Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee

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

  1. 10 giờ trước

    What If Racial Terror Is Hereditary Too? The Epigenetics Question Nobody Wants to Ask

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Communal trauma. Y’all, let’s name it. It is a shared psychological and emotional wound experienced by an entire group of people, not just isolated individuals. It occurs when a catastrophic event shatters the core identity, the safety, the security, the social fabric of a community. Ahh, but our community knows that definition too well, so much so that we ain’t need the textbook to teach it to us, the textbook needed us to write it. I really want to name it for us, y’all. There is a certain level of racial terror that we felt in our guts and our stomachs when we seen these images, when we heard about these stories. That feeling is not weakness, that feeling is not paranoia, that feeling is the communal trauma that we all experience. I see it all down my timeline, and it is very intergenerational and it is cross regional. Whether you from California, whether you in Virginia, whether you in Texas, whether you in Mississippi, you have seen this story before. As a matter of fact, it has been embedded in your memory and damn near your DNA, being retriggered by racial trauma that forces our community to go back and revisit wounds and scabs that ain’t even healed yet. The sociologist Kai Erikson studied what happened to the people of Buffalo Creek, West Virginia after a flood wiped out their hollow in 1972, and he gave the academy the language of collective trauma, a blow to the basic tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of community. Apply Erikson here. When one of ours goes missing off an island, when one of ours gets shot down in the street by soldiers, the blow don’t land on one family. The blow lands on the tissue that connects all of us. Then Ron Eyerman took it further and argued that slavery itself functions as a cultural trauma, a wound to collective identity that gets remembered, retold, and reactivated every single time the pattern repeats itself. This means the folks telling us we are overreacting are wrong. The evidence don’t support them. The pattern supports us. One Holiday Weekend, Two Names Nolan Xavier Wells was 18 years old. He was a wide receiver at Southwest Mississippi Community College, a 2025 graduate of Ocean Springs High School, a young man his coach described as humble, respectful, and hardworking, a son his mama said was always willing to cheer and uplift others. On July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of this country, Nolan went out to Horn Island, a barrier island off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, on a boat with a big group of his friends. He was last seen around 3 in the afternoon. His mother reported him missing that night. Two days later, on Monday morning, a park ranger found a body on the island, and his family confirmed the unthinkable. He would have turned 19 next month. Now let me be precise, because Research over MeSearch means I hold myself to the receipts even when my stomach is in knots. As of this writing, no cause of death has been established, the coroner is awaiting autopsy and toxicology results, and no charges have been filed against anybody. Those are the facts of record. Ahh, but here is what the community watched happen in real time while the official record was still blank. Social media accounts connected to that trip started going dark one after another, deactivated, wiped, unfollowed. I seen that clip and it pissed me off. Deactivating an account is not a crime and it is not proof of one, I want to be clear about that. But our community got 400 years of pattern recognition in its bones, and coordinated silence that moves that fast lands on us heavy, because every accusation is a confession and every silence got a history behind it. Two things can be true. We can wait on the investigation to run its course AND we can trust the gut that our grandmothers gave us. Tyrin Johnson was 20 years old. He was a young father who had welcomed his first child earlier this year. He was a former Tennessee State University student who had moved to Nashville, was working construction, and came back home to Memphis for the Fourth of July. In the early morning hours of July 5, around 4 am, after police say they were responding to reports of shots fired downtown, Tyrin was pursued on foot and shot by two Tennessee National Guard soldiers assigned to the federal task force occupying that city. His family says investigators told them he was shot twice in the chest. Police say he turned toward the soldiers with a weapon. His grandfather, a former correctional officer, disputes that his grandson would have done any such thing, and according to the United States Marshals Service the Guard members are not even outfitted with body cameras. So a United States citizen was taken out by military personnel, funded by his own tax dollars, on American soil, and the fullest account of it may never exist on film. Then here go the part that is so poetic it will make you holler. Tyrin Johnson was killed steps away from a street named after Ida B. Wells, a Memphis woman who dedicated her entire life to documenting exactly this kind of racial terror, a woman who was run out of this very same city at gunpoint in 1892 for printing the truth about lynching. The woman who documented the terror got a street name. The terror itself got a federal budget. The Congressional Budget Office projects this occupation will cost taxpayers more than a billion dollars this year. Gil Scott Heron wrote a whole poem about how the rat keeps biting little sister Nell while the money flies off to whitey’s priorities. Apply Gil here. A billion dollars for soldiers on Beale Street, and they will still look you dead in the face and say there is no money for schools, for clinics, for grief counselors in the neighborhoods those soldiers patrol. And it is so fitting, in the most bitter way, that all of this happened on the semiquincentennial. Because when I understood and learned that Crispus Attucks, the very first casualty of the American Revolution, gunned down in the Boston Massacre in 1770, was a Black and Indigenous man, it reframed everything. The first blood ever spilled for this country was Black blood. Two hundred and fifty years of fireworks later, we spent the anniversary weekend refreshing our timelines to find out if another Black boy made it home. We see right now, in real time, how the law and the institution respond to the death of a Black body, and it made me think about Afropessimism, about how our very existence gets rendered as socially dead. Critical Historical Context: The Receipts Go Back 250 Years Communal trauma stems from large scale catastrophic events or systemic issues that threaten the entire existence of a group, its survival, or its way of life. We know that well. Too well. Way too well. I’m getting flustered even writing it, so let me do what a researcher does and lay the timeline down flat, because the folks who call this paranoia are counting on you not knowing the chronology. Start with the slave patrols. Sally Hadden’s research traces how the earliest organized policing in the American South existed for one purpose, controlling Black movement and Black assembly. Surveillance of Black leisure, Black travel, and Black gathering is not a glitch in American law enforcement. It is the founding job description. Then move to 1892, Memphis, Tennessee, where three Black grocers, Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will Stewart, were lynched for the crime of running a successful business. Their friend Ida B. Wells picked up her pen, published Southern Horrors, and proved with data that lynching was not punishment for crime, it was economic and social terror engineered to be witnessed by the whole community. That is the key insight, y’all. Lynching was never aimed at one body. It was a message addressed to every Black person in the county. Racial terror has always been communal by design, which is exactly why the trauma is communal in effect. Keep going. The Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs attacked Black communities in more than two dozen cities. Tulsa in 1921, when Greenwood was burned from the ground and the air. Rosewood in 1923, when an entire Florida town was erased. These were not attacks on individuals. These were attacks on the social fabric itself, on the churches and lodges and schools and businesses that made Black community life possible, which is precisely what Erikson means when he talks about trauma destroying the tissues of social life. Then come to Mississippi, because geography matters here. In 1955, Emmett Till was pulled out of the Tallahatchie River, and his mother Mamie made a decision that turned private grief into communal witnessing. She opened the casket. She said let the people see what they did to my boy, and Jet magazine carried that image into every Black household in America. A generation of organizers, from Muhammad Ali to members of SNCC, testified that seeing that photograph changed them forever. That is communal trauma metabolized into communal purpose. In 1959, Mack Charles Parker was dragged from a Pearl River jail cell and lynched, and nobody was ever convicted. Then in 1960, on the same Gulf Coast where Horn Island sits, Dr. Gilbert Mason led Black families onto the sand at Biloxi Beach, and white mobs beat men, women, and children with pipes, chains, and bats while police watched, in what became known as Bloody Wade Sunday. Let that marinate. Within living memory, Black people were beaten bloody on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the act of touching the water. So when a Black boy goes out on those same waters with a group of friends and does not come home, and folks ask why the whole community felt it in their chest, the answer is that the water itself holds receipts. Then bring it to the recent past. Tamla Horsford, Georgia, 2018, a

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  2. 4 ngày trước

    George Washington Bought Human Teeth. Obama Calls Him Great. I Got Questions.

    Y’all know I watch these interviews so you don’t have to. On June 28, 2026, Barack Obama sat down with Michele Norris on MS NOW for a special tied to the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, ten days after the ribbon got cut in John Lewis Plaza, six days before this country throws itself a 250th birthday party. Timing matters, kinfolks. The semiquincentennial machine is running at full steam, the National Mall got a state fair on it, the flags are pressed, and into that moment the first Black president of the United States decided to hand the founding fathers a permission slip. Here is what he said, word for word, so nobody can say I’m putting words in the man’s mouth: It is possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder. And that does not negate his greatness. It simply acknowledges that there is a profound, deep flaw in these founding fathers, who were also geniuses and gave us these tools... which is true of all of us, right? It’s true of every president. We’re this mixed bag. We’ve got contradictions and embody the country’s contradictions. Now on the surface that sounds like the reasonable grown up in the room talking. It sounds like nuance. It sounds like the thing they teach you to say at a dinner party in Hyde Park. Peep the two roles frame I been teaching y’all from my debate days though: there is what a statement SAYS, and there is what a statement STRUCTURALLY DOES. What it says is, history is complicated. What it does is launder human trafficking into a personality flaw, the same way you’d say your uncle is a great man who just talks too loud at the cookout. That laundering is not neutral. Claimed neutrality IS a position, the view from nowhere, and the view from nowhere always ends up being the view from Mount Vernon’s front porch. Research over MeSearch, so let’s run the receipts. Receipts from Mount Vernon: What Kind of Great Are We Talking About? George Washington was not a man with a flaw. George Washington was a human trafficker with a farm. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved human beings held at Mount Vernon, and across his lifetime the man bought, sold, rented, raffled, and mortgaged Black people like they was equipment, because under the law of Virginia, that is exactly what we were. Historian Henry Wiencek documented this in An Imperfect God, and the Mount Vernon estate’s own records confirm it. This ain’t hidden history. This is ledger history, written in the man’s own hand. Speaking of ledgers. In May of 1784, Washington’s account books record a payment of 6 pounds and 2 shillings for nine teeth pulled from the mouths of enslaved people, teeth that scholars believe went into the dentures of the so called father of the nation. Sit with that. The smile on the dollar bill in your pocket may have been built out of Black people’s teeth. When I said on camera that this man had other people’s teeth in his mouth, that was not a punchline, that was a citation. It gets more premeditated. While Washington was serving as president in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had a Gradual Abolition Act on the books saying any enslaved person who resided in the state for six continuous months became legally free. So what did the great man do? He set a rotation. Every time an enslaved person got close to six months, Washington cycled them back to Virginia and brought them back on a fresh clock, deliberately, repeatedly, in writing, specifically so the law could not free them. Then in 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, putting the full weight of the federal government behind hunting human beings who freed themselves. That is not a contradiction inside a genius. That is a man committing calculated evil with a calendar reminder. Then there is Ona Judge. In May of 1796, a young enslaved Black woman held by the Washingtons walked out of the president’s house in Philadelphia and freed herself, slipping onto a ship to New Hampshire. Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the whole story in Never Caught. Washington did not shrug and say we’re all a mixed bag. Washington used federal officers, customs officials, and family agents to hunt this woman for years, trying to trick her onto ships, pressuring her even after she married and had children, and under the law he signed, she died in 1848 still legally a fugitive. The greatest man in America spent the last years of his life trying to drag one Black woman back into bondage. Tell me again about greatness. Nobody Ever Calls the Mustache Man a Great Orator Here is the test I gave y’all in the video, and I need you to feel how it lands in your body. Nobody, in the entire history of polite society, has ever stood in front of a camera and said the mustache man was a great leader who galvanized his people and pulled Germany out of turmoil after the first world war, and sure, he put some folks in ovens, but that does not negate his greatness, he was a great orator. That sentence does not exist. The second you even try to build it, your stomach turns, your hands get clammy, every alarm in your moral hardware goes off. That reflex is the point. Now notice when the reflex goes missing. It goes missing, every single time, when the atrocity is antiblack. Wilderson calls this gratuitous violence: violence against Black people that does not require a transgression, a reason, or a cost benefit analysis, violence that is constitutive of the world rather than an exception to it. Hartman showed us in Scenes of Subjection how the terror of slavery got absorbed into the everyday, into the mundane, into the paperwork, until it stopped registering as terror at all. That is exactly what is happening when a slaveholder’s crimes get filed under flaws. The rationalization is so smooth, so automatic, so bipartisan, that it proves the diagnosis. Antiblack violence is the one atrocity this country has trained itself to metabolize without gagging. That is the reason the status quo look the way it look. Contradiction Is a Luxury Item Let me bring this down from the marble columns to the block, because this is where it stopped being abstract for me. My daddy is a great daddy and a great man. The system does not see him as a great man. The system sees him as a man who once sold drugs, full stop, end of file. His greatness is not allowed to sit beside his record. There is no interviewer on a soundstage saying his conviction does not negate his greatness. Every guilty person sitting in a cell right now could tell you about the great things they’ve done, the kids they raised, the mamas they took care of, the crews they fed, and every one of them is still gonna be defined by the conviction. The Sentencing Project counts about 4 million Americans stripped of the vote behind felony convictions, disproportionately Black, in a country where a man who trafficked over three hundred human beings gets a monument, a state, a university, a bridge, and the number one spot on the dollar. Derrick Bell told us in Faces at the Bottom of the Well that racism is not a glitch America is working out, it is a permanent load bearing feature, and that Black people’s suffering gets acknowledged only when acknowledging it serves somebody else’s interest. Watch how that plays here. Washington’s slaveholding gets acknowledged, sure, but only in the exact form that protects him: as a flaw, a footnote, a shadow that makes the portrait more interesting. The acknowledgment is doing protection work. Meanwhile the same public that extends infinite moral credit to a dead slaveholder extends none to a living Black man with a record. Contradiction is a luxury item in this country, and everyday Black folks cannot afford it. The View from Hawaii Ain’t the View from the Plantation Now let me say the uncomfortable part with precision, because I said it on camera and I’ma stand on it in print. Barack Obama is the child of a white American mother and a Kenyan father. That is not a diss, that is a data point. His family line does not run through the auction block, through partus sequitur ventrem, through the hush harbors and the whipping post and the Great Migration. What he knows of the plantation, he learned the same place most Americans learned it, in school, filtered through the same curriculum that taught all of us that Washington could not tell a lie. Lineage is not a purity test, feel me, plenty of children of immigrants ride harder for descendants of the enslaved than some cousins I know. Socialization matters though. When the flagship Black American political figure carries no inherited memory of American slavery, and then publicly extends grace to the man who hunted Ona Judge, we are watching the difference between representation and rootedness play out on national television. This is where the intersectional lens is not optional. Crenshaw taught us to ask who sits at the intersection and gets hit from every direction, and the Combahee River Collective told us that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires tearing down every system of oppression at once. So run the Obama quote through Ona Judge. Run it through the enslaved women at Mount Vernon whose children were born into bondage because Virginia wrote in 1662 that the child follows the condition of the mother, turning Black wombs into factories of property. Spillers named that ungendering of Black flesh in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. Washington’s greatness was materially built on Black women’s bodies, their labor, their reproduction, their teeth. A framework of greatness that requires footnoting Black women is not a framework, it is a crime scene with good lighting. Exceptionalism Is a Hell of a Drug Zoom out to the empire level, because Obama’s statement is not just about the past, it is a user’s manual for American exceptionalism in the present. This country will tell you it must

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  3. 5 ngày trước

    White or Black, Pick One: The Court Cases That Built the Latino Whiteness Pipeline

    Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her), Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, Jeanne Elbe, Judy, Dmg, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This week I sat down with somebody I spent years trying to beat: Brian Ontiveros-Kersch, UNT to my OU, fifteen-something rounds against each other, from random little prelims all the way to the elims of the National Debate Tournament. We came together to talk about borders not borders the way cable news talks about borders, where the whole conversation starts and stops at “did you cross legally,” but borders the way Gloria Anzaldúa taught us to see them: a wound that never healed, a line that keeps moving, a weapon that gets pointed at some bodies and holstered for others. Brian said something early that framed the whole conversation. Talking about his mama’s people, the Ontiveros side, who been in New Mexico since before it was either “New” or “Mexico,” he put it plain: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.” Sit with that for a second, for the folks in the back. Every argument about “illegals” rests on the assumption that the border is fixed, natural, and legitimate, that the line was always there and the only question is which side of it you standing on. The history says otherwise. The history says the line been redrawn, re-enforced, and re-weaponized every single generation, and the only consistent thing about it is who it gets used against. Borderlands Ain’t Just a Place, It’s a Condition Anzaldúa grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, right on that line, and in Borderlands/La Frontera she describes the border as an open wound, a place where two worlds grind against each other and bleed, a strip of land that belongs to both countries and neither one at the same time. Anzaldúa wasn’t just talking geography. She was talking identity. The borderlands is also the mestiza consciousness, the person who carries Indigenous and European blood in the same body, who is somehow both and neither, who gets sorted differently depending on who’s doing the looking. Brian lives that. His mama’s family is Mexica, in that land before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dragged the United States over top of them in 1848. His daddy’s side goes back to the Mayflower. He presents white, went to a white high school, and still got called an anchor baby because, as he put it, passing is a privilege that gets revoked. He can be white, he can be Indigenous, he rarely ever gets to be both, and which one he gets to be changes on the circumstance. That’s the borderland. That’s the liminal spot the national dialogue got no room for, because America wants this OR that, never this AND that. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Texas Was Annexed for Slavery, Period Y’all know I’m born and raised in Texas, so let me give you the receipts they left out of your 7th grade Texas History class, the class that somehow taught “Remember the Alamo” without teaching Juneteenth. Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 under Vicente Guerrero a president of African descent, feel me, a Black man signing abolition into law decades before the United States could stomach the thought. Anglo settlers brought enslaved people into Mexican Texas anyway. When Santa Anna’s army came, the fight at the Alamo was, at bottom, slaveholders fighting to keep human property inside a country that had outlawed owning humans. Folks did walk out of the Alamo alive women, children, and enslaved people the slavers brought with them. The annexation of Texas happened because white settlers wanted slavery. That is the impetus. That is why Texas is part of the U.S. and not part of Mexico. Then there’s that “Come and Take It” flag your gun-rights uncle loves. That cannon was given to the settlers at Gonzales by Mexican authorities in the first place given to them to help fight off Native people, to keep the so-called savages at bay. Settler solidarity held as long as the deal was clearing Native land together. The moment Mexico’s abolition threatened the slave economy, the settlers turned the same cannon around on the government that armed them. What broke the solidarity wasn’t principle. Slavery broke it. Crazy how the same border got flipped the other direction too. A lot of my ancestors’ folk, enslaved Africans in Texas, ran SOUTH instead of north, because Mexico’s shifting border was a freedom line. There was a whole southern road to freedom into Mexico. The border been a freedom line and a slave-catching line at the same damn time, depending on who drew it and when. Nobody’s illegal on stolen land and the land’s been stolen more than once. The Courtroom Been a Whiteness Machine Now watch how the law manufactured all of this. In 1897, in San Antonio, a case called In re Rodriguez asked whether a Mexican man could naturalize as a U.S. citizen. Naturalization law at the time only had two doors: you could be white, or you could be of African descent. The court dodged the question of whether Rodriguez was white they leaned on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo instead, but the frame was set. Two doors. Pick one. Then in the 1930s comes Timoteo Andrade, a Mexican national up in Buffalo, New York, applying for citizenship after decades in this country. The government’s position leaned on him being Indigenous, and natives couldn’t naturalize — remember, Native Americans didn’t even get U.S. citizenship until 1924, damn near 60 years after Black folks. So what did Andrade argue in open court? That he’d been exaggerating his indigeneity. That his nose wasn’t flat like the Olmec or the Mexica. That his skin was light. That he was, in fact, white. He won. He argued himself white in a court of law, and the court agreed, and the door opened. Fast-forward to 2010, when the census told Latinos that ethnicity is not race and made folks pick a race on top of “Hispanic.” Our old debate colleague Nate Cohn yeah, that Nate Cohn, he became a stats journalist wrote it up in the New York Times: over a million people who checked “some other race” in 2000 checked “white” in 2010. Latinos became white overnight, on paper, by the stroke of a pencil. Latino is an ethnicity, kinfolks, not a race there are Black Latinos, white Latinos, Indigenous Latinos, Asian Latinos and when the machine forces the underlying racial question, where do folks run? Toward whiteness. Not because they’re uniquely evil. They run toward whiteness because whiteness is a protective class in this country, because the law been teaching that exact lesson since 1897, because the white-over-Black binary logic of America says it is best to be white, and if you cannot be white, whatever you do, don’t be Black. We talk about epigenetics when it comes to Black folks and the trauma of slavery. I’d argue there’s a social epigenetics operating in the Latino community too. Generations of symbols, patterns, norms, and court cases teaching that it is safer and more beneficial to be seen with the Europeans than to be seen with us. Black folks peep that. Consciously and subconsciously, Black folks peep that, and that inherited lesson is exactly what keeps getting in the way of solidarity. “Peons”: The Hundred-Year-Old Script The rhetorician Lisa Flores went back and studied how America talked about Mexican labor in the early twentieth century, and what she found should sound familiar as hell. After World War I took a generation of white and Black American men to Europe, Mexican workers filled the labor gap, and the country welcomed them — as “peons.” Docile. Menial. Cheap. The papers praised them for one thing in particular: they send their money back to Mexico, so they don’t disrupt our economy. Flores found that sentence in the 1920s. I heard that same sentence at somebody’s cookout THIS YEAR. The script is a hundred years old and ain’t missed a beat. Peon rhetoric is slave-adjacent rhetoric that’s the point. Paid under the table, paid below minimum wage, paid slave wages, welcomed exactly as long as the labor is needed. Then the Depression hit, the labor wasn’t needed, and the same people became “job stealers” overnight. What followed was the deportation drives of 1929 to 1936, what historians call the Mexican Repatriation: as many as a million people removed, and scholars estimate somewhere around six in ten of them was U.S. citizens. Flores tells the story of a nineteen-year-old boy, born and raised in this country, birthright citizen, working the fields, who got swept up and shipped to Mexico, a country he wasn’t born in, speaking a language he didn’t speak. Now tell me what that sounds like. Tell me that don’t sound like citizens and legal residents getting swept up in raids right now, like people getting rendered to a mega-prison in El Salvador with no process. History don’t repeat itself so much as it be reciting itself, word for word, off a script white supremacy wrote a century ago. “Do It the Right Way” Is a Moving Target Here’s where the good-immigrant/bad-immigrant paradigm collapses, just like we knew it would. Haitians in this country had Temporary Protected Status, which means by definition they did it “the right way.” Then the administration changed, the they’re-eating-the-dogs rhetoric did its work, and TPS got stripped. Thousands of people who did it the right way became “undocumented” overnight, not because they moved, but because the line moved. Meanwhile I need you to hold both of these at once white South Africans got offered a refugee welcome mat by the same administration. Every accusation is a confession. They accuse migrants of disrespecting legality; the receipts confess it was never about legality, because when legality inconveniences whiteness, legality gets rewritten. Notice too whose s

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

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

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

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  5. 25 thg 6

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

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

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  6. 24 thg 6

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

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

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  7. 19 thg 6

    Juneteenth Proves Black Folks Never Been Free in America For Real

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

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  8. 17 thg 6

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

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

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