Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee

Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. theconsciouslee.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    Two Black Children, Two Verdicts, One Lesson — Breaking Down Karmelo Anthony & Cyrus Carmack-Belton

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. When I was in college, sitting in a philosophy class before I had the vocabulary of Mills and Wilderson and Hartman to lay over it, I learned the one lesson that has organized everything I have studied since, which is that the law in this country has always been good at two specific things, justifying Black death and criminalizing Black resistance, and kinfolks, this week the country handed us the syllabus and dared us to read it out loud. Think about the collective mourning happening for Black folks right now, because we are still processing a not-guilty verdict for the man who chased and killed Cyrus Carmack-Belton, and before we could catch our breath we had to sit and watch a guilty verdict come down on Karmelo Anthony. Two children. One week. Two verdicts that, laid side by side, tell you precisely how this country has priced our lives since emancipation. None of us was surprised. That right there, the not being surprised, is the whole essay, because surprise is a luxury that belongs to the people the law was built to protect, and we have never been those people. Receipts First: What Actually Happened Let me keep the facts clean and separate from my read of them, because in this house we never blur a record with a framing. On June 1, 2026, a jury in Columbia, South Carolina found Chikei “Rick” Chow not guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting of Cyrus Carmack-Belton, a 14-year-old boy Chow chased more than a hundred yards and shot in the back over a false accusation about water bottles the child had already put down. On June 9, 2026, a jury in Collin County, Texas found Karmelo Anthony guilty of murder for the stabbing of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet in April 2025, when both boys were 17, and that same jury sentenced him to 35 years, rejected his self-defense claim, rejected sudden passion, and sent him to a cell where he will not be eligible for parole until he has served nearly two decades. Lawyers on both sides of the Anthony trial told the jury this case had nothing to do with race. Hold that sentence. We are going to come back to it, because claimed neutrality is never the absence of a position, it is a position wearing a lab coat, and Mills already named it for us as the view from nowhere that always somehow ends up standing exactly where power is standing. “The Only Good Negro Is a Dead Negro”: The Law Was Built This Way Before we talk about a single juror, we have to talk about the architecture, because the law did not wake up biased one Tuesday in Texas, it was poured into this mold on purpose. After emancipation, when the formal property claim on Black flesh was struck from the books, this country did not decide we were free so much as it decided we were dangerous, and it wrote that conclusion into the Black Codes, into vagrancy laws that criminalized Black movement itself, into convict leasing that turned the prison into the new plantation under the cover of the Thirteenth Amendment’s one loophole. Read Cruikshank in 1876 and watch the Supreme Court tell the survivors of the Colfax Massacre that the Constitution had no protection to offer them. Apply Mills here, because the racial contract he describes is not a metaphor, it is a working agreement about who counts as a full person before the bench, and it has never been formally repealed, only renegotiated in quieter language. When that old voice says the only good negro is a dead negro, it is not describing a fringe opinion, it is describing the default setting of a legal order that has always been more fluent in our death than in our defense. Apply Hartman here too, because she taught us that the spectacle of Black suffering was never incidental to American law, it was its theater and its ritual, and the lynching postcard and the courtroom selfie are cousins closer than this country wants to admit. They Were Children: The Adultification Engine Here is what gets lost in the sauce every single time. Karmelo Anthony was 17. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14. These were children, and the machinery that turns Black children into adult threats in the eyes of the law has a name and a research record, so let me give it to you. Apply Goff here, whose 2014 work showed that Black boys as young as ten are seen as older, less innocent, and more culpable than white boys the same age, that the presumption of childhood, that soft protective assumption that a kid is just a kid, gets revoked the second the kid is Black. Apply the Georgetown research, Epstein and Blake and Gonzalez, who documented the same theft of childhood from Black girls, the assumption that they need less protection and less nurturing and already know more about grown things. This is the engine. Emmett Till was 14 when this country decided his face was a provocation. The Central Park Five were children when the city and its newspapers and a certain real-estate man taking out full-page ads decided they were a wolf pack. Tamir Rice was 12, with a toy, in an open-carry state, alive for two seconds after the cruiser pulled up. The adultification of Black children is not a vibe, it is a documented perceptual mechanism that does the legal work of making a child’s fear illegible and a child’s death excusable, and you cannot understand either of these verdicts without it. Self-Defense Is a White Inheritance Now watch the inconsistency, and watch how it never embarrasses the people performing it. The same political tradition that built a folk hero out of Kyle Rittenhouse, who crossed state lines with a rifle to a protest and walked out a free man with a self-defense ruling, turns around and decides that Karmelo Anthony should never have had a pocketknife in his bag at a track meet on a rainy day. Apply the two-roles frame here, because what they say is that they believe in the universal right to defend yourself, but what the position structurally does is reserve that right for whiteness and convert that same instinct into evidence of guilt when the body is Black. George Zimmerman followed and killed Trayvon Martin and went home. Marissa Alexander fired a warning shot into a wall, hurt no one, and was offered twenty years. This also proves the point, that self-defense in this country is not a fact about danger, it is an inheritance about race, a credential issued at birth to some and withheld at birth from others. Karmelo Anthony, surrounded, afraid, a child by every legal measure that matters, reached for the only thing that felt like protection, and a jury deliberated barely longer than a lunch break before deciding his fear did not count. His fear did not count because the law has never been built to register Black fear as anything but Black threat. That is the whole machine in one sentence. “A Jury of His Peers”: The Constitution They Claim to Conserve How did the eligible jurors who looked like Karmelo get dismissed, and why is nobody who claims to love the Constitution asking? Here is the contradiction, and I am going to name it and let it hang. The same movement that wraps itself in the Constitution, that calls itself conservative, that swears it wants to preserve the founders’ design, spent this week celebrating that a Black child was convicted by a jury with not one of his peers on it. The Sixth Amendment promise of an impartial jury was so routinely denied to us that the Court had to say it out loud in Strauder v. West Virginia all the way back in 1880, and the dodge was so persistent they had to come back in Batson v. Kentucky in 1986 to tell prosecutors to stop striking jurors for being Black, and here we are, generations later, watching the strike work anyway through a hundred race-neutral pretexts. Apply the claimed-neutrality move here. When the defense and prosecution both announce that race had nothing to do with it, they are not removing race from the room, they are making whiteness invisible so it can operate without a witness, and by insisting on that invisibility they are, in fact, the ones making whiteness the loudest thing in the building. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and so is the conservatism that only discovers the Constitution when it can be used as a weapon against us, because these folks become fluent in the fine print whenever the defendant is Black and act functionally illiterate the second the defendant is one of their own. Fungibility: Mourning Interrupted by the Cash Register Then comes the part that told on everybody. Before Karmelo’s mother could leave that courtroom, before this family had a full hour to sit in the shock of a 35-year sentence handed to their child, there were people online already doing the math on how to take the house, how to convert the conviction into a civil judgment, how to extract the last dollar from a family that had already lost a son to a cage. Apply Wilderson here, because this is fungibility in real time, the treatment of Black life as an interchangeable resource to be consumed, mourned over by us and monetized by them in the very same news cycle. The grief had not cooled and the cash register was already open. Now do the Whitey on the Moon move with me, because Gil Scott-Heron gave us the perfect meter for this exact obscenity. A Black child is in a cell (but Whitey’s on the moon). The family raised half a million dollars just to afford a defense the system presumes they cannot have (but Whitey’s on the moon). And the same crowd that called that defense fund a grift is passing the hat to take a grieving family’s home (but Whitey’s on the moon). This is what racial capitalism looks like at the retail level, where, as Robinson taught us, anti-Blackness is not a malfunction of the profit motive, it is the engine of it, the place where surplus has always been wrung out of our flesh and our houses and our grief. Where Are the Black Women in This? We do not ge

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  2. 3d ago

    he Man Who Bought the Supreme Court: Leonard Leo, $1.6 Billion, and the Dark Money Maze Explained

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Opening: Name the Villain There is a man walking around this country who handpicked the judges deciding whether your grandmama can vote without standing in a four-hour line, whether your daughter controls her own body, whether your kids drink clean water, and whether your nephew gets a fair shot at the university your tax dollars built, and most of y’all could not pick this man out of a lineup. His name is Leonard Leo. Former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, current co-chairman of its board of directors, and the single most consequential unelected man in American law. I almost want to say his name backwards — Leo Leonard — because this man got the whole court moving backwards, and backwards is exactly the direction his investors paid for. Let me put the receipt on the table before anybody accuses me of feelings. Leo was personally instrumental in placing the last three justices on the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett — and his fingerprints sit on six of the nine seats when you trace the Federalist Society pipeline back through Roberts, Alito, and Thomas’s confirmation defense operations. Then in 2021, a 90-year-old electronics mogul named Barre Seid handed Leo’s brand-new nonprofit, the Marble Freedom Trust, the entirety of his company Tripp Lite, which the trust promptly sold for $1.6 billion — the largest known political donation in American history, structured so slick that Seid dodged as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the way out the door. One political operative. One point six billion dollars. Zero votes cast by you. Feel me? Some of y’all gonna say, iMa bE “the Supreme Court is too conservative is just your opinion.” Two things can be true. “Too conservative” is an opinion. “Leonard Leo controls a $1.6 billion war chest that he used to handpick and confirm the justices who delivered that conservative supermajority” is a documented, tax-filed, ProPublica-and-New-York-Times-verified fact. Facts don’t cancel feelings, kinfolks — facts sit right next to feelings and tell you your feelings been right the whole time. Public confidence in this Court has cratered to historic lows, hovering around one in five Americans in recent polling, and that ain’t because the people are confused. The people can smell capture. The Maze: How Dark Money Stays Dark Leo did not build one organization, because one organization can be tracked, subpoenaed, and shamed. He built a maze. The Judicial Crisis Network ran the attack ads against Merrick Garland and the defense ads for Kavanaugh; in 2020 it rebranded as the Concord Fund. The Judicial Education Project rebranded as the 85 Fund, which also operates under the trade name Honest Elections Project — the same outfit pushing voting restrictions and the independent state legislature theory. CRC Advisors manages the messaging. The Marble Freedom Trust sits on top holding the billion, organized as a trust specifically so it discloses less than a corporation would. Money moves from one pocket to another pocket on the same coat, and every transfer adds a layer of fog between the donor and the damage. Crazy how the maze keeps renovating itself right when the watchdogs get close. After a complaint landed with the D.C. attorney general, the 85 Fund pulled up stakes and re-registered in Texas. Then in January 2026 — yes, this year — the Concord Fund filed articles of termination and dissolved, while new entities like the Lexington Fund and the Publius Fund, formed by the same Leo-network lawyers and carrying the old trade names in their back pockets, started steering millions into state attorneys general races and the 2026 midterms. The organization dies; the money never does. That’s not a charity, y’all. That’s a shell game with a 501(c) stamp on it. Apply Mills here. Charles Mills taught us the racial contract depends on an epistemology of ignorance — a structured, manufactured not-knowing that lets the beneficiaries of domination claim clean hands. Dark money is the epistemology of ignorance with a bank account. The whole design is that you are not supposed to know who paid for the judge who just took your rights, so the ruling lands on you like weather instead of like policy. Naming Leo breaks the spell. The fog is the product. Click The Link Sign now to support SCOTUS REFORM! Critical Historical Context: This Court Was Never Neutral Now let’s back this thing up, because the folks clutching pearls about “politicizing the Court” are running a tired playbook that depends on you not knowing your history. The Supreme Court has been a political instrument of racial order since before your great-great-grandmother was born. Dred Scott (1857) declared Black people had no rights the white man was bound to respect. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) took the Colfax Massacre — white paramilitaries slaughtering Black Republicans defending a courthouse — and ruled the federal government couldn’t protect Black citizens from private white violence, handing Reconstruction its death certificate. Plessy (1896) blessed apartheid for six decades. Du Bois called the destruction of Reconstruction a counter-revolution of property, and the Court was that counter-revolution’s law firm. The view from nowhere has always been a view from somewhere, and that somewhere has historically been the big house. Here’s the part they really don’t teach, and for the people in the back I need you to hold this one: the Constitution does not set the number of Supreme Court justices. Article III is silent on it. Congress sets the number by simple statute, and Congress has changed it seven times in American history — six justices in 1789, five in 1801, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, back down to seven in 1866, and nine again in 1869, where it has sat ever since. Read that 1866 move again. Congress shrank the Court on purpose, specifically to stop President Andrew Johnson — the man busy strangling Reconstruction in its crib — from appointing justices. Court size has been a political tool wielded over questions of Black freedom since Reconstruction itself. So when somebody tells you expansion is some radical, unprecedented scheme, just admit you skipped the nineteenth century. There is no constitutional amendment required. It is an act of Congress. Senator Ed Markey and Representative Hank Johnson’s Judiciary Act would expand the bench from nine to thirteen — one justice per federal circuit, which is exactly how the number was originally pegged in the first place. This means the “institutionalists” are wrong. The two-roles frame applies: what they SAY is that they’re protecting the Court’s legitimacy from politics; what the position structurally DOES is freeze in place a majority that one man’s billion dollars built, and call that freeze “neutrality.” Having the luxury to treat a captured court as settled furniture is a sign of who the capture was never going to hurt. Apply Bell here — Derrick Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis predicts exactly this: every formal gain gets a structural counterattack, and the counterattack always arrives dressed in procedure. What the Supermajority Took: The Receipts Just in case some of y’all still asking what the impact of this conservative supermajority has actually been, let’s run the receipts. They gutted the Voting Rights Act — Shelby County v. Holder (2013) killed preclearance and Brnovich (2021) sanded down what was left of Section 2, and polling places across the Black South started disappearing the very week Shelby dropped. They overturned Roe with Dobbs (2022). They came for your water and air — Sackett v. EPA (2023) stripped Clean Water Act protection from millions of acres of wetlands, and Loper Bright (2024) overturned Chevron deference, kneecapping every federal agency that stands between a polluter and your faucet. They took race-conscious admissions with SFFA v. Harvard (2023). They killed student debt relief for forty-three million borrowers in Biden v. Nebraska (2023). Then they handed presidents broad criminal immunity in Trump v. United States (2024). Every single one of those majorities was assembled, advertised, and defended by money moving through Leonard Leo’s maze. That’s not a court drifting right. That’s a return on investment. Gil Scott-Heron got something for this moment. A rat done bit my sister Nell — but Leonard Leo’s sitting on $1.6 billion. Her face and arms began to swell — and the Concord Fund dissolved itself before the auditors called. I can’t pay no doctor bill, my kids’ school can’t pay no light bill — but one billionaire’s tax-dodged fortune is out here buying state attorneys general like trading cards. Whitey’s not on the moon this time, y’all. Whitey’s on the bench, with lifetime tenure, and your public school’s art program paid the launch costs. Click here Fight Back Against Leo and Sign Petiton The Education Implication: This Is a Schoolhouse Story I’m an educator, so let me bring this home to the schoolhouse, because court capture is an education story from top to bottom. SFFA tooken race-conscious admissions, and the first enrollment cycles after it showed Black student numbers dropping at selective institutions — the exact doors the Second Reconstruction pried open getting quietly re-locked by judicial decree. Carson v. Makin (2022) and Espinoza (2020) ruled that when states fund private education, they must fund religious schools too, accelerating the voucher pipeline that drains public school budgets in Black and brown districts — and remember, the modern “school choice” movement was born as massive resistance to Brown v. Board, with segregation academies cashing the first vouchers. Biden v. Nebraska ke

    2 min

  3. 3d ago

    Before the Binary: How Igbo Women Became Sons, Inherited Land, and Ran Families

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A male daughter in precolonial Igbo society was a daughter who was socially accepted as a son. See, before there was a missionary, before there was a governor, before the priesthood, before the binary, Africa had more than two ways of being, and the people who lived those ways did not treat them as scandals or secrets or sins, they treated them as systems, rooted in kinship, spirit, and survival. Survival of our ancestors. Don’t you ever forget that. Now before I go any further, I want to state this clearly: this is not me romanticizing the continent, this is me telling you what existed there before the Europeans showed up, with receipts, with citations, with the anthropological record sitting right next to the analysis, because the slogan around here is Research over MeSearch and I intend to keep it that way. Understand? Here go the thesis, so ain’t no confusion later: the concept of the male daughter is central to deconstructing colonial gender norms because it reveals the historical flexibility of gender and exposes the way Europeans taught us that their gender roles were natural, when the record shows those roles were normalized over time, specifically by violence. Sit with that. If the binary was natural, they wouldn’t have needed missionaries, magistrates, warrant chiefs, and criminal codes to enforce it. You don’t pass laws against things that don’t exist. What the Institution Actually Was The history of male daughters in Nigeria is a documented example of precolonial gender flexibility, one that sits entirely outside the Victorian framework, and it was captured most rigorously by the Nigerian anthropologist Ifi Amadiume in her 1987 study of the Igbo town of Nnobi, titled Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Apply Amadiume here. She demonstrated that in Igbo social organization, gender was a social category that could be decoupled from biological sex, meaning a daughter could be socially repositioned as a son, and once that repositioning happened, the community treated it as real, because it was real. A male daughter is not a metaphor. A male daughter is not a mistake. A male daughter was a social role in Igboland where a woman could become a son, inherit land, lead a family compound, hold ritual and political authority, and participate in lineage governance, which is everything the European said a woman couldn’t do. When a family had no surviving male heir, or when a daughter possessed exceptional leadership qualities, she could be designated to fill the structural position of a son, keeping the lineage, the land, and the ancestral obligations intact. Think about what that means. The role was strategic, it was flexible, it was contextual, and it answered a material question, which is who holds the land and who carries the lineage, with a social answer instead of a biological one. Then there’s the related practice that often went hand in hand with it: the female husband. This was a position where a woman of means and standing could marry a wife, establish a household, secure children for her lineage with the help of a man in a procreative role, and exercise the full social authority of a husband. The marriage was the institution. The authority was the point. Amadiume documented women in Nnobi who accumulated wealth, took titles, married wives, and ran economic operations that colonial officers later refused to even recognize on paper, because their paperwork only had two boxes and African life didn’t fit in either one. Gender as a Social Construct, Demonstrated When we say gender is a social construct, we are literally saying that depending on which society and which moment in history you’re talking about, people built gender differently, and the male daughter illustrates that with precision. In this system, a person’s ability to perform a role, like managing a household, inheriting property, or carrying leadership, mattered more than their physical sex. The genitalia did not dictate the function. The function was assigned by the community according to need, capacity, and circumstance, which means the Igbo were operating a grounded, homegrown theory of gender centuries before a single Western feminist seminar ever convened. Most of y’all been taught that the strict two-gender system is the neutral default of human civilization, the view from nowhere, just the way things are. Just admit that’s a position. Claiming the binary is natural is not the absence of an ideology, it is an ideology, one with a shipping date, a port of entry, and a paper trail running through mission schools, Native Courts, and the Criminal Code. Naming that claimed neutrality as a position is the whole ballgame, because once the binary has a history, it stops being destiny. How They Dismantled It: Two Roles, One Confession Watch the two-roles frame, because the colonizers had a script and a function and they were never the same thing. What they said: we are bringing civilization, salvation, and proper family order to a dark continent. What the position structurally did: it dismantled African systems of land tenure, lineage authority, and gender flexibility so that colonial administration and extraction could run smoothly through a single, legible, male head of household. Crazy how ‘civilization’ always seems to end with somebody else holding your land. The mechanics were specific. Missionaries branded the male daughter and the female husband as primitive and demonic, which justified throwing the devil on us. Mission schools taught Igbo girls domesticity and submission while teaching boys administration and authority, manufacturing the Victorian household one classroom at a time. Colonial Native Administration appointed warrant chiefs, men, only men, handpicked for cooperation, to replace governance systems where women had held real institutional power through their own assemblies and organizations. Then the legal system finished the job: British-derived criminal codes criminalized intimacy ‘against the order of nature,’ and inheritance law was restructured around the male heir, which made the male daughter not just disfavored but legally illegible. These folks hoodwinked us. They finessed us into believing women were divinely subordinate, then they pointed at the wreckage of the systems they destroyed and called the wreckage ‘African tradition.’ Every accusation is a confession. They called African gender systems unnatural while running an empire that required guns, courts, schools, and churches to make their own gender system stick. If your ‘natural order’ needs that much artillery, it was never natural, it was enforced. This also proves the second thing: the closet itself was an import. The down low was an import. These roles were not secrets in precolonial Igboland, they were public institutions with names, rules, and ceremonies, and it took colonial violence to convert openness into shame. This Means the ‘Un-African’ Crowd Is Wrong Now let me address the folks who love to say queerness and gender fluidity are Western imports corrupting the continent. This means you are wrong, flatly, and the receipts are not close. Scholars like Marc Epprecht and the collection assembled by Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe have documented same-sex intimacy and gender diversity across the continent long before contact, from woman-to-woman marriage among the Igbo, Nandi, and Lovedu, to the mudoko dako among the Lango that I covered earlier in this series. What actually arrived on the boat was the criminalization. Political scientists Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney ran the comparative analysis and found that former British colonies are significantly more likely to criminalize homosexuality today precisely because Britain wrote those laws into colonial penal codes. Nigeria’s Criminal Code provision punishing ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ is British law in African clothing, and the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was built on top of that colonial scaffolding, not on top of Igbo cosmology. So the next time you hear somebody declaring what’s African and what’s un-African, ask them if they picked up a history book or if they’re just regurgitating what the missionary taught their great-granddaddy. iMa bE: ‘we are defending traditional African values.’ Cool. Then defend the male daughter, defend the female husband, defend the women’s assemblies, because those are the traditions, documented and dated. What you’re actually defending is Victorian England with a Lagos zip code, and by calling that colonial residue ‘tradition’ while calling our actual traditions ‘Western,’ you are making whiteness visible, you’re just making it visible inside your own mouth. The ask is simple: read Amadiume before you legislate. Western Feminism Doesn’t Own This Critique Either This history also challenges the universality that Western feminist theory has tried to dominate us with, and I say that as somebody who has read the first wave, the second wave, and the third wave. Amadiume wrote her book partly as a confrontation with white feminist scholars who treated African women as a pile of victims waiting on European theory to rescue them. Apply Oyěwùmí here too: in The Invention of Women, she showed that among the Yoruba, seniority, not gender, organized social life until colonization translated everything into the European two-box system. María Lugones names the whole apparatus the coloniality of gender, meaning the binary and the racial hierarchy arrived as one package, installed together, enforced together. Operationalize that: you cannot decolonize race and keep the colonizer’s gender system, because they came off the same boat, signed by the same hands, blessed by the same church. Libera

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  4. 4d ago

    The Queer African History They Never Taught You: Uganda’s Mudoko Dako, Explained

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A effeminate man in northern Uganda before the colonizers pulled up was called a Mudoko Dako, and that wasn’t a slur, that wasn’t a scandal, that wasn’t something whispered behind a granary — it was a recognized place in the community, a distinct gender status among the Lango people and their neighbors the Teso and the Karamojong, with rights, roles, and yes, marriages. A lot of y’all are lost in the sauce of Western heteronormativity, so let me say it plain before we go any further: there were men in precolonial Africa who wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, lived as women, and legally married men, and no elder raised a spear in protest. Let that marinate. The word Dako in the Lango language means woman. The Mudoko Dako were assigned male at birth, understood by their communities to be womanized men, and they cooked, they cleaned, they cared for children, they worked the land — not in shame, not in hiding, but in full view of the village. Some so fully embodied their lived womanhood that they simulated menstruation. This ain’t me freestyling. This is in the colonizer’s own paperwork: British anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg documented all of it in The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda in 1923, describing how these men dressed in the manner of women, took on women’s traditional roles, and were folded into family life. Crazy how the same empire that wrote this down in its field notes turned around and wrote laws pretending it never existed. Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale, former dean of the law faculty at Makerere University, puts the receipt in one sentence: “During precolonial times, the ‘mudoko dako,’ or effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, were treated as women and could marry men.” Treated as women. Could marry men. No social sanction. Tamale has spent her career documenting that gender across precolonial African societies was less a cage and more a landscape, and she calls the “homosexuality is un-African” line what it is — a tired fable that the historical record demands we bury. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (1998) stacks example after example across the continent. The scholarship is not thin. The amnesia is manufactured. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Critical Historical Context: Gender as Spiritual Technology Here’s the context your textbook skipped, and it matters because it explains what colonialism actually destroyed. Across a range of African societies, gender-crossing wasn’t just tolerated as a private quirk — it was often read as evidence of spiritual capacity. People who could move between masculine and feminine presentation were understood to live in more realms than just the human one, and that ability to transgress the boundary made them candidates for sacred work: spiritual healers, diviners, mediums consulted by chiefs, soldiers, and war captains, instrumental in politics and justice. Among the Lugbara, transgender mediums carried messages between the human and spirit worlds; the chibados of Angola were male diviners who lived as women; the Bunyoro of Uganda held religious roles for men who dressed as women. Feminine dress could signal that a healer was that day inhabiting the side of themselves that speaks to ancestors, open for the community’s problems. The only consistent grounds for sanction wasn’t the gender-crossing itself — it was using spiritual power for harm, cursing and tricking your neighbors instead of helping them. Feel me? The line wasn’t drawn at who you were. The line was drawn at what you did to the community. Then comes the break, and the break happened twice. On the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South, enslaved Africans carried these understandings out of context — and when an enslaver saw somebody cross-dressing, somebody moving between genders the way their tradition sanctified, that person was punished, and the punishment did double work: it brutalized a body and it severed a chain of ancestral memory, oral storytelling, and tradition that could no longer be passed on. Back on the continent, the empire ran the same play with different personnel: enslavers and administrators left missionaries and priests behind to westernize the villages, teaching that indigenous gender structures were ungodly and demonic in the name of Jesus, while the law handled the hardware. In 1861 the British Empire wrote Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” — and then photocopied it across the empire, and Uganda got its version in the 1902 colonial penal code, which outlawed non-conforming gender expression and same-sex relationships as “gross indecency.” Some of y’all might be asking, what the hell is a penal code? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the moment a community’s memory becomes a crime scene. You don’t just outlaw the practice. You outlaw the remembering. Now run the math. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates — the majority of these laws trace straight back to colonial penal codes. Britain decriminalized at home in 1967 and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code; it upgraded it, most recently with the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” Crazy how Robert Mugabe could call homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote and his own ancestors never needed. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease was never the queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute — and a generation of post-colonial leaders have continued to perpetuate it, pissing on us and telling us it’s raining, calling the eraser “tradition” and the tradition “foreign.” Then Came the Penal Code Then came 1902. The British brought they beans-and-toast colonial ways to the shores of the Nile and stamped the word “illegal” onto love, importing a penal code built from the same imperial template London had been rolling out since 1861 — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” “gross indecency,” the whole catalog of Victorian disgust dressed up as law. Missionaries handled the software while the penal code handled the hardware: one taught the village that its own traditions were demonic, the other made sure anybody who remembered different could be caged. That’s how you break a chain of ancestral memory. You don’t just outlaw the practice, you outlaw the remembering. Now run the math with me. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and the majority of those laws are inherited directly from European colonial penal codes — more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates. Europe decriminalized at home and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code, it upgraded it: the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act carries the death penalty for what it calls “aggravated homosexuality.” Robert Mugabe called homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease isn’t queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute. Who Wrote the “Gay Agenda”? (Hint: It Wasn’t Gay Folks) When I first got into the conscious community as a youngster, I was told the “gay agenda” was an attack on the Black family, and it took me years to clock that the phrase itself has a birth certificate, and it’s white. The “gay agenda” as a political weapon was built by the white evangelical right: Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign cast gay people as predators coming for your kids, and in 1992 a religious-right outfit literally released a propaganda video titled The Gay Agenda that got mailed to members of Congress and circulated at the Pentagon to kill gay folks’ standing in public life. Then they exported the product line. In March 2009, American evangelicals — including Scott Lively, a man who built a career claiming gay people orchestrated the Holocaust — ran a conference in Kampala warning Ugandans about the “gay agenda” threatening their families. Months later, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill hit parliament, the one the world called the “Kill the Gays” bill, the direct ancestor of the 2023 law with death sentences in it. So when somebody Black repeats “gay agenda” talk, they are running white Christian nationalist software on Black hardware — using a script written by the same people whose ancestors wrote the penal codes, to push Black queer folks out of families, out of churches, out of organizing spaces, and into isolation that gets people killed. Two things can be true: you can have questions about anything you want, and you can refuse to let Anita Bryant’s ghost ventriloquize your mouth. Black queer people — and Black queer women and femmes catch the worst of it, like Bailey’s work on misogynoir keeps showing us — are not the agenda. They are the kinfolk. The agenda was always somebody else’s, and we were never on the committee. If You Missed the Female Husbands Piece This is the second entry in what’s turning into a Pride Month series, and if you missed the first one, go back and read the female husbandry package — women across African societies who took wives, headed households, and held lineage and property through marriages the community fully recognized, from the Igbo and Nuer

    9 min

  5. 6d ago

    Was Homosexuality “Un-African”? The 40+ Societies That Say Otherwise

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because you been lost in the sauce of a homophobia that somebody handed you and told you was tradition. Let me say it plain so the folks in the back can hear me. The homophobia a whole lot of us carry around like it’s ancestral is not African. It’s imported. It came off the same boats, through the same missions, behind the same flags as the chains, and then it got rebranded as “our values” so we’d do the policing for free. I. Before Europe Believed The World Was Round, Africa Already Knew Gender Was A Role, Not A Body Long before Europeans set foot on the continent, back when a real lot of them still believed the earth was flat, woman-to-woman marriage was a mainstream, legally recognized institution stretching from the Nuer of South Sudan to the Igbo of Nigeria to the Kuria of Tanzania and Kenya. A woman of wealth and standing could pay the bridewealth, become the legal husband, control the lineage and the property, and her wives could bear children by a chosen male consort, the genitor, whose children belonged to her line and her name. This wasn’t done in secrecy. It was an entire institution, with rites and bride price and public recognition, sitting in the open. Ifi Amadiume, in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, showed that in precolonial Igbo society gender was flexible and was not welded to the sexed body, so a woman could occupy the social role of husband and father, get addressed as such, and wield the authority that came with it. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women, pushed it further and argued that gender as the master category for organizing a whole society was itself a Western imposition mapped onto Yoruba life, which had organized power by seniority and not by what was between your legs. Operationalize that. This means the thing we fight over today, “man” versus “woman” as a fixed biological destiny, was never a universal human fact. It was one cultural arrangement among many, and Africa was running several others at the same time. So anybody who tells you the binary is “just biology” and “just how it’s always been” is wrong on the history. Flat. Two things can be true: bodies are real, and the meanings we stack on top of them are made up. II. It Wasn’t A Footnote — Queen Njinga, The Azande, And A Tomb In Saqqara Queen Njinga, who lived from around 1583 to 1663 and ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola, dressed as a king and not as a queen, led her armies in person, took women as wives, and — by the accounts of the very Portuguese who were scandalized by her — kept male concubines. I want to be honest about my sourcing, because that’s the whole brand: much of what we “know” about her intimate life comes filtered through hostile colonial chroniclers like the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi, so I read those accounts for what they reveal about European panic as much as for the facts they claim. The Portuguese were already horrified by her military genius. What disturbed them just as much was her gender and her sexual autonomy, and in their own writing they branded her “unnatural.” That word was load-bearing, because “unnatural” was the moral fuel that justified the whole civilizing mission. Then peep the Azande of Central Africa, the warrior husbands. E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented that Azande warriors married younger men, paid bridewealth in spears to the boy’s family, and the union was socially recognized, not hidden in shame. The anthology that gathers all of this, Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, walks through dozens of these societies across the continent. And go all the way back to the Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, the resting place of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two royal manicurists buried nose to nose in the most intimate embrace canonical Egyptian art ever allowed, a pose otherwise reserved for husband and wife. Here’s my honest caveat, because Research over MeSearch means I don’t cook the books to win: scholars still argue whether those two were lovers or twins, and I’m not gonna pretend that debate is settled. But the fact that the most intimate iconography on the wall is two men is itself the data, and it’s data Europe never expected us to dig up. III. Two Things Can Be True — And Pretending They Can’t Is The Colonial Filing System Talking Now here’s where folks get lost in the sauce from both directions. One camp wants to wave female husbandry around like it’s ancient gay marriage, full stop. The other camp, the homophobes, want to say “see, it was never even sexual, so it proves nothing.” Both of y’all are wrong, and the truth is more interesting than either lie. The historians and ethnographers, Amadiume included, stress that most female-husband unions were not primarily erotic. They were kinship, labor, land, and lineage arrangements that handed women access to property and power a rigid patriarchy would otherwise deny them. Two things can be true: female husbandry was mostly about material power and lineage, and the same societies also held open, recognized space for erotic same-gender bonds, like the Azande and Njinga’s court. The thread tying all of it together was never modern “sexual identity.” It’s that gender was a social role you could occupy regardless of the body you were born into, and that domestic and erotic life had more than one legitimate channel to flow through. So watch the move when somebody says “this was just economics, not gay.” That person thinks they’re being neutral and historical. They’re not. Choosing to read only the kinship and erase the erotic, and treating “economic” and “queer” as if they’re opposites, is itself a position. That’s not neutrality. That’s the colonial filing system still doing its job in your mouth, sorting human lives into the boxes Europe built and calling the sorting “objective.” Naming a position as neutral is how power hides. IV. Colonialism Didn’t Just ‘Introduce’ Homophobia — It Installed A System With Three Moving Parts Through the colonization and the enslavement of the continent, Europe didn’t just bring a bad vibe. It installed a system, and the system ran on three specific parts. One: the binary gender system, the one that says a man is a man and a woman is a woman, fixed at birth, no movement, no exceptions. Two: heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate frame, welding sexuality to reproduction and to property inheritance under European legal logic. Three: the criminalization of gender nonconformity, and this is the turn — once the female husband lost her legal recognition, she didn’t just lose a title, she became “deviant,” a criminal, a sinner to be saved or jailed. Charles Mills, in The Racial Contract, gives us the frame: colonial power doesn’t just take land, it decides whose knowledge counts as knowledge, so African ways of organizing gender got reclassified from “wisdom” to “savagery” by people who couldn’t pronounce the names. Saidiya Hartman, writing on the archive, teaches us that the colonial record doesn’t neutrally “lack” evidence of these lives, it actively worked to erase them, so the silence in the archive is not an absence, it’s a crime scene. This also proves the so-called “African values” argument is running on European software. This also proves that the anti-gay criminal codes still on the books across the continent are, in a lot of cases, literally inherited colonial sodomy statutes with the colonizer’s fingerprints still on them. This also proves that when Europe left, it left the homophobia behind like a tenant who skips out on the lease but leaves all his furniture, and we been decorating around it for generations, calling his couch our heirloom. V. Quare vs. Queer — Why E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Is The Theorist We Need For This How you read this whole history depends on the theory you bring to it, so let me get specific about the lens. Queer theory — your Judith Butler, your foundational 1990s canon — did something necessary and I’m giving it its respect: it taught us that gender is performative, that the categories are constructed and can be denaturalized, that the binary is a costume the culture sews and not a fact God handed down. That is exactly the tool that lets me stand here and say the female husband proves gender is a role and not a body. Real talk. But two things can be true: queer theory, for all its brilliance, has a documented habit of floating up into abstraction, treating race and class as discourse instead of as material conditions, and quietly defaulting its imagined queer subject to somebody white, somebody with the luxury to theorize identity instead of the obligation to survive it. Enter E. Patrick Johnson. In 2001, in an essay with the longest, most Southern title in the academy — “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother — Johnson takes “quare,” his grandmother’s Southern Black vernacular pronunciation of “queer,” and turns it into a theory. Quare studies is, in his own words, a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory built to hold racialized sexual knowledge, which means it flat-out refuses to talk about queerness as if it floats free of Black skin, working-class money, and grandmother kitchens. Here’s the comparison operationalized: queer theory deconstructs the binary, and quare insists you do that deconstruction while standing in the body, in the bloodline, in th

    4 min

  6. Jun 1

    The Emperor Has No Map: Why Greg Abbott’s “Lock” on Texas Is a Lie They Taught You

    Thank you Marcus Flowers, metamorphosic, Andrea Maria Romandini, Bluesin’ Bob, Kristen Morosky Day, and many others for tuning into my live video with Saadia Mirza! Join me for my next live video in the app. Y’all want to know how Texas works? Start with the map, because everything else is downstream of the map. When the Republican-led Legislature redrew the congressional lines and the Supreme Court let it ride, they didn’t just shade a few districts redder for the midterms, they reached into a Houston seat that has sent a Black representative to Congress since Barbara Jordan walked through the door in 1973, the first Black woman from the South ever elected to that chamber, and they rearranged the furniture so that two sitting Black Democrats, Al Green and Christian Menefee, had to climb in the same ring and beat the brakes off each other just to survive. Green’s old Ninth got painted Republican, his house got drawn into the new Eighteenth, the new Eighteenth got stuffed with more of Green’s old voters than Menefee’s, and the runoff ended with Menefee taking it close to seventy-thirty. One Black seat. Two Black men. Cannibalism by cartography. Cedric Robinson told us racial capitalism doesn’t need to hate you, it needs to use you, and the cleanest use of Black political power is to make it eat itself. Wilderson says the position of the Black is fungibility, interchangeable, swappable, and when you watch a state map two Black incumbents into one district like they’re the same line item on a spreadsheet, that’s fungibility rendered in ink. That’s the whole game, and the game got played before a single one of us touched a ballot. So let me say the thing plain. Then I’ll come back to it. Y’all Booing the Fans While the Coach Calls the Play Here’s where the misdirection comes in, and I need the folks in the back to hear me. Soon as the Eighteenth got nasty, the timeline filled up with people screaming about AIPAC, about who’s “aligned” with who, about a post AIPAC put out congratulating Menefee like that settles something. Let me be clear for the record the way I was clear when we were live: I have not seen one receipt tying Christian Menefee to AIPAC, and I’m not accusing nobody of nothing. Two things can be true. I can be highly skeptical of every PAC that buys influence in this state, and I can refuse to convict a candidate off a tweet the PAC made about him, not one he made about them. Because think about who actually made the play. You ever watch grown folks lose they whole mind booing the fans in the stands while the coach who called the timeout, drew up the play, and sent it in walks off the field clean? That’s the timeline right now. AIPAC made the post. The party takes the money. The donors set the table. And somehow all the smoke goes to some insufferable leftist with four hundred followers and zero dollars. Where is your smoke for the people with the infrastructure, the funds, and the power to pick who wins, where, and how? Every accusation is a confession, and a movement that spends its rage on the audience instead of the play-caller is confessing it doesn’t actually want to find the play-caller. Texas is the country’s defense-manufacturing backyard, the same Fort Worth line that turns out the F-35, the same oil and gas money that builds the ninety-million-dollar high school football stadiums, and when this country sends “aid” overseas it sends it as weapons, which means whoever holds office in this state sits closer to that pipeline than a senator from Vermont ever will. I’m not telling you that’s a conspiracy. I’m telling you that’s a balance sheet. If you want investigative journalism, follow that money. Don’t follow the broke kid arguing on Threads. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Emperor Has No Map (He Has Yours) Now let’s talk about the lie that’s doing the most damage, the lie of the emperor. Folks really believe Greg Abbott is forever. They say it out they mouth, Abbott got it locked, Texas is red, why even show up. And I get where the feeling comes from, the primary turnout was abysmal, our own people stayed home, schools are closing, and people look at all that and conclude the fix is permanent. That feeling has a name. Berlant called it cruel optimism, except down here it curdled past optimism into something flatter, an internalized impossibility, a learned helplessness the GOP spent thirty years teaching on purpose. So let me hit you with a double bind, the kind we used to run in policy debate. Texas has had exactly three governors since 1995. George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott. Abbott himself is chasing a fourth term that would make him the longest-serving governor in state history, and Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards left in 1995. So when your leadership turns around and blames Democrats for the state of this state, you’ve trapped yourself. Either the Democrats are so all-powerful that their phantom hand reaches through thirty unbroken years of total Republican control of every lever, or your leadership produced exactly the Texas it wanted and is now pissing on us telling us it’s raining. Pick one. Both can’t be true, and neither one lets Abbott off the hook. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but so is the conservatism that’s been driving this car since before some of y’all could vote and still wants the passengers blamed for the wreck. Who has the power to manufacture voter apathy? The party that’s held the wheel for three decades. Not the broke leftist. Not the drag queen. Not the immigrant. Lost in the sauce is the whole electorate that’s been trained to look everywhere except the driver’s seat. The Real Heist Is in the Curriculum Here’s the part where I put my higher-ed degree to work, because consciousness precedes transformation, and they know it better than we do. While y’all were watching the Senate race, the State Board of Education quietly moved a Bible-infused overhaul through a process most people don’t even know exists. Not the Legislature, the Board, the elected fifteen where Republicans hold the majority and the final vote lands this summer while your kids are out of school and you’re too busy keeping them fed to drive to Austin. That’s not an accident, that’s the calendar as a weapon. What’s in it? A reading list that has third graders moving from Charlotte’s Web to the Road to Damascus, the New Testament conversion of Paul, alongside the Prodigal Son and the Golden Rule, lifted straight out of one particular sect of one particular religion and stamped onto every child in a public building. A social studies framework that deemphasizes world history and culture down to a Texas-and-Christianity lens. Then the tell, the part that should make every one of us stand up: when a Black board member moved a plain amendment saying enslaved people were held in bondage because they were Black, the Republican majority voted it down, and when the standards said the Civil War was fought over slavery, Republican members fought that too, floating tariffs and “states’ rights” like we ain’t read this script before. The historian advising the board had to sit there and correct them on the record. Freire called it the banking model, where education deposits obedience instead of withdrawing thought. Sandy Grande and Red Pedagogy remind us the settler curriculum was always about erasing whose land and whose labor built the wealth. So understand what they’re really doing. My people were enslaved in this state. Stephen F. Austin fought to preserve slavery in this state. And the plan is for a Black child in Texas to graduate fluent in Scripture and illiterate about the cotton their great-great-grandmother was forced to pick three counties over. That’s not an oversight. Charles Mills called the racial contract an agreement to misrepresent the world, and a curriculum that can find room for Paul on the road to Damascus but can’t say out loud why a Black body was in chains is the racial contract printed on a syllabus. Don’t sleep on the vouchers stacked right next to it. Abbott’s “Education Freedom Accounts” take public dollars out of the public school your kid actually attends and hand them to families already paying private tuition, and then they got the nerve to tell a small-town parent whose district went from five days a week to four that a trans woman or an immigrant did that to them. The drag queen didn’t drain your school budget. The voucher did. The man who signed it did. For the record, the Ten Commandments mandate, SB 10, that one ran through the Legislature, got blocked by lower courts, then the Fifth Circuit turned around in April and upheld it. So they’re coming at the schoolhouse from both doors at once, the statute and the standards, and they’re betting you only watch one door. Why Small-Town Texas Keeps Voting for the Knife Now I’m from Bryan. I’m from the country. So when I say this I’m talking about home, not looking down on it. Out here, white, Black, and Brown alike, a whole lot of folks already decided nobody’s coming to save them and learned to get it out the mud, and that resignation is the most fertile soil the GOP ever planted in. Republicans walk in and say at least I’ll keep your oil job, drill baby drill, at least I’ll make a man out of your son, while Democrats too often show up sounding like the uppity Yankee who flew down from up north, didn’t read the room, assumes you’re slow, and wants you to read a dissertation before you’re allowed to have dinner. That perception is doing more damage than any single policy, and Republicans have done a sarcastically great job convincing Texans that “the establishment” means Democrats while the actual establishment has run the entire state appar

    38 min

  7. May 30

    From Latasha Harlins to Cyrus Carmack-Belton: The Long History of Anti-Blackness in Black-Asian America

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was how the prosecutor opened the case, and the second I heard it I felt that déjà vu hit me in the chest, because we have been here before, kinfolks, we have been standing in this exact spot in the historical record looking at the body of a Black child who took nothing, who was owed an apology and got a bullet instead. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen years old. Fourteen. He walked into a convenience store on Parklane Road in Columbia, South Carolina, got accused of stealing water he never stole, and when he did what any scared child does — picked up his backpack and walked out — a grown man came out from behind that counter with a pistol and chased him. Cyrus ran so hard he ran out of his shoe. He dropped two cell phones, one his, one his mother’s, and didn’t even stop to pick them up, because you do not stop running when there is a man with a gun behind you. He fell. He got up. He fell again, busted his shin, kept going. They chased that child more than 130 yards off their own property, into a public road, and then the fatal shot. Over water he didn’t take. Let that marinate. And if it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1991, a fifteen-year-old named Latasha Harlins walked into a store in South Central L.A. with money in her hand for a bottle of orange juice that cost a dollar seventy-nine. The store owner, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing, grabbed her, and as Latasha turned to walk away, Du shot her in the back of the head. Latasha had the money in her fist when she hit the floor. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the judge gave her probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. No prison. That verdict, sitting right next to the Rodney King acquittals, is part of what lit the fuse in 1992. Sophia Nahli Allison’s film A Love Song for Latasha sat with that loss and made us feel the size of it. Thirty-some years later we are watching the sequel, and the script has not changed. So let me be clear about what I’m doing here. I’m not making a “see, them too” video. I’m doing the work I always try to do — research over MeSearch — which means following the structure all the way down instead of stopping at the feeling. Feel me? Adultification Is the Murder Weapon Here is the thing nobody wants to name directly: a fourteen-year-old does not read as a child to the person who shot him. That is not an accident, that is a technology. Wilderson writes about how the Black body functions as fungible — interchangeable, available, a thing to be acted upon rather than a person to be reckoned with — and you apply that here and you see exactly what happened. Cyrus was not seen as somebody’s baby running scared. He was seen as a threat, a suspect, a problem that a grown man with a gun got to solve on the spot. The research on this has a name. Scholars at Georgetown documented how Black children, and Black girls especially, get adultified — perceived as older, less innocent, more responsible for their own harm than white children the same age. Latasha was fifteen and treated like a thief and a fighter instead of a child. Cyrus was fourteen and treated like an armed adult instead of a boy who ran out of his own shoe. And notice the gendered grammar of it, because intersectionality is not a decoration I sprinkle on at the end — Black girls get adultified into “grown” and “fast,” Black boys get adultified into “men” and “threats,” and both translations end with a body. Same machine, different gears. The Model Minority Myth Was Never a Compliment Now, here is where folks get uncomfortable, so stay with me. To understand how a shopkeeper becomes judge, jury, and executioner over a child, you have to understand the position that shopkeeper was handed. The model minority image got manufactured in the mid-1960s — Petersen wrote a whole magazine piece in 1966 holding up Japanese Americans as the success story, the good ones, the ones who worked hard and didn’t make trouble. And the timing was the tell. That was the same decade Black folks were in the streets demanding the country pay what it owed. The model minority myth was built as a rebuke. iMa bE the example, the story said, and if Asians can make it, then Black complaint must be a character flaw rather than a structural fact. Claire Jean Kim gave this its sharpest name: racial triangulation. Asian Americans get valorized relative to Black Americans — “look how well they do” — and simultaneously get marked as permanent foreigners relative to white Americans — “go back where you came from.” Two moves at once. You get held up as proof that the system works and held down as proof that you’ll never fully belong. And the function of being held up is to be aimed. A wedge has to be sharp on one end to do its job, and the job was always to be driven between Black people and everybody else. Yellow Peril Supports Black Power — And Why That Doesn’t Cancel Anything Now I need y’all to hold two things in your hand at the same time, because this is where the lazy analysis falls apart. There is a real, documented, beautiful history of Black and Asian solidarity in this country, and it is not a fairy tale. In 1969, outside the Alameda County courthouse at a Free Huey rally, Asian American activists held signs that read “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” — taking the slur that had been used to make them a danger to white America and turning it into a banner of coalition. Richard Aoki, a Japanese American who’d survived the WWII concentration camps, became a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and helped supply some of its first weapons. Yuri Kochiyama built her whole life on this bridge — she organized alongside Black radicals in Harlem, she was in the Audubon Ballroom and cradled Malcolm X as he was dying, she understood that to be in solidarity meant to show up. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State and Berkeley put Black, Asian, Chicano, and Indigenous students in the same coalition fighting for ethnic studies. That history is real, and I will defend it. And — both things can be true — that history does not cancel, excuse, or balance out anti-Blackness in Asian American communities, and it was never meant to. This is the move I need you to clock: solidarity is not a credit you bank and spend later to buy yourself out of accountability. Kochiyama and Aoki are not a hall pass for Soon Ja Du, or for whoever raised a child to see a Black fourteen-year-old as a threat first and a person never. Holding up the panther-and-tiger banner while refusing to name the anti-Blackness running through your own community isn’t solidarity, it’s nostalgia. The folks who built that solidarity built it precisely by naming the anti-Blackness in their own families, out loud, at the dinner table — that naming was the work, not a betrayal of it. So when I invoke “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power,” I’m not closing the conversation, I’m setting the standard those ancestors actually set, and that standard was accountability, not amnesty. 551 × 700 “People of Color” Is a Coordinate, Not a Coalition This is why so many Black folks get skeptical when somebody waves the “people of color” umbrella around, and that skepticism is not divisive, it’s earned. Being shoved under the same term does not mean we have the same relationship to whiteness, and pretending otherwise mostly works to launder the gap. Look at affirmative action. In 2023 the Supreme Court gutted race-conscious admissions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, and the legal vehicle they drove to do it was Asian American grievance — the claim that Asian students were being wronged by Black access. Having the luxury to be used as the friendly face on a project that strips opportunity from Black students is itself a sign of where you sit in the triangle. I’m not saying anti-Asian discrimination in admissions is fake — two things can be true. I’m saying when the remedy on offer is “so let’s end the thing that helps Black folks,” you should ask who wrote that script and who it actually serves, because every accusation is a confession, and that lawsuit confessed exactly whose interests it was protecting. So here’s the two-role frame, the way I’d run it in a debate round. There’s what the model minority myth says — you’re being honored, you made it, you’re one of the good ones. And there’s what the model minority myth structurally does — it makes you the buffer, the weapon, the proof-of-concept that whiteness points at Black people to say “see, the problem is you.” This means the people clinging to that myth as a compliment are wrong about what it is. By accepting the role of the honored exception, you make whiteness visible — you become the instrument that lets it claim neutrality while doing its dirtiest work through your hands. Back to the Water A jury in Columbia is deciding right now what a Black child’s life was worth. As I write this the defense has rested and closing arguments are about to begin, and I want to be honest with you — the verdict is not the analysis. We have watched the courtroom version of this before. Latasha got a manslaughter conviction and her killer walked out the door. So I’m not going to tell you a verdict will close the wound, because the wound is older than this trial. The wound is a country that built a hierarchy and then handed everybody a position in it — including positions that let one oppressed person stand over the body of a child and call it self-defense. Solidarity is not pretending that hierarchy isn’t there. Solidarity is what Kochiyama and Aoki actually did: name it, in your own house, out loud, and

    5 min

  8. May 27

    Are You a Comedian First or a Black Man First? The Kevin Hart Question America Won't Answer

    The Set Was Good, Though I sat in my chair and I let Tony Hinchcliffe finish, the way I let everybody finish, and now I’m doing the thing this country keeps confusing for an attack: I’m giving a criticism. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from critique. No one is above criticism. Nothing is above criticism especially comedy. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from critique. On May 10th, Netflix ran The Roast of Kevin Hart, and Tony Hinchcliffe, the same MAGA comic who got on a stage at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden and called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, looked out at the crowd and said the Black community was so proud of Kevin, and that George Floyd was, quote, looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He took a man’s dying words, the words a whole planet heard him cry out for his mama with a knee on his neck, and he flipped them into a punchline at a Black man’s celebration. Then weeks go by. George Floyd’s brothers, Terrence and Philonise, say plainly that real pain is not comedy to their family, that at some point y’all have to stop playing with us. And Kevin Hart, who attended George Floyd’s funeral, pulls up to The Breakfast Club and does the one thing that tells you everything. He defended the white man. Not with a fist. With a posture. “It wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” he says, and then in the same breath, “but Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set or one of the best sets.” “Y’all worried about the joke, but the set was good though. Remove me from it, I didn’t say it, we move on.” That’s not a defense of comedy. That’s a man with more energy and more effort for publicly protecting a white comedian’s craft, than for protecting the humanity of his own people. The people who bought your tickets, attend your shows, and made you visible from the beginning. Two Things Can Be True Now let me be fair, because two things can be true and I’m not here to do what they do to us, which is flatten a whole person into one bad night. Roast comedy is provocation. That’s the genre. Kevin caught it too: they joked about his dead mama, his dead father, put him on a slave ship in a bottle. I’m not pretending he was the only target or that he didn’t take his licks. The question was never whether Tony tells offensive jokes. We know what Tony does. Kevin himself said it: “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe, I don’t expect less.” The question is what do YOU do, Kevin, when the offensiveness stops being a bit about a celebrity and becomes a desecration of a murdered Black man whose family you sat in a pew with. Because here’s the contradiction, and I’ll name it. Kevin Hart felt individually came for, so he came to his own defense, fast, fluent, and on the biggest Black platform in the country. So I have to ask: how come Kevin didnt feel came for when your whole community is being attacked and targeted by that orange man? The same orange man Tony Hinchcliffe campaigned for. The luxury to treat George Floyd as a joke you can “move on” from is a sign that the knee was never on your neck in the way it’s on the rest of ours. The view from the top of the comedy game is a view from nowhere, and a view from nowhere is always, secretly, a view from whiteness. Racial Illiteracy: A Teaching Moment If I was still in the classroom, I’d put Kevin’s interview on the projector and I’d write two words on the board: racial illiteracy. That’s when you lack the ability to read and write situations pertaining to race. Because there is a difference, kinfolks, and it’s the whole ballgame. There’s a difference between a racial joke and being racist. There’s a difference between defending the continuity of comedy and prioritizing humanity. Kevin can read a room for a laugh better than almost anybody alive, that’s his genius, but he could not read this room, this moment, this country, and that illiteracy is not a personal failing as much as it is a learned comfort. Charles Mills called it the epistemology of ignorance, a whole social agreement to NOT know certain things, to misread the racial world in ways that keep the structure comfortable. Tim Wise says privilege costs you clarity. And when Kevin says “remove me from it, I didn’t say it,” he’s reaching for the most American defense there is, the bystander’s plea, the same logic that lets a country watch a murder on video and still ask what the victim did wrong. Pete Davidson put a Charlie Kirk joke in his set too, and Kevin shrugged at that the same way. Notice the pattern: the discomfort only ever flows one direction, away from the powerful and onto the dead who can’t clap back. Every Accusation Is a Confession “Don’t be too sensitive to take a joke,” they tell us. Every accusation is a confession. The people screaming loudest about freedom of speech turn into the most fragile beings on Earth the second the speech gets returned to sender. They’ll desecrate a man who called for his mother as he died and call it edgy, then clutch their pearls when a grieving brother says something vulgar back. They dish out cruelty for laughs and get real uncomfortable when the same energy comes home. They pissing on us and telling us it’s raining. Where is the smoke for Tony, Kevin? You found a paragraph of energy to remind us his set was strong. You had a whole rebuttal ready about your dead parents. So where’s the equal-and-opposite force for the murdered man your industry made into a closer? That silence is not neutrality. Naming neutrality as neutrality is a hustle. Silence in the presence of power is a position, and the position your silence structurally took was Tony’s. This Ain’t a Throwaway And I want to be clear, because I critique from inside the community, not from the bleachers. I’m not throwing Kevin away. I’m not calling him irredeemable. As a matter of fact, I’d love a private conversation about the ways, politically, socially, economically, that a man with his platform and his pockets could pour into Black equality, Black freedom, Black liberation, instead of pouring his protective instinct onto a comic who’d campaign against all three. You a comedian. I’m a critic. I’ma stay in my lane, that’s my ministry. But the lane I’m in says this clearly: you can care about preserving the quality of comedy AND preserving the humanity of Black people. I’m not saying you can’t hold both. I’m asking which one you reached for first, fastest, and hardest. The tape answers for you. By defending him, Kevin, you’re making whiteness visible, you’re showing us exactly whose comfort gets the bodyguard. So here’s the ask, the same one I’d give any of my folks: do better, bro. Pick humanity first next time. Because this ain’t the wrong side of comedy, this is the wrong side of history, and I don’t say that as a threat, I say it as a promise that the receipts keep. Critical Historical Context To understand why a single roast joke detonated the way it did, you have to understand that turning Black death into white entertainment is not a glitch in American culture. It is one of its oldest, most profitable traditions. From the Auction Block to the Punchline Long before Netflix, the spectacle of Black suffering was sold for amusement and instruction. The lynching postcard industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s mailed photographs of murdered Black people as souvenirs and Christmas cards; Without Sanctuary, the archive assembled by James Allen, documents how white families posed and smiled beside the bodies the way Hinchcliffe’s audience laughed beside a dead man’s last words. Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, calls this the spectacular character of black suffering, the way Black pain gets staged, repeated, and consumed until the horror becomes comfortable, even pleasurable, for the watcher. The roast joke is that lineage in a tuxedo. The Minstrel Stage and the Comedy of Black Disposability American comedy itself was, at its commercial founding, blackface minstrelsy, the most popular entertainment form in the 19th-century United States, built entirely on the premise that Black life was a thing to be mocked, mimicked, and made grotesque for white laughter. The genre survived emancipation, survived the cakewalk, survived into film with Birth of a Nation. The throughline from Jim Crow the minstrel character to Jim Crow the legal regime is not a coincidence; the laughter was always part of the machinery of dehumanization. When a modern comic stands on a stage and treats a police killing as a setup, he is not breaking taboo. He is reactivating the founding logic of the form. George Floyd, 2020, and the Largest Protests in U.S. History On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd said he could not breathe and called for his mother. His murder set off what historians have called the largest protest movement in American history, with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants across the country in the summer of 2020. The roast joke landed almost exactly six years later, in the same week as the anniversary of his death. Hinchcliffe did not pick George Floyd at random. He picked the single most recognizable symbol of the modern movement against anti-Black state violence and converted it into a closer. The joke was a referendum on whether that movement’s grief still counts. Afropessimism: Why the Joke ‘Works’ Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism gives us the most uncomfortable but clarifying lens. Wilderson argues that anti-Black violence is gratuitous, not provoked, not economically required, not a means to an end, but a structural given. The Black body functions as fungible, an object available for the world’s use, including its enjoyment. The reason the audience could laugh is that, at the level of the libidinal economy Wilderson desc

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Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. theconsciouslee.substack.com

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  • Creator
    The Conscious Lee
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation

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