Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee

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

  1. 6h ago

    Tuskegee Banned Bonnets and Texas Banned THC in the Same Week. That Is One Story, Not Two.

    Thank you Sara Willard, sandy walling, Sherell, Gretchen Lawyer, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. It’s Wednesday morning and I got three headlines open on the same screen. Texas is putting a whole industry on a Schedule I list next to heroin on July 31. Tuskegee University is banning bonnets, durags, and bedroom shoes out the classroom and the cafeteria. Two congressmen from Indiana wrote a letter demanding a university fire a Black woman for putting a cake outside a dead senator’s office. Three stories. Every algorithm in America will serve them to you as three separate arguments so you can go pick a side on each one and feel like you did something. They ain’t three stories. They one story wearing three outfits. Every single one of them runs on the same move. Somebody with power announces a standard. The standard gets described as neutral, natural, obvious, just how things are, just how the world works. Free market. Professionalism. Civility. And then, every single time, when you follow the money back to who wrote the standard and who gets paid when it is enforced, you find the same thing. Professionalism is not a thermometer. Professionalism is a preference with a payroll behind it. So is the free market. So is civility. And I’m finna show you the receipts on all three before I’m done. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. They Only Call It a Free Market When They Winning Let me get the definition in first, because I don’t want to just throw words around. Maybe we got some students watching. We ain’t going with the AI definition. We going with Merriam Webster. A free market is an economic system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and are not controlled or regulated by the government. Hold that. Now here go the receipts. In 2019, Texas passed House Bill 1325 legalizing hemp with no more than 0.3 percent delta 9 THC by dry weight, tracking the 2018 federal Farm Bill. Businesses did exactly what the law told them they could do. Farmers planted. People signed leases. People bought inventory. People hired. The industry says it grew to roughly 4.3 billion dollars in annual sales and about 53,000 jobs in Texas, and I want to flag that those are the industry’s own numbers from the Texas Hemp Business Council, not an independent audit, so hold them accordingly. Then in 2025 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 3, a near total ban. It cleared the House 87 to 54 and the Senate 25 to 6, mostly party line, in a chamber the Republicans control. Greg Abbott vetoed it just before midnight on June 22, 2025, and his stated reason was not that the ban was wrong. His stated reason was that it was, in his words, almost certainly unconstitutional, and that a law that gets immediately enjoined serves no one. He called a special session for July 21 to build a regulatory framework instead. The framework never got built. In September 2025 he issued an executive order restricting sales to adults 21 and over and pushed the rest to the agencies. Now watch what happened next, because this is the part that matters. The Legislature never passed the ban. The Legislature never passed a framework either. So the fight moved out of the room where you get to vote for somebody, and into the room where you don’t. The Department of State Health Services had quietly expanded its controlled substance definitions back in October 2021 to sweep in delta 8, delta 10, THCP, and other intoxicating THC variants. A Travis County court blocked it. That injunction held for nearly five years while the case moved. On May 1, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the agency in the Sky Marketing litigation and upheld its authority. The mandate issued June 5. DSHS published notice in the July 10 Texas Register. Effective July 31, 2026, more than trace amounts of any THC other than delta 9 is a Schedule I controlled substance in the state of Texas, sitting on the same list as heroin, LSD, and psilocybin. Somebody explain to me which part of that is the free market. The elected body could not pass it. So an unelected agency defined it into existence and a court blessed the definition. Small businesses across this state spent their hard earned money on inventory that a state agency made contraband by publishing a notice in a register. That is not competition among private businesses with prices unregulated by government. That is the opposite of the thing they say they love. That is the government picking who eats. And here is the part I need y’all to sit in. When Abbott vetoed SB 3, the model he publicly recommended was to regulate THC the way Texas regulates alcohol. The alcohol way. From the state that has been watching alcohol consumption hit record lows. The hemp industry has been saying out loud for two years that lobbyists tied to Big Alcohol and to the licensed marijuana operators were pushing the ban. I am going to be honest with y’all about the evidentiary status of that: that is an industry claim made by an industry with a direct financial stake, and I have not seen a lobbying disclosure audit that nails it down, so I am putting it on the table as a claim and not as a proven fact. But you do not need the smoking gun to see the shape of the thing. The prison industrial complex loses volume when cannabis gets easier. The alcohol industry loses shelf space when cannabis gets easier. Both of them are old, both of them are organized, both of them have Austin on retainer, and both of them just watched their competition get delisted by definition rather than by vote. That’s the call coming from inside the house. The same folks that spent my whole childhood telling me socialism is when a small group of unaccountable planners decide what gets made and what gets banned just described their own July. The Word Was the First Branding Exercise And do not let nobody act like this is a fresh fight either. Anytime the pathology around cannabis gets warmed up, it has to borrow from the old archaic file. Criminalize Black people. Make you scared of the dark brown cartels south of the border. Add a little anti work moralism on top, it’ll make you lazy, it’ll make you unable to think. The word itself was the first move. Cannabis had been in the American pharmacopeia for decades under the name cannabis. When the Federal Bureau of Narcotics went to work under Harry Anslinger in the 1930s, the word that got pushed into the newspapers and into the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was marihuana. Not a scientific term. A Spanish language term, selected because it sounded foreign and it sounded brown and it made a plant that had been sitting in tincture bottles at the drugstore feel like an invasion. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act put cannabis in Schedule I. The Shafer Commission that Nixon himself appointed came back in 1972 recommending decriminalization and Nixon threw it in the trash. Then the outcomes. The ACLU’s 2020 analysis found Black people were 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession nationally, in a country where usage rates between the two groups are roughly equal. Same plant. Same behavior. Almost four times the handcuffs. So when Texas tells me on July 31 that this is about intoxicating variants and public safety, I want to know why the word intoxicating is doing all that work and the word alcohol is not in the sentence. Drunk driving is one of the leading causes of preventable death in this country. Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of death, period. We got commercials for it during the game. We got it at graduations. We got it at the funeral after. If the concern was intoxication, the ban would have started somewhere else and everybody knows it. Most of y’all know it and won’t say it. And poetically, this is happening in the same state, in the same election year, where the whole pitch to working people is that immigrants are taking your jobs. You cannot blame an immigrant for the smoke shop closing. You cannot blame an immigrant for the grower shutting down. You cannot blame an immigrant for the shelf getting cleared by a register notice. Those jobs are getting taken by policy, in public, by people whose names are on a ballot in November, while they point at somebody who doesn’t have a vote. Gina Hinojosa is running against Greg Abbott. James Talarico is running against Ken Paxton. There is a whole ballot underneath that. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to know who did what. Bad Faith Is Not a Mistake, It Is a Job Now let me bring in the framework, because I don’t want this to just be me pointing. Lewis Gordon wrote a book in 1995 called Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Gordon takes bad faith out of the French existentialist seminar and puts it where it belongs, which is on the ground in an antiblack world. Bad faith, for Gordon, is not lying to somebody else. It is choosing to believe something you have the evidence to disbelieve, because believing it lets you keep your role, your comfort, and your innocence at the same time. The key thing in Gordon is that bad faith is not an accident. It is not ignorance. It is a labor. You have to work to keep it going. You have to manage the evidence. You have to keep the file closed. Apply Gordon here. A Texas legislator who votes to schedule a legal product out of existence and then goes home and gives a speech about the free market is not confused about economics. He knows. A university president who has the retention data in his own institutional research office and announces a bonnet ban as the intervention is not unaware of the data. He has it. A congressman who spent a decade calling the left the cancel culture party and then writes a letter demanding a university fire a woman for a cake does not lack a mirror. They are doing the

  2. 18h ago

    Same Old Sh*t In a New Toilet: What Tennessee Teaches You About the Paperwork

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Black people in Tennessee have a unique story, and I mean that in the technical sense, not the greeting card sense. Before I get into the analysis, let me tell on myself the way I told on myself on camera. As a millennial, the first person who made me think about the Black experience in Tennessee explicitly was Young Buck of G Unit, when he was putting on for Cashville. That is not a throwaway line. Hold onto it, because it is the whole method. Look at how the state maps itself through Black music. Young Buck reps Nashville, which is Middle Tennessee, which is old plantation country dressed up in country music money. Anna Mae Bullock, who the world knows as Tina Turner, comes out of Nutbush in Haywood County, which is West Tennessee cotton land, and she was so specific about it she put the town’s name in a song title and told you exactly what the city limits felt like. K. Michelle comes out of Memphis, which is the Delta’s capital city sitting on a bluff in Tennessee. Three artists, three regions, one state, and if you line them up you have already drawn the map that the legislature spent May 2026 redrawing. Clyde Woods called this the blues epistemology. Woods studied the Mississippi Delta and argued two things that MFs still are not ready for. One, that the plantation is not a period, it is a bloc, meaning a standing alliance of landholders, lenders, sheriffs, and lawmakers that survives every formal defeat by reorganizing itself under new paperwork. Two, that when the courthouse will not keep an honest record, working Black people keep it in the music, and the music becomes a system of explanation rather than a soundtrack. Apply Woods here. Nutbush City Limits is not nostalgia, it is a field report from a county that in the exact same decade was throwing Black families off the land for registering to vote. Anna Mae Bullock got out of Haywood County in the middle of the 1950s. In 1960, the people who stayed were living in Army surplus tents. That is the pattern. Tennessee hands Black people a foothold early, earlier than most, and then Tennessee takes it back with a clean piece of paper. The Last To Leave and the First To Come Back Tennessee was the last state to secede. The legislature moved in May 1861 and the voters ratified it on June 8, 1861, which put Tennessee at the back of the line going out. That late departure is part of why Black Tennesseans got an early foothold in freedom. Union armies were in Middle and West Tennessee early, contraband camps formed early, Black men enlisted in numbers, and Nashville became a federal hub while the war was still hot. That foothold did not last long. It got snatched. Snatch one. The Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, exempted Tennessee. Andrew Johnson, then the military governor and an East Tennessee man, wanted it that way, so the paper that freed people in Confederate territory skipped the state where the Union already had boots on the ground. Legally free in Mississippi. Still property in Murfreesboro. Snatch two, and this is the one nobody teaches. Tennessee was the first ex Confederate state readmitted to the Union, on July 24, 1866, after being the first to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. Sounds like a win. It was not. When Congress passed the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and cut the South into five military districts, Tennessee was the only one of the eleven left out, because Tennessee had already been let back in. Read that again slowly. Every other former Confederate state got federal troops standing between Black voters and the men who used to own them. Tennessee got home rule back first, which means Tennessee got Redemption first, and it is not a coincidence that the Klan got founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in the winter after the war ended. Being first in line to come home meant being first in line to be left alone with the people who wanted you dead. The reward for early loyalty was early abandonment. Two things can be true. Tennessee was ahead, and Tennessee was abandoned, and it was ahead precisely because it was going to be abandoned. East Tennessee Was Not Your Friend, It Was Just Not a Planter Now let me clean up something in my own video, because Research over MeSearch means I check me too. I said East Tennessee was a Union stronghold where slavery was less common and many opposed secession. True. Then I need to finish the thought. East Tennessee is mountain country, and mountain country could not run a cotton plantation economy, so the white people up there had less use for large scale slavery. Less use is not moral opposition. Their unionism was mostly a class position against the planter class in Middle and West Tennessee, and the proof of that is a man named Andrew Johnson. Johnson was East Tennessee. Johnson was a unionist. Johnson stayed in the Senate when his state seceded. Johnson also owned people, asked for Tennessee to be carved out of the Emancipation Proclamation, and then as President spent the back half of the 1860s doing everything in his power to make sure Reconstruction did not turn into Black political power. East Tennessee unionism and antiblackness lived in the same body, wore the same suit, and took the same oath. This is the discipline the transcript needed and did not have. When you tell Tennessee’s story you cannot let the Union label do the moral work. Being against secession and being for Black freedom were two different positions, and Tennessee is where you can see the seam. The Plantation Bloc Draws the Map West and Middle Tennessee had the large plantations and the economies that ran on free labor from my ancestors. When the war ended, that land did not disappear and those families did not disappear. Woods would say the bloc did not die, it refinanced. Sharecropping was the refinancing. The debt ledger at the plantation store replaced the whip, the crop lien replaced the bill of sale, and the county courthouse handled the enforcement. Which brings me to Fayette County, and I need to correct myself on air, because in the video I said Fayetteville County. It is Fayette County, Tennessee, and its neighbor Haywood County, both sitting between Memphis and nothing, both majority Black, both cotton. Here is how it started, and the mechanism is beautiful and sick at the same time. In 1959 a Black man named Burton Dodson stood trial in Fayette County for a killing from decades earlier, defended by a Black Memphis attorney. Black folks packed that courtroom and watched an all white jury do what all white juries do. Then somebody did the math out loud. In Tennessee, jury pools came off the voter rolls. No registration, no jury. No jury, no chance. So a group of them founded the Original Fayette County Civic and Welfare League in 1959, and the whole thing started as a jury problem before it was ever a ballot problem. They registered. Then they got locked out of the August 1959 Democratic primary anyway, so they sued the county Democratic Party in 1960 and they won. Watch the retaliation, because the retaliation is the lesson. The White Citizens Council put together a list. Registered Black voters and any white person helping them. That list went around to merchants, banks, insurance agents, wholesalers, and doctors. If your name was on it you could not buy groceries. You could not buy gas. You could not get a loan, could not renew a policy, could not get seen by a physician. A sheriff’s deputy sat at the county line to turn back gasoline trucks headed to John McFerren’s store, so McFerren drove to Memphis and hauled his own supplies back. A white wholesaler slipped him gas in the middle of the night and to this day nobody knows who that man was. Then the cotton came in, and once the crop was picked and the labor was no longer needed, the evictions started. Over 400 families put out. Households on land their people had worked for generations, out on the road with their possessions in the ditch, in the winter, for registering to vote. Two Black landowners, Shepard Towles and Gertrude Beasley, opened their property. Army surplus tents went up. They called it Tent City, and later Freedom Village, and families lived in canvas from late 1959 into 1962, some into 1963. One man who was evicted described a tent 16 feet by 14 feet holding him, his wife, and four children, cooking and sleeping and eating in the same square, mud to the knees when it rained. He also said he was never sorry he registered. The Justice Department finally moved, and this was the first serious use of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. September 1960 they sued. November 18, 1960 they amended to add 36 more landowners. December 14, 1960 they filed against 45 landowners, 24 merchants, and a financial institution in Fayette County. On July 26, 1962, it settled by consent decree. Nobody admitted a thing. The landowners were permanently enjoined from evicting or refusing service in order to stop people from registering. Now here is the part that should make the hair on your neck stand up. After the consent decree, the evictions did not stop. They just changed the reason on the paperwork. The landowners started putting families off for mechanization. For poor work performance. For efficiency. Same eviction, same families, same road, brand new reason, and now the reason is race neutral and unreviewable. Just admit what that is. That is not a loophole. That is the technology. They Never Needed a Hood, They Had a Filing Cabinet Once you see the swap, you cannot unsee it, and Tennessee is where the receipts stack the highest. Receipt one. Memphis, 1940. Robert R. Church Jr. was the most powerful Black political operator in the South, the man who built the Lincoln League, the man whose family name was on a park. He backed the wrong presidential candidate against Boss Crump’s machine. The city came for his mansion

  3. 2d ago

    The Cake Was Legal. The Threat to Defund a University Was Not.

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What Actually Happened, Because the Headline Lied to Me Too The Lindsey Graham cake drama I thought was about some random professor at Indiana University. Come to find out, y’all, it’s about Elizabeth Booker Houston. I’ve been seeing these old headlines on my Facebook page off and on, and I did not read or pay attention after the headlines. Congratulations, lawmakers want all you professors fired over a Lindsey Graham cake. I thought, like, damn, that’s crazy. My homegirl posted this on social media, and some professor copied off of her, and now she’s about to get fired. Damn. No. They calling her to be fired for this cake. Let me tell you why that opening paragraph matters more than the joke inside of it. I am a person who reads for a living, who teaches for a living, who has spent years in adult higher education telling grown folks that the headline is a marketing instrument and not a finding of fact, and even I scrolled past this thing four or five times without ever clicking. That is not a personal failure. That is the design working exactly the way it was engineered to work. The headline says professor. The headline says Indiana. The headline says fired. The headline does not say lawyer, does not say public health professional, does not say adjunct making about five thousand dollars a year for one course in food and drug law, does not say Memphis, does not say the woman in question buried a brother who was killed in a shooting in the Edge District in December of 2017 and has been begging that particular chamber of Congress to do something about gun violence ever since. The headline gives you a category and lets your assumptions fill in the rest, and the category it gave you was professor, which in the current climate is a synonym for suspect. Watch it run. Elizabeth Booker Houston holds a JD and an MPH from the University of Memphis. She teaches food and drug law at the IU McKinney School of Law. She is a lawyer, a public health professional, and a comedian, and she was hired by institutions that were entirely aware of her public presence, because she has been publicly loud for years and none of it was hidden. Now go read how she got described. A failed comedian. A stunt. Grotesque political theater. Tasteless. Somebody who should get mental health counseling as part of her severance, which came from a sitting member of Congress. Here is the record. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina died on July 11, 2026, at the age of 71, of an aortic dissection. His sister, Darline Graham Nordone, was sworn in to finish out the term. On July 14, Elizabeth Booker Houston posted an Instagram video of herself and another creator setting a bakery sheet cake down among the flowers outside Graham’s former Senate office. The cake carried his Senate headshot, a cross made of blue frosted roses, and the word congratudolences, which is a mashup of congratulations and condolences. She then posted the photo to X with a message addressed to the sister now holding the seat. She said in the video that she would not be praying for his salvation. Then came the calls. Congressman William Timmons of South Carolina tagged George Washington University, where she guest lectures, and asked about disciplinary action. Senator Jim Banks of Indiana said IU should fire her immediately. Representatives Marlin Stutzman and Erin Houchin joined him. Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith of Indiana went the furthest and said that if Indiana University did not fire her, the Indiana General Assembly should withhold state funding from the school, and he wrapped that threat in a complaint about why public education is failing and no longer respected. A sitting statewide executive officer publicly instructed a public university to fire a lecturer for constitutionally protected political speech, and attached a funding threat to the instruction, while explaining that his motivation was concern for the health of public education. That is the whole ballgame in one sentence. That is a man pissing on us and telling us it’s raining. II. Patterson Already Ran This Play Now here is where I need you to sit up, because this is not new, this is not novel, this is not some unprecedented moment in the culture war. This is a rerun. This exact script was performed sixty six years ago and the state of Alabama held the pen. In February and March of 1960, students at Alabama State College in Montgomery staged sit ins at the segregated snack bar in the county courthouse. Governor John Malcolm Patterson did not go after the students first. He went after the money. He leaned on the college president, H. Councill Trenholm, a Black man running a Black state institution that lived and died on an appropriation controlled by white legislators, and he made the terms plain. Purge the faculty or lose your job. On March 26, 1960, Trenholm announced he would clean out the disloyal faculty members. The Montgomery Advertiser ran it the next morning. Who got caught in that net. Lawrence Dunbar Reddick, chairman of the history department, a University of Chicago PhD, former curator of the Schomburg Collection, historian of the Montgomery Improvement Association, biographer of Martin Luther King Jr. He was fired in June of 1960. Olean Underwood was fired. And then there were the women. Mary Fair Burks, chair of the English department, founding president of the Women’s Political Council. Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, the WPC president who mimeographed the leaflets that launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott off a college machine in the middle of the night. Eleven faculty members resigned rather than wait for the axe. Burks and Robinson resigned at the close of the spring semester. Robinson had already had a rock thrown through her window by a police officer and acid poured on her car. State evaluators had been sitting in on classes to watch instructors, which is a beautiful euphemism for surveillance. King wrote Trenholm’s actions off as cowardly, and said he had hoped the man would stand up to the governor and the board of education and refuse to fire eleven faculty members who had committed no crime and no act of sedition, and that if he had done so he would have gained support across the nation that he never dreamed of. The American Association of University Professors censured Alabama State for firing Reddick without due process. That censure sat on the institution for twenty years. Twenty years. A Black college carried a professional stain for two decades because a white governor wanted a Black historian gone and used the appropriation as the crowbar. Then, and this is the part that should make the hair on your arm stand up, that same Governor Patterson is a thread in the origin story of modern American free speech law. When the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King ran a fundraising advertisement in the New York Times in March of 1960 about the treatment of those Alabama students, Patterson and other Alabama officials filed libel suits. One of those suits, brought by Montgomery Commissioner L. B. Sullivan, became New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, decided in 1964, the case that gave this country the actual malice standard and made robust criticism of public officials survivable in court. So here’s your through line. The free speech architecture that conservatives invoke every single day, the doctrine they wave around at every campus, was built in a courthouse out of white Southern officials trying to punish Black people for describing what Alabama was doing to Black students. Black speech under white state pressure is not a side plot in First Amendment history. Black speech under white state pressure is the load bearing wall. Apply Derrick Bell here. Interest convergence tells us that Black people get a legal victory when that victory happens to serve a broader white interest, and the press freedom the whole country enjoys today converged with a Black freedom struggle that needed a national newspaper to be able to print the truth about Montgomery without being sued into silence. And now, in 2026, the descendants of the people who filed those suits are demanding that a public university fire a Black woman for a cake, and threatening the appropriation to make sure it happens. Crazy how that works. Go back further if you want. Ida B. Wells was running the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight in 1892 when she wrote about the lynching of Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart at the People’s Grocery, and named the lie at the center of lynching. A mob destroyed her press and she could not go home to Memphis. Elizabeth Booker Houston is from Memphis. Ida B. Wells could not return to Memphis for describing how Memphis killed her friend. A hundred and thirty four years later a woman from that same city is being told her employment is contingent on how gently she speaks about a dead senator. The technology changed. The press was a printing press, now the press is an Instagram post. The instrument of punishment was a mob, now the instrument of punishment is a line item in a state budget. The logic never moved an inch. III. The Law Is Not Ambiguous, They Just Hoping You Don’t Know It Let’s do the law, because I am not going to argue vibes with people who claim to be the party of law and order. Number one. Indiana University is a public institution. That means it is a state actor. That means the First Amendment binds it. This is not a debate. When IU acts as an employer against an employee for that employee’s speech, the Constitution is in the room. Number two. The governing framework is Pickering v. Board of Education, decided in 1968, where the Supreme Court held that a public school teacher could not be fired for writing a letter to a newspaper criticizing the school board’s handling of money. The Court set up a balancing t

  4. 2d ago

    DEI Rollbacks Might Be a Breach of Fiduciary Duty (The Receipts)

    According to the “As You Sow” report, a company that eliminates or substantially reduces its management diversity programs in response to political pressure, rather than financial analysis, is making a decision motivated by nonfinancial considerations. Think about how wild it is to publicly announce you don’t want diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not to quietly defund it. Not to let it wither in a reorg. To announce it. To put out a press release, to schedule the earnings call, to stand at a podium and tell the world that your company has decided, as a matter of strategy, that it would prefer a narrower pool of talent, a thinner set of perspectives, and a smaller share of the American consumer. Think about the confidence that takes. Think about what a person has to believe about the world, and about who is watching, before they decide that this is the announcement that will make them look competent. I’m finna make you an evidence based argument that has nothing to do with politics or emotion. Straight data. Facts over feelings. Here is the argument in one breath, and then I will spend the rest of this piece proving every joint in it. If the evidence links management diversity to financial performance, then dismantling diversity programs for political reasons might be considered a breach of fiduciary obligations. And if you’re claiming you care about fiduciary duty, that matters, because courts and state officials have spent the last four years arguing that putting ideology ahead of financial returns can breach fiduciary duty. That argument was built by the people running the rollback. That argument was built by conservative think tanks, by Republican attorneys general, by activist shareholders who sent threat letters to boardrooms. I am not inventing a new standard. I am picking up the standard they left on the table and turning it around. Y’all know I was a professor of diversity, equity, and inclusion at a university, as well as having a master’s degree in human relations. I think I might not only be speaking from experience but also expertise. Let me tell you what that expertise actually taught me, though, because it is not what you think. It did not teach me that the business case for diversity is the strongest case. It taught me that the business case for diversity is the weakest case that white institutions were willing to accept, and that the moment it stopped being convenient, they would abandon it and pretend they never signed. Two things can be true. The evidence can support the business case, and the business case can still be a trap. I am going to hold both of those at the same time for the next several thousand words, and I need you to hold them with me. Before It Was a Business Case, It Was a Threat Now let me give you the history, because you cannot understand why corporate America folded in 2025 unless you understand what corporate America agreed to in 1990, and you cannot understand 1990 unless you go back to 1941. In 1941, A. Philip Randolph threatened to march one hundred thousand Black workers on Washington to protest exclusion from defense industry jobs. Franklin Roosevelt, who needed those factories running and did not need those cameras, issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee. Understand the mechanism. Randolph did not win 8802 by demonstrating that integrated factories were more productive. Randolph won 8802 by making segregation more expensive than integration at a moment when the state could not afford the bill. That is the origin story. The first federal fair employment policy in American history was a hostage negotiation. Truman desegregated the armed forces with Executive Order 9981 in 1948. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10925 in 1961, and that order is where the phrase “affirmative action” enters federal law. Johnson issued Executive Order 11246 in September 1965, which required federal contractors to refrain from discrimination and to take affirmative steps toward equal opportunity, and in 1967 Executive Order 11375 added sex to the covered categories. Then Nixon, of all people, expanded the Philadelphia Plan in 1969, imposing numerical goals and timetables on federally funded construction. People love to tell that story as Nixon the closet integrationist. Read the memos. The Philadelphia Plan drove a wedge between the building trades unions and the civil rights movement, two constituencies that were both aligned against him, and it cost him almost nothing. Crazy how the arithmetic works out. And in 1966, quietly, with no march and no press conference, the EEOC created a form. The Employer Information Report, Component 1. Every private employer with a hundred or more workers had to tell the federal government how many people they employed by race, by ethnicity, by sex, across ten job categories. That form is the ledger. Everything I am about to argue depends on that form existing, and I need you to remember that, because it is going to come back at the end of this essay and it is going to come back with teeth. Then came the turn. In 1978, in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Powell wrote the controlling opinion, and Powell did something that reshaped the next fifty years. Powell rejected the remedial rationale. He would not accept “we are correcting societal discrimination” as a compelling state interest. What he accepted instead was diversity, framed as an educational benefit that accrues to the institution and to everyone in it. Read that again. The Supreme Court told America that repairing harm to Black people was not a good enough reason, but enriching the learning environment for everybody was. The justice frame died in 1978 and the benefit frame was born on the same day, in the same paragraph, by the same hand. Corporate America learned that lesson faster than the academy did. In 1987, the Hudson Institute published Workforce 2000 for the Department of Labor, projecting that white men would make up a shrinking share of net new entrants to the labor force. That report got misread across every boardroom in America as a demographic emergency. Then in March 1990, R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. published an essay in the Harvard Business Review titled “From Affirmative Action to Affirming Diversity,” and that essay is the hinge. Thomas argued that affirmative action was a temporary intervention that had run its course and that what companies needed instead was to manage diversity as a competitive asset. Within a decade, the compliance officer became the diversity officer, the legal obligation became the strategic initiative, and the language of debt became the language of dividend. Ellen Berrey documented this in The Enigma of Diversity. Lauren Edelman documented the mechanism in Working Law, showing how organizations construct symbolic structures that courts then accept as evidence of compliance, so that having a diversity policy becomes legally equivalent to not discriminating. Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev spent thirty years showing that most of what companies actually built, the mandatory training, the grievance procedures, the diversity tests, did not increase management diversity at all, and sometimes decreased it. So by 2020, when George Floyd was murdered and fifty billion dollars in corporate racial equity pledges hit the newswire in about ninety days, the whole apparatus was already built on a foundation of contingent value. Not owed. Not repair. Valuable. Useful. Good for the brand. Derrick Bell told us exactly how that story ends. Interest convergence. Bell’s argument, laid out in the Harvard Law Review in 1980, is that Black people secure gains precisely and only when those gains converge with the perceived interests of white elites, and that when the convergence breaks, the gains are withdrawn without apology. Bell was writing about Brown. He could have been writing about the 2020 pledges and the 2025 press releases with the same pen. Just admit what happened. The business case was never a floor. The business case was a lease. And in January 2025, the landlord showed up. FIVE KEY TAKEAWAYS * The fiduciary argument was built by the rollback crowd, and it points back at them. Conservative shareholder activists and state officials spent years arguing that boards which put ideology ahead of returns breach their duty. The federal workforce data associates management diversity with stronger performance and associates its absence with weakened performance and retention. Apply their standard honestly and the party exposed to a duty of care problem is the board that cut a program to please an administration without documenting any analysis. * Association is not causation, and the argument survives that concession. The correct claim is materiality, not proof. Green and Hand’s 2024 replication failure against McKinsey is real and should be cited by anyone who is serious. It does not touch the mandatory federal compliance filings, which are standardized, audited, longitudinal, and were never assembled by anyone selling diversity consulting. * The owners already voted, and they voted no. More than 98 percent at Costco, 97.3 percent at Apple, roughly 2 percent support at Goldman Sachs, under 1 percent at Levi Strauss. Boards that rolled back DEI overrode the near unanimous expressed judgment of their own shareholders. Target absorbed a demand shock its CEO acknowledged on an earnings call, slid from roughly $145 to $93 a share, posted eleven straight quarters of flat or falling comparable sales, and replaced its chief executive. * The business case was a lease, not a floor, and it was signed in 1978. Powell’s Bakke opinion rejected the remedial rationale and accepted only the benefit rationale. Thomas’s 1990 Harvard Business Review essay carried that logic into corporate practice. Derrick Bell’s interest convergence predicted the e

  5. 4d ago

    "I'm Not Racist, My Partner Is Half Indian": Every Receipt Elon Hoped You'd Never Read

    Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of The Economist, sat across from the richest man on this planet at a Texas Gigafactory and asked him something plain. People say that you’re a racist. What is the motivation for doing that? And the man did not say no. The man did not say here is my record, here is my compliance data, here is the internal audit, here is the settlement history, here is what my companies did when Black workers filed complaints. The man said my partner, she’s half Indian, and I have four children with her, one of them was named after a famous Indian physicist, so I would say I’m not racist. Then he went to the second exhibit. If you look at the people that are employed at my companies, we have senior executives of all races. I don’t think there’s any racism there. Now watch what just happened, kinfolks, because the sleight of hand is the whole trick. He was asked about a pattern of documented conduct and he answered with a family photo and an org chart. He was asked about structure and he answered with sentiment. He was asked about what his institutions do and he answered with who he sleeps next to and who he has lunch with. Farr taught us that white ignorance is not an absence of knowledge, it is a manufactured product, an achievement that takes labor to maintain, and you are watching the labor happen in real time on a video call. Apply Farr right here. That answer is not a lie in the simple sense. That answer is a machine for not knowing. Then he got asked the follow up. Are you anti Muslim. And the man who had a rapid fire family alibi ready for the first question suddenly needed twenty seconds of silence. Twenty seconds. Count that out loud sometime. Then he said I am against, if people are coming to a country with antithetical views, I am against that. I’m against rape and murder. I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West. And I said in the video and I will say it again in print, that was textbook Islamophobia, and everything that he correlated to Muslims is really a call coming from inside the house. It’s really you and your people, your South African, your English, your Dutch people, you feel me. Now go into a whole bunch of countries, you invade them, you colonize them, and then you impose your diabolical, antithetical views onto the population. This essay is the receipts. Not the vibes. Not the screenshot of a screenshot. The docket, the agency findings, the peer reviewed studies, the man’s own posts under his own name on the platform he owns. Because two things can be true. A man can have children he loves and a company that a state civil rights agency says pays Black workers $1,533 less a month. Two things can be true. A man can name a son after a brilliant Indian physicist and still repost the demographic panic that has been the beating heart of white nationalism since before his grandfather packed his bags for Johannesburg. The Alibi of Proximity: A Very Old American Technology Here is the thing that made me put my hand over my mouth when I heard it. That defense is not new. That defense is not even original. That defense is roughly four hundred years old and it has a legal history in this country that is written down and citable. Start in Virginia, 1662. The House of Burgesses passes the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, that which is brought forth follows the belly. English common law said a child’s status followed the father. Virginia flipped it, deliberately, so that a child born to an enslaved woman would be enslaved regardless of who the father was. Read that slowly. The colony wrote a statute whose entire economic function was to convert white men’s proximity to Black women into inheritable property. Intimacy was not evidence against the system. Intimacy was an input to the system. Spillers gave us the vocabulary for what that statute does, the theft of gender itself, the reduction of body to flesh, the ungendering that makes the Black mother a vessel of capital rather than kin. Apply Spillers to 1662 and you understand that closeness never once functioned as a defense. Closeness functioned as a production line. Then you get to Monticello. Thomas Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV, a sustained argument that Black people were inferior in reason and in imagination, that the difference was fixed in nature, that emancipation would require removal. He wrote that. He published that. And Annette Gordon Reed’s archival work on the Hemings family established what oral history in Black communities had asserted for two centuries and what DNA analysis later supported, that Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned, a woman who was the half sister of his deceased wife, a woman who could not consent in any meaningful sense because the law did not recognize her capacity to refuse. His own children by her remained his property. Some he freed. Some he did not. As I said in the video, Thomas Jefferson also had kids with a woman that was by half another race and he still thought they were subject to the plantation. Funny how that worked. Then run it forward. Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 on a segregationist platform, filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for twenty four hours and eighteen minutes, the longest solo filibuster in Senate history, and fathered a daughter, Essie Mae Washington Williams, with Carrie Butler, a sixteen year old Black woman working in his family’s home. He paid for her education quietly. He met with her privately. He never once let that relationship interrupt a single vote. Essie Mae only went public after he died in 2003. Somebody tell Elon that just because you have all races on the payroll doesn’t mean they’re experiencing all the same thing. That is what I said and that is exactly the structural point. Bell’s thesis on the permanence of racism was never about individual hatred in individual hearts. Bell argued that racism is a stable, self replicating feature of the American legal and economic order that adjusts its surface presentation to survive. Apply Bell here and the family photo is not counterevidence. The family photo is the surface presentation. Mills called it the racial contract, an agreement whose signatories do not need to be conscious of signing, whose primary requirement is not personal malice but structural benefit combined with an epistemology of ignorance that protects the beneficiary from having to know. Under the racial contract you do not need a hood. You need a payroll, a platform, and a plausible story for the interview. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Docket: What Black Workers Say Happened in Fremont Now, receipts. The article I held up in the video was published two days before we recorded, and it says exactly what I said it says. Marcus Vaughn filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court in 2017. Case number RG17882082. Vaughn alleged he heard the N word used at least a hundred times by coworkers. His complaint described the Fremont factory floor as a hotbed for racist behavior that Tesla had done nothing to stop. He complained repeatedly to management. One offending coworker was fired. The slurs continued. When his six month contract came up for renewal, a supervisor recommended against it on the grounds that Vaughn did not have a positive attitude at work and for the company, and he was let go. That is not a random grievance. Vaughn’s case became the anchor for a legal avalanche. Hundreds of current and former Black workers filed sworn declarations to the court in the Vaughn matter. Of more than two hundred Black workers who provided statements, roughly two thirds reported seeing antiblack graffiti in the factory including nooses, racial slurs, and swastikas. About a quarter said higher ups called them the N word. A court filing catalogued more than fifty distinct antiblack slurs allegedly used or scrawled inside the plant. Nearly half said they complained to supervisors, managers, or human resources and got nothing. Dozens said complaining brought retaliation up to and including termination. Workers described being funneled into the hardest, most dangerous, lowest paid jobs on the floor. Workers, supervisors, and management alike, according to the state’s filings, referred to the facility as the plantation, with Black workers as the slaves. Say that part again, out loud, for the folks in the back. Not a metaphor a plaintiff’s lawyer invented in a conference room. A term the state civil rights agency alleges was in circulation on the shop floor of the most valuable car company in the world, in California, in the twenty first century. Owen Diaz was a contract elevator operator who worked at Fremont for roughly nine months across 2015 and 2016. Diaz was the rare plaintiff who had never signed an arbitration agreement, which is the only reason a jury ever heard him. In October 2021 a federal jury in San Francisco found for Diaz and awarded $136.9 million, one of the largest single plaintiff discrimination verdicts in American history. Judge William Orrick cut it to $15 million. Diaz refused the reduced sum and took a retrial. In April 2023 a second jury found for him again and awarded $3.2 million. He settled in March 2024 for undisclosed terms. Sit with that arc. Two separate juries, two separate years, both found Tesla liable. The number moved by ninety eight percent. The liability never moved at all. In February 2022 the California agency now known as the Civil Rights Department sued Tesla after approximately three years of investigation and hundreds of complaints. Director Kevin Kish said the agency found evidence that the Fremont factory was a racially segregated workplace where Black workers were subjected to racial slurs and discriminated

  6. 4d ago

    Slave to Soldier to Landowner: The Sergeant Buried Outside the Wall at Stones River

    Right now I’m standing on the largest earthen fortress in the United States, and it’s located here in the great state of Tennessee, about thirty five miles down the road from where a thousand mile walk to Memphis begins. It’s a part of Black history that has everything to do with the Civil War. You’ve heard of Gettysburg. You’ve heard of Vicksburg. The real turning point though, it wasn’t a battle, it was a betrayal. Two hundred thousand enslaved people betrayed their enslavers by inserting their autonomy and inserting their humanity into a war that was never designed to hold either one. That’s the sentence. That’s the whole argument. Everything after this is receipts. Stones River wasn’t won by Rosecrans. Stones River was won by men who had everything to lose and chose their freedom anyway, in the face of every law and every social norm that criminalized their autonomy. They did it anyways. Research over MeSearch, so let me show you the paper trail. RECEIPTS BEFORE RHETORIC: WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON THIS GROUND The Battle of Stones River ran from December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863, right outside Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Union General William S. Rosecrans and the Army of the Cumberland against Confederate General Braxton Bragg and the Army of Tennessee. Proportionally it produced some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war. Bragg withdrew. Rosecrans held the field. Middle Tennessee went under federal control, and the road toward Chattanooga, and then Atlanta, and then the sea, opened up behind it. Then came the fort. On January 23, 1863, Brigadier General James St. Clair Morton, chief engineer for the Army of the Cumberland, broke ground on what became Fortress Rosecrans. When it was finished in June of that same year it enclosed roughly two hundred to two hundred twenty five acres behind nearly three miles of earthen wall, with eight to nine perimeter lunettes, four interior redoubts, curtain walls, abatis, moats, magazines, sawmills, warehouses, and quartermaster depots inside. Union engineers designed it to shelter an army and to hold provisions for tens of thousands of men for up to ninety days. It was the largest earthen fortification built during the American Civil War. Not the largest in Tennessee. The largest, period. Here’s the part that gets left out of the placard. That fortress never came under attack. Not once. Which means its entire function was logistical. Fortress Rosecrans was the supply base that made the Tullahoma campaign possible, that made the drive on Chattanooga possible, that made the Atlanta campaign possible, that made Sherman’s March to the Sea possible. The Confederacy did not lose because somebody outshot them at a crossroads. The Confederacy lost because somebody out supplied them, and the base that did the supplying was raised out of Rutherford County dirt by Black hands. Understand what an earthen fortress actually is before you skip past it. It’s dirt. It’s the natural land around you, cut, hauled, tramped, packed, revetted with wood and wire and brick and stone, sloped at angles that eat artillery shells instead of shattering the way masonry does. Masonry forts were already obsolete by 1862 because rifled artillery cracked them open. Dirt absorbed. Dirt held. The most advanced defensive engineering of that war was earthwork engineering, and the people whose intellect the state had criminalized were the ones executing it. Sit in that contradiction for a second. It was illegal across the slaveholding South to teach an enslaved person to read. Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Louisiana, all of them had statutes on the books restricting Black literacy, some criminalizing the teacher, some criminalizing the assembly. The same legal order that said these people could not be trusted with the alphabet handed them the geometry of the largest fortification on the continent and said build it by Thursday. That’s not an oversight. That’s the design. Farr and Yancy would call this an epistemology of ignorance, a knowing that is organized around a strategic not knowing. The state did not actually believe Black people lacked capacity. The state needed the capacity and needed the story about the lack of capacity at the same time, because the labor was worth more when the humanity was deniable. THE PROCLAMATION THAT SKIPPED TENNESSEE Now let me correct the record on something, because I would rather be accurate than comfortable, and because the accurate version makes the point harder, not softer. The Emancipation Proclamation did not take effect weeks after Stones River. It took effect on January 1, 1863, which was the middle day of the battle. Men were dying in the cedar brakes outside Murfreesboro on the exact calendar day the document went live. Here’s the harder truth. That document did not free one single enslaved person in Tennessee. Lincoln’s proclamation applied only to states and parts of states in active rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Tennessee was exempted. Not by accident, not by oversight, but by request. Andrew Johnson, then military governor of Tennessee and later the seventeenth president of the United States, lobbied Lincoln to carve Tennessee out, and Lincoln did it. On January 11, 1863, Johnson wrote to Lincoln applauding the decision and saying the exception in favor of Tennessee would be worth much to them. Worth much to whom is the question the archive doesn’t answer politely. So when I say betrayal, I need y’all to understand the full weight of it. The Black Tennesseans who walked into Union lines at Murfreesboro in January of 1863 were not walking into freedom. Legally they were still property. The federal government they were running toward had just gone out of its way to say the freedom document does not apply to you. There was no legal category waiting on them. There was no proclamation with their name on it. They moved anyway. Slavery did not legally end in Tennessee until February 22, 1865, by state referendum, and even that came after Johnson’s October 1864 proclamation and a constitutional convention engineered under military occupation. Two full years of Black Tennesseans building forts, burying dead, feeding armies, and enlisting in a war for a freedom the paperwork had explicitly denied them. Just admit it. The freedom came first and the law came limping after. It always does. The law is a lagging indicator of Black insistence, not a leading one, and anybody teaching it the other way around is teaching mythology with footnotes. THE GENERAL STRIKE NOBODY CALLS A STRIKE Du Bois already told us this in 1935 and America spent ninety years pretending not to hear it. In Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois argued that what happened between 1861 and 1865 was a general strike of the enslaved. Not a rescue. Not a gift. A withdrawal of labor by roughly half a million people who walked off the plantations that were feeding, clothing, and financing the Confederate war machine, and then carried that labor across the line and handed it to the other side. The Confederacy did not lose its enslaved workforce to a battlefield reversal. The Confederacy lost its enslaved workforce because the workforce quit. Apply Du Bois right here, on this dirt. Every man hauling earth into a parapet at Fortress Rosecrans in the spring of 1863 was a man not planting cotton in Rutherford County that same spring. Every woman cooking and washing in the contraband camps was a woman not producing value inside a household economy that underwrote Confederate credit. The transfer was double entry. The South lost the labor and the North gained it, in the same motion, from the same decision, made by the same people. Then stack it. Robinson’s Black Marxism teaches us that antiblackness was never an aberration inside American capitalism, it was the engine. So when the engine walks off, the machine seizes. That’s not a moral victory story. That’s a structural one. Two hundred thousand Black men eventually served in the United States Army and Navy, roughly one hundred seventy nine thousand in the Army and around nineteen thousand in the Navy, which is somewhere near one in ten of the entire Union force by the end. Over half of them had been enslaved. In Tennessee alone, 20,133 Black men enlisted in the Union Army. That was more than any other state that had joined the Confederacy. Let that number sit next to the exemption from the Emancipation Proclamation and tell me again that these people were waiting on permission. Lincoln himself, in an August 1864 letter, said flatly that abandoning Black troops would mean the Union could not win in three weeks. He wasn’t being sentimental. He was doing math. TWO THINGS CAN BE TRUE: IMPRESSMENT AND EMANCIPATION ON THE SAME SHOVEL I’m not about to hand you a clean hero story, because a clean hero story is just propaganda with better lighting. Two things can be true. The people who built Fortress Rosecrans were exercising autonomy, and a whole lot of them were also impressed, conscripted, and worked under conditions that looked a whole lot like what they had just fled. The precedent is up the road in Nashville. In the summer of 1862 the United States Army began seizing Black laborers, free and enslaved, off the streets, out of churches, and off nearby farms to build Fort Negley. Roughly twenty seven hundred to twenty eight hundred laborers went into that project. Estimates of the dead run into the hundreds, from exposure, disease, malnutrition, and the work itself. Many were never paid. The Union Army promised wages and rations and delivered inconsistently, and the promise of freedom that came attached was informal, revocable, and legally unenforceable in a state the Proclamation had skipped. That’s the same army, the same theater, the same year, the same category of labor, thirty five miles up the pike from where I’m standing. Apply Hartman here. In Scenes of Subjection, Har

  7. Jul 22

    She Might Actually Beat Greg Abbott. So I Asked Her What Nobody Else Will

    “Right now, education is trash.” That was the first thing out my mouth when I sat down with Gina Hinojosa, no warmup, no small talk, jumping right into it, because when your state is sitting at the bottom of the country in what it spends on a child and the top of the country in what it spends on a cage, you do not have time for pleasantries. She did not flinch, she did not spin it, she did not hit me with that consultant tested nothing talk, she said education in Texas is a reflection of our leadership, and then she started running down receipts like she been waiting on somebody to ask. Teachers walking away from the classroom because of disrespect, because they are policed in all sorts of ways now, because of underpay. More uncertified teachers entering Texas classrooms than certified teachers joining the profession, for the first time in the history of this state. A Central Texas school district where the human resources director told her most of his teachers come from Mexico on visas because he cannot find people here to work in the classroom. Man, hold on, hold on, hold on. We are not even going to go past that. At a time where our state is criminalizing a bunch of individuals that is coming from Mexico, we also have a bunch of our students that is having a low quality education based on how much we are not funding it, and the population being criminalized for coming into our state is also the population trying to help our kids raise the quality of education in our state. Sit with that contradiction. Every accusation is a confession, y’all. The same state government that put razor wire in the river and buoys in the water is quietly stamping visas so Mexican educators can come save the classrooms that Greg Abbott starved. That is not a policy disagreement. That is a whole state pissing on our legs and telling us it is raining. This essay is what happens when you take that sit down and run it through the archive. I am going to tell you who Gina Hinojosa is, I am going to lay out what she said, and then I am going to do what Education Is Elevation always does, put the present inside the history that produced it, because the curriculum fight in Texas did not start with Trump in 2016, it did not start with critical race theory panic in 2021, it started when Texas was still an idea inside a land deal, and both parties, hear me clearly, both parties have kept the machinery of forgetting well oiled ever since. Who Is Gina Hinojosa Gina Hinojosa is the 2026 Democratic nominee for governor of Texas. She was born and raised in Brownsville in the Rio Grande Valley, a proud product of Texas public schools, a former civil rights and union side lawyer, and a mother who got into politics the way a lot of mothers do, because the state came for her child’s school. She ran for the Austin ISD school board when budget cuts threatened her son’s elementary campus, rose to school board president, and then won a seat in the Texas House in 2016, where she has served five terms representing central Austin, sitting on the Public Education Committee and becoming one of the loudest and most consistent opponents of Greg Abbott’s billion dollar private school voucher program. In 2021 she helped lead the quorum break, when Texas House Democrats left the state and flew to Washington to fight for the John Lewis Voting Rights Act after Republicans tried to ban Sunday morning voting and shut down souls to the polls. In March 2026 she won the Democratic primary with nearly sixty percent of the vote in a nine candidate field, and this November she faces Abbott, his war chest of more than one hundred million dollars, and a Republican lock on the governor’s mansion that has held since Ann Richards walked out of it in 1995. If she wins, she becomes the first Latina governor of a state that is about forty percent Latino, which she answered better than any consultant could when I asked her about it. Why wouldn’t we have one? We are Texan. Texas is all of us. What She Said: Corruption Wearing a Culture War Costume The spine of Hinojosa’s whole analysis is one sentence she kept coming back to like a broken record, her words, not mine: corruption is the source of almost all our problems, and the culture war is the costume corruption wears to the function. Everything is broken in this state, she told me. Government is broken. Our leaders, and Greg Abbott is mostly responsible because he is the governor, they just do politics all the time. They do not govern. Our schools have become ground zero for culture wars, and it did not used to be that way. When she was on the school board, before 2016, the hardcore fights were over which school got bond money for a parking lot. Then the machinery changed what schools are for. Her receipts on the ground are brutal. One hundred fifty whole school districts in Texas are operating four days a week because they cannot afford to operate five. Not one campus, not one struggling charter, one hundred fifty districts. So I asked the question every working parent in rural Texas is asking, what are kids doing on that fifth day when their parents are at work? Money that should be flowing into classrooms is flowing into vendor contracts, and she said the quiet part with her chest, corrupt vendor contracts to Greg Abbott’s donors. She sits on the public education committee and told me they are not even allowed to vote on bills that are just about kids in the classroom. It is all vendor contracts. Her plan reads like a repossession notice. Fire Mike Morath, the Texas Education Agency commissioner, a tech guy, and put an educator in the seat. Give Houston its school district back to the people of Houston, because it is never the right answer to take schools away from parents and community, the people with skin in the game. Wipe clean the teaching to the test, the canned curriculum, the contracts, and use that money to pay Texas teachers among the highest in the nation. Then hold what she called an unsession, a whole legislative session dedicated to undoing the things the state has stacked on top of teachers, and just let people teach. The part that should be taught in every civics class is her breakdown of the Bluebonnet curriculum. Pay attention to the sequence, because the sequence is the scam. The state curriculum that now has Christian nationalism baked into it did not start out as a theology project. It started out as a billion dollar vendor contract to Abbott’s donors, canned, timed, scripted lesson plans that teachers hated. Then everybody came out against it together, teachers, public school parents, even MAGA moms, all united in hating the same bill and calling out the corruption. So what did they do? They put the Christian nationalism in. It was not there before. They gave it a new name, Bluebonnet, and suddenly a united front against corruption became a culture war that splits neighbors down the middle. Hinojosa named the play perfectly: he is distracting you with one hand while he takes your money with the other hand. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Then the conversation went where Texas conversations always end up if you follow the money far enough, into the cages. She told me about the halfway house in Austin run by CoreCivic, a private prison corporation, where a man told her to his face that the state of Texas brought him to Austin from an out of state prison, released him onto streets where he knew nobody, and left him with nothing. Less than a third of the people in that facility were even from Travis County. They ship human beings to wherever the company has beds, because every bed is a billable head, and if people are not rehabilitated they reoffend and go right back into the machine that profits from them. She connected it straight to the ICE raids, to Texas being the only state that locks up little kids with their parents because Abbott built the licensing to allow what would be child abuse anywhere else, to the Texas National Guard staffing private detention centers on the taxpayer dime so the corporations can fatten their margins. I told her I was going to see if she would say the word, and she said it. Greg Abbott is trafficking. Trafficking ex offenders onto our streets, back in and out of the system. Shonda Rhimes could not have wrote this better, and I do not even look for this truth. It falls on my lap. Both Sides of the Aisle, One Side of the Erasure Now here is the structural critique, and I need y’all to hold two things at the same time, because two things can be true. Greg Abbott is uniquely corrupt, and the Texas curriculum was anti Black and anti Indigenous long before Greg Abbott ever touched it. The bipartisan beef, the red team blue team wrestling promo we watch every election cycle, functions as a mystification, because it teaches us to experience curriculum as a possession fight between two parties when the deeper truth is that both parties have administered a schooling system built on the same settler foundation. Charles Mills gave us the language for this in The Racial Contract when he described an epistemology of ignorance, a structured, socially produced way of not knowing that white polities require to see themselves as innocent. Apply Mills here. The Texas curriculum is not missing Black and Indigenous history by accident, the ignorance is the product, manufactured on schedule like any other deliverable in any other vendor contract. Arnold Farr and George Yancy push it further, whiteness maintains itself precisely by never having to examine the conditions of its own construction, and a seventh grade Texas history course with zero Black Texans in it is that non examination made mandatory and graded. Patrick Wolfe taught us that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, organized around a logic of elimination, and Sandy Grande reminds us in Red Pedagogy that the schoolhouse has always been one of settler society’s primary elimination technolog

  8. Jul 17

    He Escaped Slavery and CROSSED the Mississippi River For His Wife | The Shankleville Story

    Thank you Hilleary Z., Jill Branton, Alexis Godfrey, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Education Is Elevation. Today I got a nice, intentional conversation with y’all about Texas freedmen colonies, about the over 500 places where Black people started their own towns after emancipation, about the word colony and everything that word carries, about dancing and art and the safe communities Black people been building since before this country decided we was citizens, and about whether taking care of each other is socialism or just survival, because the answer, as we gone see, is both. This ain’t nostalgia. This is evidence. Research over MeSearch means we start with the receipts and not the vibes, so let me lay the foundation first. A freedom colony, according to the Texas Freedom Colonies Project, the scholarship and the brainchild of Dr. Andrea Roberts, is a historically significant community where Black people post emancipation were able to purchase land or were given land to start their own town. We are talking 1865 through the 1930s, Reconstruction through the Great Depression, and as of now 557 sites have been located in Texas alone, with the number still growing as descendants and researchers keep walking the county lines and reading the deed books. These communities carried a few key identifying markers: a school, a church, a cemetery. Sit with that for a second. The first three things our people built when they got a piece of ground was a place to learn, a place to worship, and a place to honor the dead, and that right there is a whole philosophy of life, authored by people who was one generation, sometimes one season, out of bondage. Some of these places are still very much active, and some have ceased to exist in their original form due to gentrification, environmental destruction, and displacement in general. The map is scarred, but the map is real, and you can read it yourself on the Project’s Atlas. Now let me handle the language, because words is where the fight starts. When you hear freedmen and colony pressed together, it almost sounds oxymoronic, feel me, because colony evokes colonizer, colonization, settlement on somebody else’s land. Some folks say freedmen town, some say freedmen settlement, some reach back further and say maroonage, the tradition Beatriz Nascimento traces through Brazil and that runs through Africatown in Alabama and every swamp and hill where stolen people made themselves free. Town, though, invokes a certain level of colonial formality, a municipality, a charter, a mayor, a governance the state and federal apparatus may recognize. Colony, in Roberts’ usage, is an invitation to think more expansively, because self governance could be me, you, my mama, my cousin and my aunties holding a plot of land and making decisions together intentionally, with no post office and no city council in sight. Ahh, but there is a tension we cannot skip, and my debate training will not let me skip it: every acre our people built freedom on was land Indigenous nations was removed from first. There was people here before. Holding both truths at once, the maroon dream and the settler grid it had to grow inside of, is not a contradiction, it is the assignment. Free in 1865, Building by 1866: The Critical Historical Context You cannot understand the freedom colony without understanding what Texas is. Texas was its own country, and that is the reason the state flag flies at the same height as the national flag, for better or for worse. Mostly for worse, because Texas broke from Mexico primarily to keep our ancestors enslaved, after Mexico moved against slavery, and the treaties Native nations had negotiated was with the Mexican government, which means Texas independence was built on a double foundation of Indigenous erasure and the preservation of bondage. Then freedom came late and came walking. Juneteenth, June 19, 1865, arrived in Galveston two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, and Texas loves to celebrate being the home of Juneteenth while the seventh grade curriculum barely whispers the word slavery. Freedom from what, and from whom. Then the state got busy making sure freedom stayed theoretical. The promise of forty acres and a mule never materialized. The Texas Black Codes and the 1866 Homestead Act specifically excluded African Americans from accessing public land, which means the government said out loud, in statute, that the people who had cleared and worked this soil for generations could not have any of it. So freedpeople bought land with cash wages, claimed land through adverse possession, and accepted the flood prone bottomlands at the edges of plantations and city boundaries, the swamps and county line margins white settlers did not want. The Texas State Historical Association will tell you that plainly. Our people took the land nobody wanted and made lemonade, lemon meringue, lemon pie, a whole way out of no way. Shankleville in Newton County. Kendleton in Fort Bend County. Barrett Station in northeast Harris County. Independence Heights and Freedmen’s Town in Houston. Givens Hill near Crockett, where Mary Allen College also stood. County Line communities scattered like seeds. In Panola County, a community my guest Stacey Allen’s own family comes from, called 1100, because eleven families pooled together and secured one hundred acres and started a community, and some of that family still owns their property there. Eleven families. One hundred acres. That is not folklore, that is a business plan, a mutual aid society, and a constitution, all spoken into a deed book. Let me give you the one story that carries the whole era. Jim and Winnie Shankle were enslaved on a plantation in Mississippi when Winnie was sold to a plantation in Newton County, Texas. Jim decided he was not going to live without his wife, so he escaped, crossed the Mississippi River, foraged through swamp and forest, and found her. After emancipation, Jim and Winnie Shankle and their son in law Stephen McBride bought land and founded Shankleville, a community that built churches, schools, mills, and eventually McBride College. Michael Strahan’s people come out of Shankleville. Stacey’s own children are descendants through her husband’s line, which means when her dance company performs The Fairytale Project, the love story on that stage is their family history moving in real time. Crazy how they gave us Romeo and Juliet every single year of secondary school and never once gave us Jim and Winnie. Then hold this too: Greenwood, the district y’all know as Black Wall Street in Tulsa, sits inside this same freedmen community tradition. It was not a miracle and it was not an exception, it was one node in a network of hundreds of Black towns and settlements across the South. When the 1921 massacre burned Greenwood down, other Black towns showed up and helped the survivors rebuild. The massacre gets taught, when it gets taught at all, as Black excellence destroyed. The rebuild, the mutual aid, the network, that part gets cropped out the frame, because the network is the blueprint, and the blueprint is the threat. Taking Care of Each Other Is Anti Capitalism: The Political Economy of the Colony Is this socialism, or is this just taking care of each other? Both. It is both. Capitalism is defined by private ownership and by the extraction of profit from other people’s labor, so once you have a community owned economy, once bartering happens, once resources are shared, once the harvest is distributed by need and the barn gets raised by everybody, you are already operating inside socialistic values and socialistic methodologies whether you ever read a theorist or not. The idea of I got mine so everybody got to get theirs is a very capitalistic, individual understanding, and the very structure of a freedmen community refutes it, because the community was organized around one collective question: how can we create a space of refuge and safety as a collective. Jessica Gordon Nembhard calls this collective courage, a whole hidden history of African American cooperative economics, and Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative carried the same DNA a century after emancipation. Apply Robinson here: racial capitalism has always needed Black labor to be extractable and Black cooperation to be unthinkable, which is exactly why the cooperative history stays untaught. Now watch the material flip side, because this ain’t just philosophy. Over eighty percent of Black owned land from the Reconstruction era to now has been taken, through deeds and heirs and straight up theft, through urban development and urban renewal, and above all through heirs property. When land passes without a will, every heir owns an undivided share, and two or three generations down, a developer only has to buy out one distant cousin to force a partition sale of everybody’s inheritance on the courthouse steps. The system that allegedly rewards individual ownership is the same system that uses individual ownership to pick us apart, because people who walk into that arena with an individual mindset are more likely to be taken advantage of than a collective force. This is not a moral failure of Black families. This is a legal technology of extraction. Which means the freedom colony methodology, land in trusts, land in cooperative structures, decisions made together intentionally, is not sentimental history, it is defensive strategy for 2026. The Seventh Grade Is a Crime Scene: Curriculum, Public Memory, and the Case for Reparations As somebody with graduate training in adult and higher education, I need y’all to understand that curriculum is never neutral, curriculum is a decision about who exists. Seventh grade Texas history contains no Black people. We do not talk about Stephen F. Austin being a colonizer and a defender of slavery, we do not talk abou

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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
    121
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation