Education is Elevation

Y’all see them children in Mexico busting a pinata with two flags on it — Israeli and American? That image symbolize so much that we got a really young package today, kinfolks. And I already know a lot of people gon’ see this and be infuriated because they wanna believe these children being indoctrinated. But let me hold this one up to the light real quick: if your kid can be a Confederate-flag-toting white supremacist sucker out here at the lake on the back of a F-150, then these kids over there can also be conscious of how these countries impacting their livelihood. Two things can be true, feel me?

Symbolism is intentional. Always. And when I see them two flags taped together on a pinata, I ain’t seeing random teenage angst — I’m seeing children doing what their elders been doing for generations: naming the structural relationship that’s stealing their air. So before y’all get to clutching them pearls, let that marinate for a second.

Here’s the thing most of us don’t know about. I like to believe a lot of us are consciously aware — no pun intended — of how America exploits and criminalizes our southern neighbor Mexico. But the relationship between Mexico and the Israeli settler-colonial project? Most of y’all lost in the sauce on that one. So lemme walk through the receipts.

The struggle of Palestinians resonate with Mexico despite 7,000 miles between them and despite distinct geopolitical surroundings. Why? Because the violent consequences of settler colonialism in Palestine conjure up the post-colonial trauma that’s already living in Mexican soil. Patrick Wolfe said it plain — settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Robinson 83 tells us racial capitalism don’t work without antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as its engine, not as accidents. So when two settler projects start trading tools, it ain’t coincidence. It’s the family business.

Look at Pegasus. Pegasus is a spy web developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, and as journalist Anthony Lowenstein documents, it was tried and tested in occupied Palestine before it ever touched a Mexican phone. Designed to be covertly and remotely installed on iOS and Android. Designed to harvest you in your sleep. And then exported. Lowenstein calls it an exported occupation, and that phrasing matter — because once it’s been deployed and proven in the field, Israeli companies promote them tools as battle-tested and occupied Palestine, which then becomes a sales pitch for any government trying to criminalize the folks just trying to get their immigration on.

This means the surveillance regime that disappears Palestinian journalists is the same surveillance regime that’s tracking Mexican human rights defenders. Same technology. Same logic. Same vendor. Just admit it: that’s not parallel oppression, that’s the same machine running two shifts.

Now lemme show y’all why there’s a statue of Yasser Arafat in Mexico City — because that question alone shut down most American history teachers I know. Arafat was the Palestinian politician and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in trying to establish a free Palestinian state. He kept close diplomatic relations with Mexico his whole life. In 1975, he met with then-Mexican President Luis Echeverria — the President flew to Cairo to meet him and soon established diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year, the PLO established an information office in Mexico City. By 1995, that office got elevated to an official delegation. Then in 2000, Arafat met with then-Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green, who paid an official visit to Gaza City and invited him to Mexico on behalf of the president. He passed in 2004. And soon after his death, the government of Mexico City placed a memorial in his honor.

Crazy how that’s the part of Mexican diplomatic history that don’t make it into the news cycle when folks wanna debate Mexican-American identity. They’ll show you Cinco de Mayo and a margarita but they won’t show you the Arafat statue. Wonder why.

Now let me close this loop by going back home to Texas, because y’all know I’m a Bryan, TX, boy and I got receipts for the local too. When we talk about remembering the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, the reason Stephen F. Austin was beefing with Santa Ana is because they had a little agreement in settler solidarity that went bad. Santa Ana had even agreed Anglo settlers could come in — under the condition they convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and not bring enslaved people. Austin and them broke the deal. So the Texas Revolution wasn’t liberation, it was a settler franchise dispute. Two colonial powers arguing over who get to extract from indigenous land and Black bodies. iMa bE the one to say it: remembering the Alamo without remembering that context is just remembering the slave power.

Most of y’all lost in the salsa of settler colonialism so heavy that you don’t even view Mexican people as indigenous folks of Turtle Island. You view them as immigrant subjects of Mexico. But the Conquistadors — Hernandez, Cortez and nem — was settlers. Mexico is a settler-colonial state laid on top of indigenous land just like the United States. Sandy Grande talks about how settler colonialism requires the disappearance of the indigenous, not just from the land but from the imagination. So when you call a Mixtec grandmother an immigrant, you’re not making a statement of geography. You’re making whiteness visible by erasing her ancestral claim to a continent.

Charles Mills in 1997 calls this the racial contract — a tacit agreement that the world is white people’s to allocate. Then you got Europeans believing this country was theirs to conquer, both the Spanish and the English, just like them folks over yonder way across the pond believe it’s their God-given right to have the land because it was promised to them 3,000 years ago. Sounds like God only come down to tell white folks this is your land, huh? Every accusation is a confession. Every theology of conquest is an admission that the conquest required theology to justify it.

Apply Wilderson here for a second. Afropessimism gon’ tell us the Black is figured as fungible and socially dead — not analogous to indigenous dispossession, but structurally entangled with it. Robinson 83 close the loop: racial capitalism uses antiblackness as essential engine of surplus value AND uses indigenous dispossession as essential engine of land accumulation. They run together. Which means Palestinian children buried under rubble, Mexican migrants tracked by Pegasus, and Black Houstonians criminalized by predictive policing tools developed by the same defense contractors — we all caught in different rooms of the same house.

And this is also where the intersectional material impacts hit different. Crenshaw 89 told y’all the experience at the intersection ain’t additive, it’s structurally distinct. So an indigenous Mexican woman crossing the border ain’t just experiencing xenophobia plus sexism plus colorism — she’s experiencing a specific weaponization of all three under a surveillance infrastructure shipped from Tel Aviv to Mexico City to Texas. Combahee told us in 77 that if Black women were free, it would mean everybody else would have to be free. Apply that here: if indigenous women of the Americas were free of settler-colonial surveillance, the whole regime collapse.

Moya Bailey’s misogynoir framework still apply too, even at this scale. Because who gets surveilled hardest by these tools when they hit U.S. soil? Black women organizers. Indigenous women water protectors. Trans women of color reporting on ICE. The Pegasus-style tools don’t just go to foreign governments — they get repackaged for domestic departments. That ain’t paranoia. That’s procurement records.

Now lemme name the contradiction and let it hang. The same federal budget that claim it can’t afford universal pre-K, can’t afford Medicaid expansion, can’t afford reparations study, somehow always got billions for foreign military aid that loops back into surveillance contracts that get pointed at the American working class. Gil Scott-Heron said it best in 1970 and it still apply: Was all that money I made last year for billion-dollar defense aid? How come ain’t no money here for the kids in Bryan or Brownsville or Brooklyn? Whitey on the moon. Whitey on the border. Same flight plan.

Having the luxury to ignore the Mexico-Israel surveillance pipeline is a sign of citizenship privilege. Naming neutrality on it is itself a position. Bell 91 talked about interest convergence — the dominant class only support justice for the marginalized when it serves their own interests. The reason these two settler projects bond is because their interests already converged a long time ago. The reason American media don’t wanna talk about it is because that interest convergence is the load-bearing wall of the empire. By doing the work of pretending Mexico is just an immigration story and Palestine is just a foreign policy story, the media is making whiteness visible — visible as the third party in the room directing the conversation.

So them children with the pinata? They wasn’t being indoctrinated. They was educated. They was doing in public what their elders been doing for generations — naming the structural relationship between two settler-colonial projects that don’t see them as fully human. The bell didn’t dismiss them, the truth did. Education is elevation.

Two things can be true: you can love your country and still tell the truth about its alliances. You can grieve every Israeli child and still grieve every Palestinian child. You can love Mexico and still call out the Mexican state’s complicity. You can be American and still know America selling Mexico Israeli surveillance is not freedom, it’s a franchise. Just admit it. And then do something about it.

Critical Historical Context

Timeline of Mexico-Palestine-Israel Relations

* 1947–48: Mexico abstains on UN Resolution 181 (the partition of Palestine), one of the few Latin American countries not to vote yes. That ain’t an accident — it’s continuity with Mexico’s earlier 1930s diplomatic resistance to fascism and its post-revolutionary commitment to non-intervention (the Estrada Doctrine, 1930).

* 1975: President Luis Echeverria flies to Cairo and establishes diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year the PLO opens an information office in Mexico City — the first such office in the Western Hemisphere outside of Cuba.

* 1975: Same year, Mexico votes for UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. The U.S. responded by organizing a Jewish-American tourism boycott of Mexico, which Mexico’s economy felt immediately. The Echeverria government walked the vote back diplomatically — receipt of how economic coercion shapes Global South solidarity.

* 1995: PLO office in Mexico City elevated to official delegation status.

* 2000: Foreign Minister Rosario Green visits Gaza City and formally invites Arafat to Mexico on behalf of the President.

* 2004: Arafat passes. Mexico City government places a memorial bust of him in Parque Tlatelolco — itself the site of the 1968 Mexican state massacre of student protesters. The placement is intentional symbolism: anti-imperial martyrs alongside victims of state violence.

* 2017: First Pegasus revelations published showing Mexican government surveilled journalists, lawyers, and activists investigating the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students. The same spyware later linked to surveillance of Jamal Khashoggi’s circle before his murder.

* 2021–present: Forensic Architecture, Citizen Lab, and Amnesty International continue documenting Pegasus deployments across Mexico, including against the families of the Ayotzinapa students and against human rights defenders working on femicide and disappearance cases.

The Pre-1492 Frame

Most American schooling treat 1492 like a starting pistol and not a crime scene. Indigenous nations across what is now Mexico — Mexica, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huichol, Yaqui, Raramuri, Purepecha, Otomi — had governance, trade, astronomy, agriculture, codices, and diplomacy. The conquistadors didn’t bring civilization, they brought a particular structure for extracting it. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks both argue that decolonization can’t be a metaphor — it requires material return of land, governance, and economy.

Stephen F. Austin, Santa Anna, and the Real Texas Revolution

This is the Bryan, TX, hometown receipt. Stephen F. Austin negotiated with Mexico in the 1820s to bring Anglo settlers into Coahuila y Tejas under three conditions: convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and don’t bring enslaved Black people. Austin and them broke all three — particularly the slavery clause. The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 was, at its root, a settler franchise dispute over whether the slave economy would expand westward. Remember the Alamo means remember the slave power. Bryan, TX, is named for William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin. That heritage is concrete in my hometown’s street signs.

Pegasus and the Exported Occupation

Anthony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (2023) documents how Israeli surveillance, weapons, and crowd-control technology gets battle-tested in the occupied territories and then exported. NSO Group’s Pegasus is the most famous example, but it’s part of a broader supply chain — Elbit drones, Cellebrite phone-cracking, AnyVision facial recognition. The U.S.-Mexico border has been a primary buyer. Customs and Border Protection has contracted with multiple Israeli defense firms for tower surveillance systems along the Rio Grande. This means the same towers watching Palestinians in Hebron got cousins watching folks in Brownsville.

A Specific Implication for Education

Here’s the part I want educators, parents, and students to sit with. American K-12 curriculum teach Mexico and Palestine in two completely separate boxes — Mexico goes in the immigration and Spanish-language box, Palestine goes in the Middle East conflict box. By design, those two boxes don’t touch. And as long as they don’t touch, the surveillance pipeline, the arms pipeline, and the settler-colonial logic stay invisible to the next generation of voters and taxpayers.

Freire told us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that banking education — where students are treated as empty containers for state-approved facts — is itself a tool of oppression. The fragmentation of these histories is banking education at the geopolitical scale. The fix is problem-posing pedagogy: let students put the maps side by side, let them follow the procurement records, let them ask why a Mexico City statue of Arafat is something they never heard about.

This means as an educator I’m asking three things of teachers, librarians, and homeschooling parents reading this:

* Teach Pre-Columbian Mexico as indigenous history, not as Spanish history. Use Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun. Use Patrisia Gonzales’s Red Medicine.

* Teach the Texas Revolution with primary sources from Mexican archives, not just the Austin–Houston narrative. The Texas State Library has the original Mexican land grants in Spanish — use them.

* Teach surveillance literacy. Students should know what Pegasus is, what Cellebrite is, what predictive policing software is in their own district’s budget. Naming the tools is the first step in resisting them.

If you a public school teacher in Texas, I already know — y’all working under a hostile curriculum regime where this kind of teaching can cost you your job. That’s not an accident either. The same political coalition pushing book bans and CRT panic is the same coalition that benefits from these histories staying separate. Their fear is itself the receipt. Education is elevation. They know it. That’s why they fight it.

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Black Communities in the United States

Border-tested surveillance technology don’t stay at the border. Predictive policing software, facial recognition, and stingray cellphone trackers piloted along the Rio Grande get redeployed in Black neighborhoods in Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, and Detroit. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters both document how surveillance infrastructure built for one racialized population gets adapted to police another. Black folks pay for the pipeline twice — once as taxpayers funding foreign military aid, again as targets of the tech when it comes home.

Indigenous Women in Mexico

Mexico’s femicide crisis — over 10 women killed daily — overlaps directly with the deployment of Pegasus against the journalists and human rights defenders investigating it. When the state spyware get pointed at the people documenting the violence, the violence accelerate. Indigenous women in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero — already at the intersection of class, race, gender, and language exclusion — bear the heaviest cost. Crenshaw’s intersection ain’t a metaphor here, it’s a coroner’s report.

Palestinian Women and Children

Every Pegasus contract signed by a foreign government is revenue that funds the next iteration of the tool deployed in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian women — particularly Palestinian women journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh — have been systematically targeted. The pipeline don’t just flow Israel-outward. It flows back, with the revenue strengthening the original occupation.

Black and Brown Migrants at the Border

Haitian migrants in Del Rio. Honduran asylum seekers in Brownsville. African migrants routed through Tapachula. They all encounter the same Israeli-designed surveillance towers, the same Israeli-trained ICE units, the same biometric capture systems first beta-tested on Palestinians. The migrant body becomes the laboratory subject for the next export.

Working-Class Americans of All Colors

The taxpayer dollars that fund the foreign military aid, the border contracts, and the domestic policing tools come out of the same budget that don’t have money for public schools, libraries, mental health care, or rural hospitals. Whitey on the moon, whitey on the border, and ain’t no money here. Robinson 83 told us racial capitalism don’t just hurt the racialized — it disciplines the white working class too, by making sure their wages and services stay subordinate to the war machine.

5 Key Takeaways

* Mexico and Palestine are linked by a documented surveillance pipeline. Pegasus and related Israeli-developed spyware were battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported to the Mexican government, where they have been used against journalists, human rights defenders, and the families of the disappeared. This is what Anthony Loewenstein calls exported occupation, and it is a structural relationship, not a coincidence.

* Mexico’s diplomatic history with Palestine is older and deeper than American media admits. The Yasser Arafat memorial in Mexico City, the 1975 PLO office, and Foreign Minister Rosario Green’s official visit to Gaza City are all part of a Global South solidarity tradition that predates the contemporary moment.

* Mexican people are indigenous people of Turtle Island, not immigrant subjects. Calling them otherwise is settler-colonial amnesia. The conquistadors were settlers; the Texas Revolution was a settler franchise dispute over the slave economy; and the modern U.S.-Mexico border is itself a settler-colonial line drawn through indigenous nations like the Tohono O’odham.

* The intersection matters materially. Indigenous Mexican women, Palestinian women, Black women in U.S. cities, and migrant women at the border are all surveilled by the same supply chain of tools and trained operators. Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Combahee’s analysis of interlocking oppressions are not abstract — they describe a procurement system.

* Public education is the battlefield. The fragmentation of Mexico and Palestine into separate curriculum boxes is itself an ideological tool. Teaching these histories together — and teaching surveillance literacy alongside them — is a precondition for any meaningful resistance. Education is elevation. Always was.

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Annotated Bibliography / Related Readings

Loewenstein, Anthony. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso, 2023).

The definitive contemporary text on how Israeli surveillance and weapons technology gets battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported globally, including to Mexico. Required reading for understanding the Pegasus pipeline.

Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (Cassell, 1999).

Wolfe’s foundational argument that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that it operates through the logic of elimination. The frame that makes the Mexico-Palestine parallel legible.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed, 1983).

Robinson’s articulation of racial capitalism as a system that requires antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as engines, not aberrations.

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

Afropessimist framework distinguishing Black social death from the Settler/Native antagonism — crucial for thinking the entanglement without collapsing the distinction.

Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (Cornell, 1997).

Mills’s argument that white supremacy operates as a global political system through a tacit racial contract — the philosophical scaffolding for understanding settler solidarity.

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

The original intersectionality essay. The frame for analyzing how indigenous women, Palestinian women, and Black women experience structurally distinct harm at the intersection.

Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977).

Black feminist statement establishing the interlocking nature of oppression and the principle that the freedom of Black women requires the dismantling of all oppressive systems.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed (NYU Press, 2021).

Bailey’s elaboration of misogynoir as a structural force, applicable to how surveillance targets Black women organizers domestically.

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

Grande’s argument for indigenous-centered education and her critique of settler-colonial schooling structures.

Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota, 2014).

Coulthard’s argument against the politics of recognition and for material decolonization.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (Decolonization, 2012).

The essay every educator should read before using the word decolonize. Insists on material land return.

Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford, 2019).

Centers Nahuatl-language sources to tell Mexica history from indigenous perspective rather than Spanish chroniclers.

Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Arizona, 2012).

Indigenous Mexican women’s traditional knowledge as resistance to colonial medicine.

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke, 2015).

Browne’s argument that modern surveillance was built on the technologies of policing Black bodies — applicable to how border tech gets domestically redeployed.

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The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. Name something more insidious. Name one thing in the modern legal landscape that exposes the architecture of pale supremacy more cleanly than that. I’ll wait.

Because here’s the thing kinfolks, this ain’t a contradiction. A contradiction is when two things accidentally don’t line up. This is a strategy. This is racial illiteracy weaponized at the highest court in the country, and the only way you don’t see it is if you ain’t been trained to see it, or worse, you been trained to look away.

Let me lay it out plain so the folks in the back can hear me. In 2023, the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, telling Black, Brown, and Indigenous students that race could no longer be considered in college admissions because, supposedly, the Constitution is color-blind. That same court, two years later, in cases dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and now Louisiana v. Callais, has been busy gutting the ability of states to draw majority-Black congressional districts, again leaning on the language of color-blindness. Then turn around, that same bench gives federal immigration agents the green light to use race and ethnicity as a factor in stopping, questioning, and detaining people who look, sound, or are presumed to be Latino, Indigenous, or otherwise non-white. Crazy how that works, right?

The Two-Roles Frame: What They Say vs. What Their Position Structurally Does

iMa bE the first one to tell you, the Supreme Court will say with a straight face that they are simply applying neutral principles of constitutional interpretation. That’s the stage rhetoric. That’s the press release. But Wilderson talks about how antiblackness operates through gratuitous violence and fungibility, where the Black body is rendered both hyper-visible when targeted and invisible when seeking protection. Apply that here. Apply Mills 1997 on the racial contract. The court isn’t being inconsistent. The court is being perfectly consistent with the actual function of American jurisprudence, which is to preserve a racial hierarchy while denying that any such hierarchy exists.

Two things can be true. The Supreme Court can claim to be color-blind. And the Supreme Court can be the most racially literate institution in the country when it comes to maintaining white power. This means the conservative legal movement is wrong when they tell us this is about principle. It also proves that having the luxury to call yourself color-blind is itself a position. Claimed neutrality is a position. A loud one. By doing color-blindness in front of cameras, you are making whiteness visible to anybody who knows how to read.

Historical Context: This Ain’t New, This Is the Pattern

For the folks who think this started with the Roberts Court, let me give you some historical context. The American legal tradition has always been bifurcated when it comes to race. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to free white persons, requiring the law to know exactly what whiteness was. In the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, the Supreme Court said the federal government could exclude people on the basis of race because national sovereignty demanded it. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 said separate but equal was constitutional, requiring the state to racially classify every citizen at the train station while pretending the classification was harmless. Korematsu v. United States in 1944 said the federal government could intern Japanese Americans on the basis of ancestry, and that ruling has never been formally overturned, only narrowed. The Insular Cases from the early 1900s established that Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and other colonized people were foreign in a domestic sense, building a whole jurisprudence around using race to distinguish full citizens from subjects.

Then in the post-Civil Rights era, the same court that finally said in Brown 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional turned around and in Milliken v. Bradley 1974 said cross-district desegregation remedies were too much. In Bakke 1978, Justice Powell invented the diversity rationale that allowed limited use of race in admissions, but only as long as it was framed as helping white students get exposure to non-white students. In Shelby County v. Holder 2013, Chief Justice Roberts gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act by famously declaring that things have changed. Then in 2023, that same court took the diversity rationale and threw it in the trash. And now in 2025, in Trump-era immigration enforcement cases, the court has signaled that racial and ethnic appearance can factor into reasonable suspicion when federal agents are looking for undocumented immigrants. Derrick Bell 1980 told us about interest convergence. Civil rights gains for Black folks only happen when they align with the interests of white elites. The retreat from those gains happens the moment that alignment breaks. We’re watching the retreat in real time.

The Mastery of Pale Supremacy: A Working Definition

What I’m calling the mastery of pale supremacy is this. It’s the institutional ability to weaponize race consciousness when it benefits the dominant group, and simultaneously demand racial color-blindness when racial consciousness would benefit anybody else. It is two doctrines held in the same hand, deployed by the same nine justices, justified by the same Constitution, depending entirely on which direction the racial flow benefits. Charles Mills called this an epistemology of ignorance. White ignorance about race is not the absence of knowledge. It is a structured, produced, defended way of not-knowing that allows the system to keep functioning. The Supreme Court has perfected this. They know exactly when to see race and exactly when to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays

Now let’s talk about who actually bleeds when these decisions come down, because this is where intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Crenshaw 1989 gave us the framework, Combahee 1977 gave us the politics, Moya Bailey gave us the language of misogynoir. When we lose race-conscious admissions, the data from California after Proposition 209 and from Michigan after Proposal 2 shows us exactly what happens. Black women in particular get pushed out of selective STEM and pre-professional pipelines at higher rates than Black men, because Black women were disproportionately the ones using those pathways to escape both racial and gender wage gaps. When voting maps get redrawn to dilute Black voting power, the immediate material consequences fall hardest on Black women in the South, who are the most consistent Black voters and whose policy priorities, things like Medicaid expansion, maternal health funding, public school funding, get traded away first. Black maternal mortality is already four times the rate of white maternal mortality. Diluted political power means even less leverage to demand state-level policy that could actually save Black women’s lives.

On the immigration side, when ICE and Customs and Border Protection get the green light to use racial appearance as reasonable suspicion, the people most likely to be stopped, detained, separated from their children, and deported are not abstract immigrants. They are Latina mothers, Indigenous women from Central America fleeing climate and cartel violence, Afro-Latino people who get racially profiled twice over, queer migrants whose asylum claims hinge on demonstrating credible fear in conditions designed to break them down. Spillers’ work on the ungendering of the Black diasporic body under captivity applies here too, because the racialized state treats migrant women’s bodies as fungible and disposable in ways that echo, not coincidentally, the logic of the slave ship. Hartman called it the afterlife of slavery for a reason.

Robinson’s Black Marxism reminds us none of this is aberration. Racial capitalism requires a racialized underclass, and the legal system’s job is to manage which bodies belong in that underclass at any given moment. When the economy needs cheap migrant labor that can be threatened with deportation, the court makes race legally legible to immigration enforcement. When the economy needs to keep Black political power suppressed so that wealth doesn’t get redistributed through democratic means, the court makes race legally illegible to voting rights enforcement. Same court. Same logic. Different application.

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Implication for Education: This Is Why We Need Critical Pedagogy

Here’s where I bring this home to education, because Education is Elevation ain’t just a tagline. The implication of this Supreme Court racial double standard for education is direct and devastating. When you ban race-conscious admissions while simultaneously allowing racial profiling, you create a generation of students who are legally invisible as racialized subjects when they try to access opportunity, but hyper-visible as racialized subjects when they try to exist in public. Freire 1968 told us the banking model of education is designed to deposit ruling-class ideology into students. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and the tradition of Black critical pedagogy from Carter G. Woodson through bell hooks tells us we have to actively counter that deposit with what hooks called education as the practice of freedom.

But how can teachers do that when curriculum is being gutted? Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and others are passing laws that ban discussion of structural racism in K-12 classrooms while university DEI offices are being defunded. The same political coalition pushing color-blind constitutionalism at the Supreme Court is also pushing color-blind curriculum in public schools. The strategy is to legally and pedagogically erase the very analytical tools students would need to understand what the court is doing to them. That’s not an accident. That’s racial illiteracy by design. Just admit it. The goal is to produce citizens who cannot read the racial structure of the world they live in, so they cannot organize against it.

The Southern Black Left Tradition Says What Now

Ella Baker would tell us the answer to a Supreme Court that has abandoned us is what it has always been. Group-centered leadership, mass-based political education, and movement infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the federal government to legitimate Black humanity. Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t wait on the court to declare her tired of being sick and tired. She built the Freedom Farm. The Southern Negro Youth Congress in the 1930s and 40s organized through Jim Crow without expecting the Supreme Court to save them. SNCC, Cooperation Jackson, Black Workers for Justice in the Carolinas, they all built infrastructure on the assumption that the federal government would either be a hostile or indifferent actor. We are returning to that political reality, and we need to return to that political tradition.

Where Is the Smoke

Where is the smoke for a court that uses race as a sword when it wants to surveil us and as a forbidden category when we want to be represented? Where is the bipartisan outrage at racial profiling becoming federal policy? Where are the Democrats who told us they would expand the court, codify voting rights, pass meaningful immigration reform? The silence is loud, and that silence is also a position. Most of the political class is shucking and jobbing while the legal foundation of multiracial democracy is being dismantled in front of us. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the wrong side of history is being decided right now, and we get to decide whether we name it clearly or whether we let the next generation inherit the same fog.

So when y’all see headlines saying the Supreme Court ruled this way on immigration and that way on voting rights, don’t read those as two separate stories. Read them as the same story, told twice, by the same authors, to the same end. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. That’s not inconsistency. That’s the mastery of pale supremacy. Now you see it. Now you can teach it. Now you can organize against it. Education is Elevation.

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5 Key Takeaways

* The court is not inconsistent, it is strategic. Allowing racial profiling in immigration enforcement while banning race-conscious admissions and voting maps is not a contradiction. It is the precise function of a legal system designed to preserve racial hierarchy while denying that hierarchy exists. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance. The court has mastered it.

* Color-blindness is itself a racial position. Claimed neutrality is never neutral. By demanding the law not see race in voting maps and admissions while granting itself permission to see race at the border, the court is performing whiteness as the unmarked default. Naming this is not paranoia. It is racial literacy.

* The material impacts are intersectional and they fall hardest on Black and Brown women. From STEM pipeline collapse after affirmative action bans, to Black maternal health outcomes worsening as Black political power gets diluted, to migrant women being targeted by racial-profile-driven enforcement, the people who lose first and worst are the people Crenshaw, Combahee, and Moya Bailey told us to look for.

* This is interest convergence in reverse. Derrick Bell taught us civil rights gains require alignment between Black interests and white elite interests. We are watching that alignment break in real time. The retreat from race-conscious remedies is happening exactly because elite interests no longer require the compromise that produced those remedies in the first place.

* The Southern Black Left tradition gives us the playbook. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, the SNCC, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Cooperation Jackson. None of them waited on the federal government to validate Black humanity. The response to a court that has abandoned multiracial democracy is mass political education, group-centered leadership, and independent movement infrastructure. Research over MeSearch.

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Related Readings and Works Cited

Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. The foundational text for understanding how Western political philosophy and law are built on an unstated racial agreement that grants moral and political personhood to whites while denying it to non-whites. Mills’ framework is essential for reading the Supreme Court’s so-called inconsistencies as actually consistent applications of the racial contract.

Bell, Derrick A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518-533. Bell’s argument that civil rights gains for Black people only occur when those gains align with the interests of white elites. Indispensable for understanding why the current Supreme Court is dismantling civil rights protections now that the Cold War-era interest convergence has expired.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167. The article that gave us intersectionality as legal theory. Required reading for understanding why Black women and women of color absorb the compounded harm of Supreme Court rulings that treat race and gender as separable categories.

Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Robinson’s argument that racial capitalism is not a deviation from capitalism but its constitutive logic. The Supreme Court’s racial double standards make sense only when read through Robinson’s framework.

Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Wilderson’s articulation of Afropessimism and the structural position of Blackness as social death. His framework explains how Black bodies are simultaneously hyper-visible to state violence and invisible to state protection.

Hartman, Saidiya V. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hartman’s concept of the afterlife of slavery, where the political and economic conditions of slavery persist in the present, frames how we should read current Supreme Court rulings as direct continuations of antebellum and Reconstruction-era jurisprudence.

Combahee River Collective. (1977). A Black Feminist Statement. The foundational statement of Black feminist politics that demands simultaneous analysis of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Essential for reading the intersectional fallout of voting rights rollbacks and affirmative action bans.

Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65-81. Spillers’ theorization of how the captive Black body is ungendered under chattel slavery and how that ungendering persists in American legal and cultural grammar.

Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. Bailey’s articulation of misogynoir, the specific anti-Black misogyny faced by Black women, is the precise lens needed to understand who absorbs the compound harm of the Supreme Court’s current direction.

hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. hooks’ framework for liberatory pedagogy and why education that ignores structural racism reproduces it.

Freire, Paulo. (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum. Freire’s banking model of education and his framework for critical consciousness are essential for understanding what the anti-CRT movement and color-blind constitutionalism are actually trying to prevent.

Grande, Sandy. (2004). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Grande extends critical pedagogy through Indigenous political thought and exposes how settler-colonial logics shape American education policy and curriculum.

Ransby, Barbara. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. University of North Carolina Press. The definitive biography of Ella Baker and the most rigorous account of group-centered leadership as an alternative to top-down, court-dependent civil rights strategy.

López, Ian Haney. (2006). White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. NYU Press. A history of how American courts have legally constructed whiteness, including the prerequisite cases of the early 20th century, directly relevant to today’s racial profiling jurisprudence.

Burnham, Linda, & Patterson, Tiffany Ruby (Eds.). Selected works on the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Black Workers for Justice, Cooperation Jackson, and the Southern organizing tradition. Essential primary and secondary sources for the Southern Black Left tradition that informs movement strategy in this current moment.

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Let me set the table for y’all real quick. Netanyahu, the sitting Prime Minister of Israel, sits down for an interview and gets asked a direct question about whether it’s time to reset the financial relationship between Israel and the United States. The man on the receiving end of $3.8 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money. And his answer? He says yes, but he wants 10 years to do it. Then he picks the word “wean.”

In my whole life of living, I ain’t never heard of nobody having to be weaned off of nothing but babies and breastfeeding and them fiends and pipes. Shidd, that’s a tell. That’s not the vocabulary of a sovereign equal partner. That’s the vocabulary of dependency dressed up in diplomatic cologne. And the question we need to be sitting with is simple: why does he need 10 years to do it? How come he can’t just end it now?

If you ever heard somebody say you trying to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining — that’s the example right there. The man is announcing a divorce and reserving a decade of conjugal visits in the same breath. Yealp.

Clip One: Netanyahu In His Own Words

[00:00:00 — 00:00:53] PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

Interviewer: “Do you believe it’s time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States, meaning what the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis?”

Netanyahu: “Absolutely. And I’ve said this to President Trump, I’ve said it to our own people, their jaws dropped. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have, because we receive $3.8 billion dollars a year. I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support… Let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years. But I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.”

“I want to draw down to zero the American financial support… it’s time that we weaned ourselves…”

— Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Now hold up. Notice the framing. He says he told Trump. He says he told his own people. He says their jaws dropped. That right there is the rhetorical sleight of hand — he’s positioning himself as the brave reformer breaking the news to a room full of dependents. Apply Farr here: the supposed neutral position of “well, we just receive this aid because we’ve always received it” is itself a position. Acting like the $3.8 billion is gravity, like it just falls from the sky, is the view from nowhere. He’s naming the policy AS a choice for the first time, and acting like that itself is the brave act.

Two things can be true. One: it IS notable that the sitting Prime Minister of Israel is on record saying draw it to zero. Two: a 10-year off-ramp on $3.8 billion annually is $38 billion more dollars before we hit zero. That’s not weaning. That’s a payment plan. Shidd, that’s a mortgage.

Clip Two: Then Cory Booker Showed His Ass

[00:01:27 — 00:01:46] U.S. SENATOR CORY BOOKER (D-NJ)

Interviewer: “Cory, you would vote to approve arms sales for Israel in a future entanglement if you thought that was necessary?”

Booker: “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.”

“Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.”

— Senator Cory Booker

Read that again. The head of state of the receiving country is in public saying wean us off. The U.S. Senator from New Jersey — a Black Democrat who built his whole brand on moral clarity and Harriet Tubman quotes — is in public saying nah, keep the pipeline open, qualitative military edge forever, amen.

This means Booker is wrong. Flatly. By his own framing of “long-standing commitment,” he’s defending a status quo that the head of the supposedly-benefiting country just said in public he wants to end. You ain’t more committed to Israel than the Prime Minister of Israel, kinfolks. That ain’t commitment, that’s a contract.

And having the luxury to ignore that contradiction — having the luxury to walk into that interview, hear the question, and answer with autopilot AIPAC talking points while Netanyahu is on the other clip saying “start now” — that’s the sign of a politician who knows his funding stack doesn’t require him to engage with the actual policy debate. The presumed-neutral “qualitative military edge” line is a position. It’s a position that says: my donors will be happier if I never have to vote no.

Where Is The Smoke For The Lobby?

Let’s name what’s actually moving here. The U.S. and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 — negotiated under Obama — that locks in $38 billion over 10 years (FY2019–FY2028). That’s $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation. Israel is the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. Over $260 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s the receipt. That’s not opinion. That’s Congressional Research Service paper.

Now layer in the lobby. AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and its affiliated United Democracy Project super PAC spent more than $100 million in the 2024 cycle alone to defeat candidates who criticized U.S. policy toward Israel. Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush. Receipts. They didn’t lose because their constituents fired them. They lost because a PAC parachuted in from outside their districts to dump the juice trash on their primaries.

So when Cory Booker says “long-standing commitment,” translate that. The commitment ain’t to Israeli security policy — because if it was, he’d be following the Prime Minister’s lead. The commitment is to the funding pipeline that keeps his own seat safe. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making the money trail visible. He’s telling on himself.

Whitey On The Moon, 2026 Edition

Gil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. Let me update it for the folks in the back.

“A rat done bit my sister Nell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. Her face and arms began to swell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. I can’t pay no doctor bills… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. No hot water, no toilet, no lights… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel.”

The Prime Minister of Israel says wean. Cory Booker says feed. Meanwhile public health funding for Black HIV outcomes got cut. The CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention took a hit. Title X providers serving Black women in the South got defunded. Pell Grants for the poorest students got squeezed. The IRS unit auditing billionaires got gutted.

Two things can be true. One: Israel’s security policy is Israel’s business. Two: when the head of that state tells you in public he wants to end the U.S. money and your Senator says no — your Senator ain’t defending Israel, he’s defending the lobby that defends his seat. Lost in the sauce.

Why 10 Years? What’s He Trying To Finish?

Now here’s the part I want y’all to sit with. Netanyahu doesn’t want to wean off tomorrow. He wants 10 years. So the question I had — and I asked it out loud in the script — is what could he possibly try to accomplish within 10 years that he absolutely needs that aid for? I wonder.

This ain’t a threat, this is a promise: the timeline is the policy. The amount of the aid matters less than the duration he’s asking to keep it locked in. A man who actually wanted to end the dependency would say zero next fiscal year. A man who wants to lock in current funding through the next two U.S. presidential cycles, through the 2026 conflict posture with Iran, through whatever territorial questions remain unsettled — that man asks for a decade.

And how much of this announcement is timeliness for the election cycle? How much is preventative damage control? Because Netanyahu knows the Overton window is shifting. Younger Democrats won’t cosign endless funding. Younger Republicans of the America-First variety are skeptical of foreign aid period. So he gets ahead of the wave by announcing the wean — and locks in 10 more years of payments before the wave breaks. That’s not naivete on his part. That’s strategy. Showed his ass on the timing.

And This Is Where It Comes Home For Us

I’m not here to tell y’all how to vote on foreign policy. I’m here to name a contradiction. Cory Booker has stood on stages quoting Harriet Tubman, talking about love, talking about T-Bone, talking about beloved community. And when given an opportunity — with the receiving country’s own Prime Minister publicly asking for the off-ramp — to align his vote with that off-ramp, he punted.

This is the distinction between Black Liberal and Black Leftist that I keep trying to draw for y’all. The Black Liberal performs morality on stage and votes the donor preference at the desk. The Black Leftist — think Ella Baker, think SNCC, think Fannie Lou Hamer, think the Combahee River Collective — says material conditions over symbolic representation, every time. Hamer was sharecropping in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and she still understood that U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic poverty are the same budget. Every dollar that goes one place doesn’t go another.

By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making whiteness visible. He’s making the bipartisan consensus visible. He’s showing that the so-called Democratic alternative on this specific issue is functionally identical to the Republican position. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

The Ask

Here’s what I want from y’all. Don’t just clip the Netanyahu sound bite and act like Israel got a sudden case of fiscal humility. Read the timeline. Ten years is a $38 billion appropriation disguised as a press release.

And don’t let Cory Booker get away with the “long-standing commitment” shucking and jobbing. Ask him directly: when the head of state of the country receiving the aid is asking publicly to end the aid, why are you to the right of that head of state? Whose commitment are you actually serving?

Because at the end of the day, the man pissing on your leg telling you it’s raining ain’t always wearing the keffiyeh. Sometimes he’s wearing the lapel pin and quoting Harriet Tubman. Education is elevation. They got to stop this.

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

Five Key Takeaways

1. Netanyahu — not a critic of Israel, the Prime Minister of Israel — publicly called for ending the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. His framing of “weaning” is the language of dependency, not partnership.

2. Netanyahu’s 10-year timeline is the actual policy. A real exit would be immediate. A 10-year wean is a $38 billion lock-in disguised as reform — strategically timed before the political consensus shifts further.

3. Cory Booker’s response — days later, on the same topic — is functionally to the right of Netanyahu’s own position. “Qualitative military edge” is the donor-class neutrality position, not a policy analysis.

4. AIPAC and its United Democracy Project super PAC spent over $100 million in the 2024 cycle defeating Black progressive incumbents like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Booker’s position is not ideological; it’s electoral self-preservation.

5. This is the test case for distinguishing Black Liberal performance from Black Leftist material analysis. Foreign aid and domestic underfunding are the same budget — Fannie Lou Hamer understood this in 1969. The question for 2026 is whether our elected Democrats do.

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RELATED READINGS

Congressional Research Service. (2024). U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel. CRS Report RL33222. — The definitive Congressional source on the aid relationship. Documents the 2016 MOU ($38 billion over FY2019–FY2028) and Israel’s status as the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since WWII.

U.S. Department of State. (2016). Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of Israel Reached September 14, 2016. — The original MOU text. Locks in $3.3B annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500M annually for missile defense cooperation.

OpenSecrets. (2024). Pro-Israel: Top Contributors to Federal Candidates and Outside Spending Groups. — Tracks AIPAC and United Democracy Project spending in the 2024 primary cycle, including the $14.5M against Jamaal Bowman and $8.5M against Cori Bush.

Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. — Foundational text on racial capitalism. Explains why critiquing U.S. military expenditure abroad is part of, not separate from, critiquing capital accumulation at home.

Hamer, Fannie Lou. (1971). “It’s in Your Hands.” Speech delivered to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. — Hamer’s analysis of how military spending and poverty programs share the same federal budget. Foundational Southern Black Left text on foreign policy and material conditions.

Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. — Afropessimist framework for reading how Black political figures get positioned as moral cover for structurally anti-Black policy consensus. Useful frame for analyzing Booker’s role.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43(6). — Required reading for understanding how Black women voters in NJ and elsewhere bear the material cost of Booker’s foreign policy votes through cut domestic programs.

Mearsheimer, John J. & Walt, Stephen M. (2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — The mainstream IR text documenting the structural influence of AIPAC and affiliated organizations on U.S. congressional voting patterns. Controversial but well-cited.

Scott-Heron, Gil. (1970). “Whitey On The Moon.” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Flying Dutchman Records. — The original budget-priority critique. Updated and applied throughout this piece.

Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. — Frame for understanding how Black women critics of U.S. foreign policy — from Angela Davis to Cori Bush — get specifically targeted and primaried out, while Black male Democrats like Booker get protected by the same lobby.

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Let me set the scene for y’all real quick. Donald Trump stands in front of a room full of schoolchildren and says, with a straight face, that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, that the United States had to send B2 bombers to “obliterate” their nuclear capacity, that Israel would have been gone, that Iran would have come for Europe and then us because — and I quote — “these are sick people.” Kinfolks, that ain’t a foreign policy briefing. That’s a catechism. That’s American empire teaching its young.

And the same people who clutch their pearls about a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are to a kindergarten class will sit a sitting president down in front of children and let him narrate a fairy tale where the United States is the dragon-slayer, Iran is the dragon, and $200 billion in bombs is the moral of the story. Every accusation is a confession. They’ll scream about indoctrination while they’re literally indoctrinating. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but imperial conservatism is the parent compound.

Three Concepts Doing the Heavy Lifting

Before I get into the receipts, let me lay down the framework so we’re all reading from the same hymnal. Three concepts run through everything Trump said in that room, and if you don’t name them, you can’t see them.

American Hegemony — The structural arrangement where the United States — through military power, dollar dominance, and institutional control — sets the terms of what is permitted on the planet. Hegemony isn’t just being strong. It’s being the one country that gets to decide who else is allowed to be strong, who is allowed to defend themselves, who is allowed to have what. When Trump says Iran was “two weeks” from a weapon, the unspoken second half of that sentence is: and that decision belongs to us.

American Imperialism — The actual practice — the bombs, the bases, the sanctions, the regime-change wars, the proxies. Imperialism is hegemony with a body count. The B2 bomber Trump bragged about isn’t a metaphor. It’s the imperial fist that makes the hegemonic argument feel like common sense. Du Bois told us imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home are the same project wearing different uniforms. Rodney told us how it underdevelops. Lenin gave us the economic mechanics. Pick your lens — the violence is the same.

American Exceptionalism — The mythology that makes the first two feel righteous. The idea that America is uniquely good, uniquely chosen, uniquely qualified to bomb other people for their own protection. Exceptionalism is the lullaby that sings empire to sleep. It’s what lets a man stand in front of children and describe killing as obliteration as protection as love. It’s the religion of the project.

Now watch how all three move through that clip like blood through an artery.

Hegemony: Who Gets to Decide Who Has What

“”They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.””

Stop. Right there. The factual problem with this statement is one thing — and I’ll get to that — but the structural problem is bigger. Trump is not asserting a fact. He’s asserting a permission structure. The United States possesses thousands of nuclear warheads. Israel possesses an undeclared arsenal it has never even admitted to. The United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea — they all have them. Iran does not. And the sentence Trump is delivering to those children is not “nuclear weapons are dangerous.” It’s “that country in particular is not allowed to have what we have.”

That is hegemony in its purest form. It’s the assumption — unspoken, unquestioned, taught to children before they can spell the word — that the United States is the referee, the umpire, the parent in the room, and every other sovereign nation is a child who has to ask permission. Iran could spend the next thousand years pointing out that the U.S. is the only country to ever drop a nuclear weapon on civilian populations, and the hegemonic frame would still hold:

we can be trusted with it. They cannot. Why? Because we said so. Because we wrote the rules. Because we have the bombers to enforce the rules we wrote. That’s the whole argument. There is no other argument.

And here’s where it gets sneaky. Hegemony works best when nobody has to defend it out loud. When a president can stand in front of children and just assume that Iran having a weapon is unthinkable while the U.S. having thousands is unremarkable — and nobody in the room interrupts to ask “wait, why?” — that’s when you know the hegemonic frame has done its job. It has become the water the fish doesn’t see.

Imperialism: The Body Count Behind the Bedtime Story

“”Remember we sent that beautiful B2 bomber in and we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated.””

Beautiful. He called the bomber beautiful. To a room of children. Y’all hear that and don’t flinch, you’re already gone. That word is doing imperial work — it’s the aestheticization of violence, the conversion of mass destruction into pageantry. The same move every empire in history has made when it needed its civilians to applaud the deaths of foreign civilians. Rome had its triumphs. Britain had its parades. America has its B2s and its words like “surgical” and “obliterate.”

Let’s stay with that word for a second. Obliterate. To remove all trace. To wipe from existence. Said casually, in front of children, about a bombing campaign in a country containing roughly 90 million human beings, many of whom are children just like the ones in that room. Trump made a point earlier in the clip about the welfare of American kids — fair enough, every child’s welfare matters. But ask yourself the question I want hanging in the air for the rest of this article:

“Where is the smoke for the Iranian children? Where is the smoke for the Lebanese children? Where is the smoke for the Palestinian children whose deaths the same B2 bombers and the same $200 billion budget directly underwrite?”

That question — the simple question of whose children count as children — is the one American imperialism cannot survive. Which is why it is never, ever asked in front of American children. They are taught instead that the bombers are beautiful. They are taught that obliteration is a happy ending. They are taught a vocabulary in which our violence is defense and their existence is the threat. Frantz Fanon called this the manichaean structure of the colonial world — a world cut in two, where one side is human and the other side is the enemy of humanity. Trump didn’t invent it. He’s just the current narrator.

And here’s the receipt for what this actually costs. According to publicly available cost estimates of the U.S. military’s recent Iran operations and the broader regional posture, we are looking at roughly $200 billion in defense and adjacent expenditures tied to that confrontation. Two hundred. Billion. Dollars. Now I want y’all to sit with that number while I tell you what else $200 billion could have bought:

* Universal childcare in the United States, with billions left over.

* Full restoration of the National Park Service budget for years.

* Significant expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program, addressing real material need.

* Renewable energy tax credits at the scale needed to meaningfully decarbonize.

* SNAP and food security programs that lift millions of children out of food insecurity.

* Medicaid expansion in every state that has refused it, covering the working poor who get pissed on and told it’s raining.

Compare us to the other countries of the Global North — Germany, France, the Nordics, Canada — and we don’t compare. They have universal healthcare. They have paid family leave measured in months and years, not days. They have childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage. We have B2 bombers. That is the imperial trade. That is the deal the American working class — Black, Brown, white, all of us — has been forced into for the better part of a century: empire abroad, austerity at home. MLK said it plain in 1967 at Riverside Church: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-nine years later, we are still approaching. We are practically there.

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Exceptionalism: The Lullaby That Sings Empire to Sleep

“”And they would have trained their sights on Europe first and then us because they’re sick people. These are sick people.””

This is the part that gives the game away. This is the part that should make every parent watching go cold. Because what Trump is doing in this exact sentence is teaching schoolchildren that an entire nation of people — a country of 90 million, with poets and grandmothers and college students and tired bus drivers and kids their age — are sick. Not led by a sick regime. Not victims of a brutal government. Sick. The people themselves. Sick.

Y’all, that is the oldest move in the imperial playbook. Dehumanize the population so the bombing of the population becomes not just permissible but morally required. Edward Said wrote a whole book about this called Orientalism, and if you have not read it, please do. The construction of the “sick” Eastern other against the rational, healthy Western self is not Trump’s invention — it is the foundational rhetoric of every European empire that ever colonized a Muslim-majority country, and the United States inherited the script the way a son inherits his father’s suits.

And the move is doubled. Notice that Trump frames the bombing as protecting the children in the room — “maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now.” That’s exceptionalism doing its laundering. The violence becomes love. The bomber becomes the bodyguard. The empire becomes the parent. And the child in the room is taught that the people on the receiving end of those bombs are not children at all — they are the threat the parent is protecting them from. This is how you grow a generation that does not flinch. This is how you raise an electorate that will fund the next war. This is how you make a permanent imperial public.

And to be crystal clear about it — because I know somebody in the comments is about to try me — two things can be true. The Iranian state under the Islamic Republic has done real harm to its own people, especially women, especially queer people, especially religious minorities, especially the Kurdish community. I am not romanticizing that regime. I have never. What I’m telling you is that American imperialism does not get a pass to bomb 90 million people because their government is repressive. By that logic, half the planet should be on the receiving end of a B2 — including, frankly, us. The repression of a government does not transfer guilt to a population. That is exceptionalism’s most violent sleight of hand, and it is the one being performed in front of children in this clip.

The Lie Inside the Lesson

Now let me come back to the factual claim. “They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”

This is not true. This has not been the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community at any point in the public record. Iran’s nuclear program — to the extent it ever crossed into weapons-grade enrichment — was assessed by U.S. intelligence and the IAEA to be months to years from a weapon, with significant scientific and engineering steps remaining between enrichment and a deliverable warhead. The “two weeks” figure is a rhetorical device. It is a small lie designed to manufacture a big consent. It is the same lie, in a new dress, that we were told about Iraqi WMDs in 2003. Same lie. New target. Same B2s.

And the audience for the lie is what makes it especially obscene. These are children. They cannot vote. They cannot fact-check. They cannot push back. They are a captive audience the way a congregation is a captive audience, and the man at the pulpit knows it. He chose them. He chose the setting. He chose the language. He told them the bombers were beautiful and the people were sick and the math worked out to you are safer because we killed them.

That is not foreign policy. That is liturgy.

Where Do We Go From Here??

So what do we do with this, kinfolks? A few things.

One. Name it. When you see a politician — any politician, of any party — frame a foreign military intervention as a moral certainty in front of children, name the three things at work: hegemony, imperialism, exceptionalism. Use the words. Take them off the shelf and put them in your mouth. The empire requires that its operating system remain unnamed. Naming it is sabotage.

Two. Demand the receipts. Every time somebody tells you about the threat that justified the bombing, ask them where the intelligence assessment is. Ask them where the IAEA report is. Ask them what the diplomatic alternative was. Ask them whose children are not in the protected category. The questions are the resistance.

Three. Connect the budget to the body. That $200 billion is not abstract. It is the childcare you don’t have, the rent you can’t pay, the asthma inhaler your kid can’t afford, and it is also the family in Tehran that no longer exists. Same dollar. Same decision. Same empire. The Southern Black Left has been telling us this since SNCC was running freedom schools in Mississippi while LBJ was burning villages in Vietnam. Fannie Lou Hamer said it plain. Ella Baker said it plain. We have the canon. Read it.

Four. Protect the children — and I mean all of them. The ones in the classroom Trump was talking to. The ones in Tehran. The ones in Gaza. The ones in Beirut. The ones in Bryan, Texas. If your politics protects some children and pours bombs on others, your politics is the problem the children are eventually going to have to clean up.

Education is elevation. This man is a fool. The lesson he taught those kids was the most expensive one this country still teaches: that some lives are protected by being told other lives don’t count. We have to teach a different lesson. We have to be the different lesson. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise.

Why This Work Lives Here

This piece — and every piece in this Substack — exists because independent Black media is one of the last places where this kind of analysis can be done without a corporate hand on the steering wheel. There is no sponsor telling me to soften the imperialism critique. There is no editor telling me to balance the Iranian children against the American ones as if the math were ever balanced. There is no boardroom. There is just me, the work, and y’all.

Public broadcasting is being defunded. Local journalism is being gutted. The educational media that used to do this work — the Mr. Rogers, the PBS specials, the Bill Moyers conversations — has been quietly starved out. What’s left is a void, and somebody has to fill it. That’s what this Substack is. That’s what Education Is Elevation is.

Fewer than 1% of the folks following me across platforms are currently paid subscribers. If you’ve read this far and the analysis matters to you — if you want it to keep coming, deeper, longer, without anybody’s leash on it — become a paid subscriber today. It is the difference between this work continuing and this work disappearing. It is how we build the alternative classroom these children deserve. Research over MeSearch. Always.

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Five Key Takeaways

1. Trump’s classroom remarks operationalized three distinct but linked concepts — American hegemony (who gets to have what), American imperialism (the bombs that enforce hegemony), and American exceptionalism (the mythology that makes both feel righteous). Naming all three is a prerequisite for resisting any of them.

2. The “two weeks from a nuclear weapon” claim is not supported by the public record of U.S. intelligence assessments or IAEA reporting on Iran’s program. It is a rhetorical device structurally identical to the 2003 Iraqi WMD claim — a small lie engineered to manufacture a large consent.

3. Approximately $200 billion tied to the Iran operation and adjacent regional posture represents an explicit opportunity cost. The same sum could fund universal childcare, expanded SNAP, Medicaid expansion, housing vouchers, and renewable energy infrastructure. The military-versus-social-uplift trade-off MLK named at Riverside Church in 1967 is still the binding constraint on American material life in 2026.

4. Describing an entire population of roughly 90 million Iranians as “sick people” is a textbook Orientalist move — the construction of the irrational Eastern other against the rational Western self — and it dehumanizes the target population in advance of the violence inflicted upon them. Two things can be true: the Iranian state is repressive AND the population is not collectively guilty.

5. Children are a captive rhetorical audience and using them as the venue for imperial catechism is a calculated choice. Independent Black-led media is one of the last places where this dynamic can be named without corporate or institutional pressure to soften the critique — which is why the paid-subscriber model is structural, not optional.

WORKS CITED OR REFERENCED

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. The foundational text for understanding how the West constructs the Middle East as inherently irrational and threatening to justify domination. Indispensable for reading the “sick people” framing in Trump’s remarks.

Du Bois, W.E.B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1915. Du Bois’s argument that European imperialism and American racial capitalism are the same project, written on the eve of World War I and still describing 2026.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodney’s framework for understanding how imperial extraction at the periphery enables consumption at the core — the structural skeleton beneath the $200 billion comparison.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. The chapter “Concerning Violence” lays out the manichaean structure of the colonial world. Required for understanding how a president can call an entire population “sick” with a straight face.

King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech delivered at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. King’s explicit naming of the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and the tying of foreign war to domestic poverty. The speech the establishment still pretends he never gave.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Robinson’s racial capitalism framework — the engine that makes both imperialism and domestic austerity profitable to the same class of people.

Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hartman’s analysis of how violence becomes “care” in the imperial and slaveholding imagination — the rhetorical move Trump performs when he frames bombing as protection.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. The intersectional framework that demands we ask which children the imperial budget protects and which children it kills — and refuse the false choice between them.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Bailey’s analysis is essential for tracking how the same exceptionalist mythology that justifies bombing Iran also writes Black women in the U.S. out of the category of “protected children” the empire claims to defend.

Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. The original argument that all the systems of domination are connected — and that the work of any one of them requires the work of all of them. The Southern Black Left’s intersectional north star.

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May 8, 2024: The Day the Cory Booker Beef Got Personal

I want to take y’all back. All the way back. Because folks be acting like my critique of Cory Booker started yesterday, started when he climbed up on the Senate floor for 25 hours, started when the AIPAC numbers dropped, started when he was the lone Democrat to confirm Charles Kushner. Nah. My beef with Cory Booker has a birthday. May 8, 2024. Washington, D.C. A content creator and influencer summit where over a hundred of us got flown in to talk about advocacy and education in the current climate. That’s the day. That’s the room. That’s where it stopped being a policy disagreement and became personal. Let me explain why, and let me walk y’all through every step of the two years that followed, because Research over MeSearch is the standard and the receipts have been receipt-ing this whole time.

Picture the scene. A senator who is a sitting United States senator, a man who has run for president once already and is clearly running again, gets invited to address a room full of content creators — the same content creators his caucus wants to mobilize, the same ones his administration’s pollsters told him he needs, the same ones who have been documenting genocide on a phone faster than the New York Times can edit a headline. And what does he do? He jumps up on a table. Tom Cruise on Oprah, you feel me. A whole ass move. Theatrical. Performative. The body language of a man who thinks he’s about to give a TED Talk to an audience that already knows the punchline.

He starts talking about the significance of new media. He starts talking about how he was born and raised on grassroots movement organizing. He starts talking about how he comes from a background of social justice. The man who voted to ban TikTok stood on a table at a content creator conference and lectured us about new media. Let that marinate. The man who has taken over $700,000 from AIPAC stood in a room full of Black and Brown content creators who had spent the previous seven months documenting white phosphorus from Alabama raining on the children of Rafa, and he tried to tell us where new media came from. Shidd. We knew where new media came from. We were new media. The whole room was new media. We were what he was supposed to be listening to, and instead he was pissing on us telling us it was raining.

Then came the questions. And this is where it got personal for me. Because the question that got asked — by a Black woman content creator who had read the bill, who had quoted the bill, who had named the specific provisions — was simple. Are you willing to call for a ceasefire? That was the question. Not a gotcha. Not a setup. A direct, material question about the position of a sitting United States senator on a sitting genocide. And what did Cory Booker do? He pulled out the tired playbook. He shucked and jobbed. He said, “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill.”

I’m sorry you don’t understand. To a Black woman. Who had read the bill. Who had cited the bill. Who knew more about the supplemental appropriation than half the senators on his committee.

That right there is misogynoir wearing a Senate pin. That right there is what Moya Bailey told us this was going to look like in the era of Black women asking questions in rooms full of cameras. That right there is what Patricia Hill Collins called controlling images deployed as political technology. That right there is what Combahee told us in 1977 — that the convergence of race, gender, and class violence does not require a hood and a rope, that it shows up in a Senate office, that it shows up in a paternalistic dismissal at a content creator summit on May 8, 2024. And let me tell you, Indigenous and Black feminist thought reads that move the same way. White feminism has historically wanted to make this a story about a man being rude. Intersectional analysis tells us that the rudeness was the form, the content was the function — silencing a Black woman who had material expertise on a question of empire because the senator did not want to answer the question she asked.

She didn’t fold. She named Rafa. She named the 600,000 children. She named the white phosphorus. She named the funding pipeline. And what she got back was, “you keep defending Hamas, you would literally just be representing them.” That move is also a technology, y’all. Equating a question about a ceasefire with defense of a terrorist organization. The same equation that got cooked up in the State Department and reheated on cable news and served back at her by a sitting United States senator at a Black creators conference. I’m sorry, that ain’t an answer. That’s a deflection wrapped in a smear.

And then he tried to make Sudan a shield. He said he voted for the supplemental because of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Cory. My brother. Sudan, where 17.1 million women and girls need aid in 2026. Sudan, whose UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Sudan, where Black African Muslim women in Darfur are being raped as a deliberate tactic of war. You want to talk about Sudan? Where is the smoke for Sudan in your voting record? Where is the supplemental for Sudan? Where is the 25-hour speech for Sudan? Don’t weaponize Sudanese women’s suffering to dodge a question about Rafa. Black African lives matter when they are useful as a rhetorical shield, and that’s the whole problem with the way liberal politicians talk about Sudan. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

That was May 8, 2024. That was day one for me. Let me tell y’all what happened next.

A MF THREAD: THE TWO-YEAR TIMELINE

May 8, 2024. D.C. Creator Summit. Booker climbs the table. Booker dismisses a Black woman creator. Booker says, “you don’t understand the bill.” Booker weaponizes Sudan. I leave that room knowing I am going to be on this man’s case for the rest of his political career. Day one.

July 24, 2024. Booker is photographed with Benjamin Netanyahu during the prime minister’s address to a joint session of Congress. The ICC has already moved on arrest warrants. Booker poses anyway. The photo will haunt him for the next two years and he will spend every public appearance after that refusing to call Netanyahu a war criminal. The man literally cannot say the words out loud.

August 2024. The Democratic National Convention. No Palestinian speaker. Booker goes on CNN’s State of the Union and defends the decision, says Kamala Harris is “anguished” over the conflict. Eight months into a documented genocide and the senator wants me to feel his vice president’s feelings. Liberalism is a hell of a drug.

November 2024. Trump wins. The same supplemental Booker voted for, the same posture Booker held, the same equivocation Booker performed, contributes to the depressed Black, Arab, and young voter turnout that delivers the second Trump administration. The “lesser of two evils” math does not work when the lesser evil is also handing the keys to the greater one.

January–February 2025. Trump cabinet confirmation votes. Booker votes to confirm Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Booker votes to confirm John Ratcliffe for CIA Director. Booker votes to confirm Scott Bessent for Treasury. Booker votes to confirm Brooke Rollins for Agriculture. The man who would later filibuster for 25 hours had already handed Trump his cabinet.

March 31 – April 1, 2025. The 25-hour Senate speech. Twenty-five hours and five minutes. Breaks Strom Thurmond’s segregationist filibuster record. Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. The same night the speech ends, Whitaker is confirmed 52-45. The standing ovation was for the performance. The legislation walked past him. I called it political theater on day one.

May 20, 2025. Booker becomes the LONE Democratic yes on Charles Kushner as ambassador to France. The lone yes. Trump’s son-in-law’s daddy. The man Booker had spent 25 hours of empty floor time supposedly opposing. Where is the smoke? Yealp.

June 2025. Booker votes to confirm David Perdue as ambassador to China. Mid-trade war. Mid-tariff chaos. Mid-China-hawk hysteria. Booker hands Trump his Beijing pick.

Summer 2025. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislative package — passes by one vote. Three Democrats had died in office before the vote. Their seats had gone to Republicans. The same Senate where Booker filibustered to nothing. Performance is not legislation, kinfolks.

October 14, 2025. Booker on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. Jennifer Welch asks if he considers Netanyahu a war criminal. Booker refuses to answer. Pivots. Says he is “not going to be outside of the room screaming.” Brother, you spent 25 hours screaming inside the room and accomplished nothing. The screaming wasn’t the problem. The strategy was.

October 16, 2025. Sludge breaks the story: Booker has taken his first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in the Senate. Total haul approaches $877,000 across the cycle when the receipts are added up. The man whose past leaked tapes had him “text messaging back and forth like teenagers” with the AIPAC president now claims a public posture of restraint while pocketing the largest single-issue check of his career.

March 2026. Booker tells Meet the Press he is “definitely not ruling out” a 2028 run. He releases a memoir, Stand. He claims he will refuse single-issue PAC money going forward. The conversion narrative arrives right on time for the primary. Two things can be true: he was on the AIPAC payroll, and he is laundering that history in time for Iowa. I’m not lost in the sauce on this one.

April–May 2026. I write the Booker pieces. I document the 25-hour speech and what it didn’t pass. I document the Kushner confirmation. I document the AIPAC pipeline. I document the Meet the Press conversion. And I tie every single one back to where this beef started: a Black woman in a room in D.C., a senator on a table, a question about Rafa, a deflection wrapped in Sudan.

That’s the timeline. That is two years of receipts. Every accusation he’s made about me being unfair, every aide who has told my mutuals that I’m being too harsh, every “but he had a good speech though” comment — every one of those moments traces back to a single question I keep asking. Where is the smoke, Cory? Where is the smoke?

The Black Liberal vs. The Black Leftist on This Question

A lot of folks want to treat this like Black-on-Black conflict. It is not. This is a distinction the Black radical tradition has been making since SNCC, since Ella Baker, since the Southern Negro Youth Congress in Richmond in 1937, since Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative, since the Combahee River Collective. There is a difference between a Black liberal and a Black leftist. Cory Booker is a Black liberal. I am a Black leftist. The Black liberal believes the system can be reformed and that a seat at the table is the goal. The Black leftist believes the table itself is the problem. The Black liberal will jump up on the table at a content creator conference. The Black leftist asks whose table is it, who built it, who is being eaten on top of it.

This is not a war. This is strategy. Cedric Robinson taught us that racial capitalism is not an aberration of an otherwise functional system — it is the engine of surplus value extraction itself. Frank Wilderson reminds us that gratuitous violence against Black flesh is constitutive, not incidental. Walter Rodney taught us how the same diplomatic posture that calls a ceasefire “antisemitic” abroad funds the police that occupy our neighborhoods at home. Angela Davis named Ferguson and Palestine in the same breath because the materials are the same — tear gas from the same companies, training from the same institutions, surveillance from the same vendors. The Black liberal will tell you these are separate fights. The Black leftist will show you the receipts proving they are one fight.

And here is the thing about the South, which is where I come from and where I do my work — Booker’s brand of liberal politics tends to pathologize the South. The Black creators he was dismissing on May 8, 2024 included a lot of Southerners. A lot of folks from Houston, from Atlanta, from Memphis, from New Orleans, from Bryan TX. We come from the soil where Black radical organizing was born. Houston had a Black Panther chapter. So did Dallas. So did Memphis. So did NOLA. Black Workers for Justice came out of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1982. The Southern Negro Youth Congress was a Richmond institution. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm was a Mississippi cooperative. Late MLK was a leftist. Huey Newton was from Monroe, Louisiana. When a coastal liberal walks into a room full of Southern content creators and tells us we don’t understand the bill, the disrespect lands on top of three generations of organizing that built the politics he is now performing. We are not lost in the sauce. We are the sauce.

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Where We Go From Here

So here is what I’m asking. When the 2028 primary comes — and it is coming — I want y’all to remember May 8, 2024. I want y’all to remember the table. I want y’all to remember the Black woman who asked the question and the senator who told her she didn’t understand. I want y’all to remember the Kushner vote. I want y’all to remember the 25-hour speech that passed zero bills. I want y’all to remember the $877,000. I want y’all to remember that this is what political theater looks like when it costs us nothing to perform and costs the rest of the world everything to absorb.

Research over MeSearch. The receipts are not vibes. The receipts are votes. And the votes are on the record. Education is elevation, kinfolks. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise — I will be on this man’s case until he is honest about it or out of the room. Shout out to Newark. Shout out to every Black woman content creator who was in that room on May 8, 2024 and held the line. We saw what they did. We never forgot.

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

This Cory Booker timeline you just read is exactly the kind of work that does not exist anywhere else. Two years of receipts. Voting records cross-referenced with public statements. A Black radical tradition lens on a Black liberal senator who is about to ask for your vote in 2028. Cable news will not give you this. The Times will not give you this. I will. Become a paid subscriber and let’s keep building the room where the receipts live.

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* The beef has a birthday. May 8, 2024, at a D.C. content creator summit, Cory Booker climbed a table to praise new media after voting to ban TikTok, dismissed a Black woman creator with “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill” when she asked about a Rafa ceasefire, and tried to weaponize Sudan as a humanitarian shield to dodge the question.

* The Sudan deflection is a tell. Sudan is real. 17.1 million women and girls need aid. The UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Booker has done nothing material for Sudan. Naming Sudan to dodge a question about Rafa is using Black African suffering as a rhetorical prop, which is itself a form of the same colonial logic.

* The 25-hour speech and the Kushner vote are the same record. Twenty-five hours of empty floor time passed zero bills. The lone Democratic yes on Charles Kushner happened weeks later. Performance and capitulation are not opposites — they are the same political product packaged for two different audiences.

* The AIPAC pipeline is the structural story. $877,000 in single-issue PAC money across the cycle, including the senator’s first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in office, then a conversion narrative announced in time for a 2028 primary. The money explains the votes. The conversion explains the brand.

* Black liberalism and Black leftism are not the same thing. A Black liberal will jump on the table. A Black leftist asks whose table it is. The distinction is not personal — it is strategic, historical, and rooted in a Southern Black radical tradition that Booker’s coastal liberalism keeps trying to erase.

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RELATED READINGS

* Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. — The foundational text on misogynoir as a specific analytic. Essential for reading the May 8, 2024 dismissal as political technology, not improvisation.

* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000 (revised edition). — Controlling images and the matrix of domination. The framework for how “you don’t understand the bill” functions as a controlling image, not a remark.

* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. — The founding text of Black feminist intersectional politics. Proof that not all Black feminism is liberal. Necessary for the Black liberal / Black leftist distinction.

* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 1991. — Intersectionality’s foundational legal-theoretical text. Frames why a Black woman creator’s question is structurally distinct from any other question in that room.

* hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. — Hooks’s foundational critique of how Black women’s political analysis is systematically dismissed. Direct line to the May 8 moment.

* Davis, Angela Y. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Haymarket Books, 2016. — The essential text linking Black liberation to Palestinian liberation. Direct framework for why Booker’s Rafa-to-Sudan pivot cannot stand.

* Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 1983 (2000 reprint). — Racial capitalism as the engine, not the aberration. Frames the AIPAC pipeline as structural rather than personal.

* Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010. — Afropessimist analysis of gratuitous violence and the fungibility of Black flesh. Reads Booker’s deflection as constitutive, not exceptional.

* Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford University Press, 1997. — The genealogy of how Black suffering gets transmuted into political currency for others. Background for the Sudan-as-shield analysis.

* Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987. — Foundational for the analysis of how Black women in that D.C. room were positioned to absorb the senator’s condescension.

* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. — The Pan-Africanist economic history that exposes selective humanitarian rhetoric about African suffering.

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

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

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

Y’all know I don’t be playing about Research Over MeSearch. So before anybody tries to make this about feelings, let me put the receipts on the table first.

National Center for Education Statistics, 1997. Government data. Over 20,000 households surveyed. The finding? Kids in grades 6–12 whose fathers are highly involved in their schools have 46 percent higher odds of pulling mostly A’s compared to kids whose fathers are not involved. Moderate involvement? Still a 21 percent boost. Same study showed children whose fathers are involved are significantly less likely to ever repeat a grade. That is not a vibe. That is the federal government’s own numbers.

Then fast forward to 2024. National Assessment of Educational Progress drops the latest Nation’s Report Card. Two-thirds of fourth graders cannot read at proficient level. A third of eighth graders cannot read at NAEP Basic — the largest percentage ever recorded. Reading scores have not recovered from the pandemic. Math is bleeding at the bottom. The Secretary of Education herself said nearly half of high school seniors test below basic in math and reading.

Let that marinate for a second. The country is failing our babies academically at a historic level. And we have decades of data saying one of the cheapest, most powerful interventions is a daddy walking into the building and being seen. Not a check. Not a text. Physical presence.

So when I tell y’all this post is for the dads who are actually present, I mean it. If you a sorry-ass daddy who not active in your kid’s life, this not for you. This for the kinfolks who showing up. And for the ones thinking about it who need that final push.

Five Things That Happen When Dads Show Up at the Schoolhouse

1. Higher Grades — and Not by a Little

That 46 percent number from NCES? That ain’t a margin of error. That is a structural difference. Even after researchers controlled for income, parent education, family structure, and a gang of other variables, fathers’ school involvement remained a significant independent predictor of kids getting mostly A’s. Reading and math are where the biggest gains show up — which matters because reading is foundational to everything else.

And here is the part the data nerds don’t always say out loud: this effect held across socioeconomic groups. White, Black, Native, Hispanic, rich, working class. Daddy showing up matters.

2. Less Grade Repetition

Statistical simulations using Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data show that if low-income resident fathers were as involved in school as high-income fathers, the gap in grade repetition between high and low SES children would drop by 23 percent. Father residence alone is associated with a 23 percent lower likelihood of a child repeating a grade.

Translation: daddies showing up moves the needle on whether your baby is on grade level. And in 2026 America, with reading scores at historic lows, you do not want your kid getting held back. That is a death sentence for confidence, social development, and long-term graduation odds. Research over MeSearch — the data is clear.

3. Fewer Behavior Issues and Disciplinary Actions

Active fathers correlate with reduced classroom disruptions. The NCES data shows reduced odds of suspension and expulsion when parents are highly involved. And this matters extra for Black and Brown kids, who get suspended and expelled at rates 2 to 3 times their white peers for the same exact behaviors. When a daddy is a known face in that building, teachers and administrators think twice before pulling the disciplinary trigger. That is not a theory. That is how institutions work.

And every accusation is a confession — the same school system that complains about Black male absence from school buildings is the same system that calls security when Black daddies do show up. Two things can be true.

4. Greater Confidence and Stress Tolerance

WatchDOGS — Dads of Great Students — is a program in over 8,800 schools nationwide. Started in 1998 in Springdale, Arkansas. Real teachers have reported that the mere presence of a WatchDOG dad dramatically reduces reports of bullying. The kids whose daddies show up build emotional resilience and higher self-esteem. And it ain’t just their kids. The whole classroom shifts.

I lived this today. My second-grade son and fourth-grade daughter’s school had me come in as a WatchDOG. Every teacher I talked to said the same thing: the energy of the room changed when a dad was in there. Not just my kids. The whole classroom. That is the ripple. That is the thing the spreadsheet cannot fully capture.

5. Stronger Cognitive Skills

Research published in NCES studies and across multiple meta-analyses shows fathers tend to play a distinct role in cognitive stimulation — providing information, modeling problem-solving, expanding vocabulary through different conversational patterns than moms typically do. Researchers have hypothesized that maternal involvement may be most beneficial for the social and emotional adjustment of children to school, while paternal involvement may be most important for academic achievement. Not a hierarchy. A complement. Two things can be true.

Now Let’s Talk About Black Daddies Specifically — Because the Lies Run Deep

Here is where I gotta put on my Research Over MeSearch hat extra tight, because the narrative around Black fathers is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history. And every accusation, like I always say, is a confession.

The 2013 CDC National Health Statistics Report — federal government data, not a Black studies pamphlet — found that Black fathers who live with their children are MORE involved in daily caregiving than white or Hispanic fathers. Seventy percent of Black fathers in the home bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped their children use the toilet every day, compared to 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. Black fathers in the home were more likely to help with homework every day — 41 percent, versus 28 percent for white fathers and 29 percent for Hispanic fathers.

And here is the part that should make every “absent Black father” myth-peddler choke on their grits: even Black fathers who do not live with their children outperformed their white and Latino counterparts on multiple involvement measures. More than 50 percent of nonresident Black fathers talked to their school-age children about their day several times per week or more, compared to 34 percent of nonresident white dads and 23 percent of nonresident Latino fathers. Nonresident Black dads were more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to host story time every day.

So where did the mythology come from? Cedric Robinson would tell you: racial capitalism needs a Black pathology story to justify itself. If the story is “Black families are broken from the inside,” then mass incarceration looks like a response instead of a cause. Then job market discrimination looks like a consequence instead of a driver. Then redlining and school underfunding look like accidents instead of policy. The absent Black father myth is not a description of reality. It is a political tool.

Now, two things can be true. Black fathers are more likely to live apart from their children — 44 percent versus 21 percent for white fathers, per the CDC. But the data tells us why: mass incarceration disproportionately targets Black men, economic instability driven by structural racism limits cohabitation, and family court systems built in a Moynihan-era frame still treat Black fathers as suspects rather than parents. The brothers who are present are MORE present than their peers. The brothers who are not present are largely not present because the state has made it materially difficult to be. That is racial capitalism doing what racial capitalism does. Walter Rodney told us how this works. Saidiya Hartman told us how it feels.

So for the Black daddies reading this — y’all already showing up at rates this country pretends you don’t. Now the work is doubling down. Going from the kitchen and the basketball court into the school building. Bringing the same energy you bring to homework at the table into the parent-teacher conference. Because the school system is not built for our babies, and your physical presence inside that building changes the calculation for every teacher, every administrator, every other kid watching.

And for the dads who are not Black reading this — y’all gotta stop spreading the absent Black father narrative. Period. The CDC has been telling you for over a decade. The fact that the story persists is the confession. Now do better.

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The 2026 Reality Check

Look at what we are working with. NAEP 2024 results, released in 2025: 33 percent of eighth graders read below NAEP Basic. Forty percent of fourth graders read below NAEP Basic — the highest since 2002. Forty-five percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in math — the highest ever. Thirty-two percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in reading — the highest ever. The Acting Commissioner of NCES literally said scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows.

We are watching a generation get academically gutted in real time. And we have research from 1997 — almost 30 years old — that has been telling us the same simple thing: when daddies show up at school, kids do better. Not maybe. Not sometimes. Consistently. Across races. Across income levels. Across grade levels.

So if you a present daddy reading this, the call is simple. Go to the school. Volunteer once a semester at minimum. Sign up for WatchDOGS if they have it. Show up to one parent-teacher conference per year, no excuses. Eat lunch with your kid one day. Read to a kindergarten class. Be the face the teachers know.

Because consciousness precedes transformation. And the consciousness y’all gotta develop is that your kid’s school is a battlefield — for their literacy, for their confidence, for their future. And daddies on the battlefield is research-backed strategy. Not a feel-good talking point.

Key Takeaways

For the folks who scrolled to the bottom — the receipts in one frame.

* 46% higher odds of A’s. Federal NCES data shows children in grades 6–12 with highly involved fathers have 46 percent higher adjusted odds of getting mostly A’s, even controlling for income, parent education, and family structure.

* 23% drop in grade repetition gap. If low-SES resident fathers were as school-involved as high-SES fathers, the socioeconomic gap in grade repetition would shrink by 23 percent.

* Reading crisis is real and historic. NAEP 2024: 40 percent of 4th graders read below NAEP Basic — highest since 2002. 33 percent of 8th graders below NAEP Basic — highest ever recorded.

* Black fathers in the home are MORE involved. 2013 CDC data: 70 percent of resident Black fathers handle daily caregiving every day vs. 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. The absent Black father narrative is propaganda.

* Even nonresident Black fathers outperform. More than 50 percent of nonresident Black dads talk to their school-age kids about their day several times a week or more — vs. 34 percent of nonresident white dads.

* WatchDOGS works. In 8,800+ schools nationally. Principals consistently report bullying drops just from a father figure being physically present in the building.

* This is structural, not symbolic. The mass incarceration system, biased family courts, and structural unemployment make Black father physical separation a state-engineered outcome — not a cultural failing. Two things can be true.

* The action is simple. If you a present daddy: one volunteer day per semester, one parent-teacher conference per year, one lunch visit. Consciousness precedes transformation.

CITED SOURCES

Nord, C. W., Brimhall, D., & West, J. (1997). Fathers’ Involvement in Their Children’s Schools. NCES 98-091. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics.

The foundational federal study. Source of the “46% higher odds of mostly A’s” finding and the grade repetition data. Drew from the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Controlled for family structure, parent education, and socioeconomic factors. Still the most-cited federal study on father school involvement.

Jones, J., & Mosher, W. D. (2013). Fathers’ Involvement With Their Children: United States, 2006–2010. National Health Statistics Reports, Number 71. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC study that destroyed the absent Black father myth with federal data. Found resident Black fathers were the MOST involved in daily caregiving across all race groups. Also found nonresident Black fathers outperformed their nonresident white and Latino counterparts on multiple involvement measures. Every American who repeats the absent Black father narrative should be required to read this report first.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2025). The Nation’s Report Card: 2024 NAEP Reading and Mathematics Assessments. Institute of Education Sciences.

The 2024 NAEP data showing 33 percent of 8th graders below NAEP Basic in reading (largest ever), 40 percent of 4th graders below NAEP Basic in reading (highest since 2002), and 45 percent of 12th graders below NAEP Basic in math (highest ever). The crisis context this entire

EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER

If this piece moved you and you a paid subscriber on Education Is Elevation, the next section is for you. I drop a six-month, month-by-month action plan for daddies who wanna go from theoretical involvement to actual physical presence in their kid’s school building. Includes:

* Month-by-month checklist (volunteering, conferences, events, advocacy)

* The ‘Daddy Diplomacy’ framework for navigating teachers and administrators when the school system is biased against your kid

* How to vet your kid’s school: ten questions every present father should be asking the principal

* Black Daddy Specific: how to push back when school staff treat your presence as suspicious instead of supportive

*

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I asked Dr. Dontá Morrison a question I knew was going to be uncomfortable. I told him it was uncomfortable on purpose. When somebody says “that’s gay as AIDS,” what is that? And he didn’t blink. He called it ignorance at its finest. He pointed out that half the people still using the phrase don’t even know what AIDS stands for — Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. He pointed out that if you’re still saying AIDS in 2026, you’re stuck in 1986. You equating a virus to a demographic of human beings. That’s the receipts on how shallow the thinking still is.

The conversation I had with Dr. Morrison wasn’t really about a slur. It was about what that slur reveals — that we are operating with an archaic, decades-old understanding of HIV inside Black communities, while a federal administration is actively dismantling the funding that keeps Black folks alive. Two things are true at the same time, and both of them are killing us.

HIV Is Not AIDS — And Knowing the Difference Matters

Before I go further, let me handle some basic education, because Dr. Morrison was right — folks don’t know. HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus. It’s a virus that attacks your immune system. AIDS, on the other hand, is the most advanced stage of HIV infection, a syndrome that develops only when HIV has gone untreated long enough to severely compromise the immune system. With consistent antiretroviral therapy, a person living with HIV today can suppress the virus to undetectable levels, live a full lifespan. Undetectable equals untransmittable — U=U is settled science.

Saying “AIDS” the way folks said it in the eighties is not just rude. It’s wrong and stigmatizing and pathological It collapses a manageable chronic condition back into a death sentence in your mouth, and that linguistic time travel does material harm. It keeps people from testing. It keeps people from disclosing. It keeps Black women from asking their men hard questions. It keeps the church from doing the work. Education is elevation. Same pill Magic Johnson takes, regular folks take. You do not need Magic Johnson money to survive HIV-positive in 2026. Period.

The Trump Cuts Are Not Abstract

Dr. Morrison is a public health doctor. He earned that degree. And last year, he woke up one morning to a phone call telling him his program had been cut overnight. The federal government, under this administration, signed away the funding for the work he had been doing for over twenty years — sexual health and HIV education in the Black community, with a particular focus on the Black church. One signature, no notice, gone. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a brother who put in the work, doing the work without unemployment, watching his livelihood get dismantled in the name of America First.

And the receipts on this are public. The Trump administration came into office in January 2025 and immediately froze foreign aid. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PEPFAR — got hit. The Office of Management and Budget released only about half of the $6 billion Congress appropriated for PEPFAR’s 2025 funding. Nearly 70,000 community healthcare workers were laid off in 2025 according to the PEPFAR data release, and many specialized outreach services were shut down. The number of PEPFAR-funded HIV tests declined by 14 million in 2025 compared to the year before — a 17 percent decrease. As of this week, the administration is now trying to divert another $2 billion in global health funding to pay for the shutdown of USAID itself.

Let that marinate. They are taking money meant to keep people alive and using it to pay the legal bills for dismantling the agency that was keeping people alive. Every accusation is a confession. They told us they were going to gut foreign aid. They told us American leadership in global health was over. We just didn’t believe them because we were taught the United States was the leader. And here is where I have to give the receipts on what we are actually losing.

The United States Was the Global Leader on HIV/AIDS — On Purpose

I want y’all to understand something. The U.S. did not become the global leader in HIV/AIDS research and response by accident. It happened through deliberate, bipartisan policy across multiple administrations, and Black-led advocacy was central to forcing it to happen. The U.S. first provided funding to address the global HIV epidemic in 1986. In 1999, President Clinton announced the Leadership and Investment in Fighting an Epidemic Initiative to address HIV in 14 African countries and India. Then in 2003, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR.

PEPFAR is not a small thing. As of August 2024, PEPFAR has provided cumulative funding of $120 billion for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research, making it the largest commitment by any nation focused on a single disease in history. It is credited with saving more than 26 million lives over the past two decades and preventing millions of HIV infections, particularly in Africa. PEPFAR accounts for more than 90 percent of PrEP initiations globally. Translation: nine out of every ten people on the planet getting access to HIV prevention medicine were getting it through American funding.

That is the program this administration is choking out. The administration’s FY 2026 budget request includes a $1.9 billion reduction for PEPFAR. As of February 2026, only 16 country agreements have been completed, and overall current pledges will result in a $4.5 billion decrease in U.S. funding for PEPFAR countries over a 5-year period. Notably, South Africa — the country with the highest HIV burden globally — has not been included. Read that again. The country where the most Black people in the world are dying of this disease is not at the table. That is not an accident. That is policy.

The Global Becomes the Local — Because We Are the Same People

Some of y’all might be reading this thinking, “That’s overseas, that ain’t us.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. Pan-Africanism is not a vibe — it’s an analysis. The same logic that pulls funding from clinics in Lagos and Kampala pulls funding from clinics in Atlanta and Jackson. The same administration that froze PEPFAR also went after Title X, also went after CDC HIV prevention budgets, also went after community-based programs serving Black queer folks here in the States. Dr. Morrison’s program was domestic. The brothers and sisters who lost their jobs were here. The Black women who are not getting the workshops, not getting the lunch and learns, not getting the pamphlets at their hair salons — they are here.

And the disparities in this country are already brutal. Compared to White non-Hispanic heterosexually-active persons, Black heterosexually-active people have a 20-fold higher HIV diagnosis rate. A 20-fold higher rate. Two thousand percent. Among African American women, 92 percent of new HIV diagnoses were attributed to heterosexual contact. Dr. Morrison hammered this point and I want to drag it into the light: stop blaming the down low. Stop blaming gay men. There are cisgender heterosexual men contracting HIV and passing it to cisgender heterosexual women, and the gay community has nothing to do with that transmission chain. Two things can be true. Black gay men carry their own disproportionate burden. Black straight women are catching HIV from Black straight men. Both of these things are happening simultaneously, and both require funded, culturally specific intervention.

The Faithful and the Forgotten

This is where Dr. Morrison’s work cuts deepest. He is the author of “Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church,” and the title alone tells you everything. The Black church is the most powerful institution we built ourselves. It was the only institution White society left relatively alone, which made it the staging ground for abolition, the civil rights movement, and Black social life as we know it. And that same church has, in too many corners, become a place where Black queer folks — particularly Black men who have sex with men — experience spiritual violence dressed up as scripture.

Dr. Morrison made a point in our conversation that I’m still chewing on. He said a lot of folks are quietly rooting for Trump’s HIV cuts because they don’t like gay people, because they still associate HIV with homosexuality, and because they have a skewed approach to Christianity that supports white supremacy. Read that one more time. The same Black folks who claim they want liberation are clapping for the dismantling of the very programs that keep their cousins, their aunties, their nephews, their sisters alive — because they think God is anti-gay. That is theology imported from the same plantation logic that taught our ancestors that their humanity was conditional. Where is the smoke for that?

Faithful and Forgotten is not an attack on the Black church. It’s a call for the Black church to do what it claims to do — to be the moral conscience of the community, to leave the ninety-nine and go after the one. You can’t preach Jesus and silently celebrate a policy that cuts off the antiretrovirals keeping your nephew alive. You can’t say you love Black people and only love the Black people whose sexuality you approve of. Two things can be true. The Black church is sacred. The Black church is also implicated. We grow by holding both.

What Dr. Morrison Is Still Doing — Without the Money

Here is the part that should hit every reader in the chest. Dr. Morrison lost his funding. He didn’t lose his calling. He compared himself to a TSA worker — pissed off, unpaid, but still showing up because lives are still at risk. He’s still hosting conversations. He’s still doing free interviews like the one we just did. He’s still writing books. He’s still showing up at churches and conferences and community spaces because he understands that without the money, all we got is word of mouth, and word of mouth is what built every Black liberation movement we have ever had.

Word of mouth has a ceiling, and that ceiling is real. He told me directly: without the money, we can’t host the workshops, we can’t host the conferences, we can’t have the virtual lunch and learns, we ain’t got no raffle tickets, we ain’t got no Target gift cards. People show up to information sessions partly because there’s something tangible attached. Y’all who have done community organizing know exactly what he means. The defunding doesn’t just kill the big infrastructure. It kills the small incentives that get a sister in her sixties to walk through the door of a church basement and learn that HIV is not what she thought it was when she was twenty-five. That’s what’s been stolen.

What This Moment Demands of Us

Dr. Morrison left me with a charge I want to pass directly to y’all. Black folks need to wake up and realize we are living in a country that is not for us. The performative outrage at one man — Trump — is a distraction. As Dr. Morrison said, this is not 100 percent about him; he is one person, but he is supported by individuals that think like him, and that group think is taking us all backwards. The folks rooting for these cuts because they think God is doing it through Trump need to be confronted, not coddled. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. So is bad theology.

So here’s what I’m asking. Get tested. Get your people tested. Stop saying “AIDS” when you mean HIV. Stop saying “gay as AIDS,” period. Read “Faithful and Forgotten.” Talk to your church about HIV like it’s a community health issue, not a sin problem — because that’s what it is. Talk to the Black women in your life about how transmission actually works, because the data says they are catching it from cisgender heterosexual men, not from a phantom down-low boogeyman. Support the doctors and educators like Dr. Morrison who are doing the work without the funding. And the next time somebody tells you the federal government cutting global health funding doesn’t affect you, hand them this article.

Same pill Magic Johnson takes, I take. Same pill regular folks take. The science exists. The medicine exists. What’s being dismantled is access. And access is the whole game.

Learn more about Dr. Dontá Morrison’s work, his book Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church, and his ongoing HIV education and advocacy at www.dontamorrison.com

Follow him on YouTube to learn more and follow Dr. Morrisons work. https://www.youtube.com/@dontamorrison

5 Key Takeaways

1. HIV is not AIDS, and using “AIDS” as a slur is decades-out-of-date misinformation that actively harms Black communities.

HIV is a manageable chronic condition with treatment. AIDS is the advanced stage that develops only when HIV goes untreated. Undetectable equals untransmittable. The vocabulary you use shapes the testing, disclosure, and treatment behavior of everyone around you.

2. The Trump administration’s dismantling of HIV funding is killing people — domestically and globally — and the data backs that up.

PEPFAR-funded HIV testing dropped by 14 million in 2025, nearly 70,000 community healthcare workers were laid off, and OMB has slow-walked half of the $6 billion Congress appropriated. Domestic programs like Dr. Morrison’s were cut overnight. This is structural violence with a budget line.

3. The United States became the global leader on HIV/AIDS through deliberate, bipartisan policy — and that leadership is being dismantled in real time.

PEPFAR has provided $120 billion in cumulative funding since 2003, saved 26 million lives, and accounts for 90 percent of global PrEP initiations. The administration’s FY 2026 budget cuts it by $1.9 billion and excludes South Africa — the country with the highest HIV burden globally — from new agreements.

4. Black women carry a disproportionate HIV burden, and the transmission story is being told wrong.

92 percent of new HIV diagnoses among Black women come from heterosexual contact. Black heterosexually-active people have a 20-fold higher diagnosis rate than their White counterparts. The down-low narrative is a distraction from the actual transmission chain: cisgender heterosexual men passing HIV to cisgender heterosexual women.

5. The Black church is both a critical resource and a site of harm — and Dr. Dontá Morrison’s “Faithful and Forgotten” demands we hold both at once.

Eurocentric interpretations of Christianity have made the Black church a place of spiritual violence for Black queer folks, while simultaneously being one of the few institutions positioned to do mass HIV education. Two things

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Let me be transparent with y’all. The conversation you just read with Dr. Dontá Morrison happened because two independent Black workers — one a public health doctor, one a media educator — sat down to do work that used to be funded by federal dollars and is no longer funded by anybody. He lost his program. The corporate media is not covering Black HIV stigma with this level of cultural specificity. The federal government is actively defunding the prevention infrastructure. The void is real, and it is being filled by people like Dr. Morrison and people like me, out of pocket and on principle.

If this piece taught you something, sharpened your analysis, or gave you ammunition to use in your own community, I’m asking you to convert that value into material support

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

CITED SOURCES

Morrison, Dontá. Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church. 2025.

U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Global Health Security and Diplomacy. “The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).” state.gov/pepfar.

Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF). “The Trump Administration’s Foreign Aid Review: Status of PEPFAR.” October 2025.

CNN. “The Trump administration is trying to divert $2 billion in global health funding to pay for USAID shutdown.” May 2026.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “Health Disparities in Black or African American People” and “HIV Among African Americans” fact sheets.

amfAR (Foundation for AIDS Research) and UNAIDS. Reports on PEPFAR Stop Work Order Impact, 2025–2026.

The Leaflet. “How US Funding Cuts Created a Double Threat to HIV Progress in Africa.” April 2026.

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On May 4, 2026, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. According to reporting, they put up at least $10 million to sponsor the event, with some sources citing the figure as high as $20 million. The night raised a record $42 million for the Costume Institute, the highest fundraising total in the gala’s history, with tech money powering most of it. This was the first year a tech figure served as lead sponsor, and the first year multiple major tech companies bought tables at the same event.

Now I want y’all to sit with that. Sit with the choreography of it. A man whose company is named in lawsuits, congressional reports, and human rights investigations from Tel Aviv to Tukwila buys himself a seat at the table where the cultural elite gathers to celebrate themselves, and the press treats it like fashion week. Mark Ruffalo collaborated on a viral video, Olivia Rodrigo skipped her usual carpet, and an organized direct action group projected images onto Bezos’ own $120 million Madison Square Park condo. The protest centered Mary Hill, a 72-year-old Amazon warehouse worker living paycheck to paycheck while battling cancer. They called the contraprogramming the Ball Without Billionaires. That’s the smoke that should be everywhere. But the algorithm decided dresses were more important.

Two things can be true. Lauren Sánchez can wear Schiaparelli inspired by Madame X and that be aesthetically interesting AND the entire spectacle can be obscene given who funded it and what that funder’s empire is doing on three continents. Both. At the same time. Y’all gotta build the muscle to hold both.

Receipts: The Bezos Tax Record

Now let me give you what the Chop Up Show been built on. Receipts. Not vibes. Not feelings. Documented, reported, sourced receipts from journalists who risked their careers to put this in the public record.

In 2021, ProPublica obtained over fifteen years of IRS data covering thousands of the wealthiest Americans. What they found should have ended the conversation about who is and isn’t paying their fair share in this country. Forever. According to that reporting, Jeff Bezos paid zero dollars in federal income tax in 2007, and he did it again in 2011. In the year he paid zero in 2011, he was already worth an estimated $18 billion. He even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. A welfare credit. For his children. While being one of the richest men in the world.

And before somebody runs in here with the “well that was a long time ago” dodge, let me hit you with the bigger picture. From 2006 to 2018, ProPublica found Bezos’ wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in personal federal taxes. That works out to a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent on the actual growth of his fortune. ProPublica’s analysis of the 2014 to 2018 window pegged his “true tax rate” at 0.98 percent. Less than one percent. And during that same period, the typical American household in his age bracket paid more in taxes than they accumulated in wealth.

Let me say that one more time for the folks in the back. Y’all are paying taxes faster than y’all are building wealth, while Bezos is building wealth faster than the federal government can tax it. That is not a glitch in the system. That IS the system.

How the Trick Works: The “Buy, Borrow, Die” Playbook

Now somebody finna ask, “Well how is this legal?” And that’s the right question. Because the legality is the indictment. The strategy has a name in tax policy circles. It’s called “buy, borrow, die,” and it works like this.

Step one, BUY. Bezos kept his Amazon salary at roughly $80,000 per year for two decades. He told the New York Times he asked the compensation committee not to give him any comp because he would have “felt icky” about it. Translation, taking salary triggers ordinary income tax. Holding stock does not. So he held stock. The federal government can’t tax wealth that hasn’t been converted to income.

Step two, BORROW. When he needs to fund a yacht, a rocket company, a Madison Square Park penthouse, or a Met Gala sponsorship, he doesn’t sell his stock and trigger capital gains. He borrows against it. Loans are not income. The IRS doesn’t tax loans. Wall Street will hand a man like Bezos credit at rates a school teacher trying to fix her transmission cannot dream of. He lives like a king and pays like a peasant.

Step three, DIE. Under current US tax law, when stock is passed to heirs at death, the cost basis steps up to the value at the time of death. Decades of unrealized gains, untaxed during his lifetime, get wiped clean for his children. The dynastic wealth gets passed down with the federal tax bill effectively zeroed out.

That is the loophole. That is how a man worth roughly $239 billion as of late 2025 has spent multiple years paying nothing while a single mother working at a Whole Foods owned by his company gets her wages garnished if she falls behind on a $200 utility bill. Every accusation is a confession, and every time a politician calls poor people lazy while protecting this loophole, they are confessing whose interests they actually serve.

Project Nimbus: Where Cloud Computing Meets Genocide

Now let’s talk about where some of that untaxed wealth goes. Because Bezos isn’t hoarding $239 billion under a mattress. He’s deploying it. And one of the places it’s deployed is a contract called Project Nimbus.

In 2021, Amazon and Google jointly signed a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government to provide cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning services to Israeli government agencies, including the Ministry of Defense and the IDF. According to investigative reporting from +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian published in late 2025 and early 2026, leaked Israeli Finance Ministry documents revealed extraordinary contractual conditions Israel imposed on the two American tech giants, including obligations to secretly notify Israeli officials if foreign courts ordered the companies to hand over data, and a clause barring Google and Amazon from limiting or revoking Israeli government access even when Israeli conduct conflicted with the companies’ own policies. Microsoft reportedly competed for the same contract and refused those demands. Google and Amazon said yes.

Internal Israeli procurement documents reportedly mandate that Israeli defense manufacturers, including Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, purchase cloud services from Amazon and Google. That means the technical infrastructure underwriting the surveillance, targeting, and data analysis used during what United Nations experts and multiple governments have called a genocide in Gaza is running, in part, on AWS servers. Servers funded with money the federal government did not collect because Bezos’ effective tax rate is functionally a rounding error.

Inside Amazon, over 300 workers signed an internal letter calling on CEO Andy Jassy to end the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus. They were ignored. Inside Google, more than 90 workers signed a similar letter, and dozens were fired for sit-in protests. They were ignored. The fungibility of Black and Brown life across the diaspora is not theoretical. Wilderson and Hartman have been telling us for decades that the structures built to render certain bodies disposable do not stay confined to one group. Project Nimbus is the contract receipt for that thesis.

Amazon Is Slavery Fast Forward 400 Years

A speaker at the Ball Without Billionaires action put it plainly. Amazon is slavery fast forward 400 years. The pickers in the warehouse, that’s the actual job title for the workers who fill the boxes, are running the same productivity logic our ancestors ran in cotton fields. Quotas. Surveillance. Bodies as units of output. Bathroom breaks regulated to the second. Now with robots, metrics, data dashboards, and algorithmic write-ups, but the core process is unchanged.

And let’s talk about the union fight, because this is where the rubber meets the road. Workers at the JFK8 facility in Staten Island voted to unionize in April 2022 with the Amazon Labor Union. Amazon refused to bargain. They challenged the election. They tied it up in court. As of recent reporting, it took over 1,500 days for the National Labor Relations Board to issue a bargaining order. Four years. Four years a billionaire used the legal system, funded in large part by tax revenue he didn’t pay, to stall the constitutional right of workers to collectively bargain. The same Bezos who can write a $20 million check for a costume gala in one night cannot find his way to a bargaining table in four years. That is not an oversight. That is strategy.

Where is the smoke for that? Where is the Wall Street Journal opinion page? Where is the cable news outrage cycle? Y’all save that energy for women on TANF buying a birthday cake.

ICE, Ring, and the Surveillance Architecture

Then there’s the surveillance side of the empire. Amazon Web Services hosts the Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology system, known as HART, which is designed to store biometric data including iris scans, voiceprints, palmprints, and in some cases DNA samples on hundreds of millions of people. AWS also provides technical infrastructure to Palantir, a Peter Thiel company that contracts directly with ICE. Documents obtained by the Project on Government Oversight showed Amazon executives meeting with ICE officials in 2018 to pitch Rekognition, the company’s facial recognition product, for immigration enforcement uses.

In late 2025 and early 2026, public scrutiny intensified over a planned partnership between Amazon’s Ring and Flock Safety, a license-plate-reader company whose data is widely accessible to ICE through local law enforcement partners. After weeks of organized backlash, including a viral Super Bowl ad controversy and public pressure from Senator Ron Wyden’s office, Ring announced in February 2026 that it was canceling the planned Flock integration. Pressure works. Organizing works. The same playbook your grandparents used in Montgomery still works. They just don’t want you to know it does.

Two things can be true. Ring may not have a direct ICE contract, AND the architecture Amazon has built creates downstream surveillance access that immigration authorities have repeatedly tapped through local police partnerships. Both. At the same time. Don’t let the corporate denial be the end of the analysis. Follow the data trail.

Conservative Contradictions and Welfare Queens

The welfare queen is one of the most successful pieces of political fiction this country ever produced. Reagan workshopped her on the 1976 campaign trail using a real woman named Linda Taylor — who was actually a serial criminal, not a typical aid recipient — and turned her into a racialized archetype that has shaped American policy for fifty years.

The image was always coded: the Cadillac, the furs, the multiple aliases, the implication that she was why your paycheck wasn't stretching. And it worked. It justified gutting AFDC, it built the bipartisan consensus for the 1996 welfare reform bill, and it trained a generation of voters to read "government assistance" as Black, female, and undeserving. But here's where the contradiction snaps the whole frame in half. The actual welfare queen is Jeff Bezos. The actual welfare queen is Elon Musk taking $38 billion in government contracts, subsidies, and tax credits across his companies, by Washington Post reporting.

The actual welfare queens are the Walton heirs, whose Walmart workforce relies on so much SNAP and Medicaid that taxpayers effectively subsidize their poverty wages to the tune of billions a year. We've got billionaires paying zero in federal income tax in multiple documented years, sitting on stepped-up basis loopholes that wipe out lifetimes of capital gains for their children, while their companies harvest federal contracts, municipal tax breaks, and HQ2-style bidding wars where cities literally hand them public money to show up. That is welfare.

That is government transfer to private benefit. That is the textbook definition. But y'all won't call it that, because the racial coding of the original trope did its job — it taught America to see a Black woman with a grocery cart as a threat to the republic and a white man with a rocket company as an innovator. Every accusation is a confession. When politicians scream about "dependency" while protecting Bezos's tax architecture, they're not describing the poor. They're describing themselves and the class they serve. The welfare queen was never on the corner. She's been at Davos this whole time. Let that marinate.

The Billionaire Welfare Class

The phrase I keep using on the show, and I’m gonna keep using it because it’s accurate, is the billionaire welfare class. These are people whose entire economic position is subsidized by the public. By tax breaks they wrote. By infrastructure they didn’t build. By labor they don’t pay fairly. By legal systems funded by taxpayers and weaponized against critics. By federal contracts they then turn around and use to surveil the very public that funded them.

Bezos has reportedly donated $10 million-plus to a super PAC. He poured millions into a documentary project. He just dropped at least $10 million, possibly $20 million, on a single night of fashion. None of those numbers, taken individually, would close out his federal tax liability if it were calculated on his actual wealth growth. But because the tax code is structured to count income, not wealth, and because most of his wealth is held as unrealized stock gains, the bill never comes due. He gets to be a philanthropist with money that should have been a public investment. He gets to play patron of the arts with revenue the IRS never saw.

That is welfare. That is government transfer. That is the public subsidizing the private. Y’all just been trained not to call it that when the recipient wears a suit instead of a hoodie.

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Liberalism Is a Hell of a Drug

I’m gonna keep saying it. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. The liberal framework cannot indict Bezos because it cannot indict the system that produced him. So it produces takes about “smart philanthropy” and “innovation” and “what would we do without Amazon Prime.” It produces Anna Wintour calling Lauren Sánchez a “wonderful asset.” It produces “well at least he’s giving back.”

SNCC was not liberal. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was not liberal. Baldwin was not a liberal, no matter how many times Aaron Sorkin tried to make him one. Black Leftism, rooted in the Black radical tradition, in racial capitalism analysis from Cedric Robinson, in the political economy work of Walter Rodney, in the structural critiques of Angela Davis and the late bell hooks, has always been able to name what liberalism cannot. Capitalism is the engine. Antiblackness is the lubricant. The billionaire is a logical output, not a glitch. You cannot reform your way to an economy that does not produce a Jeff Bezos. You have to dismantle the conditions that make him possible.

Huey said it best, and I’m gonna anchor every piece I write on billionaires with this until I draw my last breath. “The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man. Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life.” Conscious Lee’s remix for 2026, the first lesson y’all must learn is that this system is doomed. Unless y’all understand that, y’all will keep mistaking spectacle for substance, and y’all will keep clapping for our exploiters.

Where We Go From Here

I am not interested in moralizing at you. Moralizing is what liberals do when they don’t have a strategy. I am interested in equipping you. So here’s where we go.

Number one, change the language. Stop saying “tax avoidance” when you mean wealth extraction. Stop saying “philanthropy” when you mean reputation laundering. Start using “billionaire welfare class” in every conversation, on every platform, in every comment thread. Language structures politics. Reclaim the words.

Number two, support the workers actually fighting Amazon. The Amazon Labor Union, the Teamsters’ organizing efforts at delivery stations, and the Make Amazon Pay coalition are doing the slow, unglamorous work of class struggle. They need money, bodies at picket lines, and amplification. Not just tweets. Show up.

Number three, demand a wealth tax, a billionaire minimum tax, and the closure of the stepped-up basis loophole. The Biden administration proposed taxing unrealized gains at death, and the proposal died because the donor class killed it. Resurrect it. Make every congressional candidate who wants your vote answer for it. On record. In writing. Hold them to it.

Number four, divest. Where you can, divest. Cancel Prime if you can survive without it. Buy from local Black-owned and worker-owned businesses where possible. Pressure your university, your union pension, your city council, to divest from companies tied to Project Nimbus and surveillance contracts. The boycott is not a tactic of the past. It worked in Montgomery, it worked in Soweto, it works now.

Number five, build the political analysis. Read Wilderson. Read Hartman. Read Cedric Robinson’s “Black Marxism.” Read “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Read Charles Mills’ “The Racial Contract.” Listen to your elders, the ones who lived through COINTELPRO and can tell you what it looks like when a state surveils its own people on behalf of capital. Education is elevation. The information is here. The question is whether you’re going to engage it or keep doom scrolling.

Closing

Mary Hill is 72 years old. She works in an Amazon warehouse. She has cancer. She lives paycheck to paycheck. Jeff Bezos earns, by some calculations, roughly $8 million per hour. He paid zero federal income tax in 2007 and 2011. He just dropped up to $20 million on a costume party in the same week leaked documents revealed his company’s contractual entanglement with a state actively conducting genocide. He has used the legal system, funded by taxpayers, to delay a union contract for over four years.

And y’all wanna talk about who’s lazy. Y’all wanna lecture Black women about respectability. Y’all wanna ask why people are angry. This is why people are angry. This is why I do this work. This is why The Chop Up Show keeps running these receipts even when the algorithm doesn’t reward it. Because somebody has to keep saying it out loud until enough of us refuse to look away.

Let that marinate. Then come back tomorrow ready to organize.

SUPPORT INDEPENDENT BLACK POLITICAL EDUCATION

I do this work without corporate sponsors. No billionaire foundations bankroll The Chop Up Show. No legacy media outlet writes my checks. The reason I can sit here and run receipts on a man worth $239 billion is because I don’t answer to a man worth $239 billion. That independence is paid for by you.

When you become a paid subscriber to Education Is Elevation, you are doing more than supporting a writer. You are funding the kind of long-form, sourced, unflinching political analysis that public education media used to produce before the field collapsed. You are keeping a Black-led, debate-trained, Pan-Africanist research practice alive in a moment when billionaires are buying newsrooms and gutting them in real time. The Washington Post, owned by the same Bezos this article is about, just laid off roughly one-third of its staff. That void doesn’t fill itself. We fill it.

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

Five Key Takeaways

1. Bezos has paid $0 in federal income tax in multiple documented years.

According to ProPublica’s 2021 reporting on a leaked trove of IRS records, Jeff Bezos paid zero federal income taxes in both 2007 and 2011. In 2011, while worth an estimated $18 billion, he even claimed a $4,000 tax credit for his children. This is not speculation. It is documented from federal records.

2. His real, wealth-adjusted tax rate is roughly 1 percent.

ProPublica’s analysis of Bezos’ 2014 to 2018 tax record found a “true tax rate” of 0.98 percent, calculated against the actual growth of his wealth. From 2006 to 2018, his wealth grew by over $127 billion while he paid roughly $1.4 billion in federal taxes, a true tax rate of about 1.1 percent.

3. $20 million for a Met Gala, $1.2 billion for Project Nimbus.

Reports place Bezos’ sponsorship of the 2026 Met Gala at $10 million to $20 million. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google jointly hold a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government providing cloud and AI services tied to military operations in Gaza. The math of his discretionary spending tells the moral story.

4. Amazon’s union-busting cost workers more than 1,500 days.

Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility unionized in 2022 and waited over four years for a National Labor Relations Board bargaining order against Amazon’s refusal to negotiate. The same legal system that protects billionaires from taxes is used to delay workers from contracts.

5. This is welfare. Name it.

Tax loopholes, federal contracts, public infrastructure, and legal subsidies make up an entire ecosystem of public support for private billionaire wealth. The phrase “billionaire welfare class” is not rhetorical flourish. It is descriptive accuracy. Use it.

RELEVANT RECIEPTS

Eisinger, J., Ernsthausen, J., & Kiel, P. (2021, June 8). The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax. ProPublica.

Frankel, T. C. (2021, June 9). IRS records show wealthiest Americans, including Bezos and Musk, paid little in income taxes as share of wealth, report says. The Washington Post.

Americans for Tax Fairness. (2021). Summary of ProPublica’s Report on Billionaire Tax Dodgers.

Loewenstein, A., Berger, Y., et al. (2026, February 4). Inside Israel’s deal with Google and Amazon. +972 Magazine / Local Call / The Guardian.

Democracy Now. (2025, October 31). Report: Google and Amazon Violated Their Own Terms of Service in Israel’s $1.2 Billion “Project Nimbus” Deal.

Conger, K., & Roose, K. (n.d.). Project Nimbus. Wikipedia overview and aggregated reporting.

American Civil Liberties Union. (2018, October). Amazon Met With ICE Officials to Market Its Facial Recognition Product.

McGee, A. / Snopes / CNN Business. (2026, January–February). Coverage of the Ring × Flock partnership and its cancellation.

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

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

Y’all already know how this goes. Somebody with a microphone, a Black face, and a national platform spends years telling us he’s one of us, then turns around and starts auditioning for the very people who built this country on our backs. That’s where we are with Stephen A. Smith. And if we don’t break this down with receipts, the algorithm is gonna do what it always does — flatten the contradiction and serve us the polished version.

Research over MeSearch. Let me lay it out.

In November 2024, Stephen A. Smith voted for Kamala Harris. By January 2025 — barely two months later — he was sitting on Bill Maher’s couch calling himself and every other Harris voter a “damn fool” for it. Not critiquing the campaign. Not pushing the party to do better. Calling Black voters who showed up for the Black woman on the ticket fools. Then he went on Sage Steele’s show in March 2026 and confirmed it again — yeah, he regrets that vote. Sage Steele. The same Sage Steele who built her brand attacking Black women like Serena Williams for talking about race. Two things can be true: a person can have legitimate grievances with the Democratic Party AND choose to air those grievances exclusively on platforms that exist to demonize Black political consciousness. Stephen A. is choosing.

In May 2025, when Donald Trump publicly said he’d “love to see” Stephen A. run for president, Smith said he was “aghast.” Then he went on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and admitted there’s “a bit of flattery” in being praised by “the man who holds the highest office in the land.” When Tapper pressed him on whether he could actually win, Smith said, “You’re damn right.” Every accusation is a confession. And every aw-shucks denial is a confession too. By February 2026, he’s on The Hill telling reporters he’s a “fiscal conservative” who’s “social liberal” — the exact language Black conservatives have used for forty years to launder right-wing economics through cultural identity. He says he supports “strong borders.” He says he’s “disgusted” with the left. He says any “construction worker” could beat the Democrats. The man is running. He just wants us to act surprised when he announces.

Now here’s where the pro-Black branding starts cracking. In October 2025, Smith devoted a full episode of his SiriusXM show Straight Shooter to attacking Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett — a Black woman in Congress doing the actual work of holding this administration accountable. He called her communication style “street verbiage.” He questioned whether her “rhetoric for the streets” was “going to get you anywhere.” Where is the smoke for Trump? Where is the smoke for Stephen Miller? Where is the smoke for Russell Vought? Stephen A. has a multi-million-dollar microphone and he aims it at a Black woman congresswoman before he aims it at the architects of the regime she’s fighting. That’s not analysis. That’s not even disagreement. That’s the same coded language white folks have been using on outspoken Black women since Ida B. Wells. The only difference is now it’s coming out a Black man’s mouth on a Sirius XM show.

And he only apologized after Trump himself called Crockett “a very low IQ person.” Read that again. Stephen A. Smith didn’t pull back because he reflected on what he said. He pulled back because Trump used Stephen A.’s framing to attack a Black woman, and Stephen A. realized — out loud, on tape — that he’d handed the president ammunition. He said, “with Trump feeding into that nonsense, giving him fodder or ammunition, to continue to go out there and talk about our Black women that way… I don’t want to be associated with nothing like that.” Cool. But the question Crockett herself asked when she finally responded on TSR Live in October 2025 cuts to the bone — “If you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?” Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but careerism is the strongest dose.

And Crockett ain’t a one-off. Smith has spent the better part of a decade making his money diminishing Black resistance. In 2016, when Colin Kaepernick told reporters he didn’t vote, Stephen A. went on First Take and called Kaep “absolutely irrelevant.” Not the system that blackballed him. Not the league that stole his career. The Black man kneeling. In 2019, when Kaepernick showed up to that staged NFL workout in a Kunta Kinte t-shirt, Stephen A. lost his entire mind on air. He kept telling us he understood the protest — but every time Kaep moved out of the box Stephen A. drew for him, Stephen A. punished him for it on national television. In 2025, after Serena Williams danced at Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show, Stephen A. used his platform to lecture her on her marriage to Alexis Ohanian. A grown Black woman, the most decorated tennis player of all time, dancing at a Black cultural moment, and he found a way to make it about her supposed disrespect to her husband. Lost in the sauce.

When Shucking and Jiving Goes Wrong

Now connect this to the larger pattern. In May 2025, on NewsNation’s Cuomo show, Smith argued Black voters had “played the role of suckers” for the Democratic Party for sixty years. In March 2026, on his Straight Shooter podcast, he told us, “I ain’t giving you anything” — meaning his vote — and pivoted to the line that Democrats “focus on 1% of the population” instead of Black folks. We need to be precise about what he’s doing here. The 1% he’s talking about is trans people. He’s running the same divide-and-conquer playbook the right has been running since the Southern Strategy — pit one marginalized community against another, and reframe Black liberation as something that happens at the expense of trans liberation, immigrant liberation, queer liberation. Kimberlé Crenshaw been told us this is how it works. Cedric Robinson been told us racial capitalism profits from these splits. And Stephen A. is up on Fox News-adjacent platforms running it for the cameras.

Two things can be true. The Democratic Party has earned every ounce of Black skepticism. Black voters absolutely should demand more than fear-mongering and lip service. Cory Booker’s voting record told us that. The Voting Rights Act dying in front of our eyes under a Roberts Court told us that. But there is a difference between critiquing a party from inside the community to push it left, and critiquing a party on conservative platforms to push the community right. SNCC critiqued the Democrats. Bayard Rustin critiqued the Democrats. Fannie Lou Hamer critiqued the Democrats from the floor of the 1964 Democratic National Convention. None of them were on Bill Maher complaining about “woke culture.” None of them were sitting next to Bill O’Reilly taking a phone call from Donald Trump. The destination matters. The audience matters. The platform matters.

This is where the responsibility piece comes in, and it’s the part nobody wants to hear. Black platforms — and Stephen A. Smith is the most-watched Black voice in American sports media — carry a structural responsibility that white platforms simply do not. When ESPN signs you to a $100 million extension in 2025 and gives you a daily show, a primetime show, a podcast, and a guest chair on every cable news network in the country, you are not just “giving your opinion.” You are setting the terms of debate inside Black households. You are shaping what young Black boys think it means to be a successful Black man with a microphone. You are deciding which Black women get critiqued and which white men get a pass. The influence is the product. ESPN didn’t pay him $100 million for his takes on the Knicks.

Here’s the framework. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism teaches us that racial capitalism doesn’t just exploit Black labor — it commodifies Black voice. Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery shows us how the structures of unfreedom shape what gets rewarded in Black public life: Black voices that confirm white anxieties get amplified, Black voices that disrupt them get marginalized. Frank Wilderson’s work on antiblackness as a structuring logic asks us why a Black man with national reach reflexively reaches for Black women and Black resistance figures as the targets of his critique, instead of the white power structure that funds his check. The system isn’t broken. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do. And Stephen A. is being paid handsomely to play his position inside it.

The responsibility on Black platforms is not to be uncritical of Black politicians or Black movements. The responsibility is to do that critique with the receipts, with the historical context, and with an awareness of who else is in the room. When Stephen A. Smith says “I want Democrats to earn the Black vote” on Fox News-adjacent platforms in 2026, the audience hearing that line is not Black voters running back to a more progressive politics. The audience is white moderates and Black conservatives who use his words as cover to suppress Black turnout, gut the Voting Rights Act, and redraw districts to dilute Black political power. The Supreme Court just gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. Republicans are mid-decade gerrymandering five states right now. And the loudest Black voice in sports media is on national television telling Black folks the Democrats took us for granted. Whose interest does that actually serve?

We can hold this up against the standard a Cornel West or a Ta-Nehisi Coates would hold themselves to. We can hold this up against the standard Killer Mike held when he sat across from Bernie Sanders. We can hold this up against the standard Angela Davis still holds at 82 years old. The receipts are clear. Stephen A. Smith built his platform on the labor of Black athletes, the suffering of Black communities, and the loyalty of a Black audience that took him seriously when he said he was one of us. Now that the platform is built, he’s renting it out to the highest bidder — and the highest bidder right now is Trump’s America.

I’m not telling you to cancel Stephen A. Smith. Cancel culture ain’t the move and it ain’t the strategy. What I am telling you is this: when somebody on a Black platform starts telling you that the people fighting for your liberation are actually the people standing in the way of your liberation, run the receipts. Ask who’s paying. Ask who’s clapping. Ask what the platform looks like in five years if everybody on it talks the way the loudest one talks. Ask whether the analysis lines up with the material conditions of Black life — Black maternal mortality, Black wealth gap, Black voter suppression, Black incarceration — or whether the analysis exists to make white moderates comfortable while we get rolled.

Stephen A. Smith says he might run for president in 2028. He says elected officials and billionaires have encouraged him. He polled at 2% in a 2025 Democratic primary survey. He wants us to believe this is organic. It is not. It is the same playbook that gave us Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Tim Scott, Byron Donalds, and every other Black face used to legitimize a politics that treats Black liberation as a niche concern. The faces change. The function doesn’t.

Where is the smoke for the people doing the actual harm? Where is the receipts-based critique of the donors funding the gerrymandering? Where is the half-hour monologue on the Heritage Foundation’s role in Project 2025? Where is the smoke for the white owners who blackballed Kaepernick, the white prosecutors who let R. Kelly’s enablers walk, the white politicians who built the prison pipeline? When Stephen A. saves his loudest energy for Black women in Congress and his softest energy for the president of the United States, the contradiction is the message.

Y’all be safe. Stay informed. Read your Robinson. Read your Hartman. Read your Crenshaw. And when somebody with a microphone tells you who the enemy is, always — always — check who signs the back of their check.

Why Black Platforms Have a Responsibility

This is the framing paragraph the user requested — drop-in ready for newsletter pull-quote, post header, or social card.

Black platforms carry a responsibility white platforms do not, and the math on that is structural, not moral. When a Black voice with national reach speaks into a Black audience, the trust being extended is intimate — Black folks come to Black voices because we are exhausted from being misrepresented everywhere else. That trust is not free. ESPN paid Stephen A. Smith a reported $100 million in 2025 because the influence is the product, not because his Knicks takes are remarkable. Cedric Robinson taught us that racial capitalism commodifies Black voice the same way it commodifies Black labor — the system pays handsomely for the Black voices that confirm what power already wants said, and it marginalizes the ones that disrupt. Saidiya Hartman’s afterlife of slavery shows up in who gets the $100 million extension and who gets blackballed out the league. So when the loudest Black voice in American sports media uses that platform to redirect Black political grievance toward Democrats and away from the architects of voter suppression, that is not opinion. That is editorial cover. The responsibility is not to be uncritical of Black politicians or Black movements — SNCC, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Bayard Rustin all critiqued the Democrats. The responsibility is to do that critique with receipts, with historical context, and with full awareness of who else is in the room when you speak. The destination matters. The audience matters. The platform matters. Pro-Black branding is not a substitute for pro-Black behavior, and a Black audience that has been lied to from the outside our entire lives deserves Black platforms that don’t replicate the lie from the inside.

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

Five Key Takeaways

Takeaway 1. Stephen A. Smith voted for Kamala Harris in November 2024, called himself a “damn fool” for it on Bill Maher in January 2025, and confirmed his regret again on Sage Steele’s show in March 2026. Two months between vote and public regret. That’s not political evolution — that’s a pivot, executed on the platforms most hostile to Black political power.

Takeaway 2. Smith’s framing of Democrats as the party that “forgot” Black voters and is “focused on 1% of the population” (his March 2026 Straight Shooter language) maps directly onto the right’s divide-and-conquer playbook. He’s not pushing Democrats left — he’s running cover for the Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, immigrants, and other marginalized communities, with Black grievance as the wedge.

Takeaway 3. His pattern of punching down on Black women — Megan Thee Stallion (May 2025 breakup commentary), Serena Williams (after Kendrick’s 2025 halftime show), Jasmine Crockett (October 2025 “street verbiage” comments) — is not coincidence. It is the through-line. He apologized to Crockett only after Trump used his framing to attack her, which Crockett herself called out on TSR Live: “If you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?”

Takeaway 4. Trump publicly endorsed Smith for president in May 2025 on NewsNation. Smith called himself “aghast” then went on CNN and admitted he was flattered, said he could win, and by February 2026 was openly calling himself a “fiscal conservative.” He polled at 2% in a 2025 Democratic primary survey. He has never held office. The trajectory is not subtle.

Takeaway 5. Black platforms carry structural responsibility because of structural reach. ESPN signed Smith to a $100 million extension in 2025. He sets the terms of debate in Black sports media every single morning. When the loudest Black voice in American sports tells Black audiences that the Democrats took them for granted while saying nothing comparable about the architects of voter suppression, that’s not opinion — that’s editorial cover for the people dismantling Black political power.

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CITED SOURCES

1. Smith, Stephen A., interview on Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO, January 24, 2025).

Smith’s on-camera admission, alongside Rep. Ro Khanna and Jesse Eisenberg, that he and other Harris voters were “damn fools” for the November 2024 vote. The pivot point for the political phase of his platform.

2. Smith, Stephen A., interview on The Sage Steele Show (March 2026), reported in Fox News, April 1, 2026.

Smith confirms his regret for the Harris vote on Steele’s platform — a notable choice of venue, given Steele’s history of attacking Black women on race issues.

3. Trump, Donald, on NewsNation Town Hall (May 2025), with Bill O’Reilly and Stephen A. Smith.

Trump’s public endorsement of a Smith presidential run. The original document for the choreography of the endorsement-and-denial sequence.

4. Smith, Stephen A., interview with Jake Tapper, CNN’s State of the Union (May 4, 2025).

Smith’s first network response to the Trump endorsement. “There’s a bit of flattery” and “You’re damn right” he could win. The denial that wasn’t a denial.

5. Smith, Stephen A., Straight Shooter podcast (October 14, 2025 episode), reported across BET, The Hill, The Grio, Black Enterprise, Ebony, and TheRoot, October 14–November 1, 2025.

The original Crockett “street verbiage” comments. Read the BET and TheRoot coverage together for the most complete community response.

6. Smith, Stephen A., apology to Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Straight Shooter (October 22, 2025).

The apology. Smith’s own framing — that Trump was using his words as “fodder” — confirms the apology was reactive to the political consequences, not the original critique.

7. Crockett, Jasmine, interview on TSR Live (The Shade Room, October 30, 2025).

Crockett’s response in her own words. The “if you hadn’t gotten smoke, would you have done it?” question is the core analytic frame for the entire Smith pattern.

8. Smith, Stephen A., interviews with The Hill (February 13, 2026) and Yahoo Sports (February 14, 2026).

The “fiscal conservative, social liberal” framing, the 2028 confirmation, the “strong borders” line. Together these establish the political identity Smith is building heading into 2028.

9. Smith, Stephen A., interview on NewsNation’s CUOMO (May 2025).

The “played the role of suckers” framing of Black voters. Establishes the rhetorical move of redirecting Black political grievance toward Democrats and away from the structural drivers of Black disenfranchisement.

10. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983).

Foundational text for understanding how racial capitalism commodifies Black voice and labor. The framework for analyzing what ESPN’s $100M contract is actually purchasing.

11. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007); see also “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2002).

The afterlife of slavery as analytic framework — useful for understanding which Black voices get amplified in mass media and which get blackballed. The Kaepernick / Stephen A. asymmetry lives inside this analysis.

12. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989); “Mapping the Margins,” Stanford Law Review (1991).

Intersectionality as the frame that exposes the “1% of the population” rhetorical move for what it is — a divide-and-conquer device that depends on pretending Black communities and trans communities don’t overlap.

13. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010); Afropessimism (2020).

Antiblackness as a structuring logic. The framework for analyzing why a Black man with $100M in platform reach reflexively reaches for Black women and Black resistance figures as targets of his loudest critique.

14. Mallory, Tamika; Rye, Angela; Gillum, Andrew; Cross, Tiffany — public commentary on Native Land Pod and across Instagram, October 2025.

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

Thank you Great Society’s “New Frontier”, Selda, Bob Barnett, Jody Medina Precit, Sonja Kuhn, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Education is elevation, y’all. Let me set the table real quick before I get into this drama, this mess.

I came across a clip of Candace Owens and Laura Loomer going back and forth, and before we even unpack this little circus, I want y’all to feel me on the most important news of the day. What happened yesterday is really showing how they trying to take us back to the plantation, take us back to Jim Crow. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what started to remove the legal machinery that ensured segregation throughout the South. In 1964, the year before the bill passed, only about 7% of Black folks were registered to vote down South. A year after passage, in 1966, we saw over 50% of Black folks down South registered to vote. That’s what’s at stake when courts and politicians start chipping at voting rights again. That’s the real story. And while the real story is unfolding, we got these MAGA tokens out here doing the work of distraction for free.

Now let me get into Candace Owens and Laura Loomer. Trigger warning, for the folks in the back: it’s about to get real racist. It’s about to get real anti-Black. But it’s gonna make sense in a minute.

What Loomer Said, and Why It Matters

Laura Loomer went on a tirade where she literally called Candace Owens a “nappy-headed Black b***h” and a “resentful ghetto Black b***h.” She mocked Candace’s diction. She mocked Candace’s degrees. She accused Candace of being jealous of pretty white blonde girls and trying to steal their men in Greenwich, Connecticut. Then she pivoted to telling y’all she ain’t a racist person. Feel me?

Let that marinate. Loomer used textbook racism, textbook anti-Blackness, textbook white supremacist rhetoric, and capped it off with the disclaimer that she’s just not a racist. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, that is the whole MAGA brand in one sentence. The performance of racial innocence right after the racist performance.

But here’s the part that should land harder than the slurs: Loomer was able to force the administration’s hand. She went on this unhinged racist rant and then made a demand that the President of the United States issue a Truth Social post supporting her. And he did. Reporting indicates Susie Wiles was staunchly opposed and said this was a very bad idea, but Trump’s team conceded anyway. That is the question that should haunt every conservative reading this: why did Donald Trump concede to a lunatic? Owens herself has floated the rumor — and yes, even she admits it’s just a rumor — that Loomer has something on Trump tied to relations she allegedly had with him on Air Force One years ago. I’ll be real with y’all: Candace, Laura, Donald, all three of y’all are full of the same stuff they flush down toilets, so the credibility argument from any of them is losing on me. My grandfather always told me that a broken clock gets it right twice a day. In these days, maybe you change your batteries and tell time a little different. But here’s the thing about time. Time keeps score.

Why I’m Not Defending Candace

Let me be crystal clear. I’m not a racist person. I don’t hate Black people. And I’m calling Candace Owens out for the same reason I’m calling Laura Loomer out: when y’all try to act like people are not racist, it always blows my mind that Black conservatives can only understand racism when it’s put on their own body. A lot of y’all claim to be Christians, but the way you come to understand racism is through a selfishness that is not Christ-like.

The exact language Laura Loomer is using on Candace Owens right now is the exact stuff Candace Owens thought was cool and permissible when she was benefiting from it. The chastising of Black folks for not taking accountability. The lectures about Black women’s hair, Black women’s bodies, Black communities, Black culture. Candace was at the front of that line for years, getting white conservative checks for it. Now she ain’t benefiting from it no more, and she’s doing her best to appeal to Black people. When she went at Erica Kirk and said Erica Kirk was doing her best Janet Jackson rendition, she was reaching for Black cultural references to climb back into the fold. Repeat me one more time, to my Black conservative free-thinking Republicans: y’all loved having y’all presence tokenized around these folks, but inevitably in a system of capitalism, tokens will always be spent.

We always say tokens get spent. What we’re seeing with the way these Republicans are doing y’all, Black Republicans, is that y’all were always already disposable. And now that a lot of y’all are trying to come back into the fold, trying to come back around Black folks, we remember what you said and what you did. Just like you was chastising the community for not taking accountability, for not taking responsibility, before you allowed back around this stuff again, you got to take responsibility and accountability for the climate you helped create.

The Greenwich Bar Story Is the Whole Thesis

Loomer described, in her own words, how traumatizing it was for her to go on a play date as a young blonde girl in Connecticut at the home of a wealthy white blonde girl with blue eyes. She said her mommy and daddy didn’t love her, and now she sees Erica Kirk as that white blonde girl who got everything she wanted. Then she turns around and tells a story about Candace Owens being a Black girl from the hood who used to walk into ritzy bars in Greenwich and steal the hottest white guy and ruin the popular white girl’s relationship. She said this was satisfying to Candace. So now Loomer is calling Candace a nappy-headed ghetto Black b***h with a vendetta against blonde white women, while simultaneously revealing she has a vendetta against blonde white women. That ain’t it, though.

The honest read is this: a lot of y’all that got hoodwinked and bamboozled by your proximity to whiteness thought these white folks didn’t feel about you the way you said they didn’t feel about us. When chickens come home to roost, you got to embrace that chicken. Recognize that regardless of how good your diction is, how many degrees you have, how likable you try to be, at the end of the day a lot of these folks always saw you as a slur waiting to be deployed the moment you stopped being useful.

Accountability Without an Escape Hatch

A lot of these conservatives, not even just the Black ones, a lot of these Trump devout loyalists are starting to see the writing on the wall that the same vitriol and violence Trump pushed out is now coming for them too. So they’re trying to backpedal. Nah, man.

I got homeboys and family members who regret the bad actions that placed them in being incarcerated. They want to disavow the people they used to run with. The judge would tell them, yeah, that’s good you acknowledged what you did was bad and you want to disavow it, but you still got to deal with the consequences of your actions. How is it that these conservatives believe they can discursively move around the climate they created and benefited from and just say whoops, my bad? I got a cousin locked up 15 years. Whoops, my bad. He’s still in jail though. He’s still got to deal with the material reality his actions brought about.

How is it that so many of these conservatives, all of a sudden right now, are trying to ask for the exact forgiveness they never wanted to give nobody else? Self-serving, man. What would Jesus do? Sault, take it with a grain of crack cocaine, okay?

Don’t Let Them Sell You Jill Stein Again

While y’all watching the MAGA girls fight, I want to take this opportunity to redirect a different misplaced beef. Unpopular opinion: a lot of the smoke folks have for the Green Party should actually be smoked for Candace Owens and for Donald Trump supporters.

In 2016, Jill Stein received about 1% of the vote. Hillary Clinton still won the popular vote. Hillary Clinton lost a bunch of Electoral College points due to states she lost. Instead of dealing with the faulty leadership of the Democratic Party, y’all want to capitulate to Jill Stein. Y’all always could see Jill Stein had no power, has no power, has never had power, would not have any power right now. You can put all the third-party candidates together in 2024, give every single one of them votes to Kamala Harris, and Kamala Harris still loses.

Even if 100% of Black folks voted for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump would have still won. Over 85% of the Black community voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and there’s still certain Black people who want to chastise the Black community, telling us we’re the reason Kamala lost. Let’s focus on the numbers, man. The math don’t lie.

Donald Trump was able to stack the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and gut Chevron deference. Did Joe Biden stack the court? He didn’t. Did the leftists have the ability to pack the courts? No. I don’t know any offices the Green Party holds. I don’t know any positions they hold. How is it that we can blame people that are positionless for decisions made by people with positions? Facts over feelings, y’all. For some reason, feelings and emotions can become centered when they’re yours, but when they’re somebody else’s, you don’t care.

On Solidarity, Disagreement, and That Plaque on My Wall

It’s a bunch of people I rock with that I disagree with on this. It’s a bunch of folks who rock with me that I disagree with on this. And that is okay. The question becomes, do we have the emotional intelligence and capacity to have a crucial conversation where we vehemently disagree?

It’s the reason why I got that Malcolm X standing right next to that Fannie Lou Hamer on my wall. When it comes to Black ideology, when it comes to Black position, there is always a multiplicity of how we position. Do I think Fannie Lou Hamer had the same politics as Malcolm X? Some similarities, a lot of differences. But me being able to appreciate them both is the work. We can talk about how great Assata Shakur was and then turn around and chastise Black folks for taking on the same tools of democracy you say you’re trying to defend. That contradiction is why so many of these conversations go nowhere.

I’ll close with this. The Loomer-Owens feud is a Sports Center highlight reel of what racial capitalism looks like when the contract runs out. They was never colleagues. Candace was a token. Tokens get spent. Loomer is reminding her, and reminding all of us, on national air. The lesson ain’t to feel bad for Candace. The lesson is to stop sending other Black folks to that same plantation expecting a different harvest. Time keeps score. It’s keeping score on Candace, on Laura, on Donald, on every Black conservative free-thinker who thought their proximity to whiteness was a passport instead of a lease.

Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch. Let that marinate.

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Five Key Takeaways

#1 Tokens always get spent. Candace Owens being publicly degraded by Laura Loomer with the same anti-Black language Owens defended for years is racial capitalism doing exactly what racial capitalism does. The currency of Black conservatism is acceptance, and acceptance is always conditional, always revocable, always priced in slurs.

#2 Loomer’s Greenwich bar monologue accidentally tells the truth. She projected her own resentment of pretty blonde white girls onto Candace Owens, exposing that the white grievance industry runs on the same wounds it accuses Black women of having. The performance of racial innocence right after textbook anti-Blackness is the whole MAGA brand.

#3 The real news is the Voting Rights Act, not the catfight. Black voter registration in the South went from roughly 7% in 1964 to over 50% by 1966 because federal machinery dismantled the legal architecture of disenfranchisement. Every modern attempt to roll that back is the through-line we should be tracking while these tokens distract us.

#4 Stop misplacing the smoke. Jill Stein got 1% in 2016. Third-party candidates in 2024 combined could not have flipped the result. Even at 100% Black turnout for Kamala, Trump still wins. The faulty leadership of the Democratic Party and the Black conservatives who normalized Trumpism deserve the heat, not positionless leftists.

#5 Accountability is not a vibes-based reset. My homeboys locked up for 15 years cannot vibe their way out of consequences, and neither can conservatives who built the climate they’re now trying to backpedal from. You don’t get to chastise folks for not taking responsibility and then beg for forgiveness you never gave. Time keeps score.

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