Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee

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

  1. The 14th Amendment Was Built for the Freed Slaves, Not Ellis Island

    1d ago

    The 14th Amendment Was Built for the Freed Slaves, Not Ellis Island

    The clip went something like this: every American who is a natural-born U.S. citizen is only a couple generations removed from somebody who wasn’t, go back far enough and every single American is the child of a migrant, this is literally the United States of America, so trying to end birthright citizenship is the most un-American thing you could push for. And on the surface that sound like solidarity. On the surface that sound like a man with a big heart standing up for immigrants against a cruel policy. Ahh, but words have meaning. My grandfather used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and what that means in this context is I’m not about to sit here and accuse this man of evil, I’m not about to pretend Hasan woke up trying to harm nobody, because I don’t believe that he did. I believe his heart was in the right place. I also believe his analysis was empirically false. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Lefty to lefty, that’s the whole conversation. Because here go the problem. There is a difference between an immigrant and a settler, and calling the descendants of settlers “immigrants” ain’t a cute simplification — it’s a misnomer, and a dangerous one, and the danger is exactly what it erases. Words Have Meaning — Immigrant, Settler, Arrivant Let me put the definitions on the table, because this whole disagreement live and die on the definitions. A migrant — say it with me — a migrant moves into a political order that already exists. The migrant recognizes a sovereignty that is already sitting there, submits to a state that is already built, knocks on a door that is already hung. That is Lorenzo Veracini’s whole point in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview: not all migrants are settlers. The migrant enters somebody else’s house. The migrant don’t own the deed. A settler is a different animal. The settler don’t come to join the order — the settler come to found one. Veracini says settlers “come to stay,” and they carry a sovereign capacity with them, they bring the state in their pocket, they plant a flag and call the planting “discovery.” Patrick Wolfe gave us the line everybody quotes: settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that structure runs on a logic of elimination — the native is in the way, so the native has got to be made to vanish, made into a ghost, made into the past tense. And then there is the third category, the one Hasan’s “we’re all immigrants” math leaves no room for. Jodi Byrd, in The Transit of Empire, borrows a word from the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, arrivant for the people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism. Not settlers, because they founded nothing and owned nothing, not even themselves. Not migrants, because didn’t nobody migrate in the belly of a slave ship. Arrivants. Forced arrivals. Tuck and Yang built the whole frame in Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor: settler colonialism stands on a triad settler, native, slave. Three positions, three different relationships to the land, three completely different stories about how a body ended up standing on this soil. And when you take that triad and you blend it all into one smoothie called “we’re all the children of immigrants,” you ain’t being inclusive. You collapsing three histories into one. And the one you keep is the settler’s. So when I say what I said “African Americans, we ain’t settle here, we ain’t migrate either, we was forced here,” I’m not being poetic. I’m being precise. The Math Don’t Math — Ellis Island Showed Up Late Most of the people who repeat the “we’re all immigrants” line are picturing Ellis Island. The huddled masses, the manifests, the new name the clerk gave grandpa. Beautiful image. Wrong amendment. Let me walk the timeline, because the dates do the arguing for me. 1790. The very first Naturalization Act says the path from immigrant to citizen is open to “free white persons.” Free. White. Persons. That is the law. For most of this country’s history, the immigrant-to-citizen pipeline that the clip is romanticizing was, by statute, a whites-only pipeline. 1857. Dred Scott. The Supreme Court looks a Black man in the face and rules that Black people, free or enslaved, are not citizens and cannot ever be that we hold no rights the white man is bound to respect. 1868. The 14th Amendment. Born out of the Civil War, written in the blood of four years of war, ratified specifically to take Dred Scott and tear it up: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That is the root of birthright citizenship in this country. Not Ellis Island. My ancestors. The freed people. Birthright citizenship was built to account for the descendants of forced labor, to finally make citizens of the people this country had spent two and a half centuries treating as property. 1884. Elk v. Wilkins. The same court rules that Native Americans the actual indigenous people, the people who were here before “here” had a name are not made citizens by the 14th Amendment. 1892. Ellis Island finally opens its doors. Twenty-four years after the 14th Amendment had already settled birthright. The immigration mythology the clip is leaning on shows up almost a quarter-century after the clause it thinks it explains. 1898. Wong Kim Ark. Now the court extends birthright to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants a real and important expansion, but notice the order of operations. The freed slaves first. The immigrant’s child after, standing on a foundation the freed people had already laid. 1924. The Indian Citizenship Act. The first peoples of this land had to wait until nineteen twenty-four to be granted citizenship by an act of Congress — granted, like a favor, like a permission slip — while the descendants of European settlers had been citizens by default the whole time. Read that timeline back. The settler’s grandchild was a citizen automatically. The freed slave needed a constitutional amendment. The native had to wait on Congress until 1924. So when somebody tells me every single American is a generation or two removed from being an immigrant, what they are telling me whether they mean it or not is that Native Americans and Black Americans don’t count as Americans, because our citizenship did not come from Ellis Island. It came from a war, an amendment, and a sixty-year wait. Whose Womb, Whose Nation And here is where I have to do the both/and work, because this fight has never been only about race it has been litigated, every single time, on and through the bodies of women of color. Intersection ain’t a decoration on this argument. It’s the engine. Go back to 1662, Virginia, the doctrine the lawyers called partus sequitur ventrem — “that which is born follows the womb.” English common law said a child’s status followed the father. The colony flipped it: a child’s status would follow the mother. And that one flip turned every enslaved Black woman’s womb into a factory for the institution her children born into bondage automatically, hereditary slavery reproduced through her body, by law. Hortense Spillers taught us to read that ungendering, that reduction of the mother to flesh and the flesh to capital. Dorothy Roberts taught us this country has always claimed the right to police who Black women are allowed to bring into the world. Now hold that against 1868. The 14th Amendment takes partus sequitur ventrem and turns it inside out. Under slavery, the womb made you a slave; under the Citizenship Clause, birth on this soil makes you a citizen. The same site, the birth, the body, the mother went from the mechanism of bondage to the doorway of belonging. That is not a small thing. That is the whole revolution of Reconstruction compressed into one clause. So watch what happened the same week the Supreme Court upheld birthright in 2026. Within hours, the Justice Department announced it would prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism.” Birth tourism. The phrase itself points the finger straight back at the racialized woman’s womb, the Chinese mother, the Nigerian mother, the woman who had the nerve to give birth on the wrong soil. From 1662 to 2026 the through-line never breaks: in America, the question of who gets to belong has always been answered at the site of a woman of color’s body. Crazy how that part stays the same. The Melting Pot Makes Whiteness Disappear Let me name the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole point. When you say “we’re all the descendants of immigrants,” it feel generous. It feel like everybody invited to the cookout. But watch who that sentence actually disappears. It disappears the native, who was already here and didn’t immigrate to nowhere. It disappears the arrivant, who was dragged here in chains and didn’t choose nothing. And it takes the one figure who actually did come from somewhere else to take this land the settler and it rebrands him as just another immigrant, just another striver, just another huddled mass. That is the trick. Tuck and Yang call it a “settler move to innocence” — a story you tell so the settling stops feeling like settling. And the slickest part, the part you almost can’t see, is that the melting-pot story makes the white settler the invisible default, the normal one, the natural American against whom everybody else has to be measured. Veracini said it plain: the settler positions himself as both superior and normal, while the native and the slave are the ones who have to keep explaining themselves. So when you flatten all of us into “immigrants,” you do not make everybody equal. You make whiteness the water nobody can see they swimming in. By doing the inclusion, you do the erasure. By trying to put everybody on the same boat, you let the people who built th

    5 min

  2. 6d ago

    The First Drag Queen in America Was Born Enslaved — And They're Trying to Erase Him

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The first person to ever call himself the Queen of Drag in the United States was not a reality TV star or an algorithm’s invention. His name was William Dorsey Swann, and he was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860, which means the man this country now wants to legislate out of existence predates Stonewall, predates the very vocabulary the state uses to criminalize him, and very nearly predates Emancipation itself. Let that marinate. The first person to ever call themselves a Drag Queen was not some new-age phenomenon that fell out the sky in 2014. Before America could agree that Swann was a person, Swann had already decided he was a queen. Freed after the Civil War, Swann made his way to Washington, D.C., and in the 1880s and ‘90s he hosted secret balls. Swann called them “drags”, where Black men, most of them formerly enslaved, the butlers and coachmen and cooks of the capital, gathered in silk and satin gowns half a mile from the White House. He crowned himself “the Queen.” Channing Gerard Joseph, the historian who pulled Swann out of a 19th-century newspaper database and back into the record, tells us Swann lifted that title from the “queens of liberty” he watched ride flower-covered floats at D.C.’s Emancipation Day parades. Black women who personified a freedom the nation had just been forced to concede. Apply Joseph here, because it flips the whole frame: the drag queen was not borrowing from white femininity. The drag queen was borrowing from Black emancipation. The crown was a freedom symbol before it was ever a costume. This wasn’t just parties, though. There was a defiance in it. In a world that refused to see Black and quare folk as fully human and I’m saying quare on purpose, the way E. Patrick Johnson taught us to say it, theory in the flesh, theory with a grandmother and a dialect and a body. Swann was moving like a swan. And the consistency you need to clock, the through-line that runs from his century to ours, is the raid. Pride Month itself starts off a police raid at Stonewall in 1969. Swann’s story is a police raid in 1888. Same script, eighty-one years apart. If you guessed raid, you guessed right. Before the Archive Tried to Forget Him Historically speaking, before Swann ever threw a ball, enslaved people on the plantation had already drafted the blueprint, and they called it the cakewalk. They would put on their finest and parody the stiff, grandiose mannerisms of the people who owned them.. the promenade, the bow, the exaggerated elegance of the big house. Here is the part that takes the cake, literally: the enslavers thought they were being flattered. They watched Black people satirize them to their face, mistook the mockery for admiration, and awarded a cake to the best performers. That is the popular origin of the phrase “takes the cake,” and brother, that takes the cake. Brooke Baldwin’s scholarship lays out the double-edge of it. The cakewalk was stereotype and subversion in the same breath, a thing the white elite consumed as entertainment while the performers wielded it as a weapon. Two things can be true. The master saw a minstrel; the ancestor saw a mirror. Saidiya Hartman calls this the entanglement of pleasure and subjection, the way the enslaved were made to perform contentment, made to dance, made to simulate consent to their own captivity for an audience. Apply Hartman here, because the cakewalk is exactly that coerced scene flipped into something else. Our ancestors took the one territory they were ever granted, the space of the spectacle, and they smuggled critique inside the choreography. The cultural competency went clean over the enslaver’s head. That is the foundation of Black drag: reclaiming power through the body when the body is the only territory you have left. E. Patrick Johnson argues that Blackness itself is a performance that it is constantly scripted, surveilled, and policed. Apply Johnson here and the whole moral panic collapses on contact: drag is not a deviation from Blackness, it is a profound expression of it. It is the place where queerness and Blackness and a whole grammar of cultural aesthetics come together and refuse to be separated. Johnson’s work shows us that Black quare performance is not separate from Black history. It is Black history. The cakewalk, Swann’s drags, Harlem’s voguing, the ballroom houses that still walk tonight: these are not footnotes to the Black freedom struggle. They are chapters. Our culture embodies that, no pun intended. Ahh, but the state always understood this too, and the state responded the way the state responds with violence. Here I need you to hold two analytics at once, because that’s the only way the picture resolves. On one hand, Cedric Robinson’s racial capitalism: the white elite looked at the cakewalk, looked at the ball, looked at voguing, and asked the only question capital ever asks — how do we commodify this? On the other hand, Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism: the gratuitous violence that rendered the Black body fungible under slavery, a thing to be moved and used and disciplined, never actually retired. It just changed uniforms. Two roles, one body… the Black quare body is simultaneously the source America strip-mines for its culture and the threat America insists on policing. Crazy how that works. Roderick Ferguson gives us the mechanism. In his queer of color critique, Ferguson shows how the state has always treated Black gender nonconformity as an aberration to be managed, a deviance to be manufactured and then punished. Apply Ferguson here: the criminalization is not an accident, not an overreach, not a few bad apples in a few red states. It is a feature. It is load-bearing. The pattern is consistent and it is old: any time the Black body moves freely, the state moves to put it back in captivity. From the slave codes to the drag bans, the choreography of control never changes, only the statute number does. The Implication for Education The Hidden Curriculum They Ban Before You Can Teach It Every society runs two curricula. There is the explicit one the standards, the textbooks, the things on the test and there is the hidden curriculum, the one Philip Jackson named back in 1968: the lessons a child absorbs about who belongs, whose body is normal, whose history is safe to know. When a state bans a drag story hour, it’s not protecting children from a threat the evidence don’t support. It’s teaching the hidden curriculum. It’s teaching every child in earshot that gender nonconformity is obscene, that the Black quare body is dangerous, and that some histories are contraband. Watch the projection, because every accusation is a confession. They tell you a man reading a picture book in a sequined gown is sexualizing your kid. If you can look at a drag queen reading Click, Clack, Moo and the first place your mind travels is sex, I believe the call is coming from inside the house. A drag show is not inherently sexually explicit. One has to inscribe sexuality onto their body and the inscription says more about the inscriber than about the performer. What is actually being criminalized is not sex. It is gender nonconformity, the same nonconformity Swann was jailed for when they charged him with “keeping a disorderly house” and sentenced him to ten months. The same alleged nonconformity that Trump is celebrated for by MAGA. They had no law for who William Dorsey Swann was, so they invented a charge. That is the move. That has always been the move. Here is the part that should keep every educator up at night. These bans do not travel alone. They ride in the same legislative convoy as the book bans, the anti-CRT bills, the gutting of DEI, and the dismantling of the very public-education infrastructure that might have taught a kid who William Dorsey Swann was in the first place. Whitey on the moon: we will spend the political capital to criminalize a library story hour, but we will not spend it to fund the library. We will pass a law about a performer’s prosthetics, but we will not pass a lunch. The state is not confused about its priorities. Racial and cultural literacy — the skill of reading a cakewalk and seeing the satire, of reading a ball and seeing the freedom — is precisely the competency being defunded, because a population that can read the satire is a population that is harder to govern. Apply Ferguson one more time: they are not banning a performance. They are banning a literacy. Let me get concrete, because theory that never touches the ground is just vibes, and we do research over MeSearch around here. When a state criminalizes drag, the bill does not get distributed evenly. Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us intersectionality precisely so we would stop pretending it does. The penalty lands hardest at the intersections — and in this case the intersection has a name and a face: the Black and brown trans woman. The ACLU said it plainly in the Texas litigation, that SB 12’s steep criminal and civil penalties would harm Black and Latinx transgender Texans the most. That is not a side effect. Under racial capitalism, that is the design. The invoice is itemized by race and gender, and it always has been. Run the numbers like a load-bearing claim. A covered performance in Texas is now a Class A misdemeanor — up to a year in a cage and a fine — and the venue that hosts it eats a ten-thousand-dollar penalty. Now do the two-roles math. The same Black quare performer whose aesthetic gets strip-mined for the mainstream — the vogue in the pop video, the ballroom slang in the brand campaign, the “yas queen” the corporation tweets every June — is the one staring down the misdemeanor in that very same June. Hartman calls the Black body fungible: the culture is endlessly transferable, infinitely

    5 min

  3. Jun 24

    They Banned This Pig Drug in 160 Countries. America Said “Pass the Bacon.”

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bacon, sausage, ham, and hot dogs — the World Health Organization, the most authoritative health body on the planet, classifies all of them in the same cancer group as cigarettes, and that ain’t no fringe study buried in a corner of the internet, that’s the International Agency for Research on Cancer, the WHO’s own arm, telling y’all back in 2015 that processed meat is a Group 1 carcinogen, sitting in the same evidence category as tobacco and asbestos. Now let me sprinkle context, because Research over MeSearch, and the science has to be clean: that Group 1 label is a statement about how SURE the evidence is that something causes cancer, not a claim that one hot dog hits your body exactly like a Marlboro. Two things can be true. The certainty is real, and the industry has spent decades making sure you never sit with that certainty long enough to change what’s in your cart. Then comes the part they REALLY ain’t trying to tell you, because the problem starts before the meat is ever processed. American pork producers use beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine to make pigs grow faster and leaner, and those drugs are banned in more than 160 countries — not restricted, banned — by the European Union, by China, by Russia, places that will not let American pork cross the border with that chemistry still in the animal. People in the back, sit with that. You got animals raised on drugs the rest of the world won’t even allow, getting processed into products the WHO says cause cancer, and that whole chain don’t end in some abstract “marketplace.” It runs straight through communities that look like mine. Before the Label, There Was the Lagoon Before any of this showed up as a sticker in your grocery store, it showed up as a lagoon behind somebody’s house. Let me take you to eastern North Carolina, the second-biggest hog state in the country behind Iowa, where roughly nine million hogs live in about twenty-three hundred industrial swine operations that generate something like ten billion gallons of liquid waste a year, most of it stored in around thirty-three hundred open-air pits the industry politely calls “lagoons,” where the feces and the urine sit and ferment until the company sprays it across the fields as fertilizer, and the mist drifts onto the porches, the clotheslines, the schoolyards, and the lungs of the people who live downwind. Crazy how the people downwind keep being the same people. That ain’t a feeling, that’s a finding. A 2014 study out of UNC by the epidemiologist Steve Wing and his colleague Jill Johnston mapped these operations and concluded that the proportion of people of color living within three miles of an industrial hog operation was more than one and a half times higher than the proportion of white folks, with Black communities and especially American Indian communities carrying more than twice the burden in some measures. Bullard told us this would happen. In Dumping in Dixie, Robert Bullard — a Houston man, a Texan like me — showed all the way back in 1990 that the question of where the waste goes is never random, it tracks the color line as faithfully as a deed restriction, and when the industry says siting is just about “cheap rural land,” that claim of neutrality IS the position. The view from nowhere is a position. Cheap land is just a polite map of who the country decided it could afford to poison. Gilmore gives us the sharpest word for what that does to a body. Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as the state-sanctioned production of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, and once you have that frame, the health record around these operations stops reading like a coincidence and starts reading like a policy: researchers have documented elevated rates of anemia, kidney disease, infant deaths, and septicemia in the surrounding communities, and Wing himself documented the headaches, the coughing, the nausea, the respiratory distress among the neighbors before he died of cancer in 2016, before the trials even started. A lagoon of hog waste behind a Black grandmother’s house is not a smell. It’s a vulnerability, manufactured and maintained. And those neighbors fought. In 2014, an eighty-year-old Black woman named Joyce McKiver became the lead plaintiff in McKiver v. Murphy-Brown, one of more than two dozen federal nuisance suits brought by over five hundred plaintiffs, the majority of them Black, against Murphy-Brown, the hog-production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods — which is itself owned by the Chinese conglomerate WH Group. Across five trials in 2018 and 2019, juries awarded thirty-six plaintiffs almost $550 million. Then North Carolina’s punitive-damages cap shrank that to roughly $98 million. Read the choreography again: the people won in front of juries, and the LAW reached in to make the win smaller. They were warned, too. Folks built waste pits in a floodplain, and when Hurricane Floyd came through in 1999, the lagoons breached and turned whole rural communities into seas of dead hogs and toxic slurry. So the legislature did what legislatures do for the people who fund them: Right to Farm laws now exist in all fifty states, and North Carolina passed HB 467 — carried by a longtime farmer-legislator who took hog-industry money — to gut the very nuisance suits the neighbors were winning. Here’s the part that should stop you cold. Defending the industry, that same legislator told people to close their eyes and imagine how ham and sausage smell, and called the residents’ complaints exaggerations and outright lies. Read that back slow. The man waved bacon in your face to dismiss the people choking on its byproduct. Every accusation is a confession. This is the historical context that label will never carry. Sneaky, Sneaky: How Big Pork Redraws the Map So now you understand the stakes, watch the move. When voters in California passed Proposition 12 in 2018 — nearly 63 percent of them, more than seven and a half million people — and Massachusetts passed Question 3 back in 2016 with two and a half million votes, all they were saying, at minimum, is that a breeding pig should have enough room to turn around and lie down before it ends up on your plate. That’s the floor. That’s the whole radical demand. The National Pork Producers Council sued anyway, dragged it all the way to the Supreme Court in National Pork Producers Council v. Ross in 2023, and LOST — a conservative court upheld Prop 12 and rejected their main claim. That should have been the end of it. That means the industry’s legal argument is wrong, on the merits, by their own preferred referees. When they couldn’t win in court and couldn’t win at the ballot box, they went to Congress. The thing they used to call the EATS Act got a new costume and a friendlier name — the “Save Our Bacon Act” — introduced in 2025 and then buried as Section 12006 inside the 2026 farm bill, the Farm, Food, and National Security Act, which the House passed 224 to 200 at the end of April 2026. The Pork Council celebrated that the bill gave them one hundred percent of their policy requests. One hundred percent. And the provision doesn’t just touch Prop 12; an analysis out of Harvard Law found it threatens hundreds of state and local laws, including disease-prevention and public-health rules. As of this summer the Senate draft left the language out because it can’t find sixty votes — but it’s up for negotiation, which means the fight ain’t over, it’s just moved rooms. Now here’s the contradiction I want to let hang in the air. These are the same people who built whole careers on states’ rights, right up until seven and a half million Californians USED states’ rights to regulate a pig crate. States’ rights when it’s a book ban or a bathroom; sudden, urgent federal supremacy when voters protect an animal, a worker, or a watershed. What they SAY is “protect interstate commerce.” What the position structurally DOES is hand a trade group that lost in court and lost at the ballot box a federal eraser for any democratic decision it finds inconvenient. The principle was never the principle. The principle was the profit. And the name is the tell — it ain’t saving your bacon, it’s saving the industry from having to answer to you. This also proves something bigger about where the money actually goes. The same farm-bill politics that hands concentrated operations bigger checks is the politics that comes for SNAP and food assistance with a knife. Gil Scott-Heron gave us the structure for this kind of receipt, so let me borrow the frame, not his lines: A child got asthma from the spray field — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag. Grandma’s well ran foul from the lagoon — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag. Food assistance got cut by the billions — but they cut the check bigger for Big Ag. That’s not a budget. That’s a value statement with a dollar sign attached. Humane Washing Is a Finesse When they can’t kill the regulation, they trick you with the marketing. The group Farm Forward gave the practice a name — “humane washing” — and on my mama, I know a finesse when I see it. Humane washing is when companies sell animal products to conscientious consumers using deceptive packaging and labeling that manufactures the illusion of good welfare, and the labels doing the heavy lifting — “cage-free,” “humanely raised,” “natural” — are far from neutral, far from sloppy accidents of regulation. They are engineered. Here’s where the scholarship sharpens it. Farr and Mills both teach us that ignorance is not simply the absence of knowledge that nobody got around to filling in; ignorance gets PRODUCED, manufactured, and actively maintained because somebody benefit

    2 min

  4. Jun 19

    Juneteenth Proves Black Folks Never Been Free in America For Real

    Thank you Mandy Bynum, PJ Schuster, Nick G, A Dude On The Couch, Kerry Shaw, KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️, and many others for tuning into my live video with Feel Good Action! Join me for my next live video in the app. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read what we now call General Order No. 3. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the enslaved people of Texas were told they were free. That is the part the country likes to keep. Here is the part it tends to drop: the same order instructed the newly freed to remain where they were and negotiate wages with the very men who had held them. Freedom, in the same breath, was routed straight back onto the plantation — into sharecropping, into the Black Codes, into Jim Crow. I grew up in Bryan, Texas, about two hours up the road from where this began. When you read the local archive, you can watch enslavers in those counties work to hide the news — hide the war, hide the Proclamation — because an informed free person is a person who can leave. So when I celebrate Juneteenth, I celebrate it the way my people celebrated it: as jubilee. But I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale. The honest word for what happened that day is free-ish. “Granger told the freedpeople to go back to the plantation and negotiate some wages. That is the day we celebrate. So I celebrate it as jubilee — and I refuse to celebrate it as a fairy tale.” Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Emancipation Proclamation Was Foundational. It Was Also Nearly Toothless. In K–12 we are handed a clean story: Lincoln signs a paper, slavery ends, the good guys win. The Emancipation Proclamation deserves its place in history, but the mechanics matter. It applied only to states in open rebellion — places taking no orders from Washington. The loyal slaveholding border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) were untouched; people there remained enslaved. Liberation did not arrive as a switch flipped in 1863. It arrived unevenly, locally, and late — and in Texas, it arrived in 1865 wrapped in an order to get back to work. This is why the structural detail is not pedantry. If you teach Juneteenth honestly, you have to teach that the document everyone celebrates left whole categories of people in bondage, and that the “end” of slavery was a negotiation, a compromise, and a delay. That is the difference between history and mythology. Preserve the Statues, Erase the Slavery: The Conservative Contradiction There is a contradiction sitting in plain sight. The same political project that, a few years ago, fought to keep Confederate monuments standing — you cannot change history, they said, you cannot erase the past — is now, under this administration, ordering references to slavery scrubbed from historical markers, national parks, and museums. The slogan was never really about history. It was about which history. I taught ninth- and tenth-grade English in Oklahoma when the state moved to criminalize “critical race theory” — a graduate-level legal framework that was not being taught in K–12 anywhere in this country. But once you build policy around a boogeyman, the policy does the work the boogeyman cannot. Teaching the plain timeline of the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth became suspect, because an honest timeline raises an honest question: how is it that the same law used to free us is the same law that was used to re-enslave and to kill us? Hold that question against Reconstruction. We are taught that treason is the highest crime against the country. Yet Confederate soldiers and generals — men who took up arms against the United States — were welcomed back, their leaders never made to answer for it. The same governments that extended that mercy to traitors wrote laws to criminalize Black people for not having a job, not having a pass, not having a place to be — the vagrancy statutes that fed the convict-leasing machine. Amnesty for the people who tried to break the country; criminalization for the people the country had just freed. History Does Not Move in a Straight Line Americans are trained to imagine progress as one long upward arc: slavery, then the Civil War, then a little rough patch, then Dr. King, then voting rights, then everything is fine. It has never moved like that. It moves in ebbs and flows, advance and backlash, and the backlash is not an accident — it is the response progress provokes. Reconstruction sent Black men to Congress; Mississippi sent the nation its first Black U.S. senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, in 1870. A generation later, a Black person in Mississippi could be lynched for going near a ballot box. One hundred years after those Union troops reached Galveston, the country passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And in April 2026, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court took an axe to Section 2 of that Act — the dissent warned it leaves the provision all but dead — clearing the way for state after state across the South to redraw maps that erase majority-Black and majority-minority districts. The Callais standard even tells courts to give less weight to historical discrimination and demand proof of present-day intent. They are legislating the very forgetting we are here to refuse. “Everything Black people have gained, we gained in spite of democracy, not because of it. Every right that is supposed to be God-given, we had to spill blood for.” “All Fascism Matters”: On Selective Outrage I want to be careful and precise here, because I am talking about policy, not personalities. The tools this administration is using — banning books, criminalizing ideologies, attaching penalties to words like equity, diversity, inclusion, and woke — are democratic tools, mastered and turned against the vulnerable. Calling them undemocratic is comforting and incomplete. They are operating the machine exactly as it was built to be operated. Which is why I cannot let my white liberal and leftist friends off the hook. Fascism cannot only matter to you when the administration changes hands. There were people exercising their First Amendment rights — students getting their heads beaten in, protesters criminalized for how they assembled — under the previous administration too, and a lot of folks stayed quiet because the man in the White House had the right letter next to his name. You do not get to pick and choose when fascism counts, any more than you get to pick and choose when Black lives matter. Pastor Niemöller already wrote the ending to that story: first they came, and there was no one left. Look at this week. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota charged fifteen people with conspiracy to impede federal officers — community members who acted as legal observers, documenting ICE during last winter’s Operation Metro Surge. City council members called it political repression. Meanwhile, the federal agents who shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti during that same operation have not been charged for those killings. Observing is now a felony. Killing remains a matter under review. That is the priority structure, stated plainly. The Insatiable Appetite for Black Death Is Bipartisan If you want literacy in how Black people are positioned in this country, you need a structural analysis — otherwise you will keep reading every killing as an isolated tragedy instead of a pattern. So let me lay it down. Police violence is not a partisan brand. George Floyd was killed in a blue city in a blue state. Ahmaud Arbery was hunted down in a red city in a red state. There has always been a bipartisan solidarity around Black suffering, going back to the Compromise of 1877, when ending Reconstruction — pulling the federal troops out of the South — was the deal both sides could live with. The currency of that compromise was Black death. Huey P. Newton defined power as the ability to define a phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. The phenomenon here is Black life — defined, again and again, as expendable, and made to behave accordingly. Democrats do not own the fight against it. Republicans do not own the production of it. It runs underneath the partisanship. Black Children Are Never Allowed to Be Children Adultification is the engine I keep coming back to, because the numbers are obscene: the overwhelming majority of children charged as adults in this country are Black children and children of color. We are denied childhood and held to adult standards before we can read. Watch how it operates across three cases unfolding right now. In Senatobia, Mississippi, this past Sunday, police responding to an alleged shoplifting call fired into a car in a Walmart parking lot and killed Kohen Wiley, one year old, critically wounding a family friend. His mother has not been charged with any crime; her attorney says she was trying to tell officers her baby was in the car. Family members say they were buying diapers. Authorities say the vehicle drove toward an officer. Whatever the investigation concludes, hold this fixed: even if every accusation against the adults were true, shoplifting is not a capital offense, and a one-year-old cannot commit a crime. Now set two other cases side by side. In Texas, Karmelo Anthony, seventeen at the time, was tried as an adult, convicted of murder, and sentenced to thirty-five years in the death of Austin Metcalf at a Frisco track meet. In South Carolina, a store owner, Rick Chow, chased fourteen-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than 130 yards and shot him in the back over a suspicion about four bottles of water — and a jury found him not guilty, accepting that he feared for his life. The same public sentiment that wants a Black teenager held to the absolute ceiling of the law extends a Black child’s k

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  5. Jun 17

    The American Lawn Is a Colonial Project: Grass, the Dream, and Ecological Collapse

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Most Honest Acre in America The lawn looks like nothing. That’s the point. A flat green silence out front, mowed to the same height as the neighbor’s, asking for nothing, saying nothing. But the landscape in this country is shaped by colonialism, and the yard is where it’s hiding in plain sight. A lawn is an argument — a small, watered manifesto about land, labor, race, and who this country was built to hold. Let’s read it. Start with the thing nobody says out loud: the grass is not from here, and it is not innocent. The carpet of Poa pratensis — Kentucky bluegrass — that anchors most American lawns is native to Europe and the cooler reaches of Asia. It rode over in the 1600s in the holds and feed of colonists and their livestock, naturalized fast, and only later got rebranded with a homegrown name (NASA Earth Observatory; sod-industry historical record). Across the prairie and grassland West it is now classified as one of the most invasive plants on the continent — it crowds out the deep-rooted native perennials that held those ecosystems together for millennia. Bermuda grass, the Southern default, is African. The fescues are European. The American lawn is, almost in its entirety, a transplanted ecology laid down on top of a continent that was emptied to receive it. I. An Invasive Species Is the Whole Story in Miniature That is not trivia-night material. It is the argument at ground level. The historian Alfred Crosby called this ecological imperialism: European conquest of the temperate world was never only guns, germs, and steel — it was a biological invasion. Settlers traveled with a portmanteau biota, the grasses, weeds, livestock, and pathogens that remade conquered land until it looked and functioned like home. The land had to be made legible to the colonizer before it could be made profitable to him. Turfgrass is part of that portmanteau. The lawn isn’t the backdrop to settlement. It is settlement, growing. As the cultivation-narrative scholarship lays out, those imported grasses first took hold as feed for colonial livestock — but they did a second, quieter kind of work. A grassy, ordered field functioned as a physical marker, a piece of testimony that “civilized” use of the land had arrived. The mown green drew the boundary: this side colonizer, that side native peoples and the Indigenous ecologies the colonizer intended to displace. Even where the grass could not directly drive expansion the way cattle and the plow did, it normalized the alteration — it announced that the land was now permitted to be remade. Put it next to Patrick Wolfe’s formula that settler colonialism runs on a logic of elimination and is a structure, not an event, and the front yard reveals itself as one of the quietest expressions of that structure we have. The violence is finished and ongoing at once. That is what a structure is. II. They Decided the Land Was Inferior, Too Here is the part that should sit in your chest. The colonial project did not only decide that the people here were beneath them. It decided the land was beneath them. “Understand how evil you gotta be to not only believe the people are inferior and beneath you, but also believe the land itself is inferior and beneath you — and that you gotta bring your own in.” They were so lost in the sauce that everything indigenous to this place — the people and the ground they stood on — read to them as deficient. So they imported a replacement. The grass is the receipt. You don’t haul a European meadow across an ocean because you respect the prairie that’s already there; you do it because you have judged the prairie unworthy and decided to overwrite it. The manicured carpet of grass was a symbol of colonial possession — proof of conquest you could stand on in your slippers. There was a whole legal theology underwriting that contempt. John Locke, in the Second Treatise, made property flow from labor: the “industrious and rational” improver earns title, and land left “waste” is land going to ruin for want of improvement. The Puritans had vacuum domicilium — John Winthrop’s reasoning that land the natives hadn’t “subdued” in the European manner was legally vacant and free for the taking. The Crown had the broader terra nullius: nobody’s land, so anybody’s. Read those doctrines closely and the lawn is already inside them. The “improved” landscape — ordered, mown, visibly worked — was the proof of ownership. The “unimproved” landscape was the proof of vacancy, and vacancy was the license to dispossess. Indigenous land-management — controlled burns, polyculture, the cultivation of “wild” abundance — didn’t register as improvement because it didn’t look like an English estate. The aesthetic was the legal argument. And it still is: the “overgrown,” “unkempt” yard is treated as a moral failing and a fineable offense to this day. The colonist’s eye survives in the municipal weed ordinance. III. But Don’t Blame the Grass One thing has to be said clearly, because the rigor is the whole point. When we call the grass “invasive,” there’s a trap right next to the truth, and we step around it on purpose. The trap is making the plant the villain. Some Indigenous scholars — see the Anishinaabe framework of an “invasive land ethic” in the journal Sustainability Science — push back on the popular move that treats introduced species as settler-occupiers and their eradication as “decolonization.” Their point is sharper than the binary: the grass is the passenger, not the driver. Plants are opportunistic; they go where a disrupted landscape lets them. What disrupted the landscape was colonialism — the land ethic, not the seed. Blaming the bluegrass is its own kind of being lost in the sauce: it lets the actual structure off the hook and slides toward the ugly place where native-versus-alien talk starts sounding like the rhetoric fascists used (German and Italian landscape movements in the 1930s literally weaponized “native plants” and “purity” to talk about people). We are not doing that. So hold both: the grass is non-native and it does real ecological damage where it crowds out native systems — and the indictment is of the colonial relation to land that brought it, normalized it, and keeps it on life support. The villain is never the messenger. It’s the regime that sent the message. IV. The Dream Had a Deed Restriction Now the thing people actually mean when they invoke the lawn: the American Dream. The single-family house, the white picket fence, the dog, the green out front. That picture isn’t ancient. It was designed, marketed, and — the part that gets sanded off — racially engineered. The open, unfenced front lawn that reads as quintessentially American was a 19th-century invention. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Riverside, Illinois (1869) with mandatory setbacks and continuous green frontage. Frank J. Scott, in 1870, told the rising suburban middle class that hedging your yard from your neighbor’s view was practically un-Christian — the lawn was to be a shared civic offering, a commons stitched out of private parcels. Sold as democratic. Sold as community. But the commons it built had a color line written into the deed. When the lawn went mass-market — Levittown, the assembly-line Dream — it came with two kinds of fine print. The maintenance covenant: Levitt & Sons contractually required residents to mow on schedule and banned fences, so the uniform sweep would hold. And the racial covenant: Levittown’s standard lease and deed barred occupancy by anyone not of the “Caucasian race.” The grass had to be the same height and the people had to be the same color, written into the same document. Underneath sat the federal machinery — FHA and GI Bill financing routed by redlined appraisal maps toward white families and away from Black ones. Black veterans with the same benefits on paper were locked out of the neighborhoods where those benefits paid off. The lawn was the visible surface of a wealth-transfer machine: home equity that compounded for the families allowed onto the grass, denied to the families kept off it. When we talk about the racial wealth gap now, we are partly talking about who got a front yard in 1950. (This is the throughline straight out of the Levittown / residential segregation pack — the lawn is where that history is still standing.) V. The Lawn as Private Government The covenant didn’t die when courts made the racial clause unenforceable — it mutated into the homeowners’ association, a private government most Americans don’t recognize as a government. It taxes (dues), legislates (covenants), polices (compliance officers), and punishes (fines, liens, even foreclosure) — disproportionately aimed at the yard. Grass too tall, wrong species, a vegetable garden where turf should be: people have been fined, sued, and in this country even arrested over the state of their lawns. “Property values” is the stated reason, but property value is itself a coded system — the market’s memory of who and what was supposed to be where. The weed ordinance is where the old logic of “improvement” and the newer racial-property regime fuse into a single enforceable rule about grass height. VI. The Largest Crop That Feeds No One Now the ecology presents its bill. Using satellite data, NASA researcher Cristina Milesi estimated turfgrass covers roughly 163,000 square kilometers of the continental U.S. — about the size of Texas, on the order of three times the acreage of irrigated corn. By that measure the lawn is the single largest irrigated “crop” in the country. It yields no food, no fiber, no fuel. Its only product is the appearance of order. What it drinks to m

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  6. Jun 16

    AT&T Promised Us $10 Million — Then Sold Us Out for a Billion

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Yesterday I was standing in front of AT&T headquarters in Dallas, 10,000 signatures in my hand, asking one company to reinstate the very initiatives that once gave my community inclusivity, resources, access, and opportunity. I need y’all to sit with the geography of that for a second, because this is the same building, the same brand, the same gold-and-blue letterhead that less than five years ago looked Black America dead in the eye during the summer of 2020 and said we see you, we hear you, we’re committing $10 million to you. Then it folded. The receipt is public: on July 30, 2020, AT&T announced an additional $10 million to create economic opportunity in Black and underserved communities, stacked on top of a claimed $215 million over the prior five years, and the press releases were warm, the language was tender, the photo ops were plentiful. Crazy how the same company that wanted all that political capital in 2020 is now writing letters to the federal government bragging that it does not and will not have a single role focused on DEI. Two things can be true: the 2020 statement was real ink on real paper, and it was always temporary, always performative, always a lease the community was never going to be allowed to renew. The Receipts: $10 Million Then, a Letter to Carr Now Here’s the part the press release won’t tell you. In November 2024 AT&T agreed to buy roughly a billion dollars in wireless spectrum licenses from U.S. Cellular — a $1.02 billion deal that cannot close without the blessing of the Federal Communications Commission — and the FCC under this administration has made the terms of that blessing crystal clear: end your DEI, in substance and not just in name, and we’ll talk about your spectrum. So in December 2025 AT&T’s general counsel sent a letter to FCC Chairman Brendan Carr memorializing exactly that, no roles focused on DEI, no diversity training, merit and merit alone. For the folks in the back: that is not a change of heart, that is a transaction. AT&T did not discover a new moral principle; it discovered a billion-dollar incentive. Let me correct the record before somebody clips this and runs with it — AT&T was not even the first telecom to fold. Verizon ended its DEI program in May 2025 to clear a $20 billion fiber deal; T-Mobile folded in July 2025 to clear its own mergers; AT&T came in December, last in line, which somehow makes it worse, because AT&T watched the price of admission, counted the cost, and paid it anyway. Now AT&T says the new standard is “merit-based,” and I want us to name what that word is doing, because claimed neutrality is never neutral; it is a position wearing a lab coat. Apply Charles Mills here: Mills taught us that the social contract was always a racial contract, that the supposedly neutral, colorblind rules were authored by and for a specific group while presenting themselves as the view from nowhere. When a company that built its diversity numbers through decades of deliberate effort suddenly announces that merit will now sort everything fairly, it is not removing a thumb from the scale; it is pretending the scale was never tilted, that the field was always level, that history started this morning. Two roles: what AT&T says is “we treat everyone the same.” What the position structurally does is freeze in place every advantage the old, openly discriminatory system already distributed. This means the merit story is wrong on its own terms, because there is no merit measured outside of history. Who Decides Your Internet? So who is holding the dial? His name is Brendan Carr — not Brandon, Brendan, get it right for the citation — and he is not a neutral referee who wandered into this job. Carr wrote the FCC chapter of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for this presidency, and then he was handed the chairmanship of the exact agency he wrote the chapter about. As a former English teacher I have to give the author credit for his work: you wrote the assignment, you got the grade, you got the desk. Carr’s FCC has opened investigations into ABC, CBS, NBC, and NPR, has threatened broadcast licenses, and oversees the telecom giants — AT&T among them — that route your call, your data, your access. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, named for Senator John Sherman, was written precisely to stop this kind of concentrated control over the arteries of American commerce and communication, and somewhere John Sherman is rolling over in his grave, because the agency built to keep the wire fair is now being used to decide whose speech the wire will carry. And here is the tell. You don’t have to take my word, or some outside critic’s word, that the FCC is being weaponized — the warning came from inside the agency itself. In May 2026, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the commission, sent a letter to Disney’s CEO describing what the company was facing not as a string of coincidences but as a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control.” Like that judge told my cousin at sentencing — we have to acknowledge the accessory. The call came from inside the house, y’all. Here’s the quick timing for the receipts: after the White House made its displeasure with Jimmy Kimmel loud, Carr’s FCC moved on ABC’s licenses within a day, and the Brookings Institution, no radical outfit, called this not deregulation but heavy-handed regulation, an agency expanding its reach to punish content it dislikes. Then watch what he did with Disney’s DEI. Carr opened a probe in March 2025 even though Disney had already walked back its diversity programs the month before — ended “Reimagine Tomorrow,” renamed the metrics, shortened the content advisories — and Carr admitted in writing that he’d seen the rollback and pressed anyway. That is the boot coming down on a neck that had already gone limp. Every accusation is a confession: an administration that screams “censorship” is running the most documented censorship campaign against the American press in modern memory. Let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room while we’re here. The 2026 FIFA World Cup is being played on American soil right now, and it is nothing but diversity, equity, and inclusion in motion — every continent, every language, every shade of human being on one field — and these same institutions will profit off that spectacle of difference all summer while telling the rest of us that diversity is discrimination the moment it shows up as a hiring goal or a community grant. They’ll sell you the jersey; they just won’t share the table. This is where I run the Gil Scott-Heron move, because in “Whitey on the Moon” he set the nation’s lavish spending right next to Black material neglect to expose the lie of priorities, and the same arithmetic applies here: a billion dollars is available for spectrum, and no DEI for you; a quarter-billion was available for warm 2020 statements, and a boot for you in 2025; there is always money for the merger and never money for the people the merger displaces. From Ma Bell to the Boardroom: Who Has Always Owned the Wire To understand this moment you have to understand that the question “who decides your internet” is just the newest version of a very old American question: who owns the means of speaking to each other? AT&T is not a young company stumbling into politics; it is the direct descendant of the Bell System, the telephone monopoly so total that the federal government broke it up in 1984, splitting Ma Bell into the regional Baby Bells precisely because one company controlling the nation’s communication was understood as a danger to democracy itself. The Communications Act of 1934 created the FCC and, crucially, established the idea of common carriage — the principle that the company carrying your speech cannot discriminate in what it carries — and for decades the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to present controversial issues with some balance, until it was repealed in 1987 and the road opened for exactly the kind of one-sided, weaponized media environment we’re litigating today. Apply Cedric Robinson here, because in Black Marxism Robinson showed that capitalism did not emerge as a colorblind system that later picked up racism as a bad habit; it was racial from the jump — racial capitalism — meaning the extraction of value has always run on racial hierarchy. The wire was never neutral. The same infrastructure that connected white suburban America was redlined out of Black neighborhoods, the same logic that made Black labor cheap made Black communication optional, and the “digital divide” is not a glitch in the system but the system doing exactly what it was built to do. Saidiya Hartman calls this the afterlife of slavery — the way the racial calculus of bondage keeps reproducing itself in new institutional forms — and the broadband map of America is one of its most precise portraits. Here is where I hold two frameworks at once, the way I always tell y’all to. From a Black Marxist lens, the 2020 pledges and the 2025 reversals are both rational moves by capital — invest in Black goodwill when it’s profitable, divest when it’s costly — but Frank Wilderson and the Afropessimists push us further, and we have to sit in the discomfort of it: the Black position is structurally fungible, available to be acquired, leveraged, and discarded according to a logic that was never about Black thriving in the first place. The $10 million was never a relationship; it was a line item. Hortense Spillers teaches the distinction between the body and the flesh — the flesh being that which can be marked, moved, and monetized without consent — and a community reduced to a quarterly diversity statist

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  7. Jun 14

    Quare vs. Queer Theory: What E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Knew That the Academy Forgot

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. How E. Patrick Johnson took the most celebrated theory of identity in the academy and asked it the one question it kept refusing to answer — whose body are we actually talking about? “Queer theory already covers all of that — once you accept that gender is performed and sexuality is constructed, race and class fall into place on their own.” That is the most generous version of the argument I want to complicate, and I am stating it honestly before I take it apart, because the people who hold it are not arguing in bad faith; they are working from a framework that genuinely revolutionized how a generation talks about identity, and they have simply mistaken a powerful theory for a complete one. Research over MeSearch: I am not relitigating this from feeling. I am tracing where a body of scholarship went, who it left sitting in the waiting room, and what one performance scholar from western North Carolina decided to do about it. When I first encountered this material I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, reading Judith Butler and Michel Foucault alongside a much wider field of queer scholars who were, all at once, refusing the premise that our sexual and gendered identities are fixed, stable, or expressive of some inner essence we were born clutching. Queer theory’s most durable contribution is the concept of performativity, the argument advanced most influentially by Butler in Gender Trouble (1990) that gender is not a truth we possess but an effect we produce, brought into being through the repeated citation of acts, gestures, and styles until the performance hardens into something that reads as nature. Apply Butler here. When we tell a man that he is acting like a woman, or tell a straight person that he is acting gay, we confirm Butler’s point inside the grammar of the insult itself, because we are treating gender and sexuality as scripts that can be performed against the body rather than as essences the body simply contains. That is the gift, and I want to name it as a gift, because what follows is a critique with teeth, not a dismissal. The Critique With Teeth Here is the load-bearing claim: queer theory’s universalism is a position, not a neutral vantage point, and the view from nowhere is always, on inspection, a view from somewhere. When a theory announces that it speaks for all bodies while quietly modeling itself on one kind of body, it has not transcended particularity; it has universalized a particular and then forgotten it did so. This is the structural problem that quare theory names. Quare theory is a structural critique of queer studies and its tendency to drift toward white normativity — to universalize a white ideology of embodiment, or more precisely, of disembodiment, where the body in question can afford to be abstract because it has never been hunted, priced, or worked to the bone. The charge is specific. Mainstream queer theory’s universalism too often fails to analyze the particular logics of anti-Blackness, of settler colonialism, of class and race as material conditions rather than discursive flourishes. Apply Crenshaw here: a framework that treats identity one axis at a time will always lose the person standing at the intersection, and the person most reliably lost is the Black, the poor, the Southern, the working subject whose oppression refuses to be sorted into a single tidy category. The Combahee River Collective said it plainly in 1977 — the major systems of oppression are interlocking, and a politics that abstracts away from material life is a politics built for people who have the luxury of abstraction. Having the luxury to treat the body as merely theoretical is itself a sign of which body you have. Sprinkling Historical Context See, to really get Quare Theory—and I mean really get it, not just academically cosign it—you gotta understand where Queer Theory came from first. Because history ain’t neutral. And the academy damn sure ain’t neutral. Queer Theory pops off in the early 1990s. You got Judith Butler dropping Gender Trouble in 1990. You got Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick with Epistemology of the Closet also 1990. Michel Foucault’s work—especially The History of Sexuality from 1976—gets resurrected and canonized. And look, I ain’t throwing shade on the contributions. Foucault taught us that sexuality isn’t some natural drive but a historical construct produced through discourse. Butler taught us that gender isn’t an essence but a citation of practice. That’s important work. That’s foundational work. I personally appreciated old Judy’s defining gender performativity when I was in grad school. But here’s the thing nobody wanna say out loud: that foundation was poured on white middle-class soil. Let me take you back further. While Foucault was writing in France, Black queer folks in the United States were building entirely different intellectual traditions—they just wasn’t getting PhDs for it. The Combahee River Collective formed in 1974. That’s a group of Black lesbian feminists—Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Demita Frazier—who wrote the Combahee River Collective Statement. And in that statement, they said something that Queer Theory wouldn’t catch up to for almost twenty years. They said: “We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Interlocking. Not additive. Not “oh and also race.” Interlocking. That’s intersectionality before Crenshaw named it in 1989. That’s Quare Theory before Johnson wrote it in 2001. But because they were Black women writing from a collective—not a tenured position—the academy treated them as activists, not theorists. You feel me? Then you got Bayard Rustin. Architect of the 1963 March on Washington. One of the most brilliant strategists of the Civil Rights Movement. Openly gay. And what happened? He got pushed to the background. Erased from the official narratives. A. Philip Randolph had to protect him, but even then, Rustin was told to stay quiet about his sexuality because it would be “used against the movement.” That’s the material cost of queer existence in Black spaces. And mainstream Queer Theory, for all its talk about subversion, didn’t have a framework for that betrayal—because that betrayal involves both anti-Blackness and homophobia and respectability politics. You need an intersectional blade to cut that knot. Now let me bring it to the 1990s. While Butler and Sedgwick were becoming stars, Black queer scholars were fighting just to be in the room. Cathy J. Cohen wrote The Boundaries of Blackness in 1999—about how AIDS was racialized and classed—and she was critiquing both white queer theory and Black nationalism. Phillip Brian Harper wrote Are We Not Men? in 1996, asking why Black masculinity studies ignored gay men. And E. Patrick Johnson—a gay Black man from Hickory, North Carolina, not New York or San Francisco—he noticed something. He noticed that the queer theory he was reading in his PhD program talked about “the body” all day long. But it rarely talked about bodies. Bodies that are raced. Bodies that are classed. Bodies that are bruised. Bodies that are hungry. Bodies that are from below the Mason-Dixon line, where “acting gay” can get you killed differently than it gets you killed in Chelsea. So in 2001, Johnson drops “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother. And the title itself is a performance. “Quare” is Black Southern vernacular—pronounced like “kwahr” not “kweer”—and it carries multiple meanings. It means strange or odd, like queer. But it also means something more specific in Black Southern speech: quare can mean “pretentious” or “flashy in a way that invites trouble.” It can mean a person who is aggressively different, not just differently desiring. And Johnson says: that’s the difference. Queer theory is about destabilizing categories. Quare theory is about survival within categories of race and class that won’t let you go. He argues that mainstream queer theory is built on white middle-class assumptions about mobility—the assumption that you can subvert, that you can perform your way out of constraint. But try performing your way out of a sharecropper’s debt. Try citing your way out of a police stop in Mississippi. The performance doesn’t land the same way. And Johnson offers quare as a performance rooted in the Black Southern vernacular—a direct challenge to queer theory’s erasure of race and class. Because once you get below that Mason-Dixon line, it go a little different down here. Let me tell you a funny story. I used to be a college policy debater. And when I first came across quare theory—I was talking to somebody from the Midwest, my good sister Toya G.—and I said, “Hey, I came across quare theory.” And she was like, “You gonna be singing?” I was trying to say quare, you feel me? But it was through this Southern vernacular. That right there is good context for where I’m going with this. Even the pronunciation is a political act. The academy wanted to spell it “queer.” Johnson said nah, we spelling it like we say it. That’s epistemological warfare. Finna get in my linguistic bag, man. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Implication for Education Let me be clear though: I’m not advocating for a complete disregard of the scholarship or the academy research around queer theory. I’m giving you a critique with some teeth though. Education is eleva

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  8. Jun 10

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

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  • Creator
    The Conscious Lee
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    107
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation

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