Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee
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Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. theconsciouslee.substack.com

  1. 53M AGO

    No One Is Illegal On Stolen Land: The Indigenous and Black Critique That Pro-Immigration Discourse Refuses To Have

    Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Mnera, Farrah Senne, Louis DeVlugt Personal, Copaganda, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I just got done sitting in a convening about immigration with a bunch of pro-immigration workers, and I have thoughts. Before I get into them, though, I want to give a disclaimer, because my grandfather always said the pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, and what I’m about to lay down ain’t about accusing nobody of being nefarious, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally anti-Black, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally engaged in indigenous erasure. This is about impact, not intent. And as the kinfolks know, two things can be true at the same damn time — folks can mean well and still be perpetuating the exact erasure that the empire requires to function. Let that marinate. I sat in that room and listened to a presentation on the 14th Amendment, listened to lawyers grapple with how the current administration is trying to overturn birthright citizenship, listened to scholars walk through how the 14th Amendment is being weaponized against immigrant populations — and the whole time I kept asking the same rhetorical question in my head, the question that has to be the starting point for any serious conversation about citizenship in this country: What does the subject position of being an immigrant or being a citizen mean for the Indian or for the Black? What has the concept of citizenship actually engaged when it comes to what it means to be Native, or what it means to be African American? Because for the folks in the back, the 14th Amendment ain’t just a 2026 immigration story. The 14th Amendment is birthed out of the Reconstruction era. 13th Amendment freed the slaves, 14th Amendment gave citizenship, 15th Amendment gave the right to vote — but only to Black men. You feel me? The presentation didn’t grapple with that. The presentation talked about the 14th Amendment as if it dropped out of the sky and landed in 2026 on the bodies of immigrants, when in actuality this amendment is birthed in blood, birthed in slavery, birthed in Reconstruction, and has been weaponized against the very people it was supposed to protect since the second the ink dried. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Most of us engage with citizenship through a very romanticized, sanitized understanding of what it is. So let me set up some questions, because Research over MeSearch — in 2026, will we say that Black people are citizens? Yes, obviously. African Americans in 2026 are still regarded as citizens. Do we understand that citizenship is supposed to come with the right to vote? Yes. But then what is the concept of citizenship meant for the Black body? It’s never guaranteed any type of safety. It’s never guaranteed what we’re supposed to believe comes with being a citizen. Though Black people are still regarded as citizens in 2026, legally we’re having our voting rights taken away. The very same Supreme Court that says it’s legal to racially profile against immigrant populations when it comes to citizenship is the same Supreme Court that says you have to engage in colorblindness when it comes to creating congressional maps. Let that marinate. Colorblindness is good, Supreme Court says, when it comes to drawing congressional districts that would actually give Black people political representation. But color consciousness is good for the Supreme Court when it comes to enforcing immigration. This illustrates the tension in how the law accounts for indigeneity and Blackness in a completely different way than the other subject positions, and you cannot have an honest conversation about immigration without grappling with this contradiction. And for the Indigenous, the contradiction runs deeper. Do y’all know the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans? Naturalized birthright citizenship did not apply to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island — the people that have been here for thousands of years. Legally speaking, Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. The 14th Amendment passes in 1868, and Native folks have to wait fifty-six more years to be legally recognized as citizens of the country that was built on top of their bones. And then even when they were granted citizenship in 1924, what did that mean for their humanity? What did that mean for the ongoing genocide they were facing? What did that mean for the boarding schools that were still actively destroying their children? Citizenship for Native Americans has never led to preserving their culture, never led to preserving their customs, never led to seeing their sovereignty, never led to them being able to get regular old rights of being a citizen. The legal concept of citizenship does not give what it’s supposed to give. And we know this because even now, even now, even now — Black people have been regarded as citizens since 1868, and yet how much legally have our citizenship been circumvented and continues to be circumvented regardless of us being seen as naturalized citizens of America? This is where the romanticized framing of “America is a nation of immigrants” starts to crumble under the weight of historical analysis. When Zohran Mamdani says New York was built by immigrants, when Shibuzzi says America was built by immigrants, I understand the intent — the intent is to dignify immigrant labor, to push back against the xenophobic right, to remind people that this country’s prosperity was constructed by hands that the empire would now like to deport. I get it. But the impact erases the history of chattel slavery, erases the fact that a bunch of Black people built this country before the Immigration Act of 1965 brought an influx of immigrants to a country that was already built. The milk and honey people came looking for? It was already created — by particular people, under the lash, under the whip, under the auction block. Then there’s the second erasure: when you call this a nation of immigrants, what does that mean for the Indigenous folks who were already here? What does that mean for the people who didn’t migrate, who didn’t choose, whose land was taken from underneath them? You feel me? When you frame the starting point of the American story as immigration, you’ve already erased two subject positions — the people who were forced here in chains, and the people whose land was stolen. This is what Tuck and Yang call the settler’s move to innocence. The phrase “no one is illegal on stolen land” — said with the absolute best of intentions, said by Billie Eilish at the Grammys, said at every progressive rally — has a contradiction baked into it that does the work of indigenous erasure even as it claims to be solidarity. Who was the land stolen from? Do you know the specific tribe that is indigenous to the land you’re standing on when you make this statement? What does it mean for Native sovereignty when you present the starting point of the story as already-stolen land? Because if the land is just abstractly stolen, if the original people are just a hazy concept in the backdrop of your solidarity statement, then the land becomes available for redistribution among non-Native populations, and the Indigenous claim disappears into a vibe. Tuck and Yang argue that settlers reach for these moves to relieve the discomfort of being implicated in colonization without actually giving anything back. The slogan feels radical. The slogan does nothing for land back. The slogan, in fact, makes land back harder, because it converts a specific Indigenous claim into a universal humanitarian one. That ain’t the same thing. I want to be clear about the Afropessimist intervention I’m making here, because some of y’all gonna read this and try to flatten it into Oppression Olympics. That ain’t what this is. Afropessimists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton argue that anti-Blackness is antagonistic to America and to the world, while a lot of other injustices are seen as human conflicts. To understand the difference between a conflict and an antagonism: a conflict can be compromised. An antagonism is always one or the other. The relationship between America and Black suffering, between America and Indigenous genocide — that ain’t a conflict that gets resolved through better policy. That’s the structuring antagonism that makes America possible in the first place. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for Indigenous folks in America or Black folks. Democracy in America is situated upon Black bodies and Native American blood. We don’t get it without that. So when we think about the romanticized ideals around what the law is supposed to do, the ideals don’t grapple with the material reality. The scholar in me and the n***a in me is asking, in the bare bones — what has citizenship guaranteed for the n***a and the native? What has equal protection meant for us? What has political representation in citizenship meant for our plight? And here’s where the antagonism between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous discourse really comes home. After 1965, when you have non-Black, non-white immigrant populations migrating to America, and they want to prove they’re citizens in court, they have historically tethered their citizenship and humanity to whiteness. You go to the courthouse, you stand before the judge, you say “I’m a citizen because I’m white” — showing you the inherent anti-Blackness within the law itself. The law was structured in opposition to

    27 min

  2. 2D AGO

    When Mexican Kids Bust a Pinata of Two Flags: Indigenous Solidarity, Settler Colonialism, and What School Won't Teach

    Y’all see them children in Mexico busting a pinata with two flags on it — Israeli and American? That image symbolize so much that we got a really young package today, kinfolks. And I already know a lot of people gon’ see this and be infuriated because they wanna believe these children being indoctrinated. But let me hold this one up to the light real quick: if your kid can be a Confederate-flag-toting white supremacist sucker out here at the lake on the back of a F-150, then these kids over there can also be conscious of how these countries impacting their livelihood. Two things can be true, feel me? Symbolism is intentional. Always. And when I see them two flags taped together on a pinata, I ain’t seeing random teenage angst — I’m seeing children doing what their elders been doing for generations: naming the structural relationship that’s stealing their air. So before y’all get to clutching them pearls, let that marinate for a second. Here’s the thing most of us don’t know about. I like to believe a lot of us are consciously aware — no pun intended — of how America exploits and criminalizes our southern neighbor Mexico. But the relationship between Mexico and the Israeli settler-colonial project? Most of y’all lost in the sauce on that one. So lemme walk through the receipts. The struggle of Palestinians resonate with Mexico despite 7,000 miles between them and despite distinct geopolitical surroundings. Why? Because the violent consequences of settler colonialism in Palestine conjure up the post-colonial trauma that’s already living in Mexican soil. Patrick Wolfe said it plain — settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Robinson 83 tells us racial capitalism don’t work without antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as its engine, not as accidents. So when two settler projects start trading tools, it ain’t coincidence. It’s the family business. Look at Pegasus. Pegasus is a spy web developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, and as journalist Anthony Lowenstein documents, it was tried and tested in occupied Palestine before it ever touched a Mexican phone. Designed to be covertly and remotely installed on iOS and Android. Designed to harvest you in your sleep. And then exported. Lowenstein calls it an exported occupation, and that phrasing matter — because once it’s been deployed and proven in the field, Israeli companies promote them tools as battle-tested and occupied Palestine, which then becomes a sales pitch for any government trying to criminalize the folks just trying to get their immigration on. This means the surveillance regime that disappears Palestinian journalists is the same surveillance regime that’s tracking Mexican human rights defenders. Same technology. Same logic. Same vendor. Just admit it: that’s not parallel oppression, that’s the same machine running two shifts. Now lemme show y’all why there’s a statue of Yasser Arafat in Mexico City — because that question alone shut down most American history teachers I know. Arafat was the Palestinian politician and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in trying to establish a free Palestinian state. He kept close diplomatic relations with Mexico his whole life. In 1975, he met with then-Mexican President Luis Echeverria — the President flew to Cairo to meet him and soon established diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year, the PLO established an information office in Mexico City. By 1995, that office got elevated to an official delegation. Then in 2000, Arafat met with then-Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green, who paid an official visit to Gaza City and invited him to Mexico on behalf of the president. He passed in 2004. And soon after his death, the government of Mexico City placed a memorial in his honor. Crazy how that’s the part of Mexican diplomatic history that don’t make it into the news cycle when folks wanna debate Mexican-American identity. They’ll show you Cinco de Mayo and a margarita but they won’t show you the Arafat statue. Wonder why. Now let me close this loop by going back home to Texas, because y’all know I’m a Bryan, TX, boy and I got receipts for the local too. When we talk about remembering the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, the reason Stephen F. Austin was beefing with Santa Ana is because they had a little agreement in settler solidarity that went bad. Santa Ana had even agreed Anglo settlers could come in — under the condition they convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and not bring enslaved people. Austin and them broke the deal. So the Texas Revolution wasn’t liberation, it was a settler franchise dispute. Two colonial powers arguing over who get to extract from indigenous land and Black bodies. iMa bE the one to say it: remembering the Alamo without remembering that context is just remembering the slave power. Most of y’all lost in the salsa of settler colonialism so heavy that you don’t even view Mexican people as indigenous folks of Turtle Island. You view them as immigrant subjects of Mexico. But the Conquistadors — Hernandez, Cortez and nem — was settlers. Mexico is a settler-colonial state laid on top of indigenous land just like the United States. Sandy Grande talks about how settler colonialism requires the disappearance of the indigenous, not just from the land but from the imagination. So when you call a Mixtec grandmother an immigrant, you’re not making a statement of geography. You’re making whiteness visible by erasing her ancestral claim to a continent. Charles Mills in 1997 calls this the racial contract — a tacit agreement that the world is white people’s to allocate. Then you got Europeans believing this country was theirs to conquer, both the Spanish and the English, just like them folks over yonder way across the pond believe it’s their God-given right to have the land because it was promised to them 3,000 years ago. Sounds like God only come down to tell white folks this is your land, huh? Every accusation is a confession. Every theology of conquest is an admission that the conquest required theology to justify it. Apply Wilderson here for a second. Afropessimism gon’ tell us the Black is figured as fungible and socially dead — not analogous to indigenous dispossession, but structurally entangled with it. Robinson 83 close the loop: racial capitalism uses antiblackness as essential engine of surplus value AND uses indigenous dispossession as essential engine of land accumulation. They run together. Which means Palestinian children buried under rubble, Mexican migrants tracked by Pegasus, and Black Houstonians criminalized by predictive policing tools developed by the same defense contractors — we all caught in different rooms of the same house. And this is also where the intersectional material impacts hit different. Crenshaw 89 told y’all the experience at the intersection ain’t additive, it’s structurally distinct. So an indigenous Mexican woman crossing the border ain’t just experiencing xenophobia plus sexism plus colorism — she’s experiencing a specific weaponization of all three under a surveillance infrastructure shipped from Tel Aviv to Mexico City to Texas. Combahee told us in 77 that if Black women were free, it would mean everybody else would have to be free. Apply that here: if indigenous women of the Americas were free of settler-colonial surveillance, the whole regime collapse. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir framework still apply too, even at this scale. Because who gets surveilled hardest by these tools when they hit U.S. soil? Black women organizers. Indigenous women water protectors. Trans women of color reporting on ICE. The Pegasus-style tools don’t just go to foreign governments — they get repackaged for domestic departments. That ain’t paranoia. That’s procurement records. Now lemme name the contradiction and let it hang. The same federal budget that claim it can’t afford universal pre-K, can’t afford Medicaid expansion, can’t afford reparations study, somehow always got billions for foreign military aid that loops back into surveillance contracts that get pointed at the American working class. Gil Scott-Heron said it best in 1970 and it still apply: Was all that money I made last year for billion-dollar defense aid? How come ain’t no money here for the kids in Bryan or Brownsville or Brooklyn? Whitey on the moon. Whitey on the border. Same flight plan. Having the luxury to ignore the Mexico-Israel surveillance pipeline is a sign of citizenship privilege. Naming neutrality on it is itself a position. Bell 91 talked about interest convergence — the dominant class only support justice for the marginalized when it serves their own interests. The reason these two settler projects bond is because their interests already converged a long time ago. The reason American media don’t wanna talk about it is because that interest convergence is the load-bearing wall of the empire. By doing the work of pretending Mexico is just an immigration story and Palestine is just a foreign policy story, the media is making whiteness visible — visible as the third party in the room directing the conversation. So them children with the pinata? They wasn’t being indoctrinated. They was educated. They was doing in public what their elders been doing for generations — naming the structural relationship between two settler-colonial projects that don’t see them as fully human. The bell didn’t dismiss them, the truth did. Education is elevation. Two things can be true: you can love your country and still tell the truth about its alliances. You can grieve every Israeli child and still grieve every Palestinian child. You can love Mexico and still call out the Mexican state’s complicity. You can be American and still know America selling Mexico Israeli surveillance is not freedo

    4 min

  3. 2D AGO

    From Plessy to Callais: How the Supreme Court Mastered the Art of Weaponizing Race While Banning Race Consciousness

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. Name something more insidious. Name one thing in the modern legal landscape that exposes the architecture of pale supremacy more cleanly than that. I’ll wait. Because here’s the thing kinfolks, this ain’t a contradiction. A contradiction is when two things accidentally don’t line up. This is a strategy. This is racial illiteracy weaponized at the highest court in the country, and the only way you don’t see it is if you ain’t been trained to see it, or worse, you been trained to look away. Let me lay it out plain so the folks in the back can hear me. In 2023, the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, telling Black, Brown, and Indigenous students that race could no longer be considered in college admissions because, supposedly, the Constitution is color-blind. That same court, two years later, in cases dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and now Louisiana v. Callais, has been busy gutting the ability of states to draw majority-Black congressional districts, again leaning on the language of color-blindness. Then turn around, that same bench gives federal immigration agents the green light to use race and ethnicity as a factor in stopping, questioning, and detaining people who look, sound, or are presumed to be Latino, Indigenous, or otherwise non-white. Crazy how that works, right? The Two-Roles Frame: What They Say vs. What Their Position Structurally Does iMa bE the first one to tell you, the Supreme Court will say with a straight face that they are simply applying neutral principles of constitutional interpretation. That’s the stage rhetoric. That’s the press release. But Wilderson talks about how antiblackness operates through gratuitous violence and fungibility, where the Black body is rendered both hyper-visible when targeted and invisible when seeking protection. Apply that here. Apply Mills 1997 on the racial contract. The court isn’t being inconsistent. The court is being perfectly consistent with the actual function of American jurisprudence, which is to preserve a racial hierarchy while denying that any such hierarchy exists. Two things can be true. The Supreme Court can claim to be color-blind. And the Supreme Court can be the most racially literate institution in the country when it comes to maintaining white power. This means the conservative legal movement is wrong when they tell us this is about principle. It also proves that having the luxury to call yourself color-blind is itself a position. Claimed neutrality is a position. A loud one. By doing color-blindness in front of cameras, you are making whiteness visible to anybody who knows how to read. Historical Context: This Ain’t New, This Is the Pattern For the folks who think this started with the Roberts Court, let me give you some historical context. The American legal tradition has always been bifurcated when it comes to race. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to free white persons, requiring the law to know exactly what whiteness was. In the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, the Supreme Court said the federal government could exclude people on the basis of race because national sovereignty demanded it. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 said separate but equal was constitutional, requiring the state to racially classify every citizen at the train station while pretending the classification was harmless. Korematsu v. United States in 1944 said the federal government could intern Japanese Americans on the basis of ancestry, and that ruling has never been formally overturned, only narrowed. The Insular Cases from the early 1900s established that Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and other colonized people were foreign in a domestic sense, building a whole jurisprudence around using race to distinguish full citizens from subjects. Then in the post-Civil Rights era, the same court that finally said in Brown 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional turned around and in Milliken v. Bradley 1974 said cross-district desegregation remedies were too much. In Bakke 1978, Justice Powell invented the diversity rationale that allowed limited use of race in admissions, but only as long as it was framed as helping white students get exposure to non-white students. In Shelby County v. Holder 2013, Chief Justice Roberts gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act by famously declaring that things have changed. Then in 2023, that same court took the diversity rationale and threw it in the trash. And now in 2025, in Trump-era immigration enforcement cases, the court has signaled that racial and ethnic appearance can factor into reasonable suspicion when federal agents are looking for undocumented immigrants. Derrick Bell 1980 told us about interest convergence. Civil rights gains for Black folks only happen when they align with the interests of white elites. The retreat from those gains happens the moment that alignment breaks. We’re watching the retreat in real time. The Mastery of Pale Supremacy: A Working Definition What I’m calling the mastery of pale supremacy is this. It’s the institutional ability to weaponize race consciousness when it benefits the dominant group, and simultaneously demand racial color-blindness when racial consciousness would benefit anybody else. It is two doctrines held in the same hand, deployed by the same nine justices, justified by the same Constitution, depending entirely on which direction the racial flow benefits. Charles Mills called this an epistemology of ignorance. White ignorance about race is not the absence of knowledge. It is a structured, produced, defended way of not-knowing that allows the system to keep functioning. The Supreme Court has perfected this. They know exactly when to see race and exactly when to pretend it doesn’t exist. Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays Now let’s talk about who actually bleeds when these decisions come down, because this is where intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Crenshaw 1989 gave us the framework, Combahee 1977 gave us the politics, Moya Bailey gave us the language of misogynoir. When we lose race-conscious admissions, the data from California after Proposition 209 and from Michigan after Proposal 2 shows us exactly what happens. Black women in particular get pushed out of selective STEM and pre-professional pipelines at higher rates than Black men, because Black women were disproportionately the ones using those pathways to escape both racial and gender wage gaps. When voting maps get redrawn to dilute Black voting power, the immediate material consequences fall hardest on Black women in the South, who are the most consistent Black voters and whose policy priorities, things like Medicaid expansion, maternal health funding, public school funding, get traded away first. Black maternal mortality is already four times the rate of white maternal mortality. Diluted political power means even less leverage to demand state-level policy that could actually save Black women’s lives. On the immigration side, when ICE and Customs and Border Protection get the green light to use racial appearance as reasonable suspicion, the people most likely to be stopped, detained, separated from their children, and deported are not abstract immigrants. They are Latina mothers, Indigenous women from Central America fleeing climate and cartel violence, Afro-Latino people who get racially profiled twice over, queer migrants whose asylum claims hinge on demonstrating credible fear in conditions designed to break them down. Spillers’ work on the ungendering of the Black diasporic body under captivity applies here too, because the racialized state treats migrant women’s bodies as fungible and disposable in ways that echo, not coincidentally, the logic of the slave ship. Hartman called it the afterlife of slavery for a reason. Robinson’s Black Marxism reminds us none of this is aberration. Racial capitalism requires a racialized underclass, and the legal system’s job is to manage which bodies belong in that underclass at any given moment. When the economy needs cheap migrant labor that can be threatened with deportation, the court makes race legally legible to immigration enforcement. When the economy needs to keep Black political power suppressed so that wealth doesn’t get redistributed through democratic means, the court makes race legally illegible to voting rights enforcement. Same court. Same logic. Different application. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Implication for Education: This Is Why We Need Critical Pedagogy Here’s where I bring this home to education, because Education is Elevation ain’t just a tagline. The implication of this Supreme Court racial double standard for education is direct and devastating. When you ban race-conscious admissions while simultaneously allowing racial profiling, you create a generation of students who are legally invisible as racialized subjects when they try to access opportunity, but hyper-visible as racialized subjects when they try to exist in public. Freire 1968 told us the banking model of education is designed to deposit ruling-class ideology into students. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and the tradition of Black critical pedagogy from Carter G. Woodson through bell hooks tells us we have to actively counter that deposit with what hooks called education as the practice of freedom. But how can teachers do that when curriculum is being gutted? Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and others are passing laws that ban discussion of structural racism in K-12 classroom

    1 min

  4. 5D AGO

    Pissing On Our Leg And Calling It Rain: The Netanyahu Wean-Off Speech, Decoded

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the table for y’all real quick. Netanyahu, the sitting Prime Minister of Israel, sits down for an interview and gets asked a direct question about whether it’s time to reset the financial relationship between Israel and the United States. The man on the receiving end of $3.8 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money. And his answer? He says yes, but he wants 10 years to do it. Then he picks the word “wean.” In my whole life of living, I ain’t never heard of nobody having to be weaned off of nothing but babies and breastfeeding and them fiends and pipes. Shidd, that’s a tell. That’s not the vocabulary of a sovereign equal partner. That’s the vocabulary of dependency dressed up in diplomatic cologne. And the question we need to be sitting with is simple: why does he need 10 years to do it? How come he can’t just end it now? If you ever heard somebody say you trying to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining — that’s the example right there. The man is announcing a divorce and reserving a decade of conjugal visits in the same breath. Yealp. Clip One: Netanyahu In His Own Words [00:00:00 — 00:00:53] PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU Interviewer: “Do you believe it’s time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States, meaning what the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis?” Netanyahu: “Absolutely. And I’ve said this to President Trump, I’ve said it to our own people, their jaws dropped. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have, because we receive $3.8 billion dollars a year. I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support… Let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years. But I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.” “I want to draw down to zero the American financial support… it’s time that we weaned ourselves…” — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Now hold up. Notice the framing. He says he told Trump. He says he told his own people. He says their jaws dropped. That right there is the rhetorical sleight of hand — he’s positioning himself as the brave reformer breaking the news to a room full of dependents. Apply Farr here: the supposed neutral position of “well, we just receive this aid because we’ve always received it” is itself a position. Acting like the $3.8 billion is gravity, like it just falls from the sky, is the view from nowhere. He’s naming the policy AS a choice for the first time, and acting like that itself is the brave act. Two things can be true. One: it IS notable that the sitting Prime Minister of Israel is on record saying draw it to zero. Two: a 10-year off-ramp on $3.8 billion annually is $38 billion more dollars before we hit zero. That’s not weaning. That’s a payment plan. Shidd, that’s a mortgage. Clip Two: Then Cory Booker Showed His Ass [00:01:27 — 00:01:46] U.S. SENATOR CORY BOOKER (D-NJ) Interviewer: “Cory, you would vote to approve arms sales for Israel in a future entanglement if you thought that was necessary?” Booker: “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.” “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.” — Senator Cory Booker Read that again. The head of state of the receiving country is in public saying wean us off. The U.S. Senator from New Jersey — a Black Democrat who built his whole brand on moral clarity and Harriet Tubman quotes — is in public saying nah, keep the pipeline open, qualitative military edge forever, amen. This means Booker is wrong. Flatly. By his own framing of “long-standing commitment,” he’s defending a status quo that the head of the supposedly-benefiting country just said in public he wants to end. You ain’t more committed to Israel than the Prime Minister of Israel, kinfolks. That ain’t commitment, that’s a contract. And having the luxury to ignore that contradiction — having the luxury to walk into that interview, hear the question, and answer with autopilot AIPAC talking points while Netanyahu is on the other clip saying “start now” — that’s the sign of a politician who knows his funding stack doesn’t require him to engage with the actual policy debate. The presumed-neutral “qualitative military edge” line is a position. It’s a position that says: my donors will be happier if I never have to vote no. Where Is The Smoke For The Lobby? Let’s name what’s actually moving here. The U.S. and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 — negotiated under Obama — that locks in $38 billion over 10 years (FY2019–FY2028). That’s $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation. Israel is the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. Over $260 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s the receipt. That’s not opinion. That’s Congressional Research Service paper. Now layer in the lobby. AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and its affiliated United Democracy Project super PAC spent more than $100 million in the 2024 cycle alone to defeat candidates who criticized U.S. policy toward Israel. Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush. Receipts. They didn’t lose because their constituents fired them. They lost because a PAC parachuted in from outside their districts to dump the juice trash on their primaries. So when Cory Booker says “long-standing commitment,” translate that. The commitment ain’t to Israeli security policy — because if it was, he’d be following the Prime Minister’s lead. The commitment is to the funding pipeline that keeps his own seat safe. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making the money trail visible. He’s telling on himself. Whitey On The Moon, 2026 Edition Gil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. Let me update it for the folks in the back. “A rat done bit my sister Nell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. Her face and arms began to swell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. I can’t pay no doctor bills… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. No hot water, no toilet, no lights… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel.” The Prime Minister of Israel says wean. Cory Booker says feed. Meanwhile public health funding for Black HIV outcomes got cut. The CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention took a hit. Title X providers serving Black women in the South got defunded. Pell Grants for the poorest students got squeezed. The IRS unit auditing billionaires got gutted. Two things can be true. One: Israel’s security policy is Israel’s business. Two: when the head of that state tells you in public he wants to end the U.S. money and your Senator says no — your Senator ain’t defending Israel, he’s defending the lobby that defends his seat. Lost in the sauce. Why 10 Years? What’s He Trying To Finish? Now here’s the part I want y’all to sit with. Netanyahu doesn’t want to wean off tomorrow. He wants 10 years. So the question I had — and I asked it out loud in the script — is what could he possibly try to accomplish within 10 years that he absolutely needs that aid for? I wonder. This ain’t a threat, this is a promise: the timeline is the policy. The amount of the aid matters less than the duration he’s asking to keep it locked in. A man who actually wanted to end the dependency would say zero next fiscal year. A man who wants to lock in current funding through the next two U.S. presidential cycles, through the 2026 conflict posture with Iran, through whatever territorial questions remain unsettled — that man asks for a decade. And how much of this announcement is timeliness for the election cycle? How much is preventative damage control? Because Netanyahu knows the Overton window is shifting. Younger Democrats won’t cosign endless funding. Younger Republicans of the America-First variety are skeptical of foreign aid period. So he gets ahead of the wave by announcing the wean — and locks in 10 more years of payments before the wave breaks. That’s not naivete on his part. That’s strategy. Showed his ass on the timing. And This Is Where It Comes Home For Us I’m not here to tell y’all how to vote on foreign policy. I’m here to name a contradiction. Cory Booker has stood on stages quoting Harriet Tubman, talking about love, talking about T-Bone, talking about beloved community. And when given an opportunity — with the receiving country’s own Prime Minister publicly asking for the off-ramp — to align his vote with that off-ramp, he punted. This is the distinction between Black Liberal and Black Leftist that I keep trying to draw for y’all. The Black Liberal performs morality on stage and votes the donor preference at the desk. The Black Leftist — think Ella Baker, think SNCC, think Fannie Lou Hamer, think the Combahee River Collective — says material conditions over symbolic representation, every time. Hamer was sharecropping in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and she still understood that U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic poverty are the same budget. Every dollar that goes one place doesn’t go another. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making whiteness visible. He’s making the bipartisan consensus visible. He’s showing that the so-called Democratic alternative on this specific issue is functionally identical to the Republican position. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. The Ask Here’s what I want from y’all. Don’t just clip the Netanyahu sound bite and act like Israel got

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  5. 6D AGO

    Iran Was Never Two Weeks Away — Empire Just Needed a New Bedtime Story

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the scene for y’all real quick. Donald Trump stands in front of a room full of schoolchildren and says, with a straight face, that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, that the United States had to send B2 bombers to “obliterate” their nuclear capacity, that Israel would have been gone, that Iran would have come for Europe and then us because — and I quote — “these are sick people.” Kinfolks, that ain’t a foreign policy briefing. That’s a catechism. That’s American empire teaching its young. And the same people who clutch their pearls about a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are to a kindergarten class will sit a sitting president down in front of children and let him narrate a fairy tale where the United States is the dragon-slayer, Iran is the dragon, and $200 billion in bombs is the moral of the story. Every accusation is a confession. They’ll scream about indoctrination while they’re literally indoctrinating. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but imperial conservatism is the parent compound. Three Concepts Doing the Heavy Lifting Before I get into the receipts, let me lay down the framework so we’re all reading from the same hymnal. Three concepts run through everything Trump said in that room, and if you don’t name them, you can’t see them. American Hegemony — The structural arrangement where the United States — through military power, dollar dominance, and institutional control — sets the terms of what is permitted on the planet. Hegemony isn’t just being strong. It’s being the one country that gets to decide who else is allowed to be strong, who is allowed to defend themselves, who is allowed to have what. When Trump says Iran was “two weeks” from a weapon, the unspoken second half of that sentence is: and that decision belongs to us. American Imperialism — The actual practice — the bombs, the bases, the sanctions, the regime-change wars, the proxies. Imperialism is hegemony with a body count. The B2 bomber Trump bragged about isn’t a metaphor. It’s the imperial fist that makes the hegemonic argument feel like common sense. Du Bois told us imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home are the same project wearing different uniforms. Rodney told us how it underdevelops. Lenin gave us the economic mechanics. Pick your lens — the violence is the same. American Exceptionalism — The mythology that makes the first two feel righteous. The idea that America is uniquely good, uniquely chosen, uniquely qualified to bomb other people for their own protection. Exceptionalism is the lullaby that sings empire to sleep. It’s what lets a man stand in front of children and describe killing as obliteration as protection as love. It’s the religion of the project. Now watch how all three move through that clip like blood through an artery. Hegemony: Who Gets to Decide Who Has What “”They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”” Stop. Right there. The factual problem with this statement is one thing — and I’ll get to that — but the structural problem is bigger. Trump is not asserting a fact. He’s asserting a permission structure. The United States possesses thousands of nuclear warheads. Israel possesses an undeclared arsenal it has never even admitted to. The United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea — they all have them. Iran does not. And the sentence Trump is delivering to those children is not “nuclear weapons are dangerous.” It’s “that country in particular is not allowed to have what we have.” That is hegemony in its purest form. It’s the assumption — unspoken, unquestioned, taught to children before they can spell the word — that the United States is the referee, the umpire, the parent in the room, and every other sovereign nation is a child who has to ask permission. Iran could spend the next thousand years pointing out that the U.S. is the only country to ever drop a nuclear weapon on civilian populations, and the hegemonic frame would still hold: we can be trusted with it. They cannot. Why? Because we said so. Because we wrote the rules. Because we have the bombers to enforce the rules we wrote. That’s the whole argument. There is no other argument. And here’s where it gets sneaky. Hegemony works best when nobody has to defend it out loud. When a president can stand in front of children and just assume that Iran having a weapon is unthinkable while the U.S. having thousands is unremarkable — and nobody in the room interrupts to ask “wait, why?” — that’s when you know the hegemonic frame has done its job. It has become the water the fish doesn’t see. Imperialism: The Body Count Behind the Bedtime Story “”Remember we sent that beautiful B2 bomber in and we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated.”” Beautiful. He called the bomber beautiful. To a room of children. Y’all hear that and don’t flinch, you’re already gone. That word is doing imperial work — it’s the aestheticization of violence, the conversion of mass destruction into pageantry. The same move every empire in history has made when it needed its civilians to applaud the deaths of foreign civilians. Rome had its triumphs. Britain had its parades. America has its B2s and its words like “surgical” and “obliterate.” Let’s stay with that word for a second. Obliterate. To remove all trace. To wipe from existence. Said casually, in front of children, about a bombing campaign in a country containing roughly 90 million human beings, many of whom are children just like the ones in that room. Trump made a point earlier in the clip about the welfare of American kids — fair enough, every child’s welfare matters. But ask yourself the question I want hanging in the air for the rest of this article: “Where is the smoke for the Iranian children? Where is the smoke for the Lebanese children? Where is the smoke for the Palestinian children whose deaths the same B2 bombers and the same $200 billion budget directly underwrite?” That question — the simple question of whose children count as children — is the one American imperialism cannot survive. Which is why it is never, ever asked in front of American children. They are taught instead that the bombers are beautiful. They are taught that obliteration is a happy ending. They are taught a vocabulary in which our violence is defense and their existence is the threat. Frantz Fanon called this the manichaean structure of the colonial world — a world cut in two, where one side is human and the other side is the enemy of humanity. Trump didn’t invent it. He’s just the current narrator. And here’s the receipt for what this actually costs. According to publicly available cost estimates of the U.S. military’s recent Iran operations and the broader regional posture, we are looking at roughly $200 billion in defense and adjacent expenditures tied to that confrontation. Two hundred. Billion. Dollars. Now I want y’all to sit with that number while I tell you what else $200 billion could have bought: * Universal childcare in the United States, with billions left over. * Full restoration of the National Park Service budget for years. * Significant expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program, addressing real material need. * Renewable energy tax credits at the scale needed to meaningfully decarbonize. * SNAP and food security programs that lift millions of children out of food insecurity. * Medicaid expansion in every state that has refused it, covering the working poor who get pissed on and told it’s raining. Compare us to the other countries of the Global North — Germany, France, the Nordics, Canada — and we don’t compare. They have universal healthcare. They have paid family leave measured in months and years, not days. They have childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage. We have B2 bombers. That is the imperial trade. That is the deal the American working class — Black, Brown, white, all of us — has been forced into for the better part of a century: empire abroad, austerity at home. MLK said it plain in 1967 at Riverside Church: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-nine years later, we are still approaching. We are practically there. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Exceptionalism: The Lullaby That Sings Empire to Sleep “”And they would have trained their sights on Europe first and then us because they’re sick people. These are sick people.”” This is the part that gives the game away. This is the part that should make every parent watching go cold. Because what Trump is doing in this exact sentence is teaching schoolchildren that an entire nation of people — a country of 90 million, with poets and grandmothers and college students and tired bus drivers and kids their age — are sick. Not led by a sick regime. Not victims of a brutal government. Sick. The people themselves. Sick. Y’all, that is the oldest move in the imperial playbook. Dehumanize the population so the bombing of the population becomes not just permissible but morally required. Edward Said wrote a whole book about this called Orientalism, and if you have not read it, please do. The construction of the “sick” Eastern other against the rational, healthy Western self is not Trump’s invention — it is the foundational rhetoric of every European empire that ever colonized a Muslim-majority country, and the United States inherited the script the way a son inherits his father’s suits. And the move is doubled. Notice that Trump frames the bombing as protecting the children

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  6. MAY 12

    Cory Booker Jumped on a Table and Lectured Black Content Creators — Then He Tried to Make Sudan a Shield. I Was There.

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. May 8, 2024: The Day the Cory Booker Beef Got Personal I want to take y’all back. All the way back. Because folks be acting like my critique of Cory Booker started yesterday, started when he climbed up on the Senate floor for 25 hours, started when the AIPAC numbers dropped, started when he was the lone Democrat to confirm Charles Kushner. Nah. My beef with Cory Booker has a birthday. May 8, 2024. Washington, D.C. A content creator and influencer summit where over a hundred of us got flown in to talk about advocacy and education in the current climate. That’s the day. That’s the room. That’s where it stopped being a policy disagreement and became personal. Let me explain why, and let me walk y’all through every step of the two years that followed, because Research over MeSearch is the standard and the receipts have been receipt-ing this whole time. Picture the scene. A senator who is a sitting United States senator, a man who has run for president once already and is clearly running again, gets invited to address a room full of content creators — the same content creators his caucus wants to mobilize, the same ones his administration’s pollsters told him he needs, the same ones who have been documenting genocide on a phone faster than the New York Times can edit a headline. And what does he do? He jumps up on a table. Tom Cruise on Oprah, you feel me. A whole ass move. Theatrical. Performative. The body language of a man who thinks he’s about to give a TED Talk to an audience that already knows the punchline. He starts talking about the significance of new media. He starts talking about how he was born and raised on grassroots movement organizing. He starts talking about how he comes from a background of social justice. The man who voted to ban TikTok stood on a table at a content creator conference and lectured us about new media. Let that marinate. The man who has taken over $700,000 from AIPAC stood in a room full of Black and Brown content creators who had spent the previous seven months documenting white phosphorus from Alabama raining on the children of Rafa, and he tried to tell us where new media came from. Shidd. We knew where new media came from. We were new media. The whole room was new media. We were what he was supposed to be listening to, and instead he was pissing on us telling us it was raining. Then came the questions. And this is where it got personal for me. Because the question that got asked — by a Black woman content creator who had read the bill, who had quoted the bill, who had named the specific provisions — was simple. Are you willing to call for a ceasefire? That was the question. Not a gotcha. Not a setup. A direct, material question about the position of a sitting United States senator on a sitting genocide. And what did Cory Booker do? He pulled out the tired playbook. He shucked and jobbed. He said, “I’m sorry you don’t understand the bill.” I’m sorry you don’t understand. To a Black woman. Who had read the bill. Who had cited the bill. Who knew more about the supplemental appropriation than half the senators on his committee. That right there is misogynoir wearing a Senate pin. That right there is what Moya Bailey told us this was going to look like in the era of Black women asking questions in rooms full of cameras. That right there is what Patricia Hill Collins called controlling images deployed as political technology. That right there is what Combahee told us in 1977 — that the convergence of race, gender, and class violence does not require a hood and a rope, that it shows up in a Senate office, that it shows up in a paternalistic dismissal at a content creator summit on May 8, 2024. And let me tell you, Indigenous and Black feminist thought reads that move the same way. White feminism has historically wanted to make this a story about a man being rude. Intersectional analysis tells us that the rudeness was the form, the content was the function — silencing a Black woman who had material expertise on a question of empire because the senator did not want to answer the question she asked. She didn’t fold. She named Rafa. She named the 600,000 children. She named the white phosphorus. She named the funding pipeline. And what she got back was, “you keep defending Hamas, you would literally just be representing them.” That move is also a technology, y’all. Equating a question about a ceasefire with defense of a terrorist organization. The same equation that got cooked up in the State Department and reheated on cable news and served back at her by a sitting United States senator at a Black creators conference. I’m sorry, that ain’t an answer. That’s a deflection wrapped in a smear. And then he tried to make Sudan a shield. He said he voted for the supplemental because of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Cory. My brother. Sudan, where 17.1 million women and girls need aid in 2026. Sudan, whose UNICEF appeal is funded at 16 percent. Sudan, where Black African Muslim women in Darfur are being raped as a deliberate tactic of war. You want to talk about Sudan? Where is the smoke for Sudan in your voting record? Where is the supplemental for Sudan? Where is the 25-hour speech for Sudan? Don’t weaponize Sudanese women’s suffering to dodge a question about Rafa. Black African lives matter when they are useful as a rhetorical shield, and that’s the whole problem with the way liberal politicians talk about Sudan. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. That was May 8, 2024. That was day one for me. Let me tell y’all what happened next. A MF THREAD: THE TWO-YEAR TIMELINE May 8, 2024. D.C. Creator Summit. Booker climbs the table. Booker dismisses a Black woman creator. Booker says, “you don’t understand the bill.” Booker weaponizes Sudan. I leave that room knowing I am going to be on this man’s case for the rest of his political career. Day one. July 24, 2024. Booker is photographed with Benjamin Netanyahu during the prime minister’s address to a joint session of Congress. The ICC has already moved on arrest warrants. Booker poses anyway. The photo will haunt him for the next two years and he will spend every public appearance after that refusing to call Netanyahu a war criminal. The man literally cannot say the words out loud. August 2024. The Democratic National Convention. No Palestinian speaker. Booker goes on CNN’s State of the Union and defends the decision, says Kamala Harris is “anguished” over the conflict. Eight months into a documented genocide and the senator wants me to feel his vice president’s feelings. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. November 2024. Trump wins. The same supplemental Booker voted for, the same posture Booker held, the same equivocation Booker performed, contributes to the depressed Black, Arab, and young voter turnout that delivers the second Trump administration. The “lesser of two evils” math does not work when the lesser evil is also handing the keys to the greater one. January–February 2025. Trump cabinet confirmation votes. Booker votes to confirm Marco Rubio for Secretary of State. Booker votes to confirm John Ratcliffe for CIA Director. Booker votes to confirm Scott Bessent for Treasury. Booker votes to confirm Brooke Rollins for Agriculture. The man who would later filibuster for 25 hours had already handed Trump his cabinet. March 31 – April 1, 2025. The 25-hour Senate speech. Twenty-five hours and five minutes. Breaks Strom Thurmond’s segregationist filibuster record. Zero bills passed. Zero votes stopped. The same night the speech ends, Whitaker is confirmed 52-45. The standing ovation was for the performance. The legislation walked past him. I called it political theater on day one. May 20, 2025. Booker becomes the LONE Democratic yes on Charles Kushner as ambassador to France. The lone yes. Trump’s son-in-law’s daddy. The man Booker had spent 25 hours of empty floor time supposedly opposing. Where is the smoke? Yealp. June 2025. Booker votes to confirm David Perdue as ambassador to China. Mid-trade war. Mid-tariff chaos. Mid-China-hawk hysteria. Booker hands Trump his Beijing pick. Summer 2025. The Big Beautiful Bill — Trump’s signature legislative package — passes by one vote. Three Democrats had died in office before the vote. Their seats had gone to Republicans. The same Senate where Booker filibustered to nothing. Performance is not legislation, kinfolks. October 14, 2025. Booker on the “I’ve Had It” podcast. Jennifer Welch asks if he considers Netanyahu a war criminal. Booker refuses to answer. Pivots. Says he is “not going to be outside of the room screaming.” Brother, you spent 25 hours screaming inside the room and accomplished nothing. The screaming wasn’t the problem. The strategy was. October 16, 2025. Sludge breaks the story: Booker has taken his first-ever AIPAC PAC contributions despite a decade in the Senate. Total haul approaches $877,000 across the cycle when the receipts are added up. The man whose past leaked tapes had him “text messaging back and forth like teenagers” with the AIPAC president now claims a public posture of restraint while pocketing the largest single-issue check of his career. March 2026. Booker tells Meet the Press he is “definitely not ruling out” a 2028 run. He releases a memoir, Stand. He claims he will refuse single-issue PAC money going forward. The conversion narrative arrives right on time for the primary. Two things can be true: he was on the AIPAC payroll, and he is laundering that history in time for Iowa. I’m not lost in the sauce on this one. April–May 2026. I write the Booker pieces. I document the 25-hour speech and what it didn’t pass. I document the Kushner confirmation. I document the AIPAC pipeline. I document the Meet the Press conv

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  7. MAY 11

    Black Daddies, the School System, and What the Research Actually Says

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Y’all know I don’t be playing about Research Over MeSearch. So before anybody tries to make this about feelings, let me put the receipts on the table first. National Center for Education Statistics, 1997. Government data. Over 20,000 households surveyed. The finding? Kids in grades 6–12 whose fathers are highly involved in their schools have 46 percent higher odds of pulling mostly A’s compared to kids whose fathers are not involved. Moderate involvement? Still a 21 percent boost. Same study showed children whose fathers are involved are significantly less likely to ever repeat a grade. That is not a vibe. That is the federal government’s own numbers. Then fast forward to 2024. National Assessment of Educational Progress drops the latest Nation’s Report Card. Two-thirds of fourth graders cannot read at proficient level. A third of eighth graders cannot read at NAEP Basic — the largest percentage ever recorded. Reading scores have not recovered from the pandemic. Math is bleeding at the bottom. The Secretary of Education herself said nearly half of high school seniors test below basic in math and reading. Let that marinate for a second. The country is failing our babies academically at a historic level. And we have decades of data saying one of the cheapest, most powerful interventions is a daddy walking into the building and being seen. Not a check. Not a text. Physical presence. So when I tell y’all this post is for the dads who are actually present, I mean it. If you a sorry-ass daddy who not active in your kid’s life, this not for you. This for the kinfolks who showing up. And for the ones thinking about it who need that final push. Five Things That Happen When Dads Show Up at the Schoolhouse 1. Higher Grades — and Not by a Little That 46 percent number from NCES? That ain’t a margin of error. That is a structural difference. Even after researchers controlled for income, parent education, family structure, and a gang of other variables, fathers’ school involvement remained a significant independent predictor of kids getting mostly A’s. Reading and math are where the biggest gains show up — which matters because reading is foundational to everything else. And here is the part the data nerds don’t always say out loud: this effect held across socioeconomic groups. White, Black, Native, Hispanic, rich, working class. Daddy showing up matters. 2. Less Grade Repetition Statistical simulations using Early Childhood Longitudinal Study data show that if low-income resident fathers were as involved in school as high-income fathers, the gap in grade repetition between high and low SES children would drop by 23 percent. Father residence alone is associated with a 23 percent lower likelihood of a child repeating a grade. Translation: daddies showing up moves the needle on whether your baby is on grade level. And in 2026 America, with reading scores at historic lows, you do not want your kid getting held back. That is a death sentence for confidence, social development, and long-term graduation odds. Research over MeSearch — the data is clear. 3. Fewer Behavior Issues and Disciplinary Actions Active fathers correlate with reduced classroom disruptions. The NCES data shows reduced odds of suspension and expulsion when parents are highly involved. And this matters extra for Black and Brown kids, who get suspended and expelled at rates 2 to 3 times their white peers for the same exact behaviors. When a daddy is a known face in that building, teachers and administrators think twice before pulling the disciplinary trigger. That is not a theory. That is how institutions work. And every accusation is a confession — the same school system that complains about Black male absence from school buildings is the same system that calls security when Black daddies do show up. Two things can be true. 4. Greater Confidence and Stress Tolerance WatchDOGS — Dads of Great Students — is a program in over 8,800 schools nationwide. Started in 1998 in Springdale, Arkansas. Real teachers have reported that the mere presence of a WatchDOG dad dramatically reduces reports of bullying. The kids whose daddies show up build emotional resilience and higher self-esteem. And it ain’t just their kids. The whole classroom shifts. I lived this today. My second-grade son and fourth-grade daughter’s school had me come in as a WatchDOG. Every teacher I talked to said the same thing: the energy of the room changed when a dad was in there. Not just my kids. The whole classroom. That is the ripple. That is the thing the spreadsheet cannot fully capture. 5. Stronger Cognitive Skills Research published in NCES studies and across multiple meta-analyses shows fathers tend to play a distinct role in cognitive stimulation — providing information, modeling problem-solving, expanding vocabulary through different conversational patterns than moms typically do. Researchers have hypothesized that maternal involvement may be most beneficial for the social and emotional adjustment of children to school, while paternal involvement may be most important for academic achievement. Not a hierarchy. A complement. Two things can be true. Now Let’s Talk About Black Daddies Specifically — Because the Lies Run Deep Here is where I gotta put on my Research Over MeSearch hat extra tight, because the narrative around Black fathers is one of the most successful propaganda campaigns in American history. And every accusation, like I always say, is a confession. The 2013 CDC National Health Statistics Report — federal government data, not a Black studies pamphlet — found that Black fathers who live with their children are MORE involved in daily caregiving than white or Hispanic fathers. Seventy percent of Black fathers in the home bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped their children use the toilet every day, compared to 60 percent of white fathers and 45 percent of Hispanic fathers. Black fathers in the home were more likely to help with homework every day — 41 percent, versus 28 percent for white fathers and 29 percent for Hispanic fathers. And here is the part that should make every “absent Black father” myth-peddler choke on their grits: even Black fathers who do not live with their children outperformed their white and Latino counterparts on multiple involvement measures. More than 50 percent of nonresident Black fathers talked to their school-age children about their day several times per week or more, compared to 34 percent of nonresident white dads and 23 percent of nonresident Latino fathers. Nonresident Black dads were more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to host story time every day. So where did the mythology come from? Cedric Robinson would tell you: racial capitalism needs a Black pathology story to justify itself. If the story is “Black families are broken from the inside,” then mass incarceration looks like a response instead of a cause. Then job market discrimination looks like a consequence instead of a driver. Then redlining and school underfunding look like accidents instead of policy. The absent Black father myth is not a description of reality. It is a political tool. Now, two things can be true. Black fathers are more likely to live apart from their children — 44 percent versus 21 percent for white fathers, per the CDC. But the data tells us why: mass incarceration disproportionately targets Black men, economic instability driven by structural racism limits cohabitation, and family court systems built in a Moynihan-era frame still treat Black fathers as suspects rather than parents. The brothers who are present are MORE present than their peers. The brothers who are not present are largely not present because the state has made it materially difficult to be. That is racial capitalism doing what racial capitalism does. Walter Rodney told us how this works. Saidiya Hartman told us how it feels. So for the Black daddies reading this — y’all already showing up at rates this country pretends you don’t. Now the work is doubling down. Going from the kitchen and the basketball court into the school building. Bringing the same energy you bring to homework at the table into the parent-teacher conference. Because the school system is not built for our babies, and your physical presence inside that building changes the calculation for every teacher, every administrator, every other kid watching. And for the dads who are not Black reading this — y’all gotta stop spreading the absent Black father narrative. Period. The CDC has been telling you for over a decade. The fact that the story persists is the confession. Now do better. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The 2026 Reality Check Look at what we are working with. NAEP 2024 results, released in 2025: 33 percent of eighth graders read below NAEP Basic. Forty percent of fourth graders read below NAEP Basic — the highest since 2002. Forty-five percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in math — the highest ever. Thirty-two percent of twelfth graders score below NAEP Basic in reading — the highest ever. The Acting Commissioner of NCES literally said scores for our lowest-performing students are at historic lows. We are watching a generation get academically gutted in real time. And we have research from 1997 — almost 30 years old — that has been telling us the same simple thing: when daddies show up at school, kids do better. Not maybe. Not sometimes. Consistently. Across races. Across income levels. Across grade levels. So if you a present daddy reading this, the call is simple. Go to the school. Volunteer once a semester at minimum. Sign up for WatchDOGS if they have it.

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  8. MAY 7

    Black Women, HIV, and the Lie of the "Down Low": What the Data Actually Says

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I asked Dr. Dontá Morrison a question I knew was going to be uncomfortable. I told him it was uncomfortable on purpose. When somebody says “that’s gay as AIDS,” what is that? And he didn’t blink. He called it ignorance at its finest. He pointed out that half the people still using the phrase don’t even know what AIDS stands for — Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. He pointed out that if you’re still saying AIDS in 2026, you’re stuck in 1986. You equating a virus to a demographic of human beings. That’s the receipts on how shallow the thinking still is. The conversation I had with Dr. Morrison wasn’t really about a slur. It was about what that slur reveals — that we are operating with an archaic, decades-old understanding of HIV inside Black communities, while a federal administration is actively dismantling the funding that keeps Black folks alive. Two things are true at the same time, and both of them are killing us. HIV Is Not AIDS — And Knowing the Difference Matters Before I go further, let me handle some basic education, because Dr. Morrison was right — folks don’t know. HIV is the human immunodeficiency virus. It’s a virus that attacks your immune system. AIDS, on the other hand, is the most advanced stage of HIV infection, a syndrome that develops only when HIV has gone untreated long enough to severely compromise the immune system. With consistent antiretroviral therapy, a person living with HIV today can suppress the virus to undetectable levels, live a full lifespan. Undetectable equals untransmittable — U=U is settled science. Saying “AIDS” the way folks said it in the eighties is not just rude. It’s wrong and stigmatizing and pathological It collapses a manageable chronic condition back into a death sentence in your mouth, and that linguistic time travel does material harm. It keeps people from testing. It keeps people from disclosing. It keeps Black women from asking their men hard questions. It keeps the church from doing the work. Education is elevation. Same pill Magic Johnson takes, regular folks take. You do not need Magic Johnson money to survive HIV-positive in 2026. Period. The Trump Cuts Are Not Abstract Dr. Morrison is a public health doctor. He earned that degree. And last year, he woke up one morning to a phone call telling him his program had been cut overnight. The federal government, under this administration, signed away the funding for the work he had been doing for over twenty years — sexual health and HIV education in the Black community, with a particular focus on the Black church. One signature, no notice, gone. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a brother who put in the work, doing the work without unemployment, watching his livelihood get dismantled in the name of America First. And the receipts on this are public. The Trump administration came into office in January 2025 and immediately froze foreign aid. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — PEPFAR — got hit. The Office of Management and Budget released only about half of the $6 billion Congress appropriated for PEPFAR’s 2025 funding. Nearly 70,000 community healthcare workers were laid off in 2025 according to the PEPFAR data release, and many specialized outreach services were shut down. The number of PEPFAR-funded HIV tests declined by 14 million in 2025 compared to the year before — a 17 percent decrease. As of this week, the administration is now trying to divert another $2 billion in global health funding to pay for the shutdown of USAID itself. Let that marinate. They are taking money meant to keep people alive and using it to pay the legal bills for dismantling the agency that was keeping people alive. Every accusation is a confession. They told us they were going to gut foreign aid. They told us American leadership in global health was over. We just didn’t believe them because we were taught the United States was the leader. And here is where I have to give the receipts on what we are actually losing. The United States Was the Global Leader on HIV/AIDS — On Purpose I want y’all to understand something. The U.S. did not become the global leader in HIV/AIDS research and response by accident. It happened through deliberate, bipartisan policy across multiple administrations, and Black-led advocacy was central to forcing it to happen. The U.S. first provided funding to address the global HIV epidemic in 1986. In 1999, President Clinton announced the Leadership and Investment in Fighting an Epidemic Initiative to address HIV in 14 African countries and India. Then in 2003, President George W. Bush created PEPFAR. PEPFAR is not a small thing. As of August 2024, PEPFAR has provided cumulative funding of $120 billion for HIV/AIDS treatment, prevention, and research, making it the largest commitment by any nation focused on a single disease in history. It is credited with saving more than 26 million lives over the past two decades and preventing millions of HIV infections, particularly in Africa. PEPFAR accounts for more than 90 percent of PrEP initiations globally. Translation: nine out of every ten people on the planet getting access to HIV prevention medicine were getting it through American funding. That is the program this administration is choking out. The administration’s FY 2026 budget request includes a $1.9 billion reduction for PEPFAR. As of February 2026, only 16 country agreements have been completed, and overall current pledges will result in a $4.5 billion decrease in U.S. funding for PEPFAR countries over a 5-year period. Notably, South Africa — the country with the highest HIV burden globally — has not been included. Read that again. The country where the most Black people in the world are dying of this disease is not at the table. That is not an accident. That is policy. The Global Becomes the Local — Because We Are the Same People Some of y’all might be reading this thinking, “That’s overseas, that ain’t us.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. Pan-Africanism is not a vibe — it’s an analysis. The same logic that pulls funding from clinics in Lagos and Kampala pulls funding from clinics in Atlanta and Jackson. The same administration that froze PEPFAR also went after Title X, also went after CDC HIV prevention budgets, also went after community-based programs serving Black queer folks here in the States. Dr. Morrison’s program was domestic. The brothers and sisters who lost their jobs were here. The Black women who are not getting the workshops, not getting the lunch and learns, not getting the pamphlets at their hair salons — they are here. And the disparities in this country are already brutal. Compared to White non-Hispanic heterosexually-active persons, Black heterosexually-active people have a 20-fold higher HIV diagnosis rate. A 20-fold higher rate. Two thousand percent. Among African American women, 92 percent of new HIV diagnoses were attributed to heterosexual contact. Dr. Morrison hammered this point and I want to drag it into the light: stop blaming the down low. Stop blaming gay men. There are cisgender heterosexual men contracting HIV and passing it to cisgender heterosexual women, and the gay community has nothing to do with that transmission chain. Two things can be true. Black gay men carry their own disproportionate burden. Black straight women are catching HIV from Black straight men. Both of these things are happening simultaneously, and both require funded, culturally specific intervention. The Faithful and the Forgotten This is where Dr. Morrison’s work cuts deepest. He is the author of “Faithful and Forgotten: Navigating Race, Sexuality, and Belonging in the Black Church,” and the title alone tells you everything. The Black church is the most powerful institution we built ourselves. It was the only institution White society left relatively alone, which made it the staging ground for abolition, the civil rights movement, and Black social life as we know it. And that same church has, in too many corners, become a place where Black queer folks — particularly Black men who have sex with men — experience spiritual violence dressed up as scripture. Dr. Morrison made a point in our conversation that I’m still chewing on. He said a lot of folks are quietly rooting for Trump’s HIV cuts because they don’t like gay people, because they still associate HIV with homosexuality, and because they have a skewed approach to Christianity that supports white supremacy. Read that one more time. The same Black folks who claim they want liberation are clapping for the dismantling of the very programs that keep their cousins, their aunties, their nephews, their sisters alive — because they think God is anti-gay. That is theology imported from the same plantation logic that taught our ancestors that their humanity was conditional. Where is the smoke for that? Faithful and Forgotten is not an attack on the Black church. It’s a call for the Black church to do what it claims to do — to be the moral conscience of the community, to leave the ninety-nine and go after the one. You can’t preach Jesus and silently celebrate a policy that cuts off the antiretrovirals keeping your nephew alive. You can’t say you love Black people and only love the Black people whose sexuality you approve of. Two things can be true. The Black church is sacred. The Black church is also implicated. We grow by holding both. What Dr. Morrison Is Still Doing — Without the Money Here is the part that should hit every reader in the chest. Dr. Morrison lost his funding. He didn’t lose his calling. He compared himself to a TSA worker — pissed off, unpaid, but still showing up because lives are still at risk. He’s still hosting conversations. He’s still doing free intervie

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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
    90
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation

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