothers Who Are Never the Joke’s Concern

George Floyd called for his mother. The roast circuit, the defense of it, and most of the commentary that followed centered men, the comic, the host, the brothers, while the figure at the emotional center of his death, the Black mother, became invisible. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir names how Black women are simultaneously hyper-exposed to violence and erased from its mourning. The material impact: Black women, who led the Movement for Black Lives organizationally and who disproportionately do the unpaid labor of grief, protest, and care after every killing, get neither the protection nor the platform that a male celebrity commands in a single Breakfast Club segment.

Class: Whose Comfort the Joke Protects

Kevin Hart’s ability to “move on” is a function of his bank account. The Floyd family does not have that exit. The working-class and poor Black communities most likely to be policed the way George Floyd was policed are the ones who watched a member of their own, made wealthy by their dollars, defend the man who mocked their nightmare. Class does not insulate you from anti-Blackness, but it does buy you the option of pretending it isn’t there, and that pretense is purchased on credit borrowed from the people who can’t afford it.

Sexuality, Disability, and the Hierarchy of Grievable Death

Hinchcliffe’s career is built on a ladder of disposable targets, Puerto Ricans, immigrants, the disabled, the dead, and that ladder is not random. Judith Butler’s question of which lives are grievable maps directly onto who becomes safe to joke about. The same structure that makes George Floyd’s death a punchline makes disabled, queer, and undocumented people punchlines too, because they all sit on the wrong side of the line dividing lives that must be mourned from lives that may be used. An intersectional read refuses to defend Black humanity while leaving everyone else on that ladder behind.

White Feminism, White Comedy, Same Complicity

And I’ll say it the way I always say it: the “it’s just comedy, don’t be sensitive” defense is the comedy world’s version of White Feminism’s “I didn’t mean it that way.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. It lets people participate in a structure of harm while reserving the right to feel like good guys, because their intent was neutral. Intent is not the metric. Material outcome is. And the material outcome here is a culture rehearsing, one laugh at a time, that Black death is content.

Five Key Takeaways

* Defense reveals priority. Kevin Hart found fluent, immediate energy to protect Tony Hinchcliffe’s craft and almost none to protect George Floyd’s memory. What you rush to defend tells the truth about what you value. The set being “good though” was the confession.

* Freedom of speech is not freedom from critique. Hearing a joke and criticizing it are both acts of free expression. The comics demanding you not be “too sensitive” to a joke are themselves too sensitive to a critique, which means the sensitivity rule only ever runs in the direction of power.

* Racial illiteracy is manufactured, not innate. The inability to read and write racial situations is a learned comfort produced by a society that increasingly bans the very curriculum, books, and public media that would teach the skill. The roast crowd and the book-banning school board are the same project.

* The joke is a lineage, not an accident. From minstrelsy to lynching postcards to the roast stage, turning Black death into white entertainment is one of America’s oldest and most profitable traditions. Afropessimism explains why the laughter comes easy: the structure already treats Black death as available material.

* Symbolic harm carries material weight. When Black death becomes a punchline and a wealthy celebrity shrugs, the bill is paid by Black mothers erased from the mourning, by poor communities policed like George Floyd was, and by everyone else on Hinchcliffe’s ladder of disposable targets. Center the material outcome, not the intent.

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Related Readings (Annotated Bibliography)

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman’s foundational analysis of “the spectacular character of black suffering” — how Black pain is staged and consumed — is the single best frame for understanding why an audience can laugh at a recorded death.

Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020). The accessible, memoiristic entry into Wilderson’s argument that anti-Black violence is gratuitous and the Black body socially fungible. Read as descriptive, not prescriptive.

Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997). Source of “the epistemology of ignorance” — the organized social agreement to not-know that produces racial illiteracy in otherwise intelligent people.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989). The origin text for intersectionality, essential for seeing who falls through a single-axis read of this controversy.

Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey’s full treatment of the term she coined, naming the specific erasure of Black women from the mourning of anti-Black violence.

James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000). The archive of lynching postcards — the historical receipt that proves the spectacle of Black death as white entertainment is centuries deep.

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). Source of the “grievable lives” framework that explains the hierarchy of disposable targets in roast comedy.

bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995). hooks on Black rage as legitimate response and on the demand that Black people perform composure for white comfort — directly relevant to the “don’t be sensitive” defense.

Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). The definitive history of how American popular entertainment was built on the mockery of Black life, and how that logic persists.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The racial-capitalism counterweight to Afropessimism — holding both is the discipline. Robinson insists the structure that profits from Black suffering can still be fought and abolished.

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

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The Bodies Under The Bulldozer

Y’all, let me put you on game. In April 2018, a backhoe in Sugar Land, Texas hit something it wasn’t supposed to hit. The construction crew was breaking ground for a Fort Bend Independent School District career and technical education center, and what they pulled up was bone. By the time the archaeologists finished, they had counted ninety-five bodies, all African American, ages fourteen to seventy, muscularly built but malnourished, with skeletons twisted by repetitive hard labor and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. They got known as the Sugar Land 95.

Now here’s the part the city of Sugar Land would prefer you not sit with for too long. Those bodies were not a surprise. A Black man named Reginald Moore, a retired longshoreman who had worked as a corrections officer at the Fort Bend Jester Unit in the 1980s, had been telling Texas authorities for nineteen years that they were going to find those graves. He had the records, the maps, the historical research, the receipts. When he warned the school district they were about to build a school on top of a mass grave of convict laborers, they ignored him. When the bones came up out of the dirt, they initially barred him from the site. Then they let him on a task force and ignored most of his recommendations there too. Reggie Moore is gone now, passed in 2020, but every honest conversation about Sugar Land starts with his work, not with the developers, not with the museum, and damn sure not with Imperial Sugar.

Imperial Sugar Is The Oldest Business In Texas. Read That Twice.

Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas. The refinery has operated continuously on the same site in Sugar Land since 1843, two years before Texas was even a state. That is the official corporate biography. The crown logo is in the city seal. The town itself is named for the product. The Sugar Land Heritage Foundation will tell you a beautiful story about Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge as visionary founders who built a model company town with paved roads, clean water, hospitals, and schools.

Here’s what they leave out. Before Kempner and Eldridge bought the operation in 1906 and 1908, the property belonged to two Confederate veterans named Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis. In 1878, Cunningham and Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population. The entire state prison population. They were not the first growers in Texas to use convict labor, but they were the biggest. Their plantation became notorious across the state as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. The annual mortality rate was three percent, caused by mosquito-borne disease, beatings, and the absence of medical care. Convict labor worked the Ellis Plantation until 1914.

Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas because it was built on a continuous supply of unfree Black bodies for the first seventy years of its existence. The slavery into convict leasing into prison farm pipeline is not adjacent to the brand. It is the brand’s foundation.

Convict Leasing Was Slavery With A New Filing System

Let me break down what convict leasing actually was, because the Texas curriculum is going to give you maybe one sentence on it if you are lucky. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Except. Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. That exception is not a footnote. That exception is the entire blueprint for the post-Emancipation racial economy in the South.

After the Civil War, Southern states passed what historians call Black Codes, laws that applied only to African Americans and criminalized things like loitering, breaking curfew, walking alongside railroad tracks, and not carrying proof of employment. The Texas Legislature passed its own version, and the state’s prison population, which had been overwhelmingly white before the war, became overwhelmingly Black almost overnight. Once you had Black bodies inside the prison system, the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause meant the state could rent them out as forced labor to private companies. Cunningham and Ellis bought the contract. The Imperial Sugar property is what they bought it for.

Apply Afropessimism here. The slave is not a worker selling labor. The slave is an object whose flesh is fungible. Convict leasing did not just continue slavery’s economics. It continued slavery’s ontology. A Black body inside the Texas penal system in 1878 was structurally the same kind of thing as a Black body on a Mississippi plantation in 1858.

The Sugar Land 95 are the receipts. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked into the ground and buried in unmarked pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. The bones tell you what the law did. The bones tell you what the company did. The bones tell you what the state did. The bones tell you what the federal government allowed.

The Plantation Did Not End. It Got A New Address.

Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for one hundred sixty thousand dollars plus interest. The state continued to grow sugar on the property using convict labor, and the operation became known as the Central Unit prison farm. It stayed open until 2011. The Houston Museum of Natural Science Sugar Land sits inside the main unit of the central prison today. The plantation did not end in 1865. It did not end in 1914. It did not end when the state took over from the private company. It did not end when the Central Unit closed. It changed addresses and changed letterhead.

Texas still runs prison farms in 2026, and most of them are located on former plantation land. Incarcerated people, the vast majority of them Black and brown, cultivate the same crops their enslaved and convict-leased ancestors cultivated. They are not paid. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays its prisoners absolutely nothing for their labor. Texas Correctional Industries, the manufacturing arm of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, generates upwards of eighty million dollars a year in revenue from goods and services produced by people working for free. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice itself is reportedly the largest prison system in the United States, with over one hundred forty thousand people incarcerated.

Texas Tough is what Robert Perkinson called this system in his book of the same name. The system Cunningham and Ellis built in 1878 did not get dismantled. It got institutionalized. The state cut out the private middleman, took over direct management of the forced labor, and called it rehabilitation.

Who Owns Imperial Sugar Today, And Why It Matters

Now here is where the contemporary accountability conversation gets sharp. Imperial Sugar is no longer Texas-owned. The Kempner family eventually sold off. The company went public, went through bankruptcy in 2001, and got acquired by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012 for around two hundred three million dollars. In 2022, Louis Dreyfus sold Imperial Sugar to U.S. Sugar Corporation, a privately held agribusiness based in Clewiston, Florida. U.S. Sugar is one of the largest sugarcane producers in the country, with reported annual revenue in the range of one and a quarter billion dollars and operations across more than one hundred eighty thousand acres of Florida farmland.

That brand, that crown logo, that two-pound bag of cane sugar sitting in kitchen pantries across the South, all of it is a direct lineal descendant of an operation that leased the entire Texas prison population in 1878 and worked Black men to death in fields the state of Texas now uses to incarcerate their grandsons. The corporate entity changed hands. The brand equity did not. The brand equity is the asset. And the brand equity is built on top of those ninety-five bodies and every body that has not been found yet.

The Reparations Argument, Including Jim Crow

Most reparations conversations in the United States stop at slavery. The standard objection sounds like this. My ancestors didn’t own slaves. Slavery ended in 1865. That was a long time ago. I shouldn’t have to pay for something I didn’t do. The Imperial Sugar story refutes every move in that argument before the argument even gets to the table.

Slavery ended in 1865. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911. That is thirteen to forty-six years after Emancipation. We are not talking about the antebellum cotton kingdom in this case. We are talking about the post-Emancipation, federally sanctioned, state-administered, privately profitable extraction of unfree Black labor from people who were legally citizens of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment exception clause made it lawful. Jim Crow Black Codes made it inevitable. Imperial Sugar’s predecessor companies made it profitable. The State of Texas made it permanent. The federal government allowed all of it.

Apply Charles Mills here. The racial contract is not just a slavery problem. The racial contract is the white supremacist legal architecture that lets the wealth keep flowing forward across centuries while the descendants of the people whose backs built that wealth are told to get over it.

Two things can be true. Two things are true. The first thing is that no living person owned a slave. The second thing is that companies, families, and institutions that exist today still hold assets, brand equity, land titles, and accumulated capital that were generated by enslaved and convict-leased labor. Imperial Sugar’s status as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas is itself a transferable asset. That status was purchased by Louis Dreyfus in 2012. That status was sold to U.S. Sugar in 2022. The premium that gets paid for that lineage is the price tag on the convict labor that made the lineage possible.

So the reparations argument here is not abstract. It is not historical. It is line-item. Imperial Sugar, as a corporate entity, owes Black Texas. Imperial Sugar’s current parent company, as the holder of that brand, owes Black Texas. The State of Texas, as the entity that wrote the convict-leasing contracts and still runs the prison farms on the same land, owes Black Texas. And the federal government, as the entity that wrote the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause and never closed it, owes Black America.

Whitey On The Moon, Sugar Land Edition

Gil Scott-Heron asked the question more than fifty years ago and we still ain’t answered it. Was all that money I made last year for, Whitey on the moon? How come ain’t no money here? Whitey on the moon. No hot water, no toilet, no lights, but Whitey on the moon. Substitute the verses for Sugar Land in 2026 and tell me where the lie is. Was all that sugar money made for Sugar Land schools? Imperial Sugar in the master-planned suburb. How come the descendants of the convict laborers are still locked up in Texas prison farms? Imperial Sugar on the supermarket shelf. No reparations, no acknowledgment, no curriculum, but Imperial Sugar in the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

The luxury to ignore this history is itself a sign of who benefits from the history staying ignored. The view from nowhere, what Arnold Farr calls the epistemology of ignorance, is not neutral. It is structural. When the State of Texas Board of Education debates whether convict leasing belongs in the social studies curriculum, that debate is itself the answer to the reparations question. They know what is in the ground. They have known. The choice to keep it out of the textbook is the choice to keep the wealth flowing forward without the receipts attached.

What I Need You To Sit With

I am a proud Texan, born and raised in Bryan, which is itself former plantation country. I am product of the Brazos Valley County. I have family dispersed throughout this state. Some of the bodies under that career and technical education center in Sugar Land could be my people. Some of them are definitely somebody’s people. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked to death and buried in pine boxes between 1878 and 1911, while a private sugar company turned their bones into brand equity and the State of Texas turned the property into a permanent prison farm. That is not history. That is an open file. That file does not get closed until the receipts get paid.

Imperial Sugar is the oldest continuously operating business in Texas. That sentence is a confession dressed up as a corporate fun fact. Every accusation is a confession, and the longevity itself is the accusation. You cannot be the oldest business in Texas without explaining how you survived 1865, 1878, 1914, and every Texas constitution in between. The answer is convict leasing, then prison farms, then brand portability across three corporate parents. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts have never stopped accumulating.

They want us to get over slavery, but they damn sure don’t want to let go of them profits. They want us to stop blaming them for what their ancestors did, but they want to hold on tight to what their ancestors left them. Two things can be true. Two things are true. And until the second thing gets reckoned with materially, not symbolically, the first thing is going to keep happening.

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Five Key Takeaways

These are the load-bearing points. Each one is the bridge between the historical receipt and the contemporary accountability ask.

1. Imperial Sugar’s longevity is itself the indictment

The company markets itself as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas, founded in 1843. You cannot operate continuously through the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the twentieth century without a sustained labor supply. The labor supply for the first seventy-plus years of Imperial Sugar’s operation was enslaved people, then convict-leased Black prisoners, then prison-farm laborers after the state took over the property in 1914. Continuous operation is the asset. The asset is built on unfree Black labor. The longevity advertised in the corporate biography is the receipt.

2. Cunningham and Ellis ran the largest convict-leasing operation in Texas history

In 1878, Confederate veterans Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population to their sugar plantation operation in Fort Bend County. The operation became known as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. Conditions produced an estimated three percent annual mortality rate. When Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge bought the property in 1906 and 1908 and formed Imperial Sugar Company, they bought into a business model already structured by decades of convict-leasing infrastructure, contracts, and accumulated capital. The Imperial Sugar brand is the legal and economic successor to the Hell Hole.

3. The Sugar Land 95 are the evidentiary baseline

In April 2018, ninety-five sets of skeletal remains were unearthed at a Fort Bend Independent School District construction site on the former Imperial State Prison Farm property. All were African American. Ages ranged from fourteen to seventy. Bodies were muscularly built but malnourished, with bones misshapen by repetitive hard labor, and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. Activist Reginald Moore had been warning Texas authorities about exactly this site for nineteen years. The Sugar Land 95 are not symbolic. They are forensic. They are the physical evidence that the convict-leasing system documented in the historical record produced the body count documented in the ground.

4. The plantation did not end. It got institutionalized.

Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for $160,000 plus interest. The state continued sugar cultivation using prison labor on the same property, which operated as the Central Unit prison farm until 2011. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice today runs prison farms on former plantation land across the state, where incarcerated workers, the majority of them Black and brown, cultivate crops without compensation. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays incarcerated workers nothing. The labor regime that built Imperial Sugar’s wealth has not ended. It has been absorbed into the state.

5. The reparations argument has to include Jim Crow

Standard objections to reparations rely on the idea that slavery ended in 1865 and no living person is responsible for what their ancestors did. The Imperial Sugar case refutes the premise. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911, decades after Emancipation. The labor that built the brand equity was extracted under Jim Crow Black Codes, the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause, and contracts signed by Confederate veterans with the State of Texas. The brand changed corporate hands three times in the last two decades, sold for $203 million in 2012 and again in 2022, each time at a premium that reflected the company’s lineage and continuous-operation status. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts never stopped accumulating. The reparations conversation is not asking living people to pay for slavery. It is asking corporate entities and state governments to settle line-item debts that are still actively producing value today.

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WORKS CITED

Sources used to build this piece. Includes journalistic coverage of the Sugar Land 95 discovery, corporate and historical documentation of Imperial Sugar’s lineage, scholarly framing of convict leasing and prison labor, and reporting on contemporary Texas prison labor.

Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Confronting Sugar Land’s Forgotten History.’ November 2022.

Long-form feature on the discovery of the Sugar Land 95 and the historical context of convict leasing in Fort Bend County. Establishes the documented three percent annual mortality rate on the Cunningham and Ellis plantation, the Hell Hole of the Brazos designation, and the 1878 contract leasing the entire Texas prison population. Provides crucial corporate biography on Kempner and Eldridge’s purchase of the property in 1906 to 1908. Indispensable for understanding the throughline from plantation to convict leasing to Imperial Sugar Company.

Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Remembering Reginald Moore.’ March 2021.

Profile and obituary of Reginald Moore, the retired longshoreman and former Texas Department of Corrections officer whose nineteen-year research effort predicted the location of the Sugar Land 95 mass grave. Documents the city of Sugar Land’s official denial of the convict-leasing history until 2018, and the marginalization of Moore by Fort Bend County officials after the discovery. Required reading on whose research counts and whose does not.

Rice University, Woodson Research Center. ‘Reginald Moore Sugar Land Convict Leasing System Research Collection.’

Archival collection of Reginald Moore’s research materials, donated to Rice University and now part of the Woodson Research Center. Includes audio testimony to the Texas State Board of Education on convict leasing in Texas history textbooks, video documentation of Memorial Day 2018 events honoring the Sugar Land 95, and primary source materials on Fort Bend County’s convict-leasing history. The institutional record of Black research that the state initially tried to ignore.

Texas State Historical Association. ‘Imperial Sugar Company.’ Handbook of Texas Online.

Official corporate biography from the Texas State Historical Association. Confirms the 1843 founding date, the continuous operation claim, and the 1914 sale of the Ellis Plantation to the State of Texas as a prison farm with continued sugar production by convicts. Useful precisely because it is the establishment account, which makes its acknowledgments of convict labor more damning, not less.

Texas Observer, Josephine Lee and Michelle Pitcher. ‘Texas Plantation Prisons.’ July 2024.

Investigative report on the contemporary Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison farms, documenting that most are located on former plantation land and continue to cultivate the same crops as enslaved and convict-leased workers. Quotes historian Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Establishes the institutional continuity between nineteenth-century convict leasing and twenty-first-century unpaid prison labor.

Bolts Magazine. ‘They Force You to Work.’ 2026.

Reporting on Texas Correctional Industries and the use of unpaid prison labor to undercut private-sector bids. Documents the eighty-million-dollar plus annual revenue generated by goods and services produced by people working for free, and the political organizing in Houston to challenge city contracts with TDCJ. The contemporary line item on the historical bill.

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

Foundational text on the racial contract as the underlying legal and political architecture of Western liberal democracy. Mills’s framework of the epistemology of ignorance explains how the explicit historical record of convict leasing can sit alongside a public refusal to acknowledge what the record shows. Required philosophical framing for understanding why Imperial Sugar’s biography can be both publicly available and effectively invisible.

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

Foundational Afropessimist text. Wilderson’s distinction between the worker and the slave, and his account of the fungibility of Black flesh, provide the analytical scaffolding for understanding convict leasing not as a labor system but as a continuation of slavery’s ontology. Black bodies inside the Texas penal system in 1878 were structurally the same kind of thing as Black bodies on antebellum plantations.

Douglas Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name. Anchor Books, 2008.

Pulitzer Prize winning history of convict leasing, peonage, and the post-Emancipation re-enslavement of Black Americans across the South from 1865 to World War Two. The most accessible book-length treatment of the system Cunningham and Ellis operated in Fort Bend County. Essential for placing the Sugar Land 95 inside the regional and national pattern.

Robert Perkinson. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Picador, 2010.

Definitive history of the Texas prison system from its origins to the contemporary period. Documents the institutional continuity between convict leasing and state-run prison farms, the influence of Texas wardens like O.B. Ellis and George Beto on national prison policy, and the persistence of plantation logics inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The book everyone debating prison reform in Texas should have read first.

Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Louis Dreyfus Commodities LLC / Imperial Sugar Company tender offer, 2012.

Public corporate records documenting the $6.35 per share, approximately $203 million acquisition of Imperial Sugar Company by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012, including the assumption of $125 million in debt. The receipts on what the brand was worth at one moment in its corporate lineage. Followed by the 2022 sale of Imperial Sugar to US Sugar Corporation, completing the brand’s transition from Texas family ownership to global commodities house to Florida agribusiness conglomerate while the underlying lineage stayed intact.

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Thank you Decolonizing Love, Dr. Mary M. Marshall, Netta Fei, metamorphosic, baby guava, and many others for tuning into my live video with vic mensa! Join me for my next live video in the app.

“The idea that in order for me to care about what niggas is going through in America, I gotta ignore what’s going on with Palestine — it’s a false dichotomy.”

Y’all, let me start where the conversation started, because the whole thing got kicked off by a tweet, and that tweet is the tired playbook in its purest form. Somebody on Threads typed up that the people screaming AIPAC and Zionist never had a damn word to say about gerrymandering, nothing about voting rights getting gutted, silent on the Congo, silent on Haiti, silent on a dozen other issues bleeding Black communities dry — and then the kicker, you unserious clowns helped put the corrupt predator back in the White House, Jasmine Crockett isn’t the problem, you are. Read that again and let that marinate, because what that post is doing is building a wall between two rooms of the same house, and then charging you rent to stand in either one.

Here’s the thing the post doesn’t want you to clock: the person who wrote it claims a view from nowhere, like they’re just neutrally observing that the pro-Palestine crowd doesn’t care about home. But the claimed neutrality is itself a position. The view from nowhere is still a view, and this particular view has a job — its job is to make outright vocal opposition to a genocide that has killed somewhere between 600,000 and a million people the scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s own failures. That’s not analysis, kinfolks. That’s an alibi.

So I sat down with Vic Mensa, and I want to tell you why that conversation mattered, because Vic is a Ghanaian Akan brother from Chicago, a revert to Islam, a man who sat in a refugee camp in Palestine, and somebody who came up under the long shadow of Chairman Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. When two people who actually do the work get in a room, the false binary doesn’t survive contact. It just doesn’t hold up ideologically. It’s a straight fallacy.

The Receipts the Algorithm Hides

Let me get something out the way for the folks in the back, because I am the people they’re talking about. I’m the one supposedly silent on gerrymandering — except I made content with Jasmine Crockett herself in Austin fighting against gerrymandering. I’ve talked with politicians in Tennessee fighting gerrymandering. I’ve made videos about every single thing that tweet said I’ve never addressed. You just didn’t see them. And that’s the part that’s telling on you. The only time you care about my platform is when you feel like I’m going after the Democratic handlers. The attention economy and the way your algorithm is constructed is telling on you. You’re showing your ass, and you don’t even know it.

Two things can be true. I can hold that Jasmine Crockett is a brilliant orator, one of the most effective vocal challengers of Trump, of fascism, of MAGA, of the Republican Party — and I can also hold that she is intimately, integrally intertwined with a global fascist machine through her connections to AIPAC. Both things live in the same body. Naming that is not an attack on Black women. But neoliberalism has so successfully co-opted the Black identity that when you critique the Democratic Party, some folks experience it as you attacking niggas. That conflation is the trap. And I’m not stepping in it.

“It’s thinking about how can you stand for Black people and side with individuals perpetuating incarceration for Black people, perpetuating disparities of health care for Black people. It’s not just ‘they go up against Palestinians.’”

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Same corporations, different cages

When Vic was in Palestine, he started to peep something that should freeze you in place. The same multinational private prison corporations — CoreCivic, GEO Group — that operate to keep his brothers in prison for 29 years at a time also operate to keep Palestinians detained for decades at a time, and they also operate in South Africa. Same corporations. Same logic. Same flesh treated as fungible across three continents. So when somebody who is politically misinformed at best, and disingenuous and spineless at worst, tells you that what’s happening in Palestine has nothing to do with what’s happening on the south side of Chicago, they’re pissing on us and telling us it’s raining.

This is where I want to do the Whitey on the Moon move, because Gil Scott-Heron already wrote the structure of the argument for us. They tell us they can’t fund reproductive justice. (But the rocket money is for Israel.) They tell us they can’t fund HIV research. (But the missile money is for Israel.) Black people fighting for health care right now, and they tell us the well is dry — but they send billions annually to Israel, and what does Israel give its people? Free health care. Vic put it plain: his motto is education is elevation, and he’s over a hundred thousand dollars in debt for his degrees, the unsubsidized loans accumulating interest as we speak. Smart as s**t, and in perpetual debt. The resource allocation contradiction isn’t a side point. It is the point.

Fred Hampton already answered this question

Vic told me about a Twitter Space — that purgatory — where Chicago brothers and sisters, some he’s met at the street ground level, were telling him that what happens to immigrant populations, be it Latinos, be it Africans, has nothing to do with us, is none of our business, and is counterproductive to the liberation of Black people. So Vic, coming from the school of Chairman Fred Hampton, asked them straight: do you respect Chairman Fred Hampton as a Chicago person? Of course, they say yes. Then how do you feel about the Rainbow Coalition, where Hampton connected the Black Panther Party with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor white Young Patriots in a show of multiracial proletarian solidarity?

Because here’s what having the luxury to ignore the international struggle is a sign of — it’s a sign of how effective the break in the ideological continuation has been. All of our political heroes preached internationalism. Newton fought the crack epidemic and stood with Palestinians. Malcolm talked about Mississippi and couldn’t be contained to Mississippi. The notion that the best thing for Black folks is to denounce solidarity is people trying to emulate a white nationalism that even the white nationalists abandoned, because isolationist theory didn’t work for them either. You cannot vacuum yourself from the rest of the world.

And the structural argument is even sharper than the moral one. ICE is now the most funded police entity in the world. You’re going to tell me, a Black person, that the most funded police entity in the world won’t have any impact on Black policing? That’s crazy to me. The white supremacist is trying to overturn the 14th Amendment for birthright citizenship, claiming it’s all about immigrants — but the 14th Amendment comes straight out of the Reconstruction era. That was made about Black folks. So how, in your mind, does the mass deportation agenda overturning birthright citizenship not boomerang back onto you? This means the “mind your business” position isn’t just wrong, it’s self-liquidating. By the time they finish coming for the immigrant, the precedent is already sitting on your neck.

“Some people in our community hate drag queens and immigrants more than they love Black people. And that’s the reason why they can be in coalition with white supremacists.”

The Black church treats Black gay people the way America treats niggas

Vic said something that made me think a thought I’d never quite landed, and I want to give him credit for the framing because it’s how he said it. The way the Black church treats Black gay people is how America treats niggas. The same way white America uses Black cultural representation and Black labor to make America look great, look smooth, look cool — while still mistreating us — is the same way the Black church operates. You can run the choir. You can do the dance. You can be the usher, the chaperone, the musician fueling the whole sanctuary. But you better not ever, ever think we’re cool with your gay s**t. That’s extraction with a smile. That’s the libidinal economy of the sanctuary.

And I say this as somebody whose first degree is in African American studies, who grew up in a Black Southern missionary background, who is critical of the Black church and doesn’t identify as Christian today, but who has no smoke for anybody whose faith makes them a better person. Vic, a revert to Islam, said the same contradictions he watches me name in the Black church, he experiences in the mosque — the homophobia rampant in a brilliant imam’s street-corner congregation of former Nation of Islam brothers, Black Stones, Arab cab drivers, and Nigerians. And he was honest in a way most men won’t be: he admitted he felt phony, because he has the privilege to be okay with somebody else’s dehumanization since it doesn’t cost him what it costs them. If they were up there saying Black people are thieves, he couldn’t come back the next day. That’s what intellectual honesty about your own positionality sounds like.

Run the receipts on the pre-colonial archive, too. In Akan culture, in Ashanti, there were words for two-spirited and non-binary people forever — a man who is a woman, a woman who is a man — and those words didn’t carry criminalizing weight. So even where we’re actively rejecting colonial domination, transphobia and homophobia are the one piece of the colonizer’s luggage we insist on keeping. We tell ourselves the presence of LGBTQ people is an attack on the Black household, an attack on Black masculinity, like white supremacy planted it there to break us. But that move gives white supremacy more power than it actually has and erases Black queer presence inside the Black radical tradition itself.

Patriarchy is a scourge on men, too

Vic’s sister gave him a bar I can’t stop turning over. We say white people need to be on the front line combating racism. We say Jewish people need to be combating Zionism. So it would seem that men need to be combating patriarchy — and that’s exactly where it gets sensitive, gets emotional, and where men hit a wall. Because patriarchy emotionally cripples Black men while Black women disproportionately absorb the consequences of that emotional repression and violence. Racism is a scourge on white people; patriarchy is a scourge on us as men. It’s corrosive for us, actually.

Look at what happened with Megan Thee Stallion. That’s the perfect depiction of men’s blind allegiance to patriarchy. I watched niggas who have a heart, who have a spine in so many other ways, act like they needed ten trillion forms of ID before they could care that a woman got shot. I got two sisters. If my sister is with some niggas and my sister gets shot, it’s over with — I don’t need a forensic file to know how I feel. What does it mean for a bunch of hyper-masculine gangsta niggas, who’ll tell you all day what they’ll do to another nigga, to suddenly feel so victimized and so sensitive about Meg dancing on somebody that it justified her being shot? Every accusation is a confession.

And it’s connected to the religion conversation, because the root of it is Father Abraham having many sons — so many men carry a divine understanding of themselves as patriarchs, and they’ll do anything to sustain that hierarchy of men over women, masculine over feminine. White men, Black men, Native men, Hispanic men — a lot of men genuinely believe patriarchy is divine. Two plus two is four, the sky is blue, birds chirp, and men post the other woman. They think you’re broken if you don’t see it that way. Some of them think male leadership requires male domination, and the only way they know how to perform manhood is to sexually conquer a woman or beat one down. That’s the same logic that hit the woman the Houston PD said was justifiably struck because she said brick when it was a bottle — the law gets used to ratify the violence. If a woman hits me and I pick up something and hit her back, I’m a whole-ass nigga. I’m standing on that, and I’ll take the “simp” and “panderer” think pieces all day. Facts over feelings.

“It takes a lot more strength to exercise restraint and to use your mind — which is the very thing they feminize. They gender brilliance as feminine, then call it weakness.”

Vic named the part most men hide: even in a boardroom with his own companies, the patriarchal hyper-masculine voice inside says I want to whoop this thing — and it just doesn’t apply. It’s counterproductive. He has to emotionally mature beyond it to accomplish his aim without the need for domination. And here’s the read I want you to keep: physical domination is actually a lower level of strength. The restraint, the use of the mind, the dissection through words — that’s the thing patriarchy feminizes and then dismisses. Which is also why I’m so critical of the “emasculation” conversation. How does somebody else have the power to rhetorically emasculate you? How is your masculinity so flimsy it lives in another person’s mouth? By insisting on that, you are making whiteness — and patriarchy — visible as the fragile thing it is.

Kamala, misogynoir, and the refusal to do nuance

The Kamala Harris campaign was a layered, m***********g complicated thing, and I refuse to flatten it. It was dominantly steeped in misogynoir, full of anti-Blackness, full of misogyny — I could smell how much niggas hate women throughout, and I heard plenty of women say she was unfit to lead because she’s a woman, which is patriarchy gone subversive, the same way we call Black folks who side with white supremacy pick-mes. And at the very same time, there were entirely valid critiques of her participation in the genocide in Palestine, her record as a prosecutor, her role in mass incarceration. Two things can be true. The public right now doesn’t have the range to hold both, because everything has to be all or nothing, a zero-sum game.

So watch the sleight of hand. It is an effective imperialist talking point to blame the failures of a genocidal imperialist state on the anti-imperialists. U.S. sanctions have killed tens of millions over the last several decades, and somehow the people conscious of that are the ones held responsible for the loss — you’re being an insufferable leftist if you can’t look past those dead to focus only on Chicago. As if Newton couldn’t hold the crack epidemic and Palestine at once. As if Malcolm could only talk about Mississippi. How come they blame Jill Stein and Butch Ware louder than they blame Joe Biden for handing her only 107 days? He set her up. He hung her out to dry, and then the failure gets laundered onto everybody with a valid critique. The gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — 1965 to 2026 — should already tell you that the liberal myth of linear progress is a myth. There’s no straight line that only goes forward.

The hood doesn’t abandon you for being imperfect

Now I want to be self-critical, because Vic pushed me somewhere honest. The movement is so often ready to discard folks for not being perfect participants — a misstep, not revolutionary enough, the wrong take on one issue. It can be a pretentious, intellectually elitist movement at times, even though I’m fully in it. Vic, as an artist, lived it: when he had controversy, the progressive quasi-leftist circles that rallied around him would dissipate, but the folks who stuck were in the hood — and the hood is at times deeply conservative and deeply revolutionary at once, and it wouldn’t abandon him for a mistake the way the leftist circles would pounce.

I would like to also add some important context… Vic and I are speaking from the privilege of being cis-gender straight Black men in hood and I acknowledge that there are people are who are abandoned in the hood. Black women, Black LGBTQ, Black Neurodivergent people are many of times easily abandoned from the hood, by the hood.

Mr. Mensa was right to correct my language, so I’ll say it clean: the “Black liberal versus Black leftist” framing too often conflates white leftism with the Black radical tradition. When niggas hear “Black leftism,” they think Marx — and Marx ain’t bad, but there is a Black radical tradition outside the realm of European post-structural thought. The red-pill brothers try to short-circuit Black feminism by saying Black feminists just want to be white women — not realizing Black feminists already duked it out with white feminists about exactly that racism, decades ago, better than the red-pill brother ever could. Same move when a Black liberal tells a Black leftist “you just want to be like white folks.” Hold on. The Black radical tradition — Malcolm, Hampton, the Pan-Africanists — is distinct from white leftism, and pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest, especially when the same person is comfortable with white liberals who are racist as hell.

“My only real allegiance is a love for the people. I’m prioritizing Black folks. I’m Black first, I’m leftist second.”

Reparations can’t be real while slavery is still legal

They’re out here floating reparations for January 6th — a “slush fund” they’re rebranding as anti-weaponization money — while the commonly cited figure for what’s owed to Black Americans is around $14 trillion, and that’s just for unpaid labor, before you even add missed opportunity and opportunity cost. Then go down the list of who has actually received reparations. Confederate slave owners got reparations for their lost “property.” Francophone West Africa is still effectively paying France through the CFA franc, their money held in French banks. Israel received reparations after the Holocaust. Japanese Americans received reparations after the internment camps. Everybody on the ledger — except the African. And that exposes the firm, deeply held belief sitting at the bottom of this: that the African is an inferior human being who doesn’t deserve the same treatment. That’s the permanence of racism Derrick Bell tried to warn us about, and it’s why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse here.

But here’s the part that should stop your breath. Reparations cannot be a serious conversation while slavery is still happening, because under the 13th Amendment it is still absolutely legal. Vic’s brother just came home after 29 years for a murder he didn’t commit — someone else did it — and the whole time he was producing capital for the prison. He used to drive a tractor at one of the joints because it let him out the cell, and after COVID, brothers are locked down 23 and 1, 23 hours in a cell under inhumane conditions, so being outside like a human being was something he looked forward to. Vic told me he made the mistake once of asking his brother how it felt to be enslaved, and realized how stupid the question was, because that’s not a metaphor for the man — that’s the literal situation he’s in.

In Mississippi you can substantiate billions of dollars off prison labor and the men aren’t getting paid s**t. In Texas TDCJ — my own mama and daddy have been in jail, they’ll tell you — you don’t get paid at all. You get paid three hots and a cot, the roof and the tray. That’s straight-up slavery. So when somebody asks why reparations isn’t a serious conversation, the answer is sitting in plain sight: how do you compensate a harm the state is still actively committing? It’s not ironic that you and I are more likely to be convicted as punishment for a crime — crime itself is a social construct. Watch how the social construct of time bends: an undocumented person is disqualified from manhood in America for going against the law, while a man with 34 felony convictions is the President of the United States. If your register comes up $100 short, that’s an honest mistake. If you take $100 out the till, you going to jail. Same dollar, different bodies, different verdicts. That’s the whole game.

How he builds it: claim, warrant, impact

Vic asked me my process, so I’ll put it here because it’s the engine under everything above. It starts in debate: claim, warrant, impact. The claim is “yo mama so fat.” The warrant is the because. The impact is why anybody should give a damn. My claim is crime is a social construct; once I lock one warrant, I can sit down and go off. To make an argument you need all three, and most folks online give you a hot claim with no warrant and no impact — that Zionism point was dope, but what’s the impact? My debate coach, a country white man named George Lee out of Oklahoma, used to say if a man talks for nine minutes you can find something to disagree with somewhere. I was the negative, my partner Perfect Prophet Rasheed was the affirmative — he was great at saying yes, I was great at saying hell nah, here go ten reasons. On 60-second TikTok I once stacked 14 arguments in 60 seconds, because debate trained me to find the most efficient way to say the most. Purpose over popularity. Always.

And let me be clear since the man is named so much lately: what Charlie Kirk was doing was not debate. As a Hall of Fame college policy debater who won a national championship, I’ll repeat it — that was fishing for clips and a-ha gotcha moments, no argument development, no point-for-point refutation. Content farming. The plaques behind me came from doing the exact opposite of that. So if you want to build the skill, go to the archive: study Davon Love, the first Black person to win a national debate championship, who did it for Towson in 2008 and writes on Substack about how to construct the argument. Go back and learn how Black liberals and Black leftists have always been fighting, going all the way back to the plantation, and figure out where you actually fit. That’s research over MeSearch.

The close

So back to that tweet. The wall it built — home over there, the world over here — was never real. Vic learned it from a wizened old Bedouin man in a Palestinian refugee camp who asked him, are y’all just voyeurs, is this a field trip, or are you here to go tell the world what you saw? Vic promised that man he’d tell his story, and that promise is why he can’t align with any ideology that supports the destruction of a people, the same way he draws a hard line between revolutionary violence toward liberation and violence in furtherance of domination. My allegiance is a love for the people. Black first, leftist second. And the false choice between caring about niggas here and niggas everywhere isn’t a real choice — it’s a leash, and somebody is holding the other end. Don’t pick it up. Feel me?

5 Key Takeaways

1. The false binary is a leash.

“Caring about Palestine” vs. “caring about home” was never a real choice. The same prison corporations, the same fascist machinery, and the same 14th-Amendment precedent connect Chicago, the Congo, and Palestine. Internationalism isn’t a distraction from Black liberation — it’s a precondition for it.

2. Two things can be true.

Jasmine Crockett can be a brilliant orator and tied to AIPAC. Kamala’s campaign can be soaked in misogynoir and open to valid critique on Palestine and incarceration. The refusal to hold both — the zero-sum reflex — is how neoliberalism launders accountability.

3. Patriarchy is a scourge on men, too.

From Megan Thee Stallion to the boardroom, the demand to dominate is corrosive to the men performing it. Restraint and the use of the mind are strength — the very strengths patriarchy genders as feminine and then dismisses.

4. Reparations can’t be real while slavery is legal.

The 13th Amendment relocated slavery into the prison. Everyone from Confederate enslavers to Japanese Americans has been on the reparations ledger except the African — because the conversation requires admitting a harm the state is still actively committing.

5. Claim, warrant, impact — and purpose over popularity.

Real argument has all three. Clip-farming and gotcha moments are not debate. Build the warrant, name the impact, and let the analysis stand on its own.

Annotated Bibliography & Related Readings

RESEARCH OVER MESEARCH

These are starting points for the people who want to go past the clip and into the archive. Verify editions and current data yourself before citing — some figures (kill counts, dollar amounts, legal status) shift and should be checked against primary sources.

Frank B. Wilderson III — Afropessimism (2020) & Red, White & Black (2010)

Wilderson’s frame of gratuitous violence, fungibility, and ontological social death anchors why anti-Black violence isn’t merely economically determined. Useful for the prison-labor and “same corporations” sections — held as descriptive, not prescriptive.

Cedric Robinson — Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983)

The text for the article’s core correction: the Black radical tradition exists outside European post-structural thought. Robinson’s racial capitalism reframes antiblackness as the engine of surplus value, not an aberration.

Patrick E. Johnson — Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008)

Directly supports the Black-church-and-queerness section. Johnson documents how Black LGBTQ people are uniquely positioned inside Black Southern church life — indispensable to the music and ministry, yet chastised.

Moya Bailey — Misogynoir Transformed (2021)

The coinage and framework for reading the Kamala campaign and the Megan Thee Stallion discourse. Centers how anti-Blackness and misogyny compound specifically against Black women.

Kimberlé Crenshaw — “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) & The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)

The intersectional baseline for the whole pack — gender, sexuality, and class read together inside Blackness rather than as competing single issues.

Derrick Bell — Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992)

Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis explains why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse: the refusal is structural, not an oversight.

Huey P. Newton & the Black Panther Party — on the Rainbow Coalition

Primary context for the Fred Hampton argument: the BPP’s coalition with the Young Lords and Young Patriots as the historical answer to “why should we care about other communities.”

Davon Love — Substack (writings on debate & Black political analysis)

Conscious Lee’s named recommendation: first Black person to win a national debate championship (Towson, 2008). Practical guidance on how to construct an argument.

The 13th Amendment (1865) — the “except as a punishment for crime” clause

Read the text directly. The exception clause is the legal hinge for the prison-slavery argument and for why reparations and abolition are the same conversation.

Documentary: 13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016)

Accessible companion to the constitutional argument, tracing the line from the 13th Amendment’s loophole through mass incarceration and private prisons.

On the CFA franc / Francophone West Africa & France

For the reparations ledger section — the monetary arrangement keeping West African reserves in French banks. Verify current figures and reform status before citing.

PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION

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If this conversation with Vic gave you a new frame — the false binary as a leash, the 13th Amendment as the reason reparations stays buried, patriarchy as a scourge on men too — then you already know what we do here. We don’t farm clips. We build the warrant and we name the impact. That work takes time, research, and the freedom to say things that won’t be popular.

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I just got done sitting in a convening about immigration with a bunch of pro-immigration workers, and I have thoughts. Before I get into them, though, I want to give a disclaimer, because my grandfather always said the pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, and what I’m about to lay down ain’t about accusing nobody of being nefarious, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally anti-Black, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally engaged in indigenous erasure. This is about impact, not intent. And as the kinfolks know, two things can be true at the same damn time — folks can mean well and still be perpetuating the exact erasure that the empire requires to function. Let that marinate.

I sat in that room and listened to a presentation on the 14th Amendment, listened to lawyers grapple with how the current administration is trying to overturn birthright citizenship, listened to scholars walk through how the 14th Amendment is being weaponized against immigrant populations — and the whole time I kept asking the same rhetorical question in my head, the question that has to be the starting point for any serious conversation about citizenship in this country: What does the subject position of being an immigrant or being a citizen mean for the Indian or for the Black? What has the concept of citizenship actually engaged when it comes to what it means to be Native, or what it means to be African American? Because for the folks in the back, the 14th Amendment ain’t just a 2026 immigration story. The 14th Amendment is birthed out of the Reconstruction era. 13th Amendment freed the slaves, 14th Amendment gave citizenship, 15th Amendment gave the right to vote — but only to Black men. You feel me? The presentation didn’t grapple with that. The presentation talked about the 14th Amendment as if it dropped out of the sky and landed in 2026 on the bodies of immigrants, when in actuality this amendment is birthed in blood, birthed in slavery, birthed in Reconstruction, and has been weaponized against the very people it was supposed to protect since the second the ink dried.

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Most of us engage with citizenship through a very romanticized, sanitized understanding of what it is. So let me set up some questions, because Research over MeSearch — in 2026, will we say that Black people are citizens? Yes, obviously. African Americans in 2026 are still regarded as citizens. Do we understand that citizenship is supposed to come with the right to vote? Yes. But then what is the concept of citizenship meant for the Black body? It’s never guaranteed any type of safety. It’s never guaranteed what we’re supposed to believe comes with being a citizen. Though Black people are still regarded as citizens in 2026, legally we’re having our voting rights taken away. The very same Supreme Court that says it’s legal to racially profile against immigrant populations when it comes to citizenship is the same Supreme Court that says you have to engage in colorblindness when it comes to creating congressional maps. Let that marinate. Colorblindness is good, Supreme Court says, when it comes to drawing congressional districts that would actually give Black people political representation. But color consciousness is good for the Supreme Court when it comes to enforcing immigration. This illustrates the tension in how the law accounts for indigeneity and Blackness in a completely different way than the other subject positions, and you cannot have an honest conversation about immigration without grappling with this contradiction.

And for the Indigenous, the contradiction runs deeper. Do y’all know the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans? Naturalized birthright citizenship did not apply to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island — the people that have been here for thousands of years. Legally speaking, Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. The 14th Amendment passes in 1868, and Native folks have to wait fifty-six more years to be legally recognized as citizens of the country that was built on top of their bones. And then even when they were granted citizenship in 1924, what did that mean for their humanity? What did that mean for the ongoing genocide they were facing? What did that mean for the boarding schools that were still actively destroying their children? Citizenship for Native Americans has never led to preserving their culture, never led to preserving their customs, never led to seeing their sovereignty, never led to them being able to get regular old rights of being a citizen. The legal concept of citizenship does not give what it’s supposed to give. And we know this because even now, even now, even now — Black people have been regarded as citizens since 1868, and yet how much legally have our citizenship been circumvented and continues to be circumvented regardless of us being seen as naturalized citizens of America?

This is where the romanticized framing of “America is a nation of immigrants” starts to crumble under the weight of historical analysis. When Zohran Mamdani says New York was built by immigrants, when Shaboozey says America was built by immigrants, I understand the intent — the intent is to dignify immigrant labor, to push back against the xenophobic right, to remind people that this country’s prosperity was constructed by hands that the empire would now like to deport. I get it. But the impact erases the history of chattel slavery, erases the fact that a bunch of Black people built this country before the Immigration Act of 1965 brought an influx of immigrants to a country that was already built. The milk and honey people came looking for? It was already created — by particular people, under the lash, under the whip, under the auction block. Then there’s the second erasure: when you call this a nation of immigrants, what does that mean for the Indigenous folks who were already here? What does that mean for the people who didn’t migrate, who didn’t choose, whose land was taken from underneath them? You feel me? When you frame the starting point of the American story as immigration, you’ve already erased two subject positions — the people who were forced here in chains, and the people whose land was stolen.

This is what Tuck and Yang call the settler’s move to innocence. The phrase “no one is illegal on stolen land” — said with the absolute best of intentions, said by Billie Eilish at the Grammys, said at every progressive rally — has a contradiction baked into it that does the work of indigenous erasure even as it claims to be solidarity. Who was the land stolen from? Do you know the specific tribe that is indigenous to the land you’re standing on when you make this statement? What does it mean for Native sovereignty when you present the starting point of the story as already-stolen land? Because if the land is just abstractly stolen, if the original people are just a hazy concept in the backdrop of your solidarity statement, then the land becomes available for redistribution among non-Native populations, and the Indigenous claim disappears into a vibe. Tuck and Yang argue that settlers reach for these moves to relieve the discomfort of being implicated in colonization without actually giving anything back. The slogan feels radical. The slogan does nothing for land back. The slogan, in fact, makes land back harder, because it converts a specific Indigenous claim into a universal humanitarian one. That ain’t the same thing.

I want to be clear about the Afropessimist intervention I’m making here, because some of y’all gonna read this and try to flatten it into Oppression Olympics. That ain’t what this is. Afropessimists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton argue that anti-Blackness is antagonistic to America and to the world, while a lot of other injustices are seen as human conflicts. To understand the difference between a conflict and an antagonism: a conflict can be compromised. An antagonism is always one or the other. The relationship between America and Black suffering, between America and Indigenous genocide — that ain’t a conflict that gets resolved through better policy. That’s the structuring antagonism that makes America possible in the first place. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for Indigenous folks in America or Black folks. Democracy in America is situated upon Black bodies and Native American blood. We don’t get it without that. So when we think about the romanticized ideals around what the law is supposed to do, the ideals don’t grapple with the material reality. The scholar in me and the nigga in me is asking, in the bare bones — what has citizenship guaranteed for the nigga and the native? What has equal protection meant for us? What has political representation in citizenship meant for our plight?

And here’s where the antagonism between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous discourse really comes home. After 1965, when you have non-Black, non-white immigrant populations migrating to America, and they want to prove they’re citizens in court, they have historically tethered their citizenship and humanity to whiteness. You go to the courthouse, you stand before the judge, you say “I’m a citizen because I’m white” — showing you the inherent anti-Blackness within the law itself. The law was structured in opposition to particular subject positions getting rights and humanity. So when in 2026 we start talking about immigrant rights, when we start talking about how we’re going to use the law to push back against birthright citizenship being overturned, we have to grapple with the fact that this very legal apparatus, from 1776 to 2026, has been the tool we’re being asked to believe in. And I gotta be honest with y’all — I was around a bunch of lawyers in that room, and it made me think about why I didn’t become a lawyer. I didn’t become one because epistemologically, which is just a fancy word for how we produce knowledge, I could never get down with the idea that the law could be discursively permuted to get whatever ruling we want. The law is very black and white. The more we deny that, the more we have these conversations about immigration rights with this antagonistic tension sitting in the backdrop unaddressed.

Two policies in 1965 tell this story plain. The 1965 Immigration Act opens the doors to non-white immigration in significant numbers for the first time. The 1965 Voting Rights Act gives Black people federal enforcement protection for the franchise that should have been ours since 1870. These two policies happen in the same year, and the tension between them has been shaping American political life ever since. Because of redlining, because of the legacy of slavery, because of being systematically excluded from banking — economic opportunities in the Black community got filled by other immigrant populations. Whether we talking about hair weave, whether we talking about the nail industry, whether we talking about beauty supply, whether we talking about food industries throughout America, this is the backdrop of living in the Black community. Black entrepreneurs were not given those opportunities. And me being in LA right now, the 1992 Rodney King riots happened in part because of the tension between these two communities — the Black community and the Asian community. If we gloss over that, act like it’s hunky-dory, whoop-dee-doo, we impact our ability to build genuine coalitions and solidarities. When Shaboozey said America was built by immigrants, it wasn’t just Black folks that was pissed off by that statement. When we make those types of declarations, we alienate particular people from particular communities who can’t f**k with the framing because the framing erases them.

Then you got Cesar Chavez, who is iconized as the immigrant rights hero, the patron saint of farmworker organizing. Even before we came out with the fact that he was a rapist, even before we came out with the documentation of his misogyny and patriarchy, we already knew he was anti-Black. We already knew that even though he was on immigrant rights, he would call ICE on undocumented farmers when they were undercutting his union. We have statements of him saying anti-Black s**t. So when L.A. is named after him, when Cesar Chavez is the figure that gets centered in pro-immigration mythology, what does that say about whose humanity is allowed to be complicated? Whose contradictions are forgiven? Whose anti-Blackness is folded into the heroic narrative because the broader project of immigration politics needs him? Two things can be true. Chavez did organizing work. Chavez was anti-Black. Refusing to hold both is what allows the antagonism to keep operating in the dark.

And let me tell you about indigeneity in California specifically, because this part don’t get touched enough. Right now in California, there are a bunch of Indigenous folks caught up in immigration politics and immigration law — because they get coded as Mexican, because they get coded as Latin American, because the colonial lens of America sees them as Spanish-speaking subjects rather than as Indigenous peoples of land that was theirs before Spain ever arrived, before the United States ever arrived. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about this in Borderlands/La Frontera — the Mexicans didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. You hear white conservatives telling Mexican people to go back where they came from, and I’m from Texas, born and raised, living in Texas now, and it makes me cringe every time, because nigga, hear it: they are in their home. You view their sovereignty, you view their indigeneity, through the lens of colonizers — i.e., this used to be a Spanish colony, so I’m going to view everybody in this colony as Spanish subjects, point blank period. So even here in California, you got indigenous folks who can’t even access the law’s protection because the 14th Amendment didn’t give them citizenship, but they’re also Indigenous to California, so the law is already insidious to their bodies. They’re seen as aliens in their own land. They’re seen as immigrants in their own land. Because they were colonized by Spaniards who taught them Spanish, and the white folks here only understand their humanity through the colonial language they were forced to speak. This is what we’re dealing with.

A Specific Implication For Education

For educators, for curriculum builders, for the folks teaching social studies, civics, history, ethnic studies — this analysis is not an academic exercise. It’s a directive. The current public education curriculum on immigration in this country is a curriculum of liberal flattening. Students are taught that America is a nation of immigrants. Students are taught about Ellis Island as the origin story of American belonging. Students are taught that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship in a way that floats free of slavery and Reconstruction. Students are taught about Cesar Chavez as a saint without being taught about his anti-Blackness. Students are taught about the Civil Rights Movement and the Immigration Act of 1965 as parallel stories of progress without being taught about the structural tensions those two policies set into motion. The result is a generation of well-meaning young people who graduate from high school perfectly equipped to perpetuate Indigenous erasure and anti-Black erasure while believing themselves to be on the right side of history. We have to teach the 14th Amendment with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach the 1965 Immigration Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach Chavez with the Black farmworkers he undermined. We have to teach Anzaldúa, we have to teach Wilderson, we have to teach Tuck and Yang. Otherwise we are producing what Charles Mills called the white moral psychology — a citizenry capable of believing in justice while being entirely incapable of recognizing the structuring antagonisms that make injustice possible. Education is elevation, or it ain’t education at all.

Intersectional Material Impacts

The folks who get crushed hardest in the gap between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous critique are, of course, the folks sitting at the intersections. Black immigrants — Haitian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali, Afro-Latine — get hit twice. They get hit by immigration enforcement that racially profiles them as both Black and foreign. They get hit by Black communities that haven’t always made space for them in the freedom struggle. ICE deports Black immigrants at disproportionate rates relative to their share of the immigrant population — that’s documented, that’s empirical. Black women immigrants face the misogynoir Moya Bailey named on top of the xenophobia. Black trans immigrants face all of that plus the medical and legal violence the state reserves for trans folks. Indigenous women in California caught between immigration enforcement and federal Indian law sit at a junction where neither legal regime acknowledges their actual sovereignty. Indigenous trans and two-spirit folks navigate colonial frameworks that erased their cultural roles before the United States existed. Disabled Black and Indigenous folks navigate a citizenship that has never accommodated their material needs. Poor Black folks watching wealthy non-Black immigrants integrate into whiteness in ways they never could. This is what intersectional analysis demands — not symbolic representation, but material outcomes. Crenshaw didn’t give us a vibe. She gave us a tool. Use it. Most of the symbolic wins of pro-immigration politics over the last decade have left Black immigrants, Indigenous immigrants, and the Black and Indigenous communities of the United States in materially worse positions, and that ain’t an accident. That’s the antagonism doing its work while the conflict gets compromised.

Closing The Loop

So when I sat in that room and listened to that 14th Amendment presentation, what I was hearing was the failure to grapple with the foundational antagonism. The failure to grapple with how the 14th Amendment was birthed in Reconstruction and weaponized in Louisiana v. Callais to gut the Voting Rights Act. The failure to grapple with how citizenship for Native folks wasn’t recognized until 1924, and that recognition was a paper formality on top of ongoing genocide. The failure to grapple with how every “nation of immigrants” slogan does the dual work of erasing Indigenous claims and erasing Black labor. The failure to grapple with how the law itself, from 1776 to 2026, has been structured in opposition to Black and Indigenous humanity. The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions, and the room was full of good intentions, and the impact of those good intentions left without my interventions would have been more Indigenous erasure and more anti-Black erasure, dressed up in the language of progressive solidarity. We have to center Blackness and we have to center indigeneity in these conversations, because if we don’t, we engage in indigenous erasure and erasure of Black suffering, and to me that is the cornerstone of America. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for us. Land back and reparations have to be married together. We don’t get reparations without the land. The land was built with our bodies. Feel me?

Education is elevation. Let that marinate.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The 14th Amendment is a Reconstruction-era artifact, not a free-floating immigration document. Any conversation about birthright citizenship that doesn’t begin with slavery, the 13th-14th-15th Amendment sequence, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act is doing erasure work, regardless of intent.

* Citizenship has never guaranteed humanity for Black or Indigenous people in America. Black folks have been citizens since 1868 and are still having voting rights stripped. Native folks were not citizens until 1924 and were facing ongoing genocide when the paper formality arrived. Romanticized framings of citizenship as protection collapse under historical examination.

* “Nation of immigrants” and “no one is illegal on stolen land” are settler moves to innocence. Tuck and Yang’s framework explains how progressive-sounding slogans can do the work of Indigenous erasure by abstracting away specific tribal claims and converting them into universal humanitarian principles that demand nothing back.

* The 1965 Immigration Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act set structural tensions in motion that still shape Black/non-Black immigrant relations. The 1992 Rodney King riots, ongoing tensions over Asian businesses in Black communities, the iconization of Cesar Chavez despite his anti-Blackness — these are not coincidences. They are downstream consequences of policies that did not address racial capitalism’s foundational antagonisms.

* Land Back and reparations are not competing projects — they are the same project. Coalition between Black and Indigenous freedom struggles requires honesty about the material differences in subject position, not flattening into a singular “people of color” frame that allows non-Black, non-Indigenous immigrants to skip past the structuring antagonisms that make their inclusion in American life possible.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010). The foundational text for understanding the distinction between conflict and antagonism that drives this analysis. Wilderson lays out why anti-Blackness is structuring rather than incidental, and why the Indian, the Black, and the Settler operate as three distinct grammars of suffering. If you read one thing from this list, read this.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The text that gave us “the border crossed us” and reframed indigeneity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Essential for understanding why California’s Indigenous-but-Spanish-speaking populations get caught in immigration enforcement that has no language for their actual subject position.

Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2012). The article that named the “settler moves to innocence” — the rhetorical maneuvers that allow non-Native people to feel implicated in colonization without doing the material work of land return. Required reading for anyone using “stolen land” language.

Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008). Sexton’s work on how multiracial discourse can flatten and obscure anti-Blackness is directly applicable to how “people of color” framings function in immigration politics.

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The philosophical architecture for understanding why a legal apparatus designed to exclude can never simply be reformed into one that includes. Mills’s account of white moral psychology explains the room I was sitting in.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The foundational texts of intersectional analysis. Read them whole — not the watered-down version that survived corporate diversity training.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). The original articulation of how Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of interlocking systems of oppression. The reason intersectional analysis is non-negotiable.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey gave us the term misogynoir. Essential for understanding the specific position of Black women immigrants and how their experience does not collapse into either “Black” or “immigrant” frames alone.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman on the afterlife of slavery and the law’s relationship to Black flesh. Essential context for why the 14th Amendment cannot do what the legal liberal hopes it can.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Spillers on the gendered grammar of enslavement. The grammar of citizenship is downstream of the grammar of fungibility.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Robinson on racial capitalism — the framework for understanding why anti-Blackness is engine, not aberration. Indispensable.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Rodney on the global structure that produced the migrations being debated in 2026. The immigrants didn’t come from nowhere. They came from the wreckage Europe and America made.

Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004; 2nd ed. 2015). Grande on Indigenous education, sovereignty, and the limits of liberal multiculturalism in addressing Native claims.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The historical record that the standard American history curriculum erases. Read alongside Howard Zinn but understand that Dunbar-Ortiz does what Zinn could not.

King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019). King’s work specifically theorizes the meeting point of Black and Native critique — exactly the conversation pro-immigration discourse refuses to have.

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