Education is Elevation

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I had a conversation this week with Kimba White Dupree — educator, radio host at WBOK in New Orleans, womanist, mother, lifelong New Orleanian — and we sat with something most folks won’t sit with. We talked about colorism.

Not the TikTok version. Not the “light skin, dark skin” meme version. The actual structural, historical, Catholic-colonial, last-name-traceable, plantation-rooted, currency-bearing version. The version where lightness was literally legal tender.

And we used New Orleans as the case study. Because if you want to understand how colorism actually works in America — not the sanitized version, not the “we all Black at the end of the day” version — you need to understand New Orleans. That city is the receipt. Feel me?

Let me put you on.

Racial Literacy Means Reading and Writing the Situation

Before we even get to New Orleans, let’s level-set. Most of y’all lack racial literacy. I don’t say that to insult you. I say it because we are products of an education system that does not teach us how to read race as a structure. We get taught race as a personal feeling — am I racist, are you racist, did somebody hurt my feelings — instead of race as a hierarchy with property rights, legal designations, and inherited wealth attached to it.

When I asked Kimba what came to mind when I said “racial literacy,” her first words were: “white by law.”

Let that marinate.

She pointed out that until the 1940s, white people in this country didn’t all get to be “white.” Italians were Italians. Russians were Russians. Germans were Germans. Irish were Irish. Each group identified by country of origin. Then somewhere in the 1940s, the census, the Social Security infrastructure, and the broader project of racial consolidation pulled all those groups under one umbrella: Caucasian. White. One designation. One political coalition. One inheritance line.

That’s a constructed whiteness. It got built. On purpose. To consolidate power against everybody else, especially us.

Now hold that thought, because the same century where whiteness was being consolidated up north, New Orleans was running a completely different operation down in the Gulf. And that operation is where colorism in this country gets its sharpest, most documented, most legally codified form.

Why New Orleans Is Different — And Why Y’all Need to Stop Treating It Like a Costume

Most folks treat New Orleans like a vacation. A weekend. A daiquiri on Bourbon Street. Beads. Beignets. Maybe Essence Fest if you fancy.

But New Orleans is the uppermost part of the Caribbean.

Read that again.

Geographically, culturally, in terms of the Middle Passage — for most of the era of trans-Atlantic enslavement, New Orleans was the northernmost Caribbean port. We don’t think about it that way now, but we should. Because the cultural inheritance of the city — the food, the music, the language, the religion, the way race is structured — none of it makes sense if you keep trying to read New Orleans as just another American Southern city.

Louisiana is Indigenous. African. French. Spanish. Haitian. And Catholic — heavily, structurally Catholic, in a country where Catholicism is a minority faith. The state has one of the largest populations of Black Catholics in the United States. Xavier University, where Kimba was sitting when we talked, is the only Black Catholic HBCU in the country.

Now here is what most people don’t catch: Catholicism, in its colonial form, structures race differently than American Protestantism does. American Protestantism gave us the one-drop rule — binary, clean, brutal. Catholic colonialism gave us gradation. Quadroon. Octoroon. Mulatto. Passé blanc. A whole hierarchy of fractions. A measuring system for your distance from whiteness.

And in Louisiana, those weren’t just slurs. They were on birth certificates. They were on property deeds. They were tied to inheritance, marriage law, schooling, employment, and access to capital. Kimba told me she could pull her family records right now and the word “mulatto” lives there in the official paperwork. Not as an insult. As a legal classification.

That’s racial literacy. That’s understanding that the words we now treat as offensive were, in the not-too-distant past, the technical vocabulary of how the state organized human beings.

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Lightness as Currency: The Plantation Economics of Color

Here’s the part that should make you uncomfortable, because it should.

Kimba broke it down plain: in Louisiana, the lighter you were, the more likely you were the child of the master of the house. That wasn’t shameful gossip. That was the math. With French enslavers, Spanish enslavers, and yes, a small class of Black enslavers who bought their own family back, the gradation of skin became a record of who belonged to whom. Before genetics testing, color was the genetic test. The lighter your kin, the closer they were tied to the family that owned them.

And in some cases — this is the part nobody wants to deal with — French slave owners married the women they enslaved. Which meant property. Which meant a pass-along of land, of money, of social capital. So now you’ve got generations of light-skinned families in New Orleans whose fairness isn’t coincidence. It’s an inheritance line. It’s documented. It’s traceable through last names — Bourgeois, LeBlanc, Dupree, the whole French registry.

For a long time, being lighter didn’t just mean closer to white. It meant a special Black. A Black with a different relationship to property, to money, to access. The money eventually runs out across generations — but the color stays. And the color keeps spending. Because by white standards, the gradation determined who got considered “pretty.” Who got considered hireable. Who got considered marriageable. Who got considered safe.

This is why Kimba can tell you: New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor. Not once. Look at the leadership of the city across decades — the political class, the business class, the social and pleasure clubs — and you will see fairness as a through-line. That’s not an accident. That’s the residue of an economy where lightness was currency.

The receipts are right there.

Mulatto, Creole, and the Trap of Misreading the Vocabulary

Now in the comments while we were live, somebody asked: why are you using “mulatto”? It’s a slur.

Fair question. And here’s where racial literacy matters, because the answer isn’t a clean yes or no.

Yes — in 2026, “mulatto” is broadly considered offensive, derived from a Spanish/Portuguese root tied to mules (which is exactly why people object to it; it implies hybridity, sterility, a categorical “in-between” that wasn’t fully human in the eyes of the state). I respect that critique completely.

And — for Black Louisianans of a certain generation, “mulatto” appears on their actual birth certificates. It is not a slur their family hurled at them. It is the word the state used to classify them. To erase the term entirely is to erase how the state did the classifying. Kimba’s position — and I think it’s the historically honest one — is: I understand why people would have a reaction to the term, but it lives in my ancestral records. You can’t just retroactively scrub it without erasing the violence that put it there.

Now — Creole. This one matters even more, because most of y’all are using it wrong.

Creole is not a color.

Creole is a culture.

Creole is how we cook, how we worship, how we bury our dead, how we speak. Creole is gumbo and red beans on Monday and fish on Friday and the sign of the cross when you pass a cemetery. Creole is the language — French peppered with African and Spanish — that your grandparents spoke. Creole is Catholicism layered over West African spiritual practice layered over Indigenous land knowledge layered over French colonial law. It’s the amalgamation. That’s what Creole means.

And here’s the part that breaks people’s brains: there are white Creoles. Yes. Real ones. Creole-by-culture white folks, mostly French-descended, who grew up in that same soup. The book Interview with the Vampire gets this right — the character Louis is a Creole, and in the novel he’s not racially unambiguous in the way the Brad Pitt casting suggested. Creole is cultural, not chromatic.

But because lightness in New Orleans was so heavily concentrated among Creole-identified families, and because lightness was currency, the word got flattened in the popular imagination into a synonym for “light-skinned Black person from Louisiana.” That flattening erases the actual culture and reduces a 300-year-old cultural inheritance to a complexion. Don’t do that. Read the situation.

The Hierarchy and the Hurt: Why I Won’t Let This Conversation Go Bi-Directional

Now here’s where the conversation gets sharp, and where I’ll be honest with y’all about where I land.

Me and my co-host Toya G have been going back and forth for a minute on this question: when we talk about colorism, do we talk about it as a hierarchy — light over dark, full stop — or do we talk about it as bi-directional, where everybody catches hurt?

Both things are true. But they are not equally weighted.

There is real hurt that light-skinned people carry. Kimba was clear about it, and I’m going to be clear about it too. Light-skinned folks get accused of acting white. Light-skinned folks get sexualized in ways that flatten them into a fetish. Light-skinned Black men in particular get their masculinity questioned — Michael Beasley just went on Shannon Sharpe’s show and broke down growing up with green eyes and long hair and having to fight constantly because brothers underestimated him. He told Shannon, “I always seen me as you. Y’all didn’t see me as you.” That’s real. That alienation is real. The hurt is real.

And.

Light-skinned people are still preferred within the hierarchy of race. Closer in proximity to power. Closer in proximity to privilege. Closer in proximity to the magazine covers, the leading roles, the corporate suites, the political offices. That doesn’t get erased because somebody on the lighter end of the spectrum experienced rejection or alienation. Both can be true at once.

The trap of bi-directional framing — and this is where I push back on the “we all hurt the same” version of the conversation — is that it mystifies the hierarchy that produced all the hurt in the first place. There’s an analogy I keep coming back to: there are white people who experience real resentment from being positioned inside white supremacy. That hurt doesn’t negate that they are still the primary beneficiaries of the system that’s hurting them. Same logic applies inside Blackness. Lighter-skinned Black folks can carry real wounds and still occupy a structurally preferred position.

The work is to hold both at the same time. Acknowledge the hurt without flattening the hierarchy. Acknowledge the hierarchy without dismissing the hurt. That’s emotional intelligence. That’s racial literacy. That’s the job.

Don’t make me pick. I won’t pick. But I won’t let you pretend they’re equal either.

Gender, Color, and the Megan Thee Stallion Problem

We can’t talk about colorism without talking about how it intersects with gender, because the two systems do not operate independently. They braid together, and the braid does specific kinds of violence to specific kinds of bodies.

Kimba and I got into the Klay Thompson and Megan Thee Stallion situation because it’s a perfect case study. (And before y’all come for me — yes, I know how to spell Klay Thompson now.) Megan is brown-skinned, statuesque, sexually free, financially independent, taller than most of the dudes who want to humble her, and unapologetic about all of it. She is a structural threat to a particular vision of Black femininity that demands docility, smallness, sexual restraint, and emotional service to men.

And what does the culture do? The culture spends years rationalizing Tory Lanez shooting her. The culture spends years asking what she did to deserve it. The culture watches Klay step out on her and treats it like a victory lap — for him.

Kimba’s read on this is sharp: a lot of dudes celebrating Klay are not celebrating Klay because they like Klay. They are celebrating because they want what Klay has. Megan being free is offensive to a lot of men because freedom in a Black woman who looks like Megan reads as insubordination. It’s not really about her morality. It’s about her autonomy. And the colorism layer underneath all of it is that a brown-skinned woman with that much autonomy doesn’t get the soft-launch protection that a fairer-skinned woman with the same autonomy might get. (Beyoncé, for all the parasocial scrutiny she gets, has been able to keep certain things private in ways Meg isn’t permitted to.)

Then there’s the homoerotic shadow Kimba and I started circling. The same dudes who are loudest about “no homo” are doing the most homoerotic stuff — dropping everything to run to a homeboy, performing intense emotional labor for other men, fantasizing in public about other men’s sexual conquests. Some of that “Klay deserved better” energy is, academically, dudes wanting to be in the room with Klay. Feel me? That’s not me being cute. That’s me reading the situation.

And the gender-color cocktail produces predictable patterns: dark-skinned women get desexualized or hyper-sexualized but rarely allowed to be soft. Light-skinned men get their masculinity contested. Dark-skinned men get their femininity weaponized against them in arguments — “you a b***h, you soft, you a hoe” — which reveals, by the way, that misogyny is the foundation under all of it. The first move when men want to harm another man is to feminize him. Because femininity is treated as the lower category. That’s not a colorism problem. That’s a misogyny problem. But the two systems compound.

Kimba’s line on this was perfect: a lot of men don’t actually like women. They like rubbing up against women. There’s a difference.

The Quadroon Ball, Plaçage, and Why Y’all Need to Read Outside the Curriculum

When I was getting ready for this conversation, I went down a rabbit hole on something called the Quadroon Ball — 19th-century New Orleans social events where free women of color (often classified as one-quarter African descent) met wealthy white men to arrange a system of concubinage called plaçage. The wiki entries hedge — “frequently romanticized,” “likely rare or mythologized” — but the receipts in New Orleans tell a different story. This was not a myth. This was a documented practice. Women were, in effect, contracted into long-term arrangements with white men who would house them, support their children, and sometimes pass property to them, in exchange for sexual and domestic exclusivity outside of marriage.

That is colorism, gender, and economics fused into a single institution. It’s a market. The currency is lightness. The product is access. The buyer is whiteness. The seller is — well, that depends on how you frame agency under coercion, which is its own conversation.

And this is the same city that produced Plessy v. Ferguson. Think about that for a second. The Plessy case — the case that legalized “separate but equal” for the next sixty years — came out of a deliberate civil rights challenge organized in New Orleans. Homer Plessy was selected because he was light enough to pass; the whole point of the test case was to expose the absurdity of racial classification by having a man who was visibly white be arrested for sitting in a white train car. The Creole community in New Orleans organized that challenge. They lost in 1896. The country lived under the consequences for decades.

Same city, same century, also produces the integration of McDonogh 15 — the Lower Ninth Ward elementary school where, in 1960, three Black girls (Dr. Gail Etienne, Dr. Leona Tate, and Dr. Tessie Prevost) integrated alongside Ruby Bridges’ integration of William Frantz Elementary across town. White parents at McDonogh 15 unenrolled their children en masse. Dr. Tate sat in a classroom with a teacher and no other students. White flight from the Ninth Ward to Slidell followed. The same city that mounted the most sophisticated legal challenge to segregation in 1896 was, sixty years later, the site of the most aggressive white refusal to integrate primary schools.

That contradiction — Plessy and Ruby Bridges, the legal challenge and the white flight, the Quadroon Ball and the Civil Rights movement — that’s New Orleans. That’s why I keep saying the city is the receipt. It contains every contradiction American race-making produces, and it doesn’t bother to hide them.

The Erasure of Southern Black Culture

I’ll close with the thing that’s been gnawing at me, because I’m a Southerner and I’m tired.

Right now, all over the internet, people are romanticizing the Harlem Renaissance. The Great Migration. The Cotton Club. Langston Hughes. Zora Neale Hurston. Jazz in Harlem. Black New York in the 1920s as the cultural high-water mark of the diaspora.

That’s beautiful. That’s real. I’m not knocking it.

But the birthplace of jazz is not Harlem. It’s New Orleans. Jelly Roll Morton was from New Orleans. Louis Armstrong was from New Orleans. The Dew Drop Inn was in New Orleans. The artists who got celebrated in Harlem had to tour — they had to come down South and back, because Harlem alone couldn’t pay them. Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin both spent time in New Orleans; there’s a famous photo of them dancing at a New Orleans family home. The Dooky Chase restaurant had a backroom where Civil Rights organizers met because Black folks weren’t supposed to be assembling that way in public.

When y’all flatten Black 1920s culture into “the Harlem Renaissance,” you erase the South. You erase the people who didn’t migrate. You erase the artists who were touring back and forth and seeding culture in both directions. You erase the fact that while Harlem was renaissance-ing, my people in Texas were trying not to get lynched, and Kimba’s people in Louisiana were inventing the music Harlem was importing.

That erasure isn’t accidental either. It’s continuous with how American history erases Southern Blackness except as a setting for plantations or the Civil Rights Movement. We don’t get to be the producers of culture. We only get to be the suffering setting for culture, or the migrants who left to make culture somewhere else.

I’m calling that what it is. That’s Southern erasure. And it’s something I’m going to keep beating the drum about, because the receipts are too thick for us to keep getting written out of our own story.

Education Is Elevation

If you read this far, this is the part where I tell you what I always tell you. This work… this kind of writing, this kind of research, this kind of “Research over MeSearch,” does not exist without paid subscribers. I don’t take corporate money. I don’t run sponsorships that compromise the analysis. The reason I can sit with Kimba for an hour and a half on a Monday morning, run the receipts on Plessy, dig into the Quadroon Ball, push back against bi-directional framings of colorism without watering it down for an algorithm — that’s because some of y’all decided this work was worth paying for.

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

5. FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Whiteness is a coalition that got built, not a fact of nature. Italians, Russians, Germans, and Irish folks were classified by country of origin until the 1940s, when the U.S. consolidated them under “Caucasian.” Understanding whiteness as a constructed political coalition is the foundation of racial literacy.

* In Louisiana, lightness was literal currency. Tied to plantation inheritance, French and Spanish colonial law, Catholic marriage practices between enslavers and enslaved women, and property pass-through. The fact that New Orleans has never had a dark-skinned mayor is the residue of an economy that priced complexion.

* Creole is a culture, not a color. It refers to the cultural amalgamation of French, Spanish, African, Indigenous, and Catholic traditions in Louisiana. There are white Creoles. There are Black Creoles. Collapsing the term into a synonym for “light-skinned” erases 300 years of cultural inheritance.

* Colorism is a hierarchy, not a bi-directional grievance. Light-skinned folks carry real wounds — alienation, masculinity contestation, fetishization — and are still structurally preferred within the racial order. Both can be true. The “we all hurt the same” framing mystifies the hierarchy that produces all the hurt in the first place.

* Southern Black culture gets erased in romanticized accounts of the Harlem Renaissance. Jazz was born in New Orleans, not Harlem. Plessy v. Ferguson was organized in New Orleans. Civil Rights strategy was hashed out at Dooky Chase. The continuous erasure of the South from Black cultural and intellectual history is part of how American history flattens the diaspora.

Related Readings

* Brown, Brandi Amara. Read All Kind of People: A Field Guide to Reading Race in the Black South (referenced as foundational reading on Southern racial reading practices).

* Domínguez, Virginia R. White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. Rutgers University Press, 1986.

* Gould, Virginia Meacham. Chained to the Rock of Adversity: To Be Free, Black, and Female in the Old South. University of Georgia Press, 1998.

* Haney López, Ian. White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York University Press, 1996/2006.

* Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

* Hirsch, Arnold R., and Joseph Logsdon, eds. Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization. Louisiana State University Press, 1992.

* Johnson, Walter. Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. Harvard University Press, 1999.

* Medley, Keith Weldon. We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson. Pelican Publishing, 2003.

* Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

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The Supreme Court just used Reconstruction-era amendments designed to protect formerly enslaved people as a weapon against voting rights protection.

On April 29, 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Court ruled 6-3 that creating a second majority-Black congressional district violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The very amendment that ended slavery was weaponized to erase Black representation.

“So it’s racist and unconstitutional to fight against racism, huh?” That’s the question we need to sit with. Because that’s exactly what SCOTUS just ruled. And the irony is the point.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible to undo the legal machinery that made Jim Crow possible—literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses. For 61 years, it worked. Until the Supreme Court systematically dismantled it.

First they gutted Section 5 (the enforcement mechanism) in Shelby County (2013). Now they’ve rendered Section 2 (the remedy) “all but a dead letter” and they used the 14th Amendment—literally written to protect formerly enslaved people—to do it.

That’s not judicial reasoning. That’s calculated inversion. And we need to call it exactly what it is.

The Setup: How We Got Here

In 2021, Louisiana drew a congressional map with one majority-Black district representing one-third of the state’s population. Black voters sued, alleging it violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

Federal courts agreed that the map was discriminatory.

Louisiana was ordered to draw a new map by January 2024. They did. The 2024 map had two majority-Black districts. Cleo Fields—a former member of Congress—won election from the second district. The VRA worked, exactly as intended.

Then a group calling themselves “non-African American voters” sued again, claiming the new map was unconstitutional because it considered race. They argued that creating a majority-Black district to remedy voting rights violations violated equal protection.

The Supreme Court agreed.

Let that sink in: Creating a district to remedy discrimination = unconstitutional discrimination. Accepting a map that violated the Voting Rights Act = legal. The Supreme Court turned the logic backward.

The Amendment Inversion: How Reconstruction Got Weaponized

This is where it gets dark. And it’s where Toya’s right to make the irony explicit.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. It was designed to protect formerly enslaved people. Section 5 says “Congress shall have power to enforce...the provisions of this article.” That power was supposed to protect Black freedom.

The 15th Amendment (1870) was even more explicit: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race.”

For 95 years (1870-1965), the Supreme Court let those amendments sit dormant while the South used literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and violence to suppress Black voting. Then Congress passed the Voting Rights Act to enforce what the 14th and 15th Amendments actually said.

Now the Supreme Court is using the 14th Amendment—the very amendment meant to protect Black freedom—to strike down voting rights protection.

Justice Alito’s opinion says “the Constitution almost never permits the Federal Government or a State to discriminate on the basis of race.” Sounds neutral. Sounds fair. But applied to voting rights protection, it becomes a weapon.

Because it makes protecting Black voting rights look identical to suppressing them. It puts the cure and the disease on equal moral footing. And it uses the 14th Amendment—Reconstruction’s promise—to destroy it.

That’s not interpretation. That’s inversion. And the irony is absolutely the point.

The Machinery: What Jim Crow Left Behind

Here’s what they don’t teach you in civics class: Jim Crow wasn’t just about explicit segregation signs. It was a legal machinery. The literacy tests, the poll taxes, the grandfather clauses—these were written into law.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 made it possible to undo that machinery. Section 2 said: if a voting practice has the effect of discriminating based on race, it’s illegal. You don’t have to prove intent to discriminate—the effect is enough.

That was revolutionary. Because it meant states couldn’t use neutral-sounding rules (like literacy tests) to achieve discriminatory effects (preventing Black voting).

Section 2 worked. It was used to challenge maps that diluted Black voting power, practices that suppressed voting, rules that had racially disparate effects. It was the enforcement mechanism Reconstruction promised but never delivered and now the Supreme Court has gutted it.

Under Callais, Section 2 is rendered nearly meaningless. The Court says states can only violate Section 2 if there’s a “strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred.” But they get to decide what counts as sufficient inference. And their standard is impossibly high.

Louisiana’s map clearly had discriminatory effects—one majority-Black district for one-third of the population. But the Court’s new standard requires proving something close to explicit intent to harm. And even if you prove that, states can still use other excuses (like “protecting incumbents”) to justify their discriminatory choices.

The machinery of voting suppression is back. Different language. Same effect.

The Irony as the Point: They’re Using Freedom Against Freedom

Toya’s line hits because it exposes the fundamental contradiction: “They’re using the 14th Amendment literally to protect formerly enslaved people as a weapon against the exact protection.”

The same people who cite the 14th Amendment to oppose affirmative action are now using it to oppose voting rights protection. The same amendment. Different targets. But always the outcome: Black power constrained.

This is pattern-level thinking. And it’s crucial.

In the 1950s, Southern states invoked “states rights” (embedded in the 10th Amendment) to defend segregation. Federal government overruled them—the 14th Amendment forbids discrimination. They lost.

In the 1970s-80s, conservatives argued for “colorblindness”—the 14th Amendment doesn’t allow race-conscious remedies, even to fix discrimination. They won. Affirmative action got restricted.

Now they’re using the same “colorblindness” standard to strike down voting rights protection. The 14th Amendment doesn’t allow race-conscious voting remedies, even to fix voting discrimination.

Same amendment. Same “neutral” principle. Same outcome: Black power reduced.

The irony is that they’re weaponizing the amendment that was supposed to protect Black freedom. And they’re doing it by claiming neutrality. That’s the con.

The Map Reality: What Erasure Looks Like

Louisiana has roughly one-third Black population. Under the two-district map, two of six congressional seats would be majority-Black. That’s proportional representation.

Under the one-district map that Callais upholds, one of six seats is majority-Black. That’s 17% representation for 33% population. That’s deliberate dilution.

And now Callais makes it legal.

“Just look at this current map right now and look at the plausible scenario. Look at how much erasure is happening to the black majority districts,” Toya says. That’s what we need to see. Not abstract constitutional law. Real maps. Real districts. Real erasure.

Nearly half of all Black-majority state legislative districts in the South are now vulnerable under Callais logic. That’s state representatives and state senators—the people who control education funding, healthcare policy, criminal justice budgets at the state level.

The erasure cascades. Congressional districts disappear. State legislative districts disappear. Political power concentrated in fewer hands. Resources flow to where power is. Black communities lose both electoral voice and institutional leverage for resource demands.

The Voter Registration Play: The Work Outside Courts

Here’s the crucial move Toya makes: “We’re signing a voter registration drive. We have to get everybody in Harlem registered. Not as Democrats or Republicans, but registered.”

This is the strategic clarity we need.

The Supreme Court can strike down districts. It can’t strike down voters. And voters are what actually elect people.

Cleo Fields got elected because Black voters voted. Not because courts ordered it. And the Supreme Court can’t unvote that. It can redraw the district. But if voters are organized, mobilized, and registered across multiple districts, they still have power.

This is what it means to build power outside the court system. Courts are unreliable. They’ve made that clear. But voter registration, voter mobilization, voter organization… that’s infrastructure that courts can’t eliminate.

“Every time they look over their shoulder, we want them to see us,” Toya says. That’s not litigation strategy. That’s intimidation strategy. Organized voters. Mobilized communities. Direct action. Political threat.

The work is: Get everybody registered. Not as partisan strategy. As power infrastructure, because the courts have shown they’ll go back on their word, but voters… that’s real.

The Real Stakes: What Gets Lost Beyond Districts

When voting power disappears, what follows?

Education funding. States allocate resources based on electoral leverage. Lose voting power in Congress, you lose leverage in appropriations. Schools in Black neighborhoods get less. That’s not accidental—it’s mechanical.

Healthcare access. Federal healthcare dollars flow through Congress. Hospital funding, Medicaid expansion, public health infrastructure—all shaped by Congressional power. Strip voting power and you strip leverage for health equity.

Housing. HUD funding, fair housing enforcement, lending discrimination cases—all require Congressional appropriation and Department enforcement. Both require political leverage.

Criminal justice. Federal prosecution decisions, civil rights investigations, law enforcement funding—shaped by Congressional power and executive priority. Electoral power determines executive priority.

Economic development. Federal contracts, small business loans, economic development zones—all distributed through political networks. Voting power = access to the network.

The system is: Electoral power → Legislative leverage → Resource distribution → Material conditions.

Strip electoral power and you strip the whole infrastructure. That’s not metaphor. That’s how the system actually works.

The 61-Year Timeline: Why This Moment Matters

In 1965 Voting Rights Act passed. “The machinery that made Jim Crow possible” gets undone.

In 2013 Supreme Court in Shelby County guts Section 5, the VRA’s enforcement mechanism. “They removed the preclearance requirement—states don’t have to get federal approval before changing voting rules anymore.”

Now in 2026, Supreme Court in Callais renders Section 2 nearly meaningless by raising the proof standard to near-impossible levels.

In 13 years, two Supreme Court decisions have dismantled 61 years of voting rights progress. Not all at once (that would be too obvious), but methodically. First the enforcement mechanism. Then the remedy mechanism.

What’s left? A law that looks good on paper but can’t be enforced. That’s the play. You don’t overturn the law. You make the law unenforceable.

They want you confused. They want you to think this is complicated legal reasoning. It’s not. It’s strategic dismantling. One layer at a time.

The Call to Action: Breathing Down Their Throat

This is where it gets real. The Supreme Court made its ruling. The appeal is over. The courts won’t save us. But something else can.

Organized voters. Registered voters. Mobilized voters who show up and make politicians understand that there’s a cost to accepting voting rights destruction.

“We want to make them pass the strongest civil rights bill they’ve ever passed,” Toya says. Not by asking nicely. By being “right there breathing down their throat. Every time they look over their shoulder, we want them to see us.”

That’s voter registration drives. That’s primary challenges against representatives who accept the Court’s ruling without fighting it. That’s ballot initiatives. That’s showing up at district offices. That’s making politicians understand that Black voters are a threat they have to take seriously because here’s the truth: The Supreme Court doesn’t get to decide elections. Voters do. And if we organize at that scale, the Court’s decision becomes just noise.

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The World Is on Fire and They Want You to Smile Through It

I’m going to be honest with y’all. I struggled to even show up today. Not because I didn’t have something to say — I always got something to say — but because the weight of what’s happening around us right now is stacking up in a way that makes it hard to breathe, hard to focus, hard to even figure out what the hell to lead with. And I know I ain’t the only one. Feel me?

Every day, every hour, every minute of the hour, we’re getting hit with political, social, economic news — domestic, international — that impacts our livelihood, that puts stress on our bodies, that creates anxiety we ain’t even had time to process before the next thing drops. And there are people out here who want to make you feel like something’s wrong with you for acknowledging that reality. They want to move in what I call cruel optimism — a term the late theorist Lauren Berlant gave us — this idea that people can be cruelly optimistic in the face of a system that is actively destroying them, holding onto the promise that the system will eventually work in their favor even when every piece of evidence says otherwise.

That ain’t it though. I don’t think cruel optimism is going to get us anywhere. I don’t think it helps us regulate our emotions. And I damn sure don’t think it helps us take the temperature of what’s actually happening in this country.

Say Her Name: Cerina Fairfax and the Structural Reality of Patriarchal Violence

Let me start with what’s been sitting heaviest on my spirit. This past week we learned that former Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax — a Democrat, a Duke University graduate, once considered a rising political star — shot and killed his wife, Dr. Cerina Wanzer Fairfax, inside their Annandale, Virginia home before turning the gun on himself. Their two teenage children were in the house. One of them called 911.

Let that sit.

Cerina Fairfax was a dentist. She was a community-oriented professional, a mother, a woman who was in the process of leaving. Court records show she had filed for divorce in July 2025. She had testified in court that Justin drank daily. She had installed cameras throughout the house during the divorce proceedings. A judge had ordered Justin Fairfax to vacate the home by the end of April 2026. Cerina Fairfax was doing everything the system tells women to do — she was using the legal process, she was documenting, she was preparing to build a life on the other side of a dangerous situation. And she was still killed.

Now here’s where I need y’all to lock in with me, because this is the part that too many people — especially men — are getting wrong.

The immediate media framing centered Justin Fairfax’s mental health. Court documents noted his emotional decline following his failed 2013 attorney general campaign and the 2019 sexual assault allegations that ended his political career. His heavy drinking. His withdrawal from family life. And while I am not dismissing mental health — I live with ADHD and bipolar disorder myself, and I take that seriously — I need us to be intellectually honest about what’s actually happening here.

Women have mental health challenges too. Women experience ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, PTSD — often at higher rates than men because they are navigating a world that is structurally violent toward them. And I don’t see a pattern of women killing their partners. That ain’t the pattern. The pattern runs the other direction, and it has for centuries.

The #SayHerName hashtag was created precisely because women — and specifically Black women — get erased or marginalized in how we talk about violence. Their bodies magnetize conflict, death, and violence, and then the conversation gets redirected to the psychology of the man who killed them. We center the perpetrator and background the victim. Every. Single. Time.

Here’s the historical context that matters: intimate partner violence is not a series of isolated mental health events. It is a structural phenomenon rooted in patriarchal systems of ownership and control that predate this nation. English common law’s doctrine of coverture — the legal framework that literally dissolved a woman’s legal identity into her husband’s upon marriage — was imported directly into American law. William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765) that husband and wife were one person in law, and that one person was the husband. The “rule of thumb” wasn’t just a phrase — there is historical debate about whether it literally codified the acceptable thickness of a stick a man could use to beat his wife. Whether apocryphal or not, the spirit of that permission was absolutely embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence for centuries. Marital rape wasn’t criminalized in all 50 states until 1993. Let that marinate.

So when we try to explain away what Justin Fairfax did to Cerina Fairfax as a “mental health crisis,” we are doing exactly what we criticize when a 19-year-old white man leaves a white supremacist manifesto and shoots up a church or a grocery store, and the media wants to talk about his mental health instead of the structural climate of white supremacy that radicalized him. We know that framing is a dodge. We know it avoids the elephant in the room. So why do we accept the same dodge when it comes to gender violence?

There is a climate in this country that says it is okay and rational to wage violence against women — even if that woman is your partner. That is the structural analysis. That is what patriarchy produces. And you got to name it.

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Palantir’s Manifesto: When the Surveillance State Writes Its Own Mission Statement

Now let me pivot to something that might seem unrelated on the surface but is deeply connected when you understand how power operates. While we were grieving Cerina Fairfax, Palantir Technologies — the data analytics and surveillance company co-founded by Peter Thiel with early funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm — published a 22-point manifesto on social media drawn from CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic.

This wasn’t a corporate mission statement. This was an ideological declaration. Among its claims: Silicon Valley has a “moral obligation” to participate in national defense. National service should be universal. AI weapons should be built without what Karp called “theatrical debates” about their morality. The “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan was an “overcorrection.” And certain cultures are “harmful” and “regressive.”

Read that last part again. A company that holds billions of dollars in government contracts for surveillance, immigration enforcement, and military operations — a company that built ImmigrationOS, the AI platform that tracks deportations for ICE — is telling us which cultures are worthy and which are not.

Critics across the political spectrum have called this what it is. Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh labeled it “technofascism.” Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis said Palantir had signaled a willingness to add “the AI-driven threat to humanity’s existence” to the nuclear one. Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins noted that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in space — they are the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.

For the folks in the back: Palantir isn’t some startup playing around with code. This is a company embedded in the architecture of the American surveillance state. Their Gotham platform has been used by police departments to aggregate civilian data — names, addresses, social media activity, license plates, personal relationships — to predict the likelihood of people committing crimes. If you’re Black, if you’re Brown, if you’re an immigrant, if you’re poor, you already know what “predictive policing” means in practice. It means you’re the one being predicted on. It means the algorithm was trained on data sets that reflect centuries of racialized policing. It means the bias is baked in, just like it’s baked into every other system we’ve been discussing.

This connects directly to the genealogy of American surveillance. From the Slave Patrols of the 18th century — which were the first organized policing bodies in the American South — to the FBI’s COINTELPRO program that surveilled, infiltrated, and destroyed Black liberation movements in the 1960s and 70s, to the NSA’s post-9/11 mass surveillance apparatus, to ICE’s current deportation infrastructure powered by Palantir’s AI: surveillance in America has always been about controlling populations that the state deems threatening to the existing order. Palantir didn’t invent this. They digitized it. They scaled it. And now they’ve written a manifesto telling you it’s their moral right to do so.

Democracy Was Always Defined in a Particular Way

Here’s where I’m going to challenge some of y’all, and I need you to sit with this even if it’s uncomfortable.

I’m past romanticized ideas of democracy.

The world we’re living in right now is a direct byproduct of the material reality of democracy — not the ideal, not the rhetoric, not the civics textbook version. The actual, historical, material reality. From the very beginning, democracy was defined in a particular way: to be about land-owning men, to subjugate women and slaves. If you go to the beginning, if you study the genealogy of democracy, the exclusion of foreigners, enslaved people, and women cannot be stripped away from who remains marginalized to this day. That’s not a bug. That’s a core feature. That’s baked in.

Athenian democracy — the supposed origin point of Western democratic thought — explicitly excluded women, enslaved people, and foreigners (metics) from citizenship and political participation. The Athenian economy ran on enslaved labor. The democratic polis was built on the backs of people who had no access to its freedoms. When the American founders drew on Greek and Roman models, they weren’t accidentally replicating those exclusions. They were deliberately selecting a framework that concentrated power among propertied white men. The Three-Fifths Compromise didn’t break democracy. It was democracy. The Electoral College didn’t corrupt the system. It was the system — designed specifically to give slaveholding states disproportionate power.

And here’s what a lot of America is grappling with right now: the way y’all are experiencing this country under the current political crisis is a lot of ways that Black folks and Indigenous folks have been experiencing this country for a long, long, long time. What feels like collapse to some has been the status quo for others. Fannie Lou Hamer said it best: sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I’ve been hearing people say, “We need to defend democracy.” And I get it — I understand the impulse. But I also need us to ask: are we defending the ideal, or are we defending the status quo? Because the past status quo that everybody wants to fight so hard to return to is the very thing that brought us to this moment. Different flavors of fascism have been running through this country for a very long time. The powers that be just made it easy for some of us to find a digestible flavor. And then somebody came along who wasn’t digestible, and now we’re all supposed to act like this is new.

It ain’t new. What’s new is who’s finally feeling it.

The Patriarchal Paradox and the Co-optation of Identity Politics

Let me connect another thread here, because these things are not separate conversations. They are one conversation about how power conceals itself.

The paradox of patriarchy says that men can act out of emotion — anger, resentment, revenge — and still be seen as rational actors, while women are told they cannot lead because they’re “too emotional.” That’s a paradox. And it’s one of the built-in contradictions of American democracy. Countries that the United States does not consider “leaders of democracy” have already had multiple women heads of state. But in America, we operate under the implicit assumption that capitalism and democracy require male leadership — specifically white male leadership — to function properly.

This is the same structural logic that co-opted identity politics. When the Combahee River Collective coined the term “identity politics” in 1977, it was a radical framework developed by Black feminist socialist women to articulate how race, class, gender, and sexuality intersected in their oppression and their liberation. It was weaponized against the system. But then the system got smart. It recognized it could incorporate all the representation people demanded while keeping the ideology and the mission intact. You can diversify the faces without diversifying the power structure. You can have a Black president who expands drone warfare. You can have a woman candidate who doesn’t fundamentally challenge the imperial apparatus. All skin folk ain’t kin folk — and all representation ain’t liberation.

The system figured out how to commodify even resistance to itself. You can say “f**k the system,” and that very moniker gets co-opted, becomes merchandise, becomes a way to still justify the thing you were resisting. Because hey — look, democracy lets you say “f**k democracy.” That’s why it’s good, right?

The Education Implication: What We Don’t Teach Is What We Reproduce

Here’s the education piece, and this is where I need educators especially to lock in.

None of what I’ve laid out is taught in standard K-12 curricula. Not the genealogy of democracy that includes its exclusions. Not the history of coverture and the legal architecture of gender violence. Not the lineage from slave patrols to predictive policing to Palantir. Not the Combahee River Collective and the original meaning of identity politics. Not Fannie Lou Hamer’s structural critique of the Democratic Party. Not the distinction between representation and liberation.

What gets taught instead is a sanitized, decontextualized version of American history that trains students to be consumers of democracy rather than critical analysts of it. The banking model of education that Paulo Freire described — where students are treated as empty vessels to be filled with the dominant narrative — is alive and well. And it’s not accidental. The same political forces that are pushing book bans, dismantling DEI programs, defunding ethnic studies, and criminalizing critical race theory in classrooms are the same forces that benefit from a population that cannot structurally analyze the systems they live inside of.

If you don’t teach students the history of patriarchal violence as a structural phenomenon, they grow up believing intimate partner violence is a series of individual tragedies. If you don’t teach the history of American surveillance, they accept Palantir’s manifesto as innovation rather than recognizing it as the digital continuation of COINTELPRO. If you don’t teach the material history of democracy — including who it was designed to exclude — they spend their whole lives defending an ideal that was never meant to include them.

Education is elevation. But miseducation is a cage. And right now, the cage is being reinforced from every direction.

The Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price?

Let me break down the material impacts because this isn’t abstract. This is about bodies. This is about livelihoods. This is about who eats and who doesn’t.

On gender violence: According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States. That’s more than 10 million people per year. Women ages 18-34 are most commonly abused. Black women experience intimate partner violence at rates 35% higher than white women. And homicide is one of the leading causes of death for pregnant and postpartum women. These numbers exist within a context where domestic violence shelters are consistently underfunded, where legal aid for survivors is scarce, and where the very court systems women are told to use for protection are themselves embedded in patriarchal logic.

On surveillance and immigration: Palantir’s ImmigrationOS platform doesn’t just track people — it constructs risk profiles using aggregated data that includes medical records, social media activity, employment history, and family connections. The material impact is that immigrant communities — disproportionately Black, Brown, and Indigenous people from the Global South — live under a constant state of algorithmic surveillance that criminalizes their very existence. Meanwhile, ICE operations disrupt local economies, separate families, and create a chilling effect on everything from healthcare access to school enrollment.

On economic precarity: The political chaos isn’t separate from the economic reality. Tariff policies are impacting the global economy. The cost of living continues to rise. Independent creators, educators, and journalists — people like me who are trying to do this work without corporate backing — are caught in the squeeze between declining ad revenue, platform instability, and an audience that is itself financially stretched. I’ve been traveling more because I’ve been broke, and I’ve been broke because of everything that’s going on in this world. And I know I ain’t the only one.

These aren’t separate crises. They are the intersecting outputs of a system that produces violence, surveillance, and scarcity as features, not failures.

What Do We Do With All of This?

I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers. I’m processing this in real time, just like you. But here’s what I do know:

We have to stop explaining structural violence through individual psychology. Mental health matters — deeply — but it cannot be the analytical endpoint when the patterns are systemic.

We have to stop romanticizing democracy without interrogating its material history. Fighting for an ideal is noble. Fighting to return to a status quo that produced the current crisis is not.

We have to name patriarchy when patriarchy is the engine. We have to name surveillance when surveillance is the tool. We have to name capitalism when capitalism is the logic. And we have to do all of this while also acknowledging that we are tired, overwhelmed, overstimulated, and battling burnout from a news cycle that doesn’t give us time to process one catastrophe before the next one hits.

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What you just read — the connection between Cerina Fairfax’s murder and Palantir’s manifesto, between Athenian exclusion and American surveillance, between the Combahee River Collective and the co-optation of identity politics — that analysis doesn’t come from a newsroom. It comes from one person doing the research, making the connections, and putting it out for free while trying to keep the lights on. If this work matters to you, if it helps you make sense of a world that is deliberately designed to be confusing, become a paid subscriber. That’s how we build something that can sustain this level of analysis. Research over MeSearch. Education is elevation.

Let that marinate.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Intimate partner violence is a structural phenomenon, not an individual mental health failure. The framing of Justin Fairfax’s murder of Cerina Fairfax as primarily a mental health crisis obscures centuries of patriarchal legal architecture — from coverture to the delayed criminalization of marital rape — that normalizes male violence against women. The same analytical error occurs when mass shootings by white supremacists are reduced to mental illness rather than examined as products of a structural climate.

* Palantir’s 22-point manifesto is not corporate philosophy — it is the public ideology of the surveillance state. A company built with CIA venture capital, embedded in military and immigration enforcement infrastructure, and holding billions in government contracts has declared its belief in mandatory national service, AI weapons development, cultural hierarchy, and the moral obligation of tech companies to wage war. This is the digital evolution of COINTELPRO, and it requires the same level of public scrutiny and resistance.

* Democracy’s exclusions are features, not bugs. From Athenian exclusion of women, enslaved people, and foreigners to the American Three-Fifths Compromise and Electoral College, democratic systems have always been designed around the concentration of power among propertied men. The current political crisis is not a departure from democracy — it is a continuation of its material history. Fighting to return to a previous status quo without interrogating what that status quo produced is a recipe for repetition.

* Identity politics has been co-opted by the systems it was designed to challenge. The Combahee River Collective’s original framework was a radical tool of Black feminist liberation. The system learned to absorb representation demands while keeping its ideological mission intact — producing a politics where diverse faces can occupy powerful positions without fundamentally altering the structures of oppression those positions enforce.

* The deliberate erosion of education is connected to every other crisis discussed here. Book bans, DEI dismantlement, ethnic studies defunding, and the criminalization of critical frameworks in classrooms are not culture war distractions — they are strategic moves to ensure populations cannot structurally analyze the systems of violence, surveillance, and economic extraction they live inside. What we don’t teach, we reproduce.

BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

* Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765.

* Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

* Churchill, Ward, and Jim Vander Wall. The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

* Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. Reprinted in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017.

* Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. New York: Random House, 1981.

* Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1970.

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.

The Oldest Trick in the Book Ain’t a Trick—It’s a System

Let me tell y’all something that’s been sitting on my chest since I watched the internet lose its collective mind over Megan Thee Stallion’s breakup with Klay Thompson this weekend. And I need you to hear me when I say this: what you watched unfold across your timelines wasn’t gossip. It wasn’t tea. It wasn’t even drama. What you watched was a 400-year-old system doing exactly what it was designed to do. Feel me?

Meg went on Instagram, said what she said. Cheating. Playing house around his family. Cold feet about monogamy after she held him down through mood swings during basketball season. Then she gave a formal statement to TMZ that was as clear as anything I’ve read from a public figure: trust, fidelity, and respect are non-negotiable, and when those values are compromised, there’s no path forward. That’s a grown woman drawing a boundary. That’s a human being saying, “I deserve better.”

And how did the internet respond? By monitoring her body. By cataloguing every man she’s ever been photographed with. By laughing. By making jokes about whose bed she’s been in, whose ring she thought she deserved, and whether Tory Lanez—a man convicted of shooting her—somehow cursed her love life from a prison cell.

That ain’t it though.

What in the Slut-Shame Lane?

I want to zoom in on DJ Akademiks for a second, because he’s the case study. This man took to X within hours of Meg’s announcement and said—and I’m paraphrasing the spirit of multiple posts here—that she thought she was the fifth ring, that Klay wasn’t built for monogamy, and that he stands with Klay without even knowing the full story. He then invoked Tory Lanez, suggesting Meg would fabricate claims to put Klay in jail next. He’s done this before with Ayesha Curry, too. Told Steph Curry he should have his wife stressed out to keep her in line.

Now, some of y’all will look at that and say, “That’s just Akademiks being Akademiks.” And that’s the problem. That’s exactly the problem. Because when we normalize that behavior, when we frame it as personality rather than pathology, we are participating in a system that predates Akademiks by centuries. He ain’t original. He’s a replica. His talking points were written on a plantation.

Let that marinate.

The Jezebel Stereotype and the Architecture of Surveillance

Here’s where I need y’all to put on your thinking caps, because we’re about to do what we do here at Education is Elevation. We’re going to think deeply about shallow s**t.

The Jezebel stereotype didn’t emerge from thin air. It was manufactured during the period of chattel slavery as an ideological weapon to justify the systematic rape of enslaved Black women. If you could frame Black women as inherently hypersexual, as biologically incapable of restraint, then you could argue that sexual violence against them wasn’t really violence at all. It was just their nature being fulfilled. That’s not my opinion. That’s the historical record. That’s the scholarship of Deborah Gray White, Patricia Hill Collins, Saidiya Hartman, and Moya Bailey.

During slave auctions, Black women were stripped naked and paraded before buyers. Their reproductive capacity was inspected like livestock. Their bodies were commodities—valued for labor, for breeding, and for the sexual gratification of enslavers. And then—and this is the part that should make your blood boil—those same enslaved women were characterized as the ones who wanted it. The Jezebel myth made the victim the seducer. It made the enslaved the temptress. It turned systemic rape into consensual desire.

This framework didn’t die with emancipation. It adapted. It evolved. It found new hosts.

Saartjie Baartman: The Blueprint They Don’t Teach You

If you want to understand the lineage of what happened to Meg this weekend, you need to know the name Saartjie Baartman. Born around 1789 to the Khoikhoi people in what is now the Eastern Cape of South Africa, Baartman was taken to London in 1810 under a fraudulent contract that promised her domestic work and a share of earnings. Instead, she was displayed in exhibitions across Europe—nearly naked, in a cage alongside a baby rhinoceros—because European audiences were fascinated by her body, particularly her buttocks and genitalia.

They called her the “Hottentot Venus.” That name alone tells you everything. “Hottentot” was a colonial slur for the Khoikhoi people. “Venus” was the Roman goddess of love and fertility. The combination sexualized her while dehumanizing her in a single breath. After her death in Paris at age 26, the French naturalist Georges Cuvier dissected her body, preserved her genitalia and brain in jars, and displayed them at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Those remains stayed on public display until 1974. Let me say that again. Nineteen seventy-four. Her remains were not repatriated to South Africa until 2002, after Nelson Mandela formally requested their return.

Baartman’s body was studied, categorized, and archived to support the pseudoscientific conclusion that Black people were a link between animals and humans. Her exploitation wasn’t just cruelty for its own sake—it was epistemological violence. It was the production of knowledge designed to justify white supremacy. And that knowledge system is still operational.

For the folks in the back: when someone tweets that they “monitor the cat of Meg Thee Stallion,” they are participating in a tradition that literally put a Black woman’s genitalia in a jar in a museum in Paris for 158 years. The technology has changed. The logic has not.

Misogynoir: Naming the System

Moya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” to describe the specific intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny that Black women experience. This isn’t standard sexism. This isn’t garden-variety racism. It’s a compound oppression that produces harms that are, as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework teaches us, irreducible to their parts. You can’t separate the anti-Blackness from the misogyny. They are fused.

Dr. Treva B. Lindsey described what happened to Meg during the Tory Lanez trial as “a terrible storm of racialized gender stereotypes.” The National Women’s Law Center documented how Meg was adultified, hypersexualized, and had her credibility questioned precisely because her body and her persona didn’t fit the mold of a “respectable” victim. She was too tall. Too confident. Too sexual. Too much.

And here’s the educational implication that nobody wants to talk about: none of this is taught in schools. The Jezebel stereotype is not in your state standards. Saartjie Baartman is not in your AP History curriculum. Misogynoir is not a vocabulary word in any standardized test in this country. And that silence is not accidental—it is structural. When you remove the historical context that explains why Black women are treated this way, you make every new instance of misogynoir look like an isolated event rather than a chapter in a very old book. You make DJ Akademiks look like a lone provocateur rather than a product of a system that has been training men—Black men included—to surveil, ridicule, and devalue Black women since before this country existed.

The Homoeroticism of Misogyny (Yes, We’re Going There)

One of the sharpest observations from the discourse this weekend came from a commenter who pointed out that the misogyny and homoeroticism kind of go together. And I want to sit with that for a second, because it’s a deeper cut than people realize.

When men—particularly Black men in digital spaces—spend more energy cataloguing a Black woman’s sexual partners than they do examining their own political conditions, their own economic precarity, their own proximity to state violence, something is profoundly misaligned. The obsession with who Meg has slept with, the jealousy disguised as critique, the need to simultaneously degrade her and monitor every detail of her intimate life—that’s not strength. That’s not masculinity. That’s a crisis of identity being projected onto the body of a Black woman.

And it’s on brand with what bell hooks described as the way patriarchy within Black communities often mirrors the very structures of domination that white supremacy imposed on Black people in the first place. You cannot liberate yourself by oppressing the person standing next to you.

The Material Impacts Are Real

Let me bring this home with some facts over feelings, because I know some of y’all think this is just a cultural conversation. It’s not.

Black women in America experience intimate partner violence at rates significantly higher than women of other racial groups. Black women are killed at rates nearly three times higher than white women. The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community has documented that one in five Black women are survivors of rape. When Black women do report violence, they are less likely to be believed than their white counterparts. And when the cultural environment normalizes the mockery, surveillance, and character assassination of Black women who speak publicly about being wronged—as happened with Meg this weekend—you create a chilling effect that keeps countless other Black women silent.

This is not abstract. This has material, intersectional consequences. It affects employment. It affects housing. It affects custody. It affects healthcare—Black women experience maternal mortality at rates three times higher than white women, in part because medical professionals carry the same implicit biases that tell them Black women exaggerate pain, Black women are stronger than they claim, Black women don’t need the same care. These are Jezebel’s grandchildren. Different century, same DNA.

What Education Could Do—If We Let It

Here’s where I land, and I need y’all to hear this clearly. The antidote to misogynoir is education. Not the watered-down, sanitized, feel-good version of education that treats Black history as a footnote in February. Real education. The kind that teaches you the name Saartjie Baartman before you learn to tweet about a Black woman’s body. The kind that puts Moya Bailey’s framework alongside the Federalist Papers. The kind that gives students the analytical tools to recognize that DJ Akademiks and the plantation overseer are reading from the same script separated by nothing but time and technology.

But that education is under attack. Book bans. Curriculum restrictions. The systematic defunding of ethnic studies, gender studies, and any framework that might give young people the language to name what is happening to them. We are living in a moment where the very knowledge that could inoculate a generation against misogynoir is being classified as too dangerous to teach.

Research over MeSearch. That’s what we do here. We don’t just react. We trace the root. We name the system. We bring the receipts. And then we build something better.

Support This Work—Because Nobody Else Is Funding It

I want to be real with y’all for a second. This piece you just read? It draws on the scholarship of Saidiya Hartman, Patricia Hill Collins, Moya Bailey, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Deborah Gray White, bell hooks, and others who dedicated their lives to producing the knowledge that makes analysis like this possible. That knowledge is being erased from classrooms across this country right now. Curriculum that teaches the Jezebel stereotype is being banned. Courses on misogynoir are being defunded. The histories of Saartjie Baartman, of the slave auction block, of the pseudoscientific exploitation of Black women’s bodies—these are the histories being classified as too dangerous to teach.

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

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

That means the same system that doesn’t want Saartjie Baartman’s name in a textbook also benefits when independent educators can’t sustain this work. Your subscription is a direct intervention against that. It’s the difference between this analysis existing and not existing. Between the Jezebel stereotype being named and being forgotten. Between Meg getting context and Meg getting memes.

If this piece taught you something, if it gave you language you didn’t have before, if it connected dots that nobody in your classroom ever connected—become a paid subscriber today. This is how we build the thing they’re trying to dismantle.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The public reaction to Megan Thee Stallion’s breakup is not gossip—it is misogynoir operating in real time. The surveillance of her body, the cataloguing of her sexual partners, and the immediate pivot to mockery rather than empathy follow a pattern that has been documented by scholars including Moya Bailey, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Treva B. Lindsey. This is a system, not a series of individual bad takes.

2. The Jezebel stereotype was manufactured during chattel slavery to justify the systematic rape of enslaved Black women, and its logic remains embedded in how Black women are treated today. From slave auctions where Black women were stripped and inspected to social media threads monitoring Meg’s intimate life, the through-line is the same: Black women’s bodies are treated as public property subject to communal evaluation and control.

3. Saartjie Baartman’s story is the historical blueprint for the commodification and surveillance of Black women’s bodies. Exhibited in cages across Europe, dissected after death, and displayed in a Paris museum until 1974, Baartman’s exploitation was not merely cruelty—it was epistemological violence that produced the pseudoscientific framework used to dehumanize Black women for centuries.

4. The erasure of this history from American education is not accidental—it is structural. The Jezebel stereotype, misogynoir, and the history of Saartjie Baartman are absent from state standards, AP curricula, and standardized testing. This erasure ensures that each new instance of misogynoir appears isolated rather than systemic, preventing the development of critical consciousness.

5. Misogynoir has material, intersectional consequences that extend far beyond culture. Black women experience intimate partner violence, maternal mortality, and medical discrimination at rates dramatically higher than their white counterparts. The cultural normalization of surveilling and mocking Black women creates a chilling effect that discourages reporting, reduces access to care, and compounds existing structural inequalities.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

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

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

* Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.

* Crais, Clifton, and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton University Press, 2009.

* Gray White, Deborah. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. W.W. Norton, 1985.

* Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. Yale University Press, 2011.

* Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. W.W. Norton, 2019.

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

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

* hooks, bell. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge, 2004.

* Morton, Patricia. Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women. Praeger, 1991.

* National Women’s Law Center. “’A Terrible Storm’: Megan Thee Stallion, Misogynoir, and Leaving Black Survivors Unprotected.” December 2022.

* Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Verso, 2015 edition.

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

* Willis, Deborah, ed. Black Venus 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot.” Temple University Press, 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

The Same Struggle, Different Geography

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

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

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

Democracy Will Wipe Your Ass Out

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

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

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

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

The Settler’s Move to Innocence and White Psychopathology

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

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

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

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

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

The Magical Negro and Imperial Liberalism

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

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

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

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

Purity Politics Is a Slur for Refusing to Settle

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

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

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

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

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

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

The False Dichotomy of Local Versus Global

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do We Go From Here

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

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

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

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

5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

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Annotated Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The District, The Incumbent, and the Absentee Seat

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

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

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

What Does a Congressperson Actually Do?

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

Facts over feelings.

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

The Seniority Trap and Why Old Democrats Won’t Leave

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

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

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

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The Implication to Education — Because Everything Is

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

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

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

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

Intersectional Material Impacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ask

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

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

Education is elevation. Don’t wait your turn.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The Hypocrisy Has a Pattern

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

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

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

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

Education as the Real Battleground

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

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

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

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

The Intersectional Material Reality

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

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

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

That’s not coincidence. That’s function.

What Education is Elevation Actually Means Here

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

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

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

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

PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL-TO-ACTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

Media Analysis & Misdirection

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

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

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

Anti-Trans Legislation & Policy

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

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

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

Education, Epistemological Violence & Erasure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Medicalization That Changed Everything

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

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

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

Resilience Against the Machinery

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

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

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

What We Owe

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION

I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted.

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

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. We could do the research that nobody else is doing. We could tell the stories that nobody else is telling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Legal Architecture of Historical Revisionism

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

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

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

The Hypocrisy is Structural, Not Individual

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

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

The Reparations Contradiction

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

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

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

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

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

What HB 167 Actually Reveals

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

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

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

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

This Country Has a Natural Allegiance Toward Losers

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

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

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

The Educational Void and What It Costs

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

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

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

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

Facts Over Feelings

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

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

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

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

EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER ASK

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

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

I’m fighting to fill that void.

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

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & CRITICAL READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let that sit for a second.

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

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

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

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

Feel me?

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

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

The History They Will Not Teach You

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change Is the Context They Keep Ignoring

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

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

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

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

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

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

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

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

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

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

Education is elevation.

PAID SUBSCRIBER EXPLICIT ASK

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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