Thank you Under the Golden Boot, Tamibetcha, Lee, Francisca Michel, The Depths of Justice, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

My co-host, Toya G, and I spent hours unpacking what this means: for the stalled movement for reparations in America, for the complex infighting among Black diasporic communities, and for the very real, documented playbook (Project 2025) that the current administration is using to privatize our government and police our bodies. We laughed, we raged, and we connected dots that the mainstream media refuses to touch. Political Plug aka Domo was out with a sinus infection.

Here’s what I need you to understand.

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

1. The Resolution Is a Mirror, and the West Is Looking Away

The UN resolution is powerful, but it’s also the UN General Assembly is essentially a “global town hall.” It has no army, no police force, and no real enforcement mechanism. Its resolutions are recommendations—the world’s opinion, written down and recorded.

The nations most responsible for the slave trade—the ones who built their industrial revolutions, their empires, and their modern wealth on the backs of enslaved Africans—are the very nations holding the keys to any international action. They abstained, pleading the fifth. The United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy—they all abstained.

This is where we have to be intellectually honest. Portugal, the nation responsible for trafficking more Africans across the Atlantic than any other European country, abstained. Belgium, whose King Leopold later perpetrated a genocide in the Congo that was paved by the slave trade’s infrastructure, abstained. Their abstention isn’t neutrality. It’s a refusal to be on the record for something they know, deep down, they will never be able to fully repay.

2. The “Oppression Olympics” Argument Is a Smokescreen for Debt

When the vote came down, the predictable conservative retort emerged: “Why is this the gravest crime against humanity? What about the Holocaust? What about other historical atrocities?” This is a debate tactic, not a genuine inquiry.

As Toya G pointed out, this argument is a way to avoid accountability. They love to run to “whataboutism” because it creates a hierarchy of pain that they can then claim is “divisive.” But the historical weight is not the same. When you look up “blackface,” you find a history of racial caricature and violence used to dehumanize an entire race to justify their enslavement. When you look up “whiteface,” you find clowns.

This is the foundation of the “Oppression Olympics” argument—it’s a tool used by those who benefit from the status quo to avoid paying their debt. The U.S. even argued that we can’t “retrospectively apply international laws” to slavery. The message is clear: “We’ll acknowledge it, but we won’t pay for it.”

3. Who Gets Reparations? The FBA Conversation Exposes a Deeper Dilemma

The UN resolution’s focus on the entire Transatlantic Slave Trade—and thus the entire Black diaspora—forces a conversation that Foundational Black Americans (FBA) have been having for years: who is “black enough” to get paid?

I’m not one to sit on the sidelines and dismiss the FBA conversation outright. I get it. The point they make about lineage, about the fact that their ancestors were here building this country for centuries while other immigrant groups arrived later and benefited from that struggle, is a valid historical point. But my issue has always been the political bedfellows they sometimes keep—the celebration of mass deportation, the alignment with white nationalist aesthetics.

Toya G helped me articulate the central tension: the police don’t care if you’re FBA or Caribbean. If you’re Black, you’re a target. The violence is anti-Black, not just “descendants of American slaves” anti-Black. So, while the initial reparations focus should be on those with generational lineage from the chattel slavery era, the larger framework of anti-Blackness makes this conversation infinitely more complex.

Max, our producer, dropped the widely cited benchmark from William Darity Jr. and A. Kristen Mullen: $10 trillion to $12 trillion to eliminate the Black-white wealth gap. That’s a starting point. But the how and the who will be the fight of our lives.

4. Mark Wayne Mullin, Project 2025, and the Privatization of the State

As we discussed, the appointment of Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullin—a man with no security experience who has publicly bragged about beating his child—to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not an accident. It is a feature of the system they are building.

This isn’t about incompetence; it’s about loyalty. It’s about putting people in place who will follow the playbook. And the playbook is Project 2025. We pulled it up on the stream. I typed in “TSA” (which DHS oversees) and found it mentioned 26 times. The plan is to starve the agency, cause chaos, and then privatize it.

When you privatize a state function like airport security, you don’t just hand it to corporations. You create a cloak of anonymity. The government is no longer directly accountable for the violence, the harassment, and the abuse that will inevitably follow. It’s the same logic that allowed the “Gestapo” tactics of the early Trump administration to flourish.

5. Seeing Black ICE Agents: The Ultimate Betrayal

Perhaps the most frustrating part of our conversation was seeing the images of Black ICE agents on social media. The discourse that followed—”If you don’t want Black ICE agents, why do you defend gang culture?”—is a false binary designed to make us accept our own oppression.

I was being facetious when I asked Toya G, “Why not have Black overseers on the plantation?” But the logic is the same. The desire for “representation” in institutions built on anti-Blackness is a trap. It’s identity politics commodified by the state. You don’t need Black people in the room if the room is designed to destroy Black people. It’s not representation; it’s participation in your own subjugation.

As Toya G said, if you have to choose between being a slave catcher and selling drugs, those aren’t your only two options. The fact that people defend the choice to become a state agent of violence as “hustling” shows how deeply neoliberalism has consumed our identity.

Explicit Ask to Become a Paid Subscriber

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.

If you found value in this breakdown—the UN resolution, the FBA debate, the Project 2025 analysis—please consider becoming a paid subscriber today. Your support allows me to do the deep research, produce these articles, and keep the conversations going that you won’t find anywhere else. Click the button below to join the community.

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 UN Resolution is Symbolic, But Important: The declaration of the slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” is a major moral statement, even if it lacks enforcement power. It creates a historical record that future generations can use to demand justice.

* The “No” Votes Are a Warning: The U.S., Israel, and Argentina voting no isn’t an anomaly. It signals a global realignment of states that are comfortable with white supremacy and the erasure of Black historical trauma.

* Reparations is a Global Diaspora Question: The FBA conversation about lineage is valid, but the reality of anti-Blackness means any reparative justice framework must grapple with the interconnectedness of the entire Black diaspora.

* Privatization is the Path to Fascism: Project 2025 is the blueprint. From TSA to USPS, the goal is to privatize public goods, stripping them of accountability and turning them into profit centers that can be weaponized against marginalized communities.

* Representation is Not Liberation: Seeing Black faces in oppressive institutions like ICE is not progress. It is a deliberate strategy to give these institutions a veneer of legitimacy while they continue to carry out the state’s anti-Black agenda.

Related Readings (Bibliography)

* The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones (The New York Times Magazine): For a foundational understanding of slavery’s centrality to American capitalism and democracy.

* From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen: The definitive text on the moral and economic case for reparations, including the $10-12 trillion benchmark.

* “Project 2025” Presidential Transition Project (The Heritage Foundation): The primary source document outlining the conservative agenda for the next administration. A must-read for understanding the policy goals.

* The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad: Explores how the construction of Black criminality was essential to the formation of modern policing and state violence.

* “The United Nations General Assembly Resolution on the Transatlantic Slave Trade” (March 24, 2026): The full text of the resolution itself, detailing the 123-3-54 vote and the official language of the declaration.

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