Education is Elevation

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I disagree with KRS-One.

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

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

Let that marinate.

Two Things Can Be True

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

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

That’s the receipt.

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

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

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

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

Both of those things are true. Feel me?

The Dangerous Logic of the “Untouchable”

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

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

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

Read that again.

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

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

That ain’t it though.

The Institutional Abuse Framework

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

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

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

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

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

Facts over feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Freudian Slip

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

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

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

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Hassan Campbell and the Sound of Unheard Trauma

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

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

We sympathize with the leader. We pathologize the victim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is not an accident. This is architecture.

The Graph They Don’t Want You to Read

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

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

The Anatomy of a Manufactured Villain

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Oldest Trick in the Book

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

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

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

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

Victimization Is When You Build the Narrative for Your Own Abuse

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

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

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

The Numbers Behind the Silence

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

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

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

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

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

Consciousness Precedes Transformation

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Numbers Don’t Lie

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

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

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

Environmental Racism Has a New Address

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

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

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

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

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

The Historical Playbook

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

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

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

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

The Water Crisis Within the Crisis

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

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

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

Communities Fighting Back

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

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

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

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

Policy That Matters

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

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

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

The Bigger Frame

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

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

Research over MeSearch. Facts over feelings. Feel me?

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

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5 Key Takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

Bibliography / Related Readings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here’s where the pattern starts.

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

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

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

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

Y’all starting to hear the pattern?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The receipt.

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

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

In other words, they effectively re-enslaved them.

The Language Was the Second Weapon

And they called it a “Tulsa Race Riot.”

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

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

Feel me?

The Beneficiaries Are Still Operating Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terrence Crutcher. Hands up. Murdered. 2016.

Same city. Same pattern. A hundred years apart.

Let that marinate.

The Legal Fight Is Still Happening Right Now

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

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

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

This fight is not over.

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The Domestic and the International Are the Same Blueprint

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facts over feelings.

Research over MeSearch.

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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.

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

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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When I tell y’all that the conservative contradictions are writing themselves at this point, I need you to understand I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m reading receipts. And this week, we got a whole dossier.

Let me set the stage. We’re sitting down on The Chop Up Show — me, Toya G, and Domo aka Political Plug — and within the first ten minutes we’re touching Kristi Noem’s husband getting caught cross-dressing with an immigrant sex worker, the largest protest in American history, Pam Bondi getting fired, Donald Trump publicly embarrassing Caroline Levitt, a basketball player weaponizing Christianity to dehumanize queer people, and a legendary R&B singer laughing on camera about the statutory logistics of sleeping with a teenager. And somehow, all of these things are connected. That’s the part I need y’all to sit with.

Research over MeSearch. Always.

The Conservative Contradiction Machine

Let’s start where the contradictions are loudest. Kristi Noem’s husband, Bryon Noem, got caught in a scandal involving cross-dressing — the very behavior that the conservative movement has spent the last several years criminalizing through legislation targeting drag queens and transgender individuals. We’re talking about actual laws that were passed. Legislation that criminalized the very act that the DHS Secretary’s husband was engaging in privately with an immigrant sex worker.

Now here’s the play. I believe the Trump administration already knew this was coming down the pipeline. That’s why Noem was being repositioned before the story broke. But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop at the personal scandal — it’s structural. The Supreme Court just ruled that conversion camps are protected under freedom of speech. So my question becomes: does Kristi Noem’s husband now have to attend the conversion camps that his wife’s political allies championed? Probably not. And that selective moral outrage is the whole game.

What we’re witnessing is not inconsistency. It’s architecture. The cisgender conservative white man believes he has the right to do everything he wants while criminalizing those same behaviors in others. That’s not a contradiction — that’s a feature of the system.

And it’s not just Noem. Pam Bondi — Trump’s attorney general — was fired. If you recall, Trump fired Jeff Sessions in 2018 because Sessions wouldn’t obstruct the Mueller probe. Same pattern, different pawn. Then Trump publicly humiliated Caroline Levitt, his own press secretary, joking about his 97% negative press coverage being her fault. Three prominent white women in the Trump administration, and all three treated as disposable.

Let’s not forget: 53% of white women voted for Donald Trump — the only majority of women to do so. And he showed them exactly what that loyalty purchases: a front-row seat to your own disposability. You praise a king, you get treated like a pawn.

No Kings Day 3.0 and the Underutilization of Protest

Eight million people showed up for No Kings Day 3.0 — the largest protest in United States history. And the first thing I heard from folks was: what’s the point?

I want to challenge that. I’ve been rethinking the utility of protests, and here’s where I’ve landed. Protests are big-ass meetings. They’re not just about standing next to each other singing and chanting the same phrases. They should be networking opportunities. Communication hubs. Strategic planning sessions. Especially when we know the internet has been infiltrated and surveilled.

The problem isn’t that protests don’t work. The problem is that we don’t have the organizational infrastructure to capitalize on what happens when millions of people are physically together. We’re underutilizing the capacity of collective presence. The question is always going to be: whose directions are we following? What structures are we legitimizing? Those are questions about moral conscience, ethical compass, and strategic viability — and they require a level of intentionality that most protest movements haven’t achieved yet.

Jaden Ivey and the Anatomy of Christian Psychosis

Now let’s talk about Jaden Ivey, because this situation is a case study in everything I’ve been warning about at the intersection of religion, nationalism, and the recruitment of Black athletes.

The Chicago Bulls released Ivey for conduct detrimental to the team. The specifics: he went on 40-minute Instagram rants steeped in anti-queer rhetoric. He categorized teammates as “righteous” and “unrighteous.” He told team doctors that Jesus healed his knee injury — an injury the MRI confirmed was still present. He destroyed locker room culture with persistent, condemnatory preaching that the Bulls organization formally described as “weirdness in the workplace.”

Now, here’s where it gets nuanced, and this is the part I want y’all to think deeply about because we’re thinking deeply about shallow s**t on this one.

Everything Ivey was criticized for — the witnessing, the bearing testimony, the sacred declaration, the chastising of the unrighteous — these are actual tenets of evangelical Christianity. Bearing witness is what Christians are called to do. The Bible talks about the fire burning at the altar and never going out. Many Christians interpret themselves as the altar — mobile vessels carrying the fire and the fear of Christ to share with the world. Sacred declaration — speaking life and not death, the whole notion that life and death are in the power of the tongue — that is foundational doctrine. Even the righteous-versus-unrighteous classification has biblical license. The text gives believers authority to chastise and bring people into the faith.

So here’s the question I posed to the crew: is this religious psychosis, or is this a man living his faith? And the distinction matters.

Religious psychosis involves hallucinations and fixed false beliefs with religious themes — believing one is a deity, a prophet, or possessed. It’s not a specific diagnosis, but a recognized form of psychosis. Now, I do think Ivey is displaying attributes consistent with religious psychosis. But here’s the critical move: I’m not diagnosing him. Psychosis and diagnosis are not the same thing. You can identify the attributes of a phenomenon without pretending you’re a clinician.

And here’s where Domo brought the fire. He said something I want everyone to sit with: one of the biggest issues with religion is that it gives people excuses to be bad people. They wrap their “fucked-up-ness” in the guise of holiness. Because there are Christians who can hold their beliefs without condemning another person’s lifestyle or identity. That type of Christian exists. Which means the bigotry is not unique to Christianity — it’s that bigoted people find Christianity a convenient vehicle for their bigotry.

What’s extremely dangerous about Ivey’s jersey sales skyrocketing after his expulsion is what it reveals: we’ve entered an era where bigots view the rejection of bigotry as oppression. Folks are framing pushback against hate as persecution. And Ivey’s situation folds perfectly into the white Christian nationalist playbook. He can now claim he was persecuted by the NBA, which feeds directly into Trump’s “anti-Christian bias” narrative. This is how Christian nationalism recruits Black folks — specifically Black athletes — into a movement that was never designed to protect them.

Freedom of Speech Is Not What You Think It Is

A lot of people conflated this with freedom of speech, and I had to set the record straight live on the show. So let me lay it out:

First, you can have freedom of speech without that speech entailing the condemnation of an entire group of people. Second, freedom of speech protects you from the federal government — not from private entities. The NBA is a private organization. Third, I dare any of y’all to walk into your job tomorrow and declare an entire group of people unrighteous. You’ll be in HR before lunch, if not fired on the spot. Fourth, a lot of people are being loud, proud, and wrong when they try to play pseudo-intellectual with First Amendment arguments.

And as Domo put it: rights don’t exist in a vacuum. Your rights are bounded by their interaction with other people’s humanity. When your speech creates an environment that produces material outcomes detrimental to another group, people have the right to push back. Hate speech turns into real-life material violence. It starts in the language and then it turns into people doing things. Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Bernie Mac told you: there gon’ be some consequences and some repercussions.

Brandy, Wanya Morris, and the Predator Playbook

Now let me transition to the part of the conversation that requires a trigger warning, because we’re getting into grooming, age of consent, power imbalance, and the infrastructure that allows grown men to secretly date teenage superstars in plain sight.

Brandy confirmed in her 2026 memoir Phases that she dated Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men beginning around 1994-1995, when she was 15-16 years old and he was 22. Before I even get into the analysis, let me ground this with definitions, because I don’t play the game where we’re debating things without agreeing on what words mean.

Grooming: a deliberate process where an older or more powerful person builds trust, emotional dependency, or secrecy with a younger or less powerful person to exploit them, often sexually.

Age of consent: the legally defined age at which a person can consent to sexual activity, varying by state, typically 16 to 18.

Informed consent: agreement that is freely given by someone with the maturity, knowledge, and autonomy to understand what they’re agreeing to and its consequences.

A 16-year-old navigating fame under the guidance of a 22-year-old mentor is, by definition, operating within limited capacity for informed consent.

Now, in a 2014 Breakfast Club interview, Wanya Morris was asked directly about the relationship’s legality. When the interviewer noted Brandy was young, Morris said, “She wasn’t that young.” When pressed that Brandy said she was 15, he corrected to 16 or 17. When asked if the relationship was legal in the state they were in, he joked — joked — “We did it in the states where it was legal.” He said they had a “nomad relationship.” And his Boyz II Men bandmate Shawn sat there wide-mouthed laughing through the whole exchange.

Let me tell you what that interview revealed about this man’s character. At the height of his career — “I’ll Make Love to You,” all the sex music, could have had any woman in the country — he decided to pursue a 16-year-old. And his defense was jurisdictional shopping. That tells you everything. When someone treats statutory age-of-consent laws as loopholes to navigate rather than boundaries designed to protect children, you’re not looking at a love story. You’re looking at a predator who did the research.

As I told the crew: we’ve all done research to figure out loopholes and workarounds for things we knew weren’t above board. There was a level of consciousness about both the act and the potential consequences. The same logic applies here. You don’t accidentally research which states have lower ages of consent. That level of intentional contemplation about the act and its consequences, followed by proceeding anyway, is what separates a mistake from predation.

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The Mentor-to-Lover Pipeline

Brandy wrote in her memoir: “What began as admiration had transformed into something else. It seems to me that he weaponized my admiration, shaped my friendship into dependence, my respect into desire.”

That right there is the grooming playbook articulated by the survivor herself.

The mentor-to-lover pipeline is especially dangerous for child entertainers because of the adultification baked into the industry. These kids aren’t living regular teenage lives. They’re not being socialized normally. They’re isolated from their peers and surrounded by adults. When you’re 16, you’re looking for your equals — your clique, your people. But celebrity strips that away. So you pivot to non-familial relationships with the adults around you. And when one of those adults is young, attractive, successful, and willing to “put you on” — the manipulation is almost baked into the infrastructure.

Domo broke it down perfectly: you think he’s giving you game, but he’s grooming you. You think he’s putting you on, but he’s shaping you to hang on his every word. He’s telling you how the game goes, how to move, how to think — and he’s programming you with the emotional and sexual expectations of the 22 and 25-year-old women he should be dealing with. That’s grooming par excellence.

And celebrity worship is the lubricant that makes it all frictionless. We are too trusting of celebrities because they are celebrities. We are too quick to suspend our logic to justify the people we’re fans of. And when it comes to children in Hollywood, that’s where the greatest danger lives — because celebrity becomes a shield for predatory behavior.

The Epstein Parallel

I drew a direct line on the show, and I’m drawing it here: the Epstein files revealed a network of powerful men who exploited their access, wealth, and fame to prey on minors while an entire ecosystem of assistants, managers, and media looked the other way. What structural similarities exist between that ecosystem and the 1990s music industry that allowed grown men to secretly date 16-year-old superstars in plain sight?

Every argument Wanya Morris made on The Breakfast Club — the jurisdictional maneuvering, the age minimization, the “she wasn’t that young” deflection — those are the same arguments that defenders of Epstein-adjacent figures deploy. The ability for people to defend what Wanya did to Brandy is the same hubris that makes it hard to hold anyone in those files accountable. And it wasn’t just Wanya. Aaliyah was also being passed around as a child by overgrown men who felt entitled to possess her beauty. The industry infrastructure facilitated all of it.

The “Fast Girl” Narrative and Adultification Bias

Brandy wrote: “I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable, obsessive fan. I was a child, and he was an adult.”

The “fast girl” narrative has been weaponized against Black girls specifically to justify the sexual behavior of adult men. And the scope is staggering. Girls are labeled “fast” for wearing shorts, having nail polish, understanding their own bodies, posting pictures, walking with a natural hip movement, being interested in fashion, or simply existing as developing human beings.

Here’s where the double standard gets lethal: boys are encouraged — sometimes by their own parents — to pursue, to date, to prove their masculinity. But if a girl initiates or reciprocates any of the same behaviors, she’s automatically “fast.” We’re raising hypersexual young boys and then policing the very girls they’re pointed toward. And the fastest way to silence a victim is to say she brought it on herself.

Research from the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality in 2017 documented what scholars call adultification bias — the finding that Black girls are perceived as needing less nurturing, less protection, and more accountability than white girls of the same age. That’s not opinion. That’s data. And it maps directly onto how Brandy’s experience was processed by the culture — minimized, laughed about, normalized.

What This Moment Demands

If you got a problem with either conversation — the Jaden Ivey situation or the Brandy-Wanya accountability discussion — and you think there are “more important things to talk about,” I think you’re speaking from a position of privilege. People who experience homo-negative violence don’t have the luxury of saying this doesn’t matter. People who experience the gender violence embedded in these age-gap dynamics don’t have the privilege of dismissal.

We are the generation shaping the next generation. We’re not the kids anymore. And a lot of these conversations matter to us precisely because they didn’t matter when they should have mattered for us. We had to grow up and realize that the traditions we inherited produced a lot of harm. That the things people were okay with in the ‘80s and ‘90s — things we witnessed — are things we refuse to adopt and pass forward.

F**k celebrity worship. If you don’t get anything else from this piece, get that.

And as Alicia Marie reminded us in the live chat: while the adultification of young girls is a critical issue, it is even more so the refusal to hold the patriarchy accountable for their own thoughts, their own decisions, their own actions — which equal and equate to abuse. Being perceived as “fast” does not equal sexual entitlement for the person doing the perceiving. The question is always what she had going on instead of what he had going on. And no, it’s not all men — but it’s always men. Until we redirect the gaze from what the victim was wearing to what the perpetrator was choosing, we are maintaining rape culture, not dismantling it.

We have to talk about how young girls get a chance to see themselves and understand themselves. And we have to talk about how young boys are programmed to participate in the negative ways they see feminized beings, if not women in particular. These are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation.

Research over MeSearch. Always.

BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER

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

This week alone, we broke down the legal architecture of age-of-consent loopholes, the Georgetown research on adultification bias, the First Amendment distinctions between government and private entities, and the structural parallels between 1990s industry predation and the Epstein ecosystem. That’s the kind of work that takes hours of preparation and years of study. If this work fills a gap in your understanding — if it arms you with language and evidence you didn’t have before — I’m asking you to invest in its continuation. Subscribe. Share. And if you’re already here, upgrade to paid. This is how we build the thing that replaces the thing they took away.

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5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Conservative contradictions are structural, not accidental. The same political movement that criminalized cross-dressing and championed conversion camps now quietly absorbs the scandal of Kristi Noem’s husband engaging in those very behaviors. Meanwhile, three prominent white women in the Trump administration — Noem, Bondi, and Levitt — have been publicly discarded by the man 53% of white women voted for. Selective moral outrage is not hypocrisy; it’s the operating system.

2. Jaden Ivey’s expulsion exposes the Christian nationalism recruitment pipeline for Black athletes. Every behavior Ivey was criticized for — bearing witness, sacred declaration, classifying people as righteous or unrighteous — has roots in evangelical doctrine. But when those practices are deployed to dehumanize queer people, they serve the same function as white Christian nationalism’s broader project. His expulsion becomes a “persecution” narrative that feeds directly into Trump’s “anti-Christian bias” rhetoric, revealing how Christian nationalism recruits Black bodies to advance a white supremacist political agenda.

3. The rejection of bigotry is not oppression. Freedom of speech protects citizens from government censorship — not from consequences imposed by private entities, employers, or communities. The NBA, like any workplace, has the right to enforce standards of conduct. When bigots frame accountability as persecution, they are constructing a victimhood that empowers further harm. Hate speech produces material violence. Pushing back against it is not censorship; it’s self-preservation.

4. Wanya Morris’s Breakfast Club interview is a masterclass in how predators narrate their own behavior. The jurisdictional maneuvering (”we did it in the states where it was legal”), the age minimization (”she wasn’t that young”), and the casual laughter from his bandmates all reveal a system where powerful men can publicly confess to predatory behavior and have it processed as entertainment. The mentor-to-lover pipeline that Brandy describes — admiration weaponized into dependence, respect groomed into desire — is the same infrastructure that protected figures in the Epstein files.

5. The “fast girl” narrative is a weapon of adultification bias that protects predators by blaming children. Georgetown Law’s 2017 research confirmed that Black girls are perceived as needing less nurturing, less protection, and more accountability than white girls. That bias turns every natural adolescent behavior — fashion interest, body awareness, social media presence — into a justification for adult male predation. Brandy’s memoir declaration — “I was a child and he was an adult” — is the corrective the culture desperately needs. The question should never be what she had going on. It should always be what he chose to do.

BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. 2017. [Available at law.georgetown.edu]

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

* Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States. Oxford University Press, 2020.

* Butler, Anthea. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America. University of North Carolina Press, 2021.

* Gorski, Philip and Samuel Perry. The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2022.

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

* Morris, Monique W. Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools. The New Press, 2016.

* Crenshaw, Kimberlé, et al. Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced, and Underprotected. African American Policy Forum, 2015.

* American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5). 2013. [Relevant sections on psychotic disorders and religious/cultural considerations.]

* Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class. Vintage, 1983. [Historical analysis of the intersection of sexual exploitation and racial oppression.]

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

* Brandy Norwood. Phases. [Memoir, 2026.]

* The Mann Act (White-Slave Traffic Act). 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2424. 1910, amended. [Federal law on transportation of minors across state lines for sexual purposes.]

* Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946). [Foundational case on First Amendment application to private entities.]

* Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, 587 U.S. ___ (2019). [Recent ruling clarifying First Amendment constraints apply to government, not private organizations.]

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Native Americans are presented to us as a conquered people, but we never talk about how the United States federal government has broken over 500 treaties — and no war was fought. Let that sit with you. No declaration of war. No battlefield. Just paper, pens, and power. The weapon wasn’t a rifle. It was a contract. And the violence wasn’t in a single moment — it was stretched across centuries, administered through bureaucracy, and dressed up as progress.

1948 was one hell of a year in history, wasn’t it? That’s when one of the most devastating photographs in American history was taken — and most of y’all have never seen it. It’s the story of George Gillette, the chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. In that photo, Gillette is covering his face, weeping, while Secretary of the Interior Julius Krug signs a contract — not an agreement, a contract — that would forcibly transfer over 155,000 acres of the most fertile, productive tribal land to the United States federal government for the construction of the Garrison Dam. A damn dam.

And I need y’all to understand why that image hits different when you know the full story. Because it’s not just a man crying. It’s a man being forced to watch the legal destruction of his people’s homeland in real time, knowing he had no power to stop it. That’s the part they leave out of the history books. That’s the part that makes this Research over MeSearch.

The Land Before the Theft

Before we unpack the theft, let’s talk about what was taken. The Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 recognized nearly 12 million acres belonging to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nations — territory spanning across what we now call North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Twelve million acres. By the time the federal government formally created the Fort Berthold Reservation in 1870, that territory had already been slashed dramatically. But what remained was still rich. Still alive. Still theirs.

The Three Affiliated Tribes — the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara — had survived smallpox epidemics in the 18th and 19th centuries that nearly wiped them out entirely. These epidemics, brought by European settlers, devastated their population so severely that the three nations consolidated for survival, eventually settling together at Fort Berthold along the Missouri River. And they rebuilt. They recovered. They created a self-sustaining economy based on agriculture, ranching, and the abundant resources of the Missouri River bottomlands. They had farms. They had cattle. They had a hospital. They had tribal headquarters. They had a way of life.

And then the Army Corps of Engineers showed up.

The Pick-Sloan Plan: Infrastructure as Colonial Weapon

Here’s where you have to understand the machinery behind the theft. In 1944, Congress authorized the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program — a massive infrastructure project designed to control the Missouri River through a series of dams. The plan was the brainchild of Colonel Lewis A. Pick of the Army Corps of Engineers and William Glenn Sloan of the Bureau of Reclamation. The stated goals were flood control, navigation, irrigation, and hydroelectric power.

But here’s what the history books don’t emphasize enough — the Missouri River States Committee that selected the dam sites had zero Native American members. None. The locations were chosen based on topography, minimal impact to major cities and towns, and cost-to-benefit ratios. And because there were no Indigenous voices at the table, the impact to reservations simply wasn’t a “large consideration.” That’s not my language — that’s the historical record.

The Garrison Dam was one of five massive main-stem dams built along the upper Missouri River. And here’s the kicker — the original Sloan plan actually assessed the situation and recommended leaving tribal holdings alone. But when the plans merged into Pick-Sloan, that recommendation was ignored. White support of Native opposition to the dam declined radically once Congress accepted the combined plan. As somebody that knows a lot about history in this country, urban development and government projects have always been about how can we preserve white institutions and comfort and efficiency at the expense of people of color. Every. Single. Time.

Historian Vine Deloria Jr. — one of the most important Native American scholars in history — called the Pick-Sloan Program “the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.” Read that again. The single most destructive act. Not the Trail of Tears. Not the Indian Removal Act. This. And most Americans have never heard of it.

They Started Building Before They Even Asked

This is the part that should make your blood boil. The Army Corps of Engineers began construction on the Garrison Dam in 1946 — two years before the tribes even signed the contract. Two years. When the Corps arrived at Fort Berthold to start construction, the Three Affiliated Tribes had no idea they were coming. Nobody told them. Nobody consulted them. The Bureau of Indian Affairs made no objections while the project was debated in Congress, and none of the tribes were consulted during the legislative process.

And you from the hood or you know how it works in terms of urban development. Hey, we don’t give you the option to sell it under value or it’s eminent domain — you don’t get a damn thing. You don’t get nothing at all. That’s the reason why George Gillette is crying in that photograph, because he didn’t have a real option. He had to sell over the land to get something because it was better than nothing. But the entire time, it was coercion and not consent.

The tribes knew that if they failed to agree to the outlined terms, they would receive even less compensation in the future — or nothing at all. The construction was already happening. The dam was already being built. This wasn’t a negotiation. This was a mugging with paperwork.

On May 20, 1948, George Gillette, fighting back tears, watched Secretary Krug sign the contract. In his own words, Gillette said: “The truth is, as everyone knows, our Treaty of Fort Laramie and our constitution are being torn to shreds by this contract.” He said, “We will sign this contract with a heavy heart. With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation. Right now the future doesn’t look too good to us.”

He was right.

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What Was Lost

The flooding of Fort Berthold was catastrophic. The Garrison Dam created Lake Sakakawea — the second-largest man-made lake in the United States — and it drowned the heart of the reservation. Let me give you the receipts on what was destroyed:

156,000 acres of the most fertile farmland on the reservation — gone. Tribal headquarters — gone. The hospital — gone. Approximately 90% of the tribal population was forced to relocate to higher ground — barren, dry, wind-swept land with poor soil and no timber for protection from North Dakota winters. 325 families displaced. 80% of tribal members forced to move. An entire self-sustaining economy, decimated overnight.

And here’s what makes this even more sinister — the compensation the tribes received was well below market value and significantly less than what non-Indian landowners received for comparable land. The initial offer was $5.1 million. It was eventually increased to $12.6 million, but that was still $9 million less than what the tribes calculated as fair compensation. And the final settlement legislation denied them the right to use the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing, or any other purposes. It also rejected their requests for irrigation development and royalty rights on subsurface minerals. They took the land, flooded it, and then told the original owners they couldn’t even use the shoreline of the lake that destroyed their home.

The dam now generates over $40 million worth of hydroelectric power every single year. The tribes saw almost none of it. It took until 1992 — forty-four years later — for Congress to finally provide additional compensation of $142 million to the Three Affiliated Tribes. Forty-four years of poverty, displacement, and health devastation before the government acknowledged what it had done.

The Health Crisis Nobody Talks About

Before the Garrison Dam was built, there wasn’t a single known case of diabetes on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Obesity was almost unheard of. Let that sink in. These were people who farmed, ranched, hunted, and lived off the land their ancestors had cultivated for a millennium.

After the dam? The loss of agricultural land decimated their food sources. Natural foods were replaced with processed government commodities. Drinking water now came from wells with high-alkaline content. The construction project triggered long-term unemployment, intense poverty, and a decades-long descent into obesity, hypertension, diabetes, alcoholism, and drug abuse. Today, the population suffers diabetes at more than double the national average. This is what happens when you destroy a people’s ability to feed themselves and then hand them commodity cheese and call it assistance.

This is how coloniality works. We’re going to force you on a reservation and take the majority of your land. And then when you own that reservation because white folks are losing their houses, we’re going to make you lose your land and your house to make sure they don’t lose theirs and build a dam because we can’t have this Missouri River threatening the descendants of settler colonizers while you, the colonized subjects, lose everything. Give me that.

This Wasn’t Just Fort Berthold

And here’s what blows my mind — the Garrison Dam wasn’t an isolated incident. Under the Pick-Sloan Plan, the Army Corps of Engineers built five main-stem dams that destroyed more than 550 square miles of tribal land across North Dakota and South Dakota. The projects devastated multiple reservations — Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Crow Creek, Lower Brule, and Yankton. The Oahe Dam alone flooded over 200,000 acres on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Reservations. In total, more than 900 Native American families were displaced. Over 1.6 million acres of fertile bottomland were flooded — and a massive percentage of that was Indigenous land.

The Pick-Sloan Plan reduced the total land base of five Sioux reservations by 6% and forced one-third of their population to relocate. And here’s the pattern — the best land on every reservation was flooded, and residents were moved to barren, dry uplands. Every time. The fertile land was taken, the people were pushed to the margins, and the benefits — the cheap power, the flood protection, the recreation lakes — flowed downstream to non-Native communities.

That ain’t development. That’s dispossession with an engineering degree.

Stop Thinking Deeply About Shallow S**t

People want to act like treaty violations and land theft are ancient history. Something that happened “back then.” But the Garrison Dam was completed in 1953. My parents were alive. Your grandparents were alive. This ain’t ancient — this is modern American policy. And the health consequences, the poverty, the displacement? Those are happening right now. Today. Unemployment on Fort Berthold remains around 42%. Communities that were once connected by the river are now separated by a lake they never asked for, with a single bridge connecting them.

And this is what I need y’all to understand about the difference between how we’re taught history and how history actually operates. It’s presented to you as if these people consensually agreed. Look what they signed. Look what they agreed to. But they signed under force. Under coercion. Under the threat of getting nothing if they didn’t take something. That’s not consent. That’s extortion.

The Garrison Dam is a case study in how the United States federal government uses infrastructure as a weapon of colonial dispossession. Highways through Black neighborhoods. Dams on Native reservations. Urban renewal that’s really urban removal. The machinery changes, but the logic doesn’t — sacrifice communities of color to preserve white comfort, white property, and white profit.

And until we teach this in every classroom, until we name it for what it is, we’re not doing education. We’re doing propaganda.

EXPLICIT TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER

This article took hours of research, cross-referencing primary sources, legal records, and historical archives to produce. And I did it without a single corporate sponsor telling me what I can and can’t say.

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.

If this article taught you something your school never did — if it made you think differently about the photograph of George Gillette, about dam construction, about what “eminent domain” really means for colonized people — then I’m asking you to put your money where your education is. A paid subscription isn’t charity. It’s an investment in the kind of independent, fearless, receipts-based education that no corporation will fund and no government wants you to have.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

* Parker, Angela K. Damming the Reservation: Tribal Sovereignty and Activism at Fort Berthold. University of Nebraska Press, 2023.

* Lawson, Michael L. Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980. University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.

* Deloria, Vine Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. University of Oklahoma Press, 1969.

* Wilkinson, Charles. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.

* Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon Press, 2014.

* “For the Taking: The Garrison Dam and the Tribal Taking Area.” Cultural Survival Quarterly, February 2010.

* “Dam Floods Hospital, One-Quarter of Reservation.” National Library of Medicine, Native Voices Timeline, 1948 Entry. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/nativevoices/timeline/489.html

* Ferrell, John R. Big Dam Era: A Legislative and Institutional History of the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, 1993.

* VanDevelder, Paul. Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial That Forged a Nation. Little, Brown and Company, 2004.

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Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Rosie Riverter, Education is a lamp, Patricia, Evan, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Y’all ever notice how every election cycle, somebody grabs a microphone and tells you to “save democracy”? Save it from what? Save it for whom? And more importantly—has democracy ever been something Black people were included in enough to save?

Let that marinate.

Because when I sat down with Political Plug (Domo) and Toya G on The Chop Up Show to have a real conversation about democracy—not the bumper sticker version, not the “vote blue no matter who” version, the actual historical, philosophical, epistemological version—what we found was a system that, from its very first breath in 508 BC Athens, was designed to exclude the majority of human beings from participation. Women. Slaves. Foreigners. The people who actually built the society were locked out of deciding how it functioned.

And here we are in 2026. Who’s still getting locked out? Descendants of slaves. Immigrants. Women fighting for bodily autonomy. The same categories. The same exclusions. Two and a half thousand years later. That’s not a glitch in the system, y’all. That’s the system working exactly as intended.

The Greek Myth: Democracy’s Origin Story Is a Story of Exclusion

Let’s start where they always want us to start: Athens. The Athenian politician Kleisthenes is widely credited as the “father of Athenian democracy” around 508 BC. But Domo brought up something essential—before Kleisthenes, you had Solon, who introduced the reforms that made Athenian democracy possible. And here’s the part they leave out of the textbooks: according to Herodotus, Solon traveled to Egypt, specifically to the Saite dynasty, and observed how multiple tribes existed under a unified structure where different groups contributed to collective decision-making. He took that concept back to Athens and started removing hereditary barriers to political participation.

Read that again. The so-called “father” of Western democracy borrowed the concept from Africa. Then the Greeks took credit for it, called the people they learned from “barbarians,” and built a system that only allowed roughly 30,000 adult male citizens to participate—excluding women, slaves, and foreigners, who comprised the majority of the population.

From the very beginning, democracy was a system of collective governance for some, built on the exclusion and exploitation of the many. That’s not me editorializing. That’s the historical record. Facts over feelings.

The Debate We Had to Have: Is Democracy the Problem, or Are the People Running It?

This is where The Chop Up Show got heated—and I mean heated in the best way possible because Domo made a compelling argument that I want y’all to sit with: the problem isn’t democracy as a concept. The problem is the ideology of the people who deploy it.

His position was this: the idea that people should have a say in governance is not inherently flawed. What’s flawed is when racists, white nationalists, and patriarchal power structures get to decide who counts as “people.” He pointed to ancient Igbo societies in West Africa, where decentralized power structures included village assemblies, councils of elders, and—crucially—women’s councils that regulated markets and resolved disputes. These were sophisticated forms of collective governance that predated Athens and, in many ways, were more democratic than what the Greeks built.

And I hear that. I respect that. But here’s where I pushed back.

You cannot separate the tool from the hand that built it. When Kleisthenes or Solon or whoever we want to credit with formalizing Athenian democracy constructed this system, they explicitly excluded women, slaves, and foreigners. That wasn’t an accident. That wasn’t a limitation they planned to fix later. That was the design. The very civilizations that practiced collective governance—the ones Solon learned from in Egypt—were subsequently labeled “uncivilized” by the same Greeks who borrowed their ideas. Democracy, as a term and as a practice formalized by Athens, was always already defined in opposition to the governance models of non-European peoples.

Think about that. The Athens that built “democracy” simultaneously built a civilization hierarchy that positioned democratic nations as morally and politically advanced, granting them the rhetorical right to intervene in, guide, and impose systems on what they called “less developed” states. That’s not a footnote. That’s the blueprint for every imperialist project that followed.

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The Epistemology Problem: Who Gets to Define What Democracy Means?

Now here’s where the conversation got philosophical, and this is the part that’s going to make some people uncomfortable. Domo made an epistemological argument that I think deserves serious engagement. He said: if we acknowledge that the concept of collective governance existed before the term “democracy” was coined, then the Greeks don’t own the concept—they own the term. And if we’re committed to decolonizing our thinking, we should be willing to understand these principles outside the epistemology of whiteness.

That’s a strong argument. And as someone who studied epistemological violence under scholars like George Yancy, Arnold Farr, Charles Mills, and Linda Alcoff, I take that seriously. The idea that Western thought has monopolized how we understand governance—and that this monopoly serves the interests of white supremacy—is not controversial in critical theory. It’s foundational.

But here’s my counter, and I stand on this: the epistemology of democracy IS patriarchal. Not just American democracy. The concept as formalized, named, and exported is inseparable from the patriarchal, slaveholding, xenophobic context that produced it. You can’t transplant a term that carries 2,500 years of exclusionary baggage and pretend the baggage doesn’t come with it. African communalism is not democracy. It’s something distinct, something in many ways superior, and collapsing the two does the work of Western thought by erasing that distinction.

As I told the audience: African communalism and Athenian democracy represent two distinct approaches to governance. The former emphasizes consensus, holistic community well-being, and relational existence—“I am because we are.” The latter focuses on direct majoritarian rule by a minority of male citizens. Conflating them is an act of epistemological violence in itself.

Slavery and Democracy: Co-Constitutive From Day One

Here’s where I’m going to say what a lot of people don’t want to hear: slavery is not a bug in democracy. It’s a feature. In Athens, the entire economic foundation that allowed male citizens to participate in the agora—debating where to put the sewage, deciding how to educate children, voting on policy—was built on slave labor. The leisure to practice democracy depended on someone else doing the work.

Fast-forward to America. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime.” That exception isn’t a loophole. It’s a continuation. The convict lease system, mass incarceration, felon disenfranchisement—these are the mechanisms through which democracy and slavery continue to function as co-constitutive systems. If you go through the prison-industrial complex—the neo-slavery that the Constitution explicitly permits—you come out the other side disqualified from voting. Your democracy is suspended. Any residue of slavery on you complicates your ability to participate in the system.

Toya G put it plainly: in order to have civilized society, in order to have a democracy, you always already have to have some population of people being exploited in order to have the organization and development of those societies. That’s not cynicism. That’s the historical record examined without the rose-colored glasses.

I challenged the audience: show me one iteration of democracy in world history that is not co-constitutive with slavery. I’m still waiting.

Democracy as a Geopolitical Weapon: From CRT Panic to Regime Change

Domo made one of the sharpest observations of the night, and I want to make sure y’all catch it. He compared the weaponization of democracy to the weaponization of terms like “woke” and “critical race theory.” Remember how people who actually study CRT watched in horror as the term was co-opted by bad-faith actors who had no idea what they were talking about? That’s exactly what happens with democracy.

The democratization efforts of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, even Joe Biden—these weren’t about spreading self-governance. They were about opening markets, securing neoliberal control, and facilitating the kind of neocolonialism that allows Western powers to dictate the internal politics of other nations. The language of democracy was the cover story. The reality was resource extraction and geopolitical domination.

And here’s the part that should make you sit up straight: the same civilizing mission that justified European imperialism—the “duty” to bring governance to “savage peoples”—is the direct descendant of Athens calling African communalism “uncivilized.” The line is unbroken. From 508 BC to the Iraq War to AFRICOM. Education is elevation, y’all. Once you see the pattern, you cannot unsee it.

Can American Democracy Be Reformed? The Honest Answer.

We closed The Chop Up Show with the hardest question: can American democracy be reformed?

Toya G said no. She said we missed the window. She pointed to Project 2025, to the unraveling of voting protections, to Democrats capitulating on ICE funding—the very party supposed to “save democracy” caving to authoritarian demands to avoid political blame. She said corruption is too high. And she’s not wrong.

Domo said no—but for a different reason. American democracy can’t be reformed because its foundation is white supremacy. As long as the society that deploys democracy is entrenched in whiteness, no reform will produce genuine liberation. But he argued that if we reconceptualize governance—if we return to the pre-Greek, African models of collective decision-making—there’s something worth building. Not reforming the existing house. Building a new one.

And I land here: democracy is a broke-down house that’s been standing since 508 BC. It’s given some people shelter. It’s given others splinters. But the foundation is cracked, the walls are crumbling, and every time Black people try to build something better—Tulsa, Rosewood, the MOVE family in Philadelphia—that house sends someone to burn ours down. The cling to European ideas of governmentality, this insistence that this mode of government is the best we have and can always be made better—that’s the ideology I’m exposing. We have innovated everything else. Why is this one sacred?

Malcolm X said it: you can change the government peacefully if you want to. You don’t have to be violent. You can change it by using the ballot. But if you don’t use the ballot, you gotta use the bullet. That ain’t a threat. That’s a diagnosis. When democracy is for sale, when it’s being stripped limb from limb, when the people who control it have no interest in the models of governance that actually originated with us—at some point, you have to stop asking whether the system can be saved and start asking what replaces it.

EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION ASK

This article exists because I refuse to let the real history of democracy get buried under talking points and campaign slogans. From Solon borrowing governance concepts from Egypt to the Igbo women’s councils that Athens never acknowledged to the 13th Amendment’s slavery exception that still functions today—this is the kind of reporting that requires research, time, and independence from the institutions that benefit from your ignorance.

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

* Athenian democracy (508 BC) was built on the exclusion of women, slaves, and foreigners from the start—and according to Herodotus, Solon borrowed core governance concepts from Egypt’s Saite dynasty before the Greeks formalized and took credit for “democracy.”

* African communalism—including Igbo village assemblies and women’s councils—predated and in many ways exceeded Athenian democracy in inclusivity, yet was labeled “uncivilized” by the same civilization that borrowed from it.

* Slavery is co-constitutive with democracy, not incidental to it: from Athens’ slave economy enabling citizen participation to America’s 13th Amendment exception to the prison-industrial complex’s felon disenfranchisement, exploited populations have always underwritten democratic societies.

* Democracy has functioned as a geopolitical weapon—from the Greek “civilizing mission” to U.S. “democratization efforts” under multiple administrations—to justify imperialism, open markets, and impose Western governance on societies that already had functional collective systems.

* American democracy cannot be reformed within its current framework because its foundation is white supremacy, but the principles of collective governance that predate Athens offer a roadmap for building something new—if Black communities are empowered to self-determine outside the structures designed to exclude them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY & RELATED READINGS

* Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing, 1998.

* Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Vintage Books, 1967.

* Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.

* Frank, Thomas. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. Metropolitan Books, 2004.

* Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes. University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

* Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Robin Waterfield. Oxford University Press, 1998.

* Malcolm X. “The Ballot or the Bullet.” Speech delivered April 3, 1964, Cleveland, Ohio.

* Mbiti, John S. African Religions and Philosophy. Heinemann, 1969.

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

* Nzegwu, Nkiru. “Recovering Igbo Traditions: A Case for Indigenous Women’s Organizations in Development.” In Women, Culture, and Development, edited by Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover. Oxford University Press, 1995.

* Ober, Josiah. Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens. Princeton University Press, 2008.

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

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

* Wiredu, Kwasi. “Democracy and Consensus in African Traditional Politics.” In A Companion to African Philosophy, edited by Kwasi Wiredu. Blackwell, 2004.

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

* Alexander, Michelle

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Thank you Tope Eletu, Sherell, Sherri Nourse, Heather A Murphy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Education is Elevation and I know a lot of us are lost in the sauce of capitalism. I know a lot of us are so deep in how this system has commodified our human relationships that we can’t even see the water we’re swimming in. But I need y’all to sit with me on this one, because the question I’m posing today isn’t hypothetical. It’s not academic. It’s the most material, most practical, most urgent question facing every single person reading this right now.

Is socialism the answer?

Now, before you have that knee-jerk reaction — before the programming kicks in and you start typing “but Venezuela” or “who’s gonna work the factory?” — I need you to breathe. I need you to sit in the discomfort. Because that discomfort? That’s the system working exactly as designed. That emotional response you’re about to have? Capitalism put that there. And if you stick with me through this piece, I’m going to show you exactly how.

The Monstrous Critique: What Capitalism Actually Is

Let me start here, because I think before we can even talk about an alternative, we need to be honest about what we’re living in right now.

Socialism is not the government just doing things. It’s not just free healthcare and free childcare. Socialism is an entire restructuring of life around human needs. Right now — and I need you to really hear this — life is structured around profit. Around money. When you say “I need a house,” you don’t actually go get a house. You say, “I need enough money for a house.” When you say “I need a car,” you don’t go get a car. You say, “I need enough money for a car.” Capitalism bars your access to the things you need to survive, and to get access, you have to slave. You slave for the factory, you slave for the corporation, or you slave for yourself as a small business owner, sacrificing meals and health and time to attract enough currency to justify your existence.

For others to have more, you must have less. That is exactly how this system works.

And here’s what people don’t understand: what I’m describing when I talk about socialism is how human beings lived for 95% of our existence. This idea of one person hoarding everything while the rest of us fight over scraps? That’s a brand new thing. Because in the past, when humanity first emerged, if we did not share what we had, we all died. Survival was cooperative. That wasn’t idealism. That was biology. That was the default state of humanity — surviving collectively.

From Farming to Fascism: The Historical Architecture of Exploitation

Then we started farming. And we started having surplus. And to protect that surplus, you needed patriarchy. You needed violence. You needed separation. This is where we see the nuclear family born — not out of love, but out of property protection. This is where we see the subjugation of women to the household. And that household? One of the first prisons.

Sylvia Federici documents this brilliantly in Caliban and the Witch. We learn in school that the witch hunts were religious hysteria. That’s the sanitized version. The truth is that the witch hunts were the centralization of power. Women held communal power in their communities — power that didn’t arise from money. It arose from fertility, from veneration, from spirituality, from a connection to land and culture. There were common lands where people farmed, lived, gathered. The church sat on common land. During the witch hunts, they took those common lands. And the women who were called “witches” were the influential community leaders whose power threatened the emerging capitalist order.

This is where we see domestic labor — reproductive labor like raising a child — treated as non-work. You could take care of a baby all day and under capitalism they’ll treat you like you never put in an hour of work. Because under this system, your purpose as a human being is to reproduce labor. You become a machine. Everything the system does is designed to extract from you. Even having fun. Even joy itself is commodified and used to extract from you.

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

Socialism Defined: A Transition, Not a Fantasy

So what is socialism? Let me be precise, because precision matters.

Socialism is a transition. It’s a transition toward communism, which is a kind of endpoint — a society where there is no race, no class, no money, no state. Just human beings living among each other as we once did. And to get there, we need socialism because there is so much extraction embedded at every point of this system that you have to dismantle it piece by piece.

The way you dismantle it is by first identifying the contradictions. A contradiction works like this: the slave owner needs me to build his house, but I have no house. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we can’t pay our bills. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we don’t have medicine. That’s a contradiction. We work every day, yet we’re undereducated and can barely read. These contradictions are not bugs in the system. They are the system.

Karl Marx talked about this using the terms “lower communism” and “fuller communism.” Communism is both a process and an endpoint at the same time. The same way a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not a square. We have to get to a point where we’re not worried about money, about race, about the thousand divisions capitalism manufactures to keep us from seeing each other clearly. And to do that, people need to not be worried about survival first.

Under capitalism, for you to get food in America, you either have to slave at CVS, slave in a prison, slave for the system, or steal it. Under socialism, for you to get food, all you’d have to do is be alive. That is the difference. Socialism is allocating the resources we already have — taking the factories that capitalism built through exploitation and turning them into production systems that serve human needs. As simple as that.

Alienation: How Capitalism Captured Your Mind

Frantz Fanon was an author, a psychologist, and a revolutionary who studied colonized peoples in Algeria during the civil war. He realized something profound: the colonized wanted to become the colonizer. They had their own language but wanted to speak the colonizer’s language. They had their own culture but wanted to adopt the colonizer’s culture. And yet, on the other hand, the colonizer would never accept them. So as a colonized person, you exist in a limbo. This is why we have these desires. This is why we carry a hatred for communism and socialism that we can’t even explain rationally — because the system cannot survive without that hatred.

Karl Marx calls this alienation. He outlines it in Das Kapital. Capitalism alienates you from four things: the people around you, your labor, what you make, and eventually yourself. This alienation makes us feel like we’re in constant danger, like we’re not safe, like we need the system. And the system plays daddy — it comes along and says, “It’s gonna be okay. Just let me do the exploitation and you’ll get your bag of chips and your DoorDash.”

I saw this playing out in real time during a live conversation. People in the comments were asking, “Who’s gonna work the factory?” and “Who will you sell the products to?” and “Who’s gonna learn how to operate everything?” Every single one of those questions is framed through the perspective of alienation. They can’t imagine a factory existing to provide products for people. They can only imagine a factory existing to generate transactions. That’s how deep the programming goes.

But think about this: is anyone getting paid to read this article right now? No. You’re here because you chose to be. People go to school for hours studying subjects that capitalism says have no market value — that’s proof that human beings are motivated by more than profit. The very people who mock “worthless degrees” are conceding that people pursue knowledge for its own sake. You’ve already disproved your own argument.

Late-Stage Capitalism: The System Is Crumbling

The German economist Werner Sombart coined the phrase “late-stage capitalism.” It describes the current, often absurd phase of the modern economy, characterized by extreme income inequality, massive corporate influence over government, and the commodification of daily life. If you’re in denial that this definition describes exactly where we are right now, you’re confused about which country you live in.

Look around you. People have three, four jobs in a household and can’t afford to live. My friend spent $10,000 on his son’s Little League baseball at a public school. Just for a kid to go have fun outside, they extract from you. Just for you to get food, medicine, to drive down the road — they extract from you. Every single moment, they are extracting from you.

Every seven to ten years, we see a stock market crash. 2008 was the housing crisis. 2020 was COVID. And they could have operated the economy in a way where COVID didn’t completely destroy it. Instead, they operated in a way where they could shut your business down and buy it. They destroy the economy for people like you and me so the ultra-rich can buy everything we have until we’re all debt slaves. This is what they want with techno feudalism. Elon Musk wants to own Texas and have you buying things with Tesla coins. The American dollar is crumbling, and they know it. The end is coming because they don’t pay you enough, they won’t invest in the infrastructure to keep society running, and they don’t care if the world ends as long as they can fly away and preserve their power.

And then you see fascism. Fascism is capitalism defending itself. It’s an animal backed into a corner, scratching and clawing. The industrial factory owners put Hitler in power because communists and socialists were demanding better pay and more rights. To preserve their power, the capitalist class will always turn to fascism. You don’t even have to reach for historical examples — everybody watching American politics right now understands we’re dealing with fascism, and it exists solely to protect the capitalist interests of corporations. Every war America has fought since World War II has been in the interest of corporations. You’re not fighting for American freedom if you’re blowing up Iranian schools or going into Iraq to steal oil.

Commerce Is Not Capitalism: The Lie You Keep Repeating

Here’s the homework I’m assigning y’all, and I need you to take this seriously.

A lot of people conflate commerce with capitalism. Commerce is defined as the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale. That’s it. Commerce predates capitalism by hundreds and hundreds of years. The Aztec empires traded. The Inca empires traded. The Silk Road existed centuries before anyone conceived of capitalism. You don’t need slavery, rape, murder, pedophilia, or a military-industrial complex to buy and sell things.

According to Britannica and the Harvard Gazette, capitalism began to emerge between the 16th and 18th centuries in Europe, particularly in England, through the transition from feudalism via market practices and agrarian changes. That means capitalism is not even 500 years old. Human beings have been here for approximately 300,000 years. The claim that the whole world has always practiced capitalism is empirically false. It’s historically wrong.

And here’s the contradiction that should keep you up at night: capitalism tells you it breeds innovation and that we should always be advancing everything. But when it comes to the economic system itself? Suddenly we’re stuck at what Europeans came up with in the 1500s. You believe we should innovate everything — technology, medicine, transportation — but not the system of governance that organizes all of it? That’s not logical. That’s programming.

Capitalism was born out of the enclosure movement, where common lands were privatized and worked by tenants for market production. It was born out of slavery, out of colonialism, out of the most abhorrent violence imaginable. It was born out of unsustainability — European feudalism was collapsing, resources were depleted, and colonialism was a desperate, violent expansion to steal what they couldn’t produce. And the democracy we practice now? That didn’t come from Greece. It came from the Six Nations, the Iroquois Confederacy. The native nations already had democratic governance. We stole it, exploited it, and erased it so we could tell our own origin story.

Socialism vs. Capitalism vs. Communism: What Black Academics Have to Say

Now let me take a moment to address this directly, because this is a conversation that Black scholars have been having for over a century — and it’s one that mainstream discourse consistently ignores.

Cedric Robinson, in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, argued that Marxism alone was insufficient to explain the experience of Black people under capitalism because capitalism itself was always already racial. Robinson coined the term “racial capitalism” to demonstrate that capitalism didn’t just exploit labor — it required the invention of racial hierarchy to function. For Robinson, communism as Marx described it was a necessary intervention, but it needed to be filtered through the Black radical tradition that predated Marx — through the maroon communities, the slave revolts, the quilombos of Brazil.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in Black Reconstruction in America, documented how the formerly enslaved carried out what he called a “general strike” — the largest labor action in American history — and attempted to build cooperative, socialist institutions during Reconstruction. Du Bois argued that it was not the failure of socialism that ended Reconstruction but the violent reassertion of white capitalist power through the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow. Later in life, Du Bois became an open socialist and eventually joined the Communist Party, arguing that capitalism and white supremacy were structurally inseparable.

Angela Davis has consistently argued that the prison-industrial complex is the logical extension of plantation capitalism — that mass incarceration is not a failure of the system but a feature of it, designed to warehouse surplus labor and generate profit from captive Black bodies. For Davis, abolition is inherently a socialist project because you cannot dismantle the prison without dismantling the profit motive that sustains it.

Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, demonstrated that African economies were systematically dismantled by European capitalism, not because they were “backward” but because their destruction was necessary for European capital accumulation. Rodney argued that socialism was the only viable path to genuine African development precisely because capitalism’s relationship to Africa was always extractive by design.

And Claudia Jones, the Trinidad-born activist and intellectual, argued in her foundational essay “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” that Black women occupied a position of “super-exploitation” under capitalism — exploited by race, class, and gender simultaneously. Jones was a committed communist who understood that no amount of reform within capitalism could address the interlocking systems of oppression that defined Black women’s lives.

The throughline among these thinkers is consistent: capitalism was not built to include Black people. It was built on our exclusion, our exploitation, and our dehumanization. Communism and socialism, while imperfect in their historical applications, represent the only theoretical frameworks that demand the total reorganization of economic life around collective human needs rather than private profit. The question for Black communities is not whether capitalism has “worked” — the racial wealth gap alone answers that — but whether we have the courage to imagine and build something entirely different.

There Is No Ethical Consumption Under Capitalism

And for the people who love to say, “How can you be against capitalism if you’re wearing capitalism?” — I need you to think about what you’re actually saying. That’s like asking a slave how they can critique the plantation while eating the master’s food. We don’t exist outside the system. That’s the whole point of the critique. A lot of us criticize capitalism precisely because it forces us to survive within it.

You make the iPhone. You make the shirt. The worker creates the product. Capitalism just exploits the labor that creates it. The things you think wouldn’t exist without capitalism — technology, art, infrastructure — all of it existed before capitalism. The pyramids were built before capitalism. The Indus Valley civilization had sewers, grid roads, temples, and what we’d call fast food restaurants. Pottery, art, music, language — all of it predates the 1500s. Things are not made because of capitalism. Things are made because of people. And people have always created, always innovated, always built — because that’s what human beings do.

If something can be built, it can be destroyed. And capitalism was built. Not out of necessity. Out of greed, unsustainability, and violence. And if it was built, it can be replaced with something better.

The Call to Action: Unplug, Organize, Build

So where do we go from here?

First, reject their reality. Unplug from the matrix. The first step is understanding that the world as it’s been presented to you is not the world as it actually is.

Second, get into your community. Real life. Capitalism alienates you from real life, so you have to go out of your way to read books, to learn trades and skills that are valuable to your community. If you know electricity and your neighbor’s lights are messed up, go help. If you’re a mechanic and you hear grandma’s car struggling every morning, go fix it. This is the first step.

Third, educate yourself and others. Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that the system trains you to be passive about your oppression — and not just passive, but active in oppressing others by training you to accept information without question. Instead of learning through conversation and challenge, you’re taught to shut up and memorize. That’s the first step in training docility. So read. Question. Challenge. That’s how we get free.

And fourth — and this is the one that really matters — organize. The Bolsheviks didn’t have a majority of their country. They had 30%. All we need is the people who see the truth to come together, get organized, strategize, and build. Because as my man the Chain Slayer said: to leave you powerless, they will leave you knowledgeless. And knowledge is power.

Capitalism has a lot of y’all lost in the sauce, and you don’t realize how much it impacts how you value learning and what you value learning. The Heritage Foundation that created Project 2025 employs people with degrees in Women’s and Gender Studies — the very discipline they tell you is worthless. They build think tanks to defund and discredit the same ideologies they use to consolidate their own power. They know the value of this knowledge. They just don’t want you to have it.

So I’ll leave y’all with this: capitalism has a lot of us lost in the sauce. It impacts how we value learning, how we value knowledge, and how we value each other. The racial wealth gap has only widened over the past 70 years. No matter how many Black billionaires or Black millionaires you can count, the system wants you to sensationalize these individualistic examples to distract from how the collective is suffering. Any Black man with a billion dollars — his billion is making a hundred billion for a white man. That’s math, not emotion.

I don’t care if you disagree with me. I don’t care if you say f**k me. Whether you hate me or love me, I believe education is elevation. And that discomfort you feel? That’s not weakness. That’s growth. That’s how you start to push yourself into action and build on your understanding.

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

* Socialism is not “the government doing things” — it’s a complete restructuring of society around human needs rather than profit. Under capitalism, your access to housing, food, medicine, and education is gated behind money. Under socialism, access to those things requires only being alive. That’s not a utopian fantasy — it’s how humans organized survival for 95% of our existence.

* Capitalism is not even 500 years old, and commerce predates it by millennia. People conflate buying and selling with capitalism, but markets existed long before the enclosure movement privatized common lands in 16th-century England. The Silk Road, the Aztec trading networks, the Indus Valley’s urban economies — all of this predates capitalism. You don’t need exploitation to have exchange.

* Late-stage capitalism is not a theory — it’s a description of right now. Coined by German economist Werner Sombart, the term describes extreme income inequality, corporate capture of government, and the commodification of daily life. When people work 80 hours a week and still can’t eat, the system’s own promises have been broken. The cyclical crashes — 2008, 2020 — aren’t accidents. They’re features designed to consolidate wealth upward.

* Fascism is capitalism defending itself, not an alternative to it. Every historical instance of fascism — from the German industrialists backing Hitler to the current corporate capture of American politics — represents capital choosing authoritarian violence over sharing power with workers. Understanding this connection is essential to understanding why “reform” within capitalism consistently fails.

* The emotional resistance you feel to this analysis is itself a product of capitalist conditioning. Marx’s concept of alienation, Fanon’s analysis of the colonized mind, Freire’s critique of banking education — all describe how the system programs your responses before you even encounter the argument. The discomfort isn’t a sign you’re wrong. It’s a sign the programming is being challenged.

EXPLICIT PAID SUBSCRIBER 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.

Think about what we just broke down together — the history of capitalism from the enclosure movement to techno feudalism, the way alienation programs your emotional responses, the scholars like Cedric Robinson and Angela Davis who’ve mapped the architecture of racial capitalism for decades.

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS

* Marx, Karl. Das Kapital, Volume 1 (1867)

* Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

* Federici, Sylvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)

* Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

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

* Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970)

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

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

* Davis, Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003)

* Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972)

* Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman” (1949)

* Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (1997)

* Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism (2023)

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

A man sat on a nationally syndicated radio station in 2014 and told the world—laughing, mind you—that he was sexually involved with a 16-year-old girl when he was 22 years old. His bandmates were right there next to him, giggling. The host was entertained. The audience was amused. Nobody flinched. The man was Wanya Morris of Boyz II Men, and the girl was Brandy Norwood—the same Brandy who was America’s sweetheart, whose debut album was still warm on the shelves, whose entire career was being built under the supervision of the very man who was sleeping with her in secret.

His exact words: “We did the thing when she was like 16, 17.” Then, when someone asked whether she was too young, he said: “She was old enough to get it.”

A whole 16-year-old girl. A child. And a room full of grown men decided that was comedy.

This week, Brandy released her memoir, Phases, and she confirmed what the whispers always said. The relationship was real. It started when she was 16 and he was 22. He was her mentor. He called himself her boyfriend in private and denied it to the world. She lost her virginity to him. She hid the relationship from her parents. She carried the shame for thirty years while he controlled the narrative on Instagram Lives and podcast couches.

What I want to do in this piece is something that most of the coverage is not doing. I don’t want to rehash the gossip. I want to give you the framework—the legal architecture, the clinical definitions, the historical pattern, and the structural parallels—that make this story not just a celebrity scandal but a case study in how the exploitation of Black girls was industrialized, normalized, and protected by every institution that was supposed to prevent it. Thinking deeply about shallow s**t, as always. Research over me searching. Let’s get into it.

What Brandy Actually Wrote

In Phases, Brandy described meeting Wanya Morris through industry connections around 1994, shortly after she began opening for Boyz II Men on their national tour. She was a teenager stepping into a world of grown folks’ money, grown folks’ schedules, and grown folks’ access. Wanya was six years older and already one of the biggest R&B stars on the planet. He positioned himself as a mentor—someone who could guide her through the industry, help her navigate fame, protect her from the machinery that chews up young artists.

Brandy wrote that by 1995, when she was 16, the relationship had crossed from mentorship into a secret sexual relationship. Wanya would call himself her boyfriend in private but maintained a public fiction that nothing romantic was happening. The plan, she said, was to reveal the relationship once she turned 18. In the meantime, everything was hidden—from her parents, from the press, from the public.

She described the experience with a clarity that only comes from decades of processing. She wrote that he weaponized her admiration for him. She said he saw a 15-year-old girl with rising fame and admiration for his talent and, in her words, “deliberately took advantage.” She described the relationship as involving a significant power imbalance and said she was “too young to recognize she was being used.”

And then she wrote something that should be printed on billboards in every entertainment district in America: “I was not a fast girl with a crush. I was not a dramatic teenager who couldn’t handle rejection. I was not an unstable obsessive fan. I was a child. And he was an adult. And it’s time the world understood the difference.”

That is not gossip. That is testimony.

What Wanya Said—and How It Contradicts Everything

In 2021, Wanya Morris went on Instagram Live to get ahead of the narrative. He told his followers that Brandy was his “little protege,” that her mother had asked him to guide her through the industry, and that nothing romantic happened until she was of legal age. He said it with the kind of confidence that only comes from believing the other person will never speak.

His exact words: “There’s no lie going on here. You can ask Brandy and she will tell you the same story.”

Brandy told her story. It directly contradicts every word that came out of his mouth. She said the relationship started at 16. He said it started at 18. She said it was secret, coercive, and shaped by a power imbalance. He said it was organic and mutual. She said she was hiding from her parents. He said her parents allowed him to “guide Brandy.”

That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s not a “difference of perspective.” That is a man who spent years constructing a public narrative designed to pre-empt and discredit the testimony of the girl he exploited. And it worked—until she wrote a book.

The Grooming Framework—By the Book

I need to give you the clinical definition here because too many people are treating this like it’s a matter of opinion. It is not.

Grooming is defined in clinical psychology as a deliberate process by which an older or more powerful person cultivates trust, emotional dependency, and secrecy with a younger or less powerful person in order to exploit them—often sexually. The process typically moves through identifiable stages: targeting a vulnerable individual, gaining trust through mentorship or protection, filling an emotional need, isolating the target from other support systems, sexualizing the relationship, and maintaining control through secrecy and shame.

Now read Wanya’s own description of the relationship back through that framework. He said he was introduced to Brandy through industry connections. He described himself as her mentor. He said her parents entrusted her career development to him. He said they grew close over time. And then—by his own admission on a public podcast—they became sexually involved when she was 16.

That is not a love story that went through normal stages. That is the grooming playbook executed step by step, in order, on camera, with the perpetrator narrating it himself and not even recognizing what he was describing. When you go from “I was guiding this young woman through her career” to “we were intimate when she was 16,” you are not describing mentorship that blossomed into romance. You are describing exploitation that used mentorship as its delivery mechanism.

And every single person in that studio who laughed—every member of Boyz II Men who sat there and smiled while he said “she was old enough to get it”—participated in the normalization that makes the next Brandy possible.

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Coerced Consent and Consent vs. Coercion

This is where I need everybody to slow down, because this is the part that most people get wrong and the part that matters most.

There is a difference between consent and the absence of force. The fact that nobody held a gun to Brandy’s head does not mean she consented. Consent—informed, meaningful consent—requires three elements: maturity to understand what is being agreed to, knowledge of the consequences, and autonomy to freely accept or refuse without coercion. A 16-year-old navigating sudden fame under the guidance of a 22-year-old mentor who controls her access to the industry is, by definition, operating with a compromised capacity for all three.

Coercion does not require physical force. Coercion can be structural. When the person you are sleeping with is also the person who introduced you to the industry, who has relationships with every producer and label executive you need, who your own parents have entrusted with your career—the power differential itself becomes the coercive mechanism. You don’t have to threaten someone when the architecture of their entire professional future runs through your approval. The imbalance does the work.

Brandy wrote that she “genuinely believed it was true love.” That belief is not evidence of consent. It is evidence that the grooming worked. The entire purpose of grooming is to manufacture the appearance of consent—to make the victim believe they are choosing freely when the conditions of that choice have been engineered by the person exploiting them. When a 16-year-old says “I was in love,” that does not retroactively validate the behavior of the 22-year-old adult who cultivated that feeling while occupying a position of authority over her career and emotional development.

Brandy also wrote that she believed having sex with Wanya would “cement their bond”—that she convinced herself it was her choice, only to later realize she never really had one. This is the hallmark of coerced consent: the victim internalizes the groomer’s framing so completely that they experience the exploitation as their own decision. The coercion is invisible to the person being coerced because the entire environment has been shaped to make compliance feel like desire.

And let me be precise about the legal dimension here. Neuroscience has established that the prefrontal cortex—the brain region responsible for decision-making, impulse control, and evaluating long-term consequences—does not fully mature until approximately age 25. At 16, a person’s brain is not equipped to evaluate the long-term emotional, psychological, and social consequences of a secret sexual relationship with an adult authority figure. This is not opinion. This is neuroanatomy. This is why age of consent laws exist in every jurisdiction in the country—not because teenagers lack all judgment, but because the law recognizes the developmental asymmetry between adolescents and adults, especially adults who hold power over them.

So when people say “she knew what she was doing,” I need you to understand: knowing what you are doing and having the developmental capacity to meaningfully consent to it are two entirely different things. A 16-year-old can understand the physical mechanics of a sexual relationship and still lack the cognitive architecture to evaluate the power dynamics, emotional consequences, and long-term damage of a secret relationship with a mentor who is six years older and infinitely more powerful in the only world that matters to her. Consent without capacity is not consent. It is compliance with extra steps.

The Legal Loophole Confession

This should have been the headline on every news outlet in America. On that podcast, when pressed about whether the relationship was legal given Brandy’s age, Wanya Morris laughed and said: “We didn’t do it in the states where it was illegal.”

I need you to sit with that. A grown man described flying a teenager around the country and calculating which jurisdictions would allow him to have sex with her—and he said it as a joke. The room laughed. Nobody stopped the tape.

The age of consent in the United States varies by state: 30 states set it at 16, seven states at 17, and 13 states at 18. What Wanya described—moving a minor between states while navigating this patchwork of laws—is jurisdictional arbitrage. It is the same strategy documented in the Epstein files, where minors were transported between Florida, New York, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and international destinations to exploit gaps in consent law and prosecution.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 1591 and the Mann Act provisions of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2423, transporting a minor across state lines for the purpose of sexual activity is a federal crime. When the victim is under 18, the law does not require proof of force, fraud, or coercion. The minor’s age alone establishes the crime. This is a strict liability framework—the same framework that was used to prosecute the Epstein network.

When a 22-year-old man treats the statutory age of consent as a legal loophole rather than a boundary designed to protect children, he is not being romantic. He is not being adventurous. He is doing precisely what federal trafficking law was written to prevent. And he told on himself on a podcast.

The Epstein Parallel Is Structural, Not Metaphorical

The Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law on November 19, 2025. By January 30, 2026, the Department of Justice had released over 3 million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images. UN human rights experts described the contents as evidence of a “possible global criminal enterprise” involving systematic sexual abuse, trafficking, and the commodification of women and girls. The UN statement specifically noted that these crimes occurred against a backdrop of racism, extreme misogyny, and dehumanization.

I am not saying Wanya Morris is Jeffrey Epstein. Brandy’s case did not involve trafficking or a criminal network. But what the Epstein revelations taught us—and this is the part that everybody wants to skip past—is that exploitation operates on a spectrum. On one end, you have organized criminal networks flying children on private jets. On the other end, you have a 22-year-old R&B star flying a 16-year-old mentee between states, joking about which jurisdictions permit him to have sex with her, while the entire industry looks the other way. The mechanism is the same: access, fame, power imbalance, secrecy, legal maneuvering, and a culture of complicity that punishes the victim for speaking and rewards the perpetrator for silence.

The structural similarities are not accidental. They are the product of the same system—one in which powerful men exploit their access to young women and girls while institutions that are supposed to protect those girls instead protect the revenue streams those girls generate.

Rest in Peace, Aaliyah

I cannot write this article without talking about Aaliyah. In August 1994—the same year Brandy began touring with Boyz II Men—R. Kelly secretly married 15-year-old Aaliyah Haughton. Kelly was 27. He was her mentor and producer. He had produced her debut album, which was titled, with a cruelty that only makes sense in retrospect, “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number.”

A fake ID was obtained to list Aaliyah’s age as 18 on the marriage certificate. Kelly’s former tour manager later testified that Kelly knew her real age, that the relationship began when she was in her early teens, and that the marriage was arranged after Kelly feared she was pregnant. Federal prosecutors eventually charged Kelly with paying a bribe to obtain the fraudulent identification document.

Two teenage Black girls. Two adult male mentors. Two secret relationships. The same industry. The same decade. The same silence. Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001 at 22 years old. She never got to write her memoir. She never got to reclaim her story. The industry that failed to protect her spent decades framing her as a teen seductress rather than recognizing her as a victim.

Brandy got to write the book. Aaliyah did not. That alone should tell you how high the stakes are when we talk about believing survivors on their timeline.

The Pushback—and Why Every Objection Collapses

“He was young too.” He was 22. She was 16. At 22, you have graduated college, you are paying taxes, you can legally drink, sign contracts, and serve on a jury. At 16, you cannot vote, you cannot sign a contract, and in 20 states you cannot legally consent to sex with a 22-year-old. The developmental gap between a 16-year-old brain and a 22-year-old brain is documented by every neurological study on adolescent development published in the last three decades. This is not a gray area.

“It was a different time.” Statutory rape laws existed in the 1990s. The age of consent was codified in every state. These laws were enforced—against non-celebrity defendants—regularly. What was different about the 1990s is not the law. It was the enforcement gap. Celebrity and wealth created a de facto exemption from accountability. That is not an argument for tolerance. That is an indictment of complicity.

“Why is she bringing this up now?” Because survivors get to choose their own timeline. Because Brandy carried this for 30 years while Wanya controlled the narrative. Because the question was never “why is she talking now?”—the question is “why did we let him lie for this long?”

And for the people who want to protect Wanya’s legacy—what about hers? What about Brandy’s family watching him joke about this on podcasts? What about her children hearing “she was old enough to get it” from a man their mother trusted as a teenager? When you center the perpetrator’s comfort over the survivor’s truth, you are telling every exploited girl in America that her story matters less than his reputation. And that is exactly how the cycle perpetuates.

What This Demands of Us

Next time you share an Epstein file and perform outrage—next time you quote-tweet a document dump and say “protect the kids”—I need you to remember that the exploitation of children did not require a private island. It did not require a billionaire’s black book. It happened on tour buses and in hotel rooms and between studio sessions, in an industry that turned children into products and then blamed those children when grown men consumed them.

The 1990s music industry had a child exploitation problem that we glamorized as romance, buried under VH1 specials, and allowed powerful men to narrate from their own perspective for three decades. Brandy just took the pen back. The least we can do is read what she wrote. The least we can do is believe her. The least we can do is stop laughing.

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. Grooming is a structural process, not an opinion.

When a 22-year-old mentor initiates a secret sexual relationship with a 16-year-old protege, the textbook definition has been met. Wanya Morris’s own description of the relationship—mentorship, trust-building, secrecy, then sexual contact—maps onto every clinical stage of the grooming process regardless of anyone’s feelings about the individuals involved.

2. Consent without capacity is not consent.

The absence of force does not equal the presence of consent. A 16-year-old operating under the professional authority and emotional influence of a 22-year-old mentor lacks the developmental capacity and structural autonomy to meaningfully consent to a secret sexual relationship. Coercion can be structural—built into the power imbalance itself—without a single threat being spoken.

3. Legal loopholes are not moral defenses.

Wanya’s joke about avoiding states where the relationship was illegal reveals a predatory calculus that treats age of consent laws as obstacles to navigate rather than protections for children. This is the same jurisdictional arbitrage that federal trafficking statutes were designed to prosecute, and it mirrors the geographic maneuvering documented in the Epstein files.

4. The 1990s music industry had a systemic child exploitation problem.

Brandy’s story exists alongside Aaliyah’s experience with R. Kelly and a broader documented pattern of adult male artists pursuing teenage female artists under the cover of mentorship and career development. This is structural, not incidental. The industry created the conditions, the culture provided the cover, and the silence ensured it could repeat.

5. Survivors own their timeline.

Brandy carried this story for 30 years while Wanya controlled the public narrative. Her memoir reclaims it on her terms. The appropriate question is never “why is she speaking now?” It is “why did we let him lie unchallenged for three decades?”

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

Bibliography & Related Readings

Primary Sources

Norwood, Brandy. Phases: A Memoir. Hanover Square Press, 2026.

Surviving R. Kelly. Directed by Dream Hampton. Lifetime, 2019–2023.

DeRogatis, Jim. Soulless: The Case Against R. Kelly. Abrams Press, 2019.

Epstein Files Transparency Act, Pub. L. No. 119-XX (2025). Released documents: justice.gov/epstein.

Legal & Policy Sources

18 U.S.C. § 1591 – Sex Trafficking of Children by Force, Fraud, or Coercion.

18 U.S.C. §§ 2421–2423 – Mann Act provisions on Transportation of Minors for Illegal Sexual Activity.

Andreozzi + Foote. “15-Year-Olds Are Children: The Law, the Epstein Files, and the Lie of ‘Barely Legal.’” January 2026.

United Nations OHCHR. “Flawed ‘Epstein Files’ Disclosures Undermine Accountability for Grave Crimes.” Press Release, February 17, 2026.

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I need y’all to hear me on this one.

I don’t say things to be provocative. I say things because the data demands it. Right now, Senator Cory Booker is out here on a nationwide book tour, sitting on Meet the Press telling Kristen Welker he’s “definitely not ruling out” a presidential run in 2028. I’m not here to bash him and yes we disagree on alot, however I hope this video and piece written by me is something he and his team can sit on. Process and digest.

Let’s start where everybody wants to start. The speech.

On March 31, 2025, Cory Booker took to the Senate floor and spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sit. He didn’t use the restroom. His staff removed his chair so he wouldn’t be tempted to sit down. And when he was done, Democrats gave him a standing ovation, Chuck Schumer shed a tear, and the internet lost its collective mind. It was a cool moment, though I remained critical. He broke the record previously held by Strom Thurmond—the segregationist senator from South Carolina who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for 24 hours and 18 minutes trying to stop Black people like Booker from ever sitting in the United States Senate.

Now, the symbolism of a Black senator breaking the record of a white supremacist senator? I see the power in that. I’m not going to negate the historical symbolism of what he did. On my PawPaw grave here’s where I need y’all to think deeper than the optics.

What did the speech actually accomplish?

Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. Zero policy changes. Let me say that again for the people in the back who confuse applause with legislation: zero.

Stated simply, Conscious Lee will not substitute my cultural pride for political accountability. Yes we can celebrate that cultural moment in history while also not separating it from political accountability and critique. As a Public Educater and Edutaining Content Creator, I’m critiqued best in this very framework nonetheless I’m no policy maker.

See, I know political theater when I see it. And just like Strom Thurmond’s historical act didn’t stop the Civil Rights Act from passing the very next day by a vote of 60–15, Booker’s speech didn’t stop a single thing either. Matthew Whitaker—a man with no significant foreign policy experience who served briefly as Trump’s acting attorney general—was confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO by a vote of 52–45 the same evening Booker stopped talking. The Senate literally waited for him to sit down and then proceeded with business as usual. Feel me?

Pay attention and read closely. Here’s what nobody wants to talk about. What Booker did after the speech.

The Receipts

Receipt number one.

The very next month after his marathon performance, Booker voted to confirm David Perdue—Trump’s pick for U.S. Ambassador to China—joining 15 other Democrats in handing Trump a 67–29 victory. This is during an active trade war that Trump started with his reckless 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports. You just stood on your feet for 25 hours telling America how dangerous this administration is, and then you handed them a confirmation vote on a critical diplomatic post in the middle of an economic confrontation? Make that make sense.

Receipt number two.

In May 2025, Cory Booker was the only Democrat—the only one—to vote to confirm Charles Kushner as the United States Ambassador to France. Who is Charles Kushner? He’s Jared Kushner’s father, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law, a convicted felon who pled guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and—this is the part that should disqualify any senator’s vote—witness tampering. The man hired a sex worker to seduce his own brother-in-law, had it filmed, and sent the tape to his sister as retaliation for cooperating with federal investigators. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Trump pardoned him in 2020. And Cory Booker—Mr. 25-Hour Moral Stand—was the lone Democrat to say, “Yeah, that’s fine with me.”

Why? According to the New Jersey Globe, Booker and Kushner have a relationship going back decades. Charles Kushner provided financial support for Booker’s first mayoral run in Newark back in 2002. So when the moment came to choose between principle and patronage, Booker chose patronage. Every single time.

Receipt number three.

Booker himself stood on the Senate floor later in 2025 and said—and I’m paraphrasing here—”This is a problem with Democrats in America right now. We’re willing to be complicit with Donald Trump. We are standing at a moment where our president is eviscerating the Constitution, and we’re willing to go along with it.” He said that. On the record. About his own party. But Senator, you are the party. You are the complicity you’re describing. Because when the votes came, you went along with it too.

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The Historical Context You Need

Let me give you the history that most people won’t, because this pattern didn’t start with Booker.

Strom Thurmond’s 1957 filibuster is instructive not because of its length but because of its futility and its function. Thurmond stood for 24 hours and 18 minutes reading state election laws, the Declaration of Independence, and George Washington’s Farewell Address—not because he believed he could stop the Civil Rights Act, but because the performance of resistance served his political brand. Even his fellow Southern Democrats—men like Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge, committed segregationists—were furious with Thurmond. Russell called it “personal political aggrandizement.” Talmadge called it grandstanding. They had agreed as a caucus not to filibuster the bill, and Thurmond broke ranks for the spectacle. The bill passed the next day.

Now I’m not drawing a moral equivalence between Thurmond’s cause and Booker’s. Thurmond was fighting to stop Black people from voting. Booker was ostensibly fighting to protect democratic institutions. But the structural function of both speeches is identical: a marathon performance that stopped nothing, changed nothing, and primarily elevated the speaker’s national profile. Thurmond used his filibuster to become a national figure in Southern politics. Booker used his speech to launch a book tour and fuel 2028 presidential speculation. The pattern is the pattern.

And this is where the deeper history gets uncomfortable. The Democratic Party has a long tradition of what I call performative resistance—gestures designed to signal opposition without actually disrupting the machinery of power. When Hakeem Jeffries and Booker sat on those stairs together for their viral moment, I said at the time: that’s what me and my content creator friends do. We sit down and have conversations and hope they reverberate through the culture because we don’t have levers of power. But Booker does. He’s a United States Senator. He has committee assignments, voting power, the ability to place holds on nominations, and the procedural tools to actually obstruct. He chose the performance instead.

This is the difference between Frederick Douglass and the Black faces in high places that Malcolm X warned us about. Douglass didn’t just speak—he organized, he built institutions, he demanded structural change. Malcolm drew the distinction clearly: there’s a difference between the house Negro and the field Negro, between the entertainer and the leader. The entertainer performs resistance. The leader produces it. And if we’re being honest—facts over feelings—Booker’s record is that of a performer, not a producer.

He’s Voted Nice Before—But This Moment Demands More

Now, let me be fair. I want to be fair because that’s what we do at Education is Elevation. We don’t deal in caricature. We deal in complexity. We leave the pathology and antiblack tropes for them other folks.

Cory Booker has cast votes I respect. He was the first senator in history to testify against a fellow senator during Jeff Sessions’ 2017 attorney general confirmation hearing. He co-sponsored the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2013. He has spoken powerfully about criminal justice reform, and he’s introduced legislation around environmental justice that reflects genuine concern for marginalized communities. He showed moral courage during the Kavanaugh hearings. I see that. I acknowledge that.

In Bryan, Texas we have the saying about “dry ass hating” which means exactly how it sounds. I’m not dry ass hating.

But here’s what I need the culture, my neighbors and kinfolks to understand: a voting record built in calmer waters does not predict performance in a storm. How that pipe functions when’s its easy flow will not tell negate how pressure bust pipes. Bro is just not piped up to be President. And right now, we are in a Category 5 hurricane. We have an administration that has, by Booker’s own admission on the Senate floor, “inflicted harm after harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the foundations of our democracy.” We have DOGE dismantling federal agencies. We have ICE operating with expanded impunity. We have tariff wars destabilizing working families. We have an assault on public education, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security happening in real time.

And in this climate… this specific, unprecedented, constitutional crisis climate—Cory Booker has shown us who he is. He speaks for 25 hours and then votes to confirm the nominees of the very administration he just railed against. He writes a book called Stand while sitting down on the votes that matter. He talks about being part of “a new generation of leadership” while practicing the oldest form of political careerism there is: building a brand on the backs of people’s pain without delivering material results.

The current moment doesn’t need someone who can rise to a podium. It needs someone who can rise to the moment. And Cory Booker, based on his own record, has illustrated that he cannot rise to the moment for the American people—only for himself.

The “I Am Spartacus” Problem

Remember the Kavanaugh hearings? Booker had his dramatic “I am Spartacus” moment where he claimed to be risking expulsion from the Senate by releasing confidential documents. The White House had actually already cleared those documents for release. It was theater. Effective theater, maybe—but theater. And the White House knew it then, which is exactly why their spokesperson responded to the 25-hour speech by saying Booker was “looking for another ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.”

When your opponents can predict your playbook because your playbook is always the same—performative resistance followed by institutional compliance—you are not a threat to power. You are a relief valve for it. You give people the emotional catharsis of resistance without the material consequences of it. And that is not leadership. That is content creation with a Senate salary.

What His Own State Is Saying

Let me bring this home. New Jersey—Booker’s own state—shifted significantly toward Republicans in 2024. Kamala Harris won the state by less than six points after Biden won it by sixteen. Booker’s approval ratings have been a subject of concern among New Jersey Democrats for years. His 2026 reelection is not the guaranteed victory it once would have been. And according to my New Jersey sources and multiple reports, there is genuine frustration among constituents who feel that Booker has prioritized national ambitions over the needs of the state that elected him.

This is a man who has raised $10 million—with a major fundraising bump directly after the 25-hour speech—for a campaign account and affiliated joint fundraising committee. He released a book the same month he went on Meet the Press to not rule out a presidential run. The timeline isn’t subtle, y’all. The speech was the launch pad. The book is the campaign literature. And the presidential campaign is the destination that every single one of these moves has been designed to reach.

The question isn’t whether Cory Booker wants to be president. He’s told us he does. The question is whether his record justifies that ambition. And based on the receipts—zero bills passed, confirmation votes for Trump nominees including a convicted felon, a speech that stopped nothing, and a book tour that started immediately after—the answer is no.

The Standard We Should Demand

I want to have a respectful conversation about this. I hope this article has showcased that I have the ability to be respectful and analytical while still being direct. I’m not here to assassinate anyone’s character. I’m here to evaluate a public servant’s record against their stated ambitions.

Because if we’re serious about 2028—if we’re serious about building a Democratic Party that can actually defeat Trumpism and not just perform opposition to it—then we need candidates whose records match their rhetoric. We need leaders who don’t vote to confirm convicted felons to ambassadorial posts because of two-decade-old political debts. We need senators who understand that a 25-hour speech means nothing if you hand the opposition a confirmation vote 24 hours later.

Thinking deeply about shallow s**t is what we do here. And the shallow s**t in this case is the 25-hour speech. It looks deep. It feels powerful. It moved people to tears. But when you dig beneath the surface—when you pull the receipts and lay the voting record next to the rhetoric—what you find is a politician who is exceptionally skilled at performing the aesthetics of resistance while maintaining the practice of compliance.

That’s not a president. That’s a brand.

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

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. The 25-hour speech produced zero legislative results. No bills passed. No votes stopped. Matthew Whitaker was confirmed as NATO Ambassador the same evening Booker stopped speaking. The speech was a physical feat, not a legislative one.

2. Booker’s voting record contradicts his rhetoric. After publicly opposing the Trump administration for 25 hours, Booker voted to confirm David Perdue as Ambassador to China and was the sole Democrat to confirm convicted felon Charles Kushner as Ambassador to France—a man who financially supported Booker’s first campaign.

3. The historical pattern of marathon Senate speeches is clear. From Thurmond in 1957 to Cruz in 2013 to Booker in 2025, lengthy Senate speeches have almost never changed legislative outcomes. They change narratives and build personal brands. Thurmond’s own allies called his filibuster “personal political aggrandizement”—a criticism that applies equally today.

4. Booker’s post-speech trajectory reveals his priorities. A book release, a national tour, $10 million in fundraising, and a public refusal to rule out a 2028 presidential run all followed the speech. The speech was a launchpad for personal ambition, not a catalyst for collective action.

5. The current moment demands legislators who produce results, not performances. With DOGE dismantling agencies, tariff wars destabilizing the economy, and constitutional norms under unprecedented assault, the Democratic Party needs leaders whose voting records match their stated opposition—not senators who speak for 25 hours and then hand the administration confirmation votes.

Explicit Ask To Become Paid Subscriber

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

The article you just read—pulling Senate voting records, historical analysis of the filibuster tradition from Thurmond to Booker, cross-referencing confirmation votes with public statements, and contextualizing all of it within the history of performative resistance in American politics—this is the kind of independent, receipts-based on investigative education that doesn’t exist on cable news. They’ll show you the 25-hour speech. They’ll let Booker promote his book unchallenged. They won’t pull the Kushner vote, the Perdue confirmation, or the Whitaker timeline and lay it all out for you in one place. That’s what your paid subscription makes possible. That’s what Education is Elevation is building. If this work matters to you, become a paid subscriber today. We’re building the media we deserve—together.

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