Education is Elevation

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

  1. 1d ago

    The Psychosis of Whiteness: Dr. Kehinde Andrews Explains

    We are looking right at a cultural phenomenon that refuses to name itself, and that avoidance is precisely where the pathology lives. When you trace how dominant power structures operate across generations, you realize that the refusal to confront historical reality is not an accidental oversight; it is an active, engineered cognitive defense mechanism. Scholars across disciplines have spent decades attempting to articulate this peculiar brand of social sickness, giving it rigorous terminology to match its devastating systemic impact. When you examine the mechanics of whiteness as a structural arrangement, you find a continuous loop of denial, projection, and self-delusion that manages to masquerade as objective normalcy. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Epistemic Exploitation and the Burden of Proof One of the most insidious mechanisms of this white psychopathology is what scholars call epistemic exploitation. This takes place when privileged persons compel marginalized persons to produce an education or explanation about the nature of the oppression they face. Epistemic exploitation reproduces structures of exploitation by remaining wedded to the perspective of privilege and placing the onus of responsibility on those experiencing oppression to account for or prove their oppression, thereby typically depicting their oppression as personal or cultural failure. As such, it burdens the oppressed with engaging in psychologically and emotionally demanding labor that tends to remain uncompensated and unrecognized. By disingenuously presenting itself as a vital instrument to the virtuous endeavor of scientific progress, epistemic exploitation succeeds at reproducing systems of oppression by on one hand keeping the oppressed systematically busy with accounting for their oppression and on the other keeping the oppressed relieved of the burden to account for their privilege. It only takes one academic article promoting the logic of colonialism to immediately burden those still affected by the reverberations of this structure of subjugation and dehumanization with the task of disproving this argument, allowing those benefiting from white supremacy and privilege to continue taking their privilege for granted. It is indeed by incessantly and deliberately staging a debate without history that white hallucinations maintain their efficacy and strength in reinscribing white normativity and supremacy. Epistemic exploitation flourishes under conditions where one sees the world without seeing its structure or its history. Dick Gregory once said white folks will hire a nanny to change a baby’s diaper and then walk behind a dog to pick up the dog s**t. Paul Mooney once said white people don’t want to be criticized for what their ancestors did, but they sure as hell want to hold on to the profit that their ancestors left. It is my favorite meme of all time, by the way. Today’s lesson is about white psychopathology. See, scholars subscribe to this as not a clinical diagnosis for individuals, but as a critical framework for us to be able to build up our linguistic ability to read and write situations upon you feel me? You know, Dr. Kehinde Andrews describes whiteness as a discursive psychosis. He argues that society’s delusions and hallucinations used to avoid facing racism are best described as a collective psychosis because we got to be able to define the phenomenon and make it act in a designated manner. That is what Huey P. Newton taught me. The core argument is that this flavor of psychopathology is a socially constructed system of power that operates through the collective psychological dysfunctions man. You know I like words with a whole bunch of syllables. This includes delusion, narcissism, and psychosis that are socially sanctioned and cause for widespread harm. The literature argues that this pathology is not blackness. It is the system of whiteness itself because it is always trying to get us lost in the sauce. It defines the problem of racism as an individual prejudice rather than us getting into the institutions and systems. I used to argue that this was a psychological disorder that is embedded within the social fabric of this country especially when it comes to the structures. They do not want you to talk about it. Dr. Dante D. King argues that whiteness is a socially sanctioned psychopathy that is sustained by denial, projection, and disassociation. He positions racism not as a mere social construct, but as a disease, an illness, a psychosis, a psychopathology that is woven in this country’s cultural pathology. Think about it. The same people who said that we were inherently dirty, disgusting, filthy also had women breastfeeding their children and being in their home feeding them food. That is a psychopathology that needs to be unpackaged. And we see it right now. We are rampant with people that said our administration, Education Is Elevation. Historical Roots of the Collective Delusion To truly understand how this pathology manifests in our current social climate, we have to trace the historical architecture of racial capitalism and chattel slavery. The foundational paradox of white supremacy required a profound and enduring cognitive dissonance. Enslaved Africans were legally classified as chattel, treated strictly as labor units, and subjected to horrific, systemic physical violence, yet they were simultaneously entrusted with the most intimate domestic spaces of white families. Enslaved wet nurses breastfed white infants, and enslaved domestic workers cooked meals, cleaned homes, and raised children while being deemed entirely subhuman by the legal and social codes of the plantation economy. This deep contradiction is not merely historical hypocrisy; it is the genesis of a collective psychopathology that persists today. The cognitive acrobatics required to simultaneously exploit, dehumanize, and rely entirely upon Black bodies for survival and comfort bred a deep cultural psychosis across generations. Generations of white society inherited a socialized denial mechanism, projecting their own internal moral decay onto the populations they subjugated. When Paul Mooney observed that white people refuse accountability for historical atrocities while fiercely protecting inherited economic advantages, he was identifying the core preservation tactic of this pathology. It is a system designed to protect stolen wealth behind a wall of manufactured innocence. Pedagogical Fractures: Critical Implications for Education Whiteness studies in education reveal that traditional curricula function primarily as protective shields for dominant cultural neuroses. When educational institutions sanitize history, ban critical race theory, and punish discussions of systemic racism, they are actively participating in the societal delusion Dr. Kehinde Andrews and Dr. Dante D. King diagnose. Classrooms become theaters of disassociation where students are taught to view racism as individual interpersonal meanness rather than an engineered structural reality. For Black educators navigating this landscape, the challenge is twofold. We must dismantle the gaslighting embedded in standard textbooks while surviving hostile institutional environments that penalize truth telling. Education Is Elevation requires us to break the silence, moving beyond the superficial diversity workshops that treat equity as a branding exercise. We must equip students with the linguistic and analytical tools to diagnose institutional pathologies rather than internalizing the systemic dysfunctions thrust upon them. Intersectional Collateral: Material Realities of Racialized Power The psychological dysfunctions of whiteness are never abstract; they translate directly into devastating material impacts across intersecting vectors of race, gender, and class. When white psychopathology operates as a socially sanctioned system of power, its primary objective is resource hoarding and the maintenance of racial hierarchies. This manifests directly in housing segregation, educational funding disparities, healthcare inequities, and the deliberate dismantling of social safety nets whenever Black and brown communities begin to achieve generational stability. Consider the racial wealth gap, which functions as the material legacy of historical plunder. The refusal to acknowledge systemic theft ensures that contemporary economic policies continue to favor white asset accumulation while penalizing Black labor. Furthermore, this pathology weaponizes state apparatuses, such as policing and child welfare systems, to police Black families under the guise of protection, mirroring the exact domestic surveillance and control mechanisms of the antebellum era. The material impact is a continuous cycle of extraction where Black communities are forced to constantly rebuild from manufactured crises while structural whiteness insulates itself from accountability. Education As Elevation: The Classroom as a Site of Diagnosis and Resistance The classroom is ground zero for this psychopathology. Education shapes culture. Institutional policies and practices shape culture. In today’s sociopolitical climate where concepts like Critical Race Theory, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, and intersectionality dominate public discourse, we must offer a critical lens to examine how the American legal system has codified White supremacy, anti-non-Whiteness, and anti-Blackness. Dr. Cheryl E. Matias argues that discussing race and racism often conjures up emotions of guilt, shame, anger, defensiveness, denial, sadness, dissonance, and discomfort. Instead of suppressing those feelings, coined emotionalities of whiteness, they are, nonetheless, important to identify, understand, and deconstruct if one ever hopes to fully commit to racial equity. The work delves deeper into these white emotionali

  2. 2d ago

    The Sandinista Revolution Just Exposed Your Socialist Fantasy

    I want to start with the sentence I said on that stage, because it is the whole argument and I said it almost by accident. I said there are certain communities that is always already viewed as being classless. Sit with that. Not poor. Not working class. Not lumpen. Classless. Outside the ledger entirely. Because a class analysis is a counting exercise before it is anything else, and if your state never counted us, then every program built on that count arrives at a house it does not have the address for. That is not a critique of the left. That is a critique of the arithmetic the left inherited and never audited. Here is how I got there. I was on stage with a sister whose family is Nicaraguan, born and raised in Florida, and the whole time growing up she heard the word socialism land in her community like a slur and a wound at the same time. She named Venezuela. She named Cuba. She named Nicaragua. And then she said the thing that made the room get quiet: it was a bloody, bloody civil war, it was brother against brother, and it cracked our families open. Then she said the part that a whole lot of y’all online need tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. She said when y’all playing y’all little fantasy, utopian games about socialism, there is real people. She said what y’all learned in theory, we lived. Now, before I go one inch further, let me clear something up, because the framing of this conversation keeps getting geography wrong and precision is not a vibe, precision is a discipline. Nicaragua is in Central America. Cuba is in the Caribbean. Venezuela is in South America. When we say “the left in Latin America” we are collapsing three different colonial histories, three different racial regimes, and three different relationships to the United States into one word, and the collapsing is itself part of the problem I am about to describe. So I am going to say the Americas. Hemispheric. Because the border between what happened in Bluefields and what happened in South Central is thinner than your passport suggests. And that is the second half of what I said on that stage. I told her: between us two, we got two communities that has been impacted by American imperialism. Iran Contra is the hinge. The United States government decided that Black people’s livelihood in this country was worth less than defeating a leftist government in Central America. That is not a metaphor. That is a budget line and a court docket, and I am going to walk you through both. But I am not going to let the American receipts do all the work, because that would be too easy and it would let a whole lot of people off the hook. The harder question, the one that actually makes this piece worth your time, is this one. What happened to Black people inside the revolution? Not before it. Not after the empire crushed it. Inside it. Because here is what nobody wants to say out loud. Nicaragua has a Black population. It has had one for centuries. English speaking, Moravian, Caribbean facing, and concentrated on a coast that the Spanish speaking Pacific side of the country did not govern until 1894. And when the revolution came in 1979 with a program to redistribute land and teach the whole country to read, the Black and Indigenous coast experienced that program as an arrival, not a liberation. Not because they loved Somoza. Because a state that had annexed them in 1894 was now showing up in 1980 with a plan they had not been asked about. Two things can be true. The revolution was real and the exclusion was real. Hold both. If you can only hold one you are not doing analysis, you are doing fandom. BEFORE THERE WAS A REVOLUTION THERE WAS A FILIBUSTER Let me give you the historical context, because most people come into the Nicaragua conversation at 1979 and that is like coming into a movie at the third act and arguing about the ending. In 1855 a lawyer and newspaperman from Tennessee named William Walker sailed to Nicaragua with about sixty men. By 1856 he had made himself president of the country. The Franklin Pierce administration recognized his government. And on the twenty second of September, 1856, William Walker issued a decree reinstating slavery in Nicaragua. Read that again. Slavery had been abolished across the Federal Republic of Central America in 1824, thirty two years earlier, four decades before the Thirteenth Amendment. An American went down there and brought it back. Not as an accident, as policy, because his project required a slaveholding Central America integrated into the American South. So the first significant American intervention in Nicaragua was a slavery restoration project. That is not a footnote. That is the foundation. Every conversation about socialism in that country sits on top of a memory of a white American who showed up with an army and reinstalled the auction block. When the sister on that stage talked about political trauma, this is how deep the sediment goes. Then came the Marines. The United States occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933, with a brief interruption, and out of that occupation came Augusto César Sandino, who fought the occupation from 1927 until the Marines left. Out of that same occupation came the Guardia Nacional, a national police force trained and equipped by the United States and handed to a man named Anastasio Somoza García. On the twenty first of February, 1934, Sandino was assassinated after leaving a dinner. Somoza took the country and his family held it for more than four decades. So when the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional took Managua on the nineteenth of July, 1979, they were not overthrowing a homegrown tyrant. They were overthrowing a dynasty that the United States built, trained, armed, and named. Just admit that part. You cannot understand why a generation of people in that country called themselves socialists without understanding that the alternative had an American return address on it. BROTHER AGAINST BROTHER HAD A GEOGRAPHY She said brother against brother. She said it cracked our families open. She is right and I want to give that sentence a map, because in the Nicaraguan case the crack ran along the coast. The Sandinista government arrived on the Caribbean Coast with a nationalization program, a literacy program, and a theory of national unity. The coastal organizations, chiefly MISURASATA, which brought together Miskitu, Sumu, and Rama with the Sandinista front in its very acronym, wanted land and self government. The government read those demands as separatism. By 1981 leaders were being arrested. By December of 1981, in the aftermath of the operation the government called Navidad Roja, Red Christmas, the state decided to empty the Río Coco. Between the first of January and the twentieth of February, 1982, roughly eight thousand five hundred people were marched or trucked out of forty two villages along that river to five settlements about sixty kilometers south, a resettlement zone the government named Tasba Pri, which means Free Land in Miskitu. Roughly half the region’s population crossed into Honduras instead. Homes were destroyed. Livestock was lost. The Inter American Commission on Human Rights documented all of it, including the killings at Leimus and San Carlos, in a country report that remains on the record. Now here is where it gets uncomfortable for everybody. A significant number of Miskitu people took up arms with the contras. The same contras funded by the same Reagan administration that was, at that exact moment, presiding over the conditions that produced the crack economy in Black American neighborhoods. So the Indigenous people fleeing a socialist state’s forced relocation ended up in a coalition with an American proxy army, and the Black people in Los Angeles ended up on the receiving end of that same army’s financing network. American empire made both of those things happen and neither community chose the other as an enemy. That is what she meant by respect. That is what she meant when she said people have historical legacies and we got to know how to navigate those things. And the resolution matters, so I am going to give it to you. After the 1984 elections and two years of consultation, the National Assembly approved Law 28, the Autonomy Statute, on the seventh of September, 1987, published on the thirtieth of October. It created two autonomous regions on the Caribbean Coast, recognized communal land ownership, recognized Miskitu, Mayangna, Rama, Creole English, and Garífuna as official regional languages, and established elected regional councils. At the time it was among the most advanced legal frameworks for Indigenous and Afrodescendant rights anywhere in the hemisphere. The revolution did that. Under war conditions, under embargo, under the pressure of a shooting insurgency, that government sat down and wrote a statute that gave up centralized power. Hold that alongside Tasba Pri. Both are true. That is the whole discipline. THE CARTILLA CAME IN SPANISH AND THE COAST WAITED ITS TURN In March of 1980, eight months after taking power, the Sandinista government launched the Cruzada Nacional de Alfabetización. Around sixty thousand young brigadistas, plus tens of thousands of adults, left the cities and lived in the countryside for five months teaching people to read. Women were roughly sixty percent of the brigadistas and about half the learners. The national illiteracy rate fell from a little over fifty percent to under thirteen percent. Roughly four hundred thousand new readers. UNESCO gave Nicaragua the Nadezhda Krupskaya prize in September of 1980, and the archive of the campaign now sits on the Memory of the World register. I am not going to be cute about that. That is one of the most extraordinary educational mobilizations of the twentieth century and there is no honest way to describe it as anything less. Arnove documented it in real time and his account still holds up. Now the second fact. That crusade w

  3. 5d ago

    Switzerland Had No Colonies. That Is Exactly Why It Got Rich Off Slavery.

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Switzerland’s Neutrality Was a Front for Colonial Violence and I Have the Receipts Switzerland is famous for neutrality, chocolate, banks, but behind that peaceful facade lies the hidden truth. Switzerland never had no colonies, but yet it’s deeply entangled in colonization. Since the 16th century, that’s the 1500s for all that don’t know, Swiss citizens were everywhere in the colonial system, with over 250 Swiss companies and individuals participating in the chancellery slave trade, deporting more than 170,000 enslaved Africans. As somebody with a degree in African-American studies, walking through the beautiful city of Geneva, Switzerland, I was constantly reminded of Dr. Walter Rodney’s book, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is a 1972 historical and political book by Guyanese scholar Walter Rodney who masterfully argued Europe actively impoverished the African continent through centuries of slavery and colonial exploitation thats well cited with much documentation. A country known for the Swiss chocolate stamp produces no cocoa plants. Swiss merchants grew rich on colonial commodities like cocoa, coffee, cotton, built the nation’s chocolate industry and banking sector, while Swiss mercenaries fought brutal campaigns, y’all. So when I’m hearing about universal human rights or civil society, I’m thinking, what did that mean for neutrality in terms of colonial violence and how one could be implicated? I got a lot of homeboys, a lot of family members locked up for being accessories to crime because the judge said you were in proximity when the crime was being committed, therefore you are guilty. And when it comes to Switzerland’s neutrality, I think you’re a spectator at the lynching. So how did the neutrality enable this? As a historian noted, Switzerland had no colonies, which is exactly why it profited. While European powers spent a bunch of capital maintaining the empire, Switzerland stayed neutral, gaining access to all sides without cost, and its neutrality made it the hub. There have been times that Switzerland was sheltering anti colonial activists, but more often, they was providing financial dealings that profited from the exploitation of them folks.Though the Swiss government has long claimed it was never a colonial power, museums now tell a different story. One of anti indigeneity and anti blackness. That’s profiting. I call it finessing in my hood. That still shaped the legacy of global inequality, revealing that Switzerland wasn’t neutral. It was selectively complicit. Selectively complicit. And that’s what I think has been in the back of my mind. So when I see a bunch of descendants of colonial subjects coming to Europe, the pinnacle of colonialism, talking about, hey, we should just be treated better, it hit a little different. But I also know in my country, they’re trying to erase history and make sure that their atrocities is not caught in the archives. So I think that’s the value of me being here. Education Is Elevation. I can’t wait to tell y’all and reflect with y’all how much I’ve learned by being in Geneva. And I’m going to end this video on this view right here, man. Historical Context: The Architecture of Swiss Complicity The narrative of Swiss innocence has been carefully constructed, but the archival record tells a different story. From the 16th century onward, Swiss citizens embedded themselves within every facet of the colonial enterprise despite the nation never officially holding overseas territories. The transatlantic slave trade, which peaked in the 18th century, involved over 250 Swiss companies, private individuals, and even communes in the transportation and exploitation of enslaved Africans. Swiss nationals participated in deporting approximately 172,000 people, representing a significant portion of the estimated 11 to 12 million Africans transported to the Americas and Caribbean to work on plantations and in mines. The Swiss trading houses became essential intermediaries in the colonial commodity network. They traded colonial goods including silk, spices, tobacco, tea, and critically, cotton and cocoa, which would become foundational to the Swiss chocolate industry and banking sector. Swiss banks, including entities that evolved into major financial institutions, owned substantial stakes in companies like the French Compagnie des Indes, which held a monopoly over the West African slave trade, financing and doing business with slave traders. Switzerland’s lack of raw materials paradoxically drove its merchants to become leading commodity traders by the 19th century, positioning the country as a hub for colonial extraction. Swiss mercenaries served as minions, assets, tools, beneficiaries of colonial violence from the end of the 16th century, participating in European armies that undertook colonial conquests, crushed resistance movements, and maintained colonial order. Between 1815 and World War I, approximately 8,000 Swiss soldiers joined the Dutch colonial army in Indonesia, while an estimated 40,000 Swiss served in the French Foreign Legion between 1830 and 1960, fighting in North Africa and Vietnam. These soldiers were often impoverished young men from rural Switzerland, fleeing economic hardship in a country that was one of the poorest in Europe until the late 1880s. The Swiss government, ironically, even provided aid to those willing to emigrate to the Americas, facilitating the demographic pressures that drove young men into colonial militaries. Swiss missionaries accompanied the colonial expansion, opening schools and hospitals while introducing cash crops like cocoa to West Africa. The Basel Mission in Ghana introduced cacao cultivation in 1858, leading to Ghana becoming the world’s largest cocoa producer by World War I. While missionaries sometimes trained future anti colonial leaders, including Eduardo Mondlane, founder of the Mozambique Liberation Front, their work undeniably prepared the terrain for deeper colonial exploitation. The entanglement was multifaceted, involving not just economic extraction but the very production of racial knowledge. Scientists at the universities of Zurich and Geneva formulated race theories that gained international credence and helped legitimise the colonial system, participating in what the National Museum Zurich now acknowledges as “scientific racism.” Civil Society for Whom?? The UN will tell you civil society is the bridge between the global and the local, that multilateralism thrives with the active participation of civil society actors, that these organizations transform international commitments into actions that improve lives. It's all about coalition, partnership, dialogue, about citizens coming together to achieve change on particular issues, about building a more inclusive, responsive, and effective United Nations where every voice matters, especially those that challenge the system to be better. According to Afropessimism, civil society ain't even a space that includes Black folks as subjects, it's the very structure that depends on Black exclusion and death for its existence. The promises of equal access to justice and accountability are formal guarantees on paper, but the UN system was designed to block measures that would actually deliver transformative change. Some would argue this reduces the UN to mere aspirations and symbolic gestures toward racial equity that lack political will and investment from member states. So when I hear the United Nations talking about civil society, they’re talking about that third sector between government and business. Civil society is the public space where people can voluntarily associate to advance their interests and ideas, where trade unions, women's groups, religious organizations, and non-governmental organizations come together to monitor policies, provide expertise, and hold governments accountable. Most of us present are/were former colonized subjects of the countries who created this amazing council for Universal Human Rights. Frank Wilderson will tell you that civil society is the terrain where hegemony is produced and contested, but the invitation to participate in that hegemony's gestures of influence and leadership is not extended to the Black subject, we live in the world but exist outside of civil society, structurally impossible, a paradox because the Black subject is vital to civil society's political economy, kick starting capital at its genesis and rescuing it from over accumulation crisis at its end, Black death is its condition of possibility . While the UN sees civil society as a space of mediation where different groups can come together to address grievances and pursue justice, Afropessimism says civil society is predicated on a foundational partition between Blackness and non-Blackness, a monument to fundamental antagonism instead of a space of resolution. Afropessimist scholars argue Civil Society is the world where violence against Black people is not a form of discrimination but a necessary violence to forward civil society, a health tonic for everyone who is not Black. So when the UN talks about civil society participation and human rights for all, I can't help but think about what that actually means for descendants of enslaved Africans who built the wealth that made these institutions possible in the first place, because civil society according to Afropessimism is not a space where Black suffering can be articulated or mediated, it's the very apparatus that makes that suffering illegible and irreparable, forever asking us to mourn within a symbolic order that was never designed to account for our grief . Selective Complicity: The Neutrality Paradox Switzerland’s neutrality was not a moral position, but a stra

  4. Aug 21

    bell hooks Warned Y'all About Liberalism and Nobody Listened

    Now, bell hooks was a sharp, consistent critic of liberalism, and she was that critic for forty years, across nearly forty books, from Ain’t I a Woman in 1981 all the way to the last essays she published in Berea, Kentucky, before she died in December of 2021. She argued that its core principles was inadequate to achieving genuine liberation because she understood they failed to address the intersecting systems of what she named white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, and when she was feeling especially precise about it she said imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, because she wanted the foreign policy in the sentence too. Most of y’all encountered that phrase on a tote bag. Most of y’all encountered that phrase as a caption. Most of y’all have never sat with the fact that she built it as a diagnostic instrument, not a slogan, and that the whole point of stacking those four words together was that you cannot pull one out and treat it separately, because the moment you treat racism as a separate problem from capitalism you get a solution that hires Black managers, and the moment you treat patriarchy as a separate problem from white supremacy you get a feminism that pays a Black woman eleven dollars an hour to watch the children while the movement goes to the conference. So let’s do this right. Let’s put her four arguments on the table, and then let’s put a receipt under each one, because the tenth of nothing is still nothing, and theory without an archive is just vibes with footnotes. Tomorrow, August 22, 2026, is the thirtieth anniversary of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, Public Law 104 193. A Democratic president signed it. A Republican Congress wrote it. It was sold as compassion. It has a thirty year record now. And that record is the single best piece of evidence for everything bell hooks was saying while people were calling her too radical, too angry, and not constructive enough. Let’s get into it. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Argument One: Liberal Democracy as Mystification Hooks argued that liberal democracy operates as an ideological smokescreen that obscures the reality of systemic oppression. Rather than a system of liberty and justice for all, she contended that white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has a standing preference in favor of certain races, certain classes, and certain genders, and that this preference is maintained by structural violence, which is a fancy way of saying people die on schedule and nobody gets charged. For hooks, liberalism is a reformist political framework focused on legal rights, equal opportunity, and inclusion within existing arrangements. The goal is getting a seat at the table. We’re talking voting, desegregation, equal pay, all that. The flaw, according to bell hooks, is that it mistakes legal inclusion for liberation. It does not challenge the fundamental structure of capitalism or any other system at all. It just wants those systems to move slightly fairer. Here is where the archive backs her up so hard it hurts. In 1935, this country passed the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act in the same window. That is the founding architecture of the American social safety net and the American labor movement, and it is correctly remembered as one of the most significant expansions of economic security in the history of the republic. It is also correctly remembered, if you actually read it, as a piece of legislation that excluded agricultural workers and domestic workers from old age insurance, from unemployment insurance, and from the right to organize. Now, who was the agricultural workers. Who was the domestic workers. Ira Katznelson, in When Affirmative Action Was White, does the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says roughly sixty five percent of Black workers nationally fell into those two excluded categories, and in the South the share ran higher than that. There is no race in the statute. There is no slur in the statute. The statute is race neutral on its face and it is a racial policy in its effect, and the reason it was written that way is that Southern Democrats controlled the committees and told Roosevelt what the price of their votes was. That is mystification. That is exactly what hooks meant. The bill says universal. The bill does universal for some. The word “universal” then goes on to do political work for the next ninety years, because every time a Black person says the safety net was not built for us, somebody pulls up the 1935 statute and says look, it applies to everybody. Apply Melamed here. Melamed’s argument in Represent and Destroy is that formally antiracist and formally inclusive frameworks do not simply fail to stop racial capitalism. They become the thing that makes racial capitalism legible as fair. The 1935 statute is the first great American demonstration. The bill says universal. The economy needs somebody outside the bill picking the crop and cleaning the kitchen. And once the word universal is on the page, the explanation for why that somebody stays poor gets assigned, in advance, to their family, their habits, and their morals, rather than to the committee chairman who wrote the exemption in exchange for his vote. That is the move underneath all four of hooks’s arguments. Once the state can point to a universal statute, a desegregation ruling, or a diversity officer, it has purchased the right to describe every remaining disparity as a private failure of the people still on the bottom. The inclusion is not a broken promise. The inclusion is the receipt. That is why hooks would not accept “we’re making progress” as an answer, and that is why she got called difficult. Argument Two: Liberal Individualism as the Lost in the Sauce Machine Number two, the OG bell contended that liberal individualism was a flaw. She specifically criticized the ideology of competitive, antagonistic liberal individualism as something I would call lost in the sauce, and I’ll go a step farther and say a lot of y’all are lost in it right now. Hooks argued that it created a shallow common oppression narrative that ignores the differences and the intricacies, and that power and privilege allow a lot of y’all to mystify. See, OG bell was arguing that this selfish prioritization of the individual undermines the collective solidarity that’s needed for radical change. As a matter of fact, some of y’all heard it. I don’t care what’s happening structurally with my tax dollars, as long as my grandma get her insulin. You feel me? You have to be able to understand how the individual suffering falls into the collective always already, and because they’re able to use your tax dollars to blow them up over there, your granny probably will never get the insulin. You see what I’m saying? You got to have the collective consciousness. Let me put a whole legal chain under that, because this is the part where people think I’m being dramatic. Between 1968 and 1971, poor Black women and their lawyers ran one of the most successful litigation campaigns in American history, and almost nobody knows their names. King v. Smith, 392 U.S. 309 (1968). Alabama had a substitute father rule. If a caseworker decided a man was in the house, the children lost benefits, and the caseworker got to decide. Mrs. Sylvester Smith sued. The Supreme Court struck the rule down unanimously. Shapiro v. Thompson, 394 U.S. 618 (1969). States were imposing one year residency requirements to keep poor people from moving in. Struck down. Goldberg v. Kelly, 397 U.S. 254 (1970). You cannot terminate somebody’s benefits without a hearing first. Due process attaches to welfare. That case is now in every administrative law casebook in the country. Individual rights. Individual dignity. Real wins. I am not dismissing a single one of them. Now watch what happened in the same window. Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970). Maryland capped the total grant per family regardless of family size, so the sixth child got nothing. The Court upheld it. Rational basis. Economic and social welfare legislation gets the lowest level of scrutiny. Wyman v. James, 400 U.S. 309 (1971). A caseworker can come into your home. It is not a search under the Fourth Amendment, the Court said, because you can always refuse and just lose your benefits. You see the shape of it? The rights framework won you the hearing and lost you the money. It won you procedure and lost you substance. The state could not throw you off the rolls without a letter, but the state could set the grant so low that the letter did not matter, and the state could walk through your bedroom while you were on it. That is what hooks meant when she said liberalism mistakes legal inclusion for liberation. The individual got a right. The class got a ceiling. And because we had been trained to celebrate the individual win, a whole lot of people read that decade as progress and never looked at the ledger. Just admit it. Two things can be true. Goldberg v. Kelly is a genuine victory and the material position of poor Black mothers got worse across the exact same period. Holding both of those is not cynicism. That is literacy. Argument Three: Reform That Served White Women First Number three, bell hooks argued that liberal feminism was inadequate. She understood that it was too focused on reform and that it primarily benefited and privileged white women. She saw it as acceptance within a structure rather than a demand for fundamental change. I would say a lot of y’all want to conserve your individual comfort at the expense of the collective because you worked so hard to get there. See, that’s how capitalism has hoodwinked and bamboozled you into being a self centered, selfish b*****d in many instances, because as long as you got yours, righ

  5. Aug 20

    Y'all Keep Saying "We The Real Indians." A Jamaican Professor Just Gave You a Better Argument.

    Thank you Mandy Ohman, OnyxRose💛🤍💜🖤🏳️‍⚧️, Mary Elizabeth, KATIE FULLER, PhD, Aimee Chamernik, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Every time I put out a video about indigeneity, my comment section fill up with the same energy. All of my aboriginals. All of my we was the real Indian. All of y’all still commenting on that video of me waxing buddy. I see y’all, and I am not here to dunk on you today, because underneath that comment is a real wound and a real question, and the wound is legitimate even when the answer y’all reaching for is not. The question underneath is this. If everybody else got a homeland, a language, a cosmology, and a set of grandparents who can tell you which village the family come from, then what do the descendants of enslaved Africans got? What is ours? Where did it come from? Who can say it belong to us? On Wednesday, August 19th, I sat down with Dr. Catherine A. John, who is a professor and the chair of Africana Studies at the University of Rhode Island, who used to teach at the University of Oklahoma, who let a 21 year old George Lee come into her hip hop class and teach, and who has just published a book with Duke University Press called Afroindigenization: A Theory of Grassroots Cultural Practice. It drops August 25th. Rashid Campbell was on the livestream, better known as Perfect Prophet, my debate partner, the first African American to ever win top speaker at the National Debate Tournament. The cover artist Ire Asojo was on the call too. And the last chapter of that book, chapter 4, is called “Enter the Dragons of Debate: Rashid Campbell and George Lee’s 2014 Run.” So yeah, I got a horse in this race. Let me be transparent about that up front and then let me do what I always do, which is bring the receipts and let the argument stand on its own legs. Because Dr. John is not answering that comment section question the way most people answer it. Most people answer it with a claim. We was here first. We the real Indians. Dr. John answers it with a mechanism, and a mechanism is worth more than a claim, every single time. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. SAME SHIPS, DIFFERENT STOPS Dr. John opened with a number, and I want y’all to sit with the number before we get to the theory, because the number is the foundation and most of us walking around with the foundation wrong. Of the roughly 12.5 million Africans forced onto ships in the transatlantic trade between the early 1500s and 1866, about 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage and disembarked in the Americas. Brazil received somewhere around 4.8 to 4.9 million of them. The Caribbean received somewhere in the range of 4.1 to 4.7 million. Mainland North America, which is to say the place that became these United States, received roughly 388,000 directly. That is less than 4 percent. The Caribbean and South America together took about 95 percent of everybody who arrived. Read that again. Less than 4 percent. Now here is the part where Dr. John quoted her elder, Professor Erna Brodber of Woodside, St. Mary Parish, Jamaica, and Erna Brodber gave us the line that reorganizes the whole thing. Same ships, different stops. A vessel leave the coast of what we now call Sierra Leone. It stop in Charleston. It go back. It stop in Galveston. It go back. It stop in Port au Prince. It go back. It stop in Kingston. It go back. It stop in Trinidad. Same hold. Same crew. Same ledger. Different port of sale. Most of us was raised on a version of Black history where the story starts in Virginia in 1619 and stays there, and everything that happened in Kingston or Salvador or Cap Haïtien is somebody else’s business, some kind of foreign Black story that we watch on a documentary. Dr. John’s whole career, going back to her first book Clear Word and Third Sight, has been an argument against that parochialism. What she calls civilizational similarities sitting underneath cultural differences. The patty in Kingston and the hot water cornbread in Bryan, Texas are not the same food, and they are not unrelated food either. That is the marasa trois again. Neither one, neither two, the third thing. Crazy how the smallest stop on the route became the loudest voice in the diaspora, and then used that volume to forget the other stops existed. THE RETENTION FIGHT AND WHY SCHOLARS WALKED AWAY FROM THE WORD Dr. John said something on that live stream that a lot of y’all scrolled right past. She said scholars don’t like to use the word retentions anymore, because they saying it is much more than just a few retentions. Let me tell you what she was gesturing at, because this is a hundred year old fight and it is not settled and it is the exact fight that produced the department Northwestern just gutted. In 1941, Melville Herskovits published The Myth of the Negro Past. Herskovits was a white Jewish anthropologist trained under Boas at Columbia who did fieldwork in Suriname, Dahomey, Haiti, Trinidad, and Brazil, and his thesis was that the myth to be destroyed was the idea that enslavement burned everything African out of Black people in the Americas. He went looking for what he called survivals and retentions. Music, kinship, religion, motor habits, speech patterns. E. Franklin Frazier, the most prominent Black sociologist alive at the time, went at him. Frazier had just published The Negro Family in the United States, and Frazier’s position was that the Middle Passage and the plantation had in fact been that total, that the Black family and Black culture in America was made in America under American conditions, and that the search for Dahomey in Harlem was a distraction from the political economy of the present. Gunnar Myrdal was skeptical of Herskovits too. Ralph Bunche quoted Myrdal saying Herskovits sees everything in the light of African inheritance. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, on the other hand, praised the effort, which is its own kind of irony given that Herskovits privately dismissed both Woodson and Du Bois as propagandists because their scholarship had a social reform orientation. Sit with that one. The white anthropologist who built his career proving that Black culture was African called the two Black men who founded the study of Black history propagandists. Every accusation is a confession. Then in 1948, with a three year grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Herskovits gathered the Africa related courses Northwestern had been offering since the 1930s into the first interdisciplinary Program of African Studies in the United States. In 1954 the Herskovits Library of African Studies opened, and it is to this day the largest separate Africana collection in the world, over 260,000 bound volumes, 15,000 books in around 300 African languages. In 1957 he founded the African Studies Association and served as its first president. In 1961 Northwestern named him to the first chair of African Studies in the country. Hold that. We coming back to it. So why did the field walk away from the word retention? Because retention is an accounting word. Retention implies a fixed original quantity, a percentage lost in transit, and a remainder you can count on the receiving end. Retention treats culture like cargo. It also, and this is the part that matters, positions the scholar as the auditor who tells Black people what percentage of Africa they still own. Dr. John’s move is to change the verb. Not what did we retain. What did we do. Afroindigenize is a verb before it is a noun. Her formulation on the live stream was that we took what we had inside ourselves, wherever that came from, and used it as the fuel to transform whatever we needed to transform. That is not an inventory. That is a technology. THE QUIET WAS NEVER EMPTY I want to end where the stream started, with the artist, because Ire Asojo said something that is doing more theoretical work than most people caught. Ire made that cover through copper plate etching, which is iterative by nature, you work through version after version to arrive at an image, and then collaged it with paper made from different fiber and bark that she hand dyed. Dr. John asked her to evoke calm and mystery. Then she added joy. Ire said joy is not always something that comes naturally in her work, and that when she thought about the passages of the book, she kept noticing how often joy sits in relationship to oppressive systems, so she went looking for the subtle forms of joy that a person can experience daily. Quiet forms of joy. Her imagery pulls from trees, roots, water, and dirt, because the connection between the body and the land is both metaphorical and physical, and because that relationship has been estranged through violence, which raises the question of how reclamation happens through that estrangement rather than around it. Kevin Quashie wrote a whole book called The Sovereignty of Quiet arguing that Black expressive culture has been read almost exclusively through resistance, so that everything a Black person does gets converted into a public political statement, and that this reading, however sympathetic, leaves no room for an interior life. Quashie’s quiet is not silence and it is not passivity. Quiet is the inner life that is not performing for anybody, including for the people who are rooting for you. Apply Quashie to the elders of Woodside and it clicks. They did not withhold the mermaid stories as an act of resistance. They withheld them because those stories were not for public display. There is a difference between a secret and a private thing, and the entire discipline of anthropology was built on refusing to learn it. Apply Quashie to Aretha in that church in 1972 and it clicks again. Nobody in that room was making a statement. They were being restored. And apply Quashie to the book cover. A

  6. Aug 18

    Justice Sensitivity in ADHD: The Hidden Burden No One Talks About

    The Weight of Unfairness: Understanding ADHD Justice Sensitivity Through a Critical Lens ADHD is correlated with justice sensitivity. We have a hard time getting over something being unjust. We feel things strongly. We have a hard time with emotional regulation. We also absorb information like a fire hose, news, data, you name it. Studies have found that ADHD individuals, especially those who have an intuitive type, are much more likely to be justice sensitive than those without ADHD. In fact, researchers found that people who have ADHD feel such a strong need to restore justice that they will take action to do so even if they hurt themselves in the long run. There may be several possible reasons for this. As somebody who was diagnosed with ADHD and now I have kids that also have ADHD, I can definitely tell y’all there is something innate about this justice sensitivity because if we feel like you playing with us or playing somebody around us or insulting the antennas of somebody where it’s done in a way it’s unjust, finally, there is a personal experience. Growing up in a world not made for ADHD brains creates many repeated injustices that create a particular sensitivity. Every time you’re misunderstood, it kicks the area of injustice which makes it much more sensitive to any of the injustice that you encounter because you always already do soup because. Simply put, I’m exploring the intersection of ADHD justice sensitivity with historical context, educational implications, and material impacts, arguing that this trait is not merely a psychological quirk but a deeply rooted response to systemic oppression that deserves serious scholarly attention and practical accommodation. Historical Context: The Long Shadow of Injustice To understand the profound justice sensitivity experienced by those with ADHD, we must situate it within a broader historical framework of systemic injustice and the struggle for recognition. The ADHD brain’s heightened response to unfairness does not emerge in a vacuum but interacts with and is shaped by historical patterns of marginalization, exclusion, and resistance. Historically, the concept of neurodivergence has been pathologized and weaponized against marginalized communities, particularly Black and brown people. The framing of certain behaviors as deviant, disruptive, or deficient has served as a tool of social control, justifying exclusionary practices in education, employment, and community life. This is not a new phenomenon. The history of race, disability, and justice in the United States reveals that what is deemed “normal” or “acceptable” behavior has consistently been defined along racial and class lines. Consider the ways in which Black children have been disproportionately labeled as having behavioral disorders while their white counterparts receive ADHD diagnoses and accommodations. This disparity reflects a deeper historical pattern where the behaviors of Black children are read as threatening or defiant rather than as symptoms of a neurodevelopmental condition requiring support. The justice sensitivity of the ADHD brain thus becomes not just a reaction to immediate unfairness but a recognition of a historical inheritance of being misunderstood, misdiagnosed, and marginalized. The repeated injustices that those with ADHD face growing up in a world not made for their brains are compounded for those who also navigate racism, classism, and other forms of oppression. Every time you are misunderstood, whether by a teacher who sees your forgetfulness as laziness or a boss who reads your impulsivity as incompetence, you are encountering a system that was not designed for you. This is not simply a personal frustration but a reflection of historical patterns of exclusion and the ongoing struggle for dignity and recognition. Classrooms as Battlegrounds For those with ADHD, the classroom is often the first site of repeated injustices, a place where the mismatch between neurodivergent brains and neurotypical expectations becomes painfully clear. Research has consistently shown that students with ADHD experience their classrooms as less just than their peers do. This perception is not merely subjective but reflects real differences in how they are treated, disciplined, and supported. Students with ADHD are more likely to be disciplined, suspended, and expelled than their neurotypical peers. They are less likely to receive appropriate accommodations, even when legally mandated. Their behaviors are more likely to be interpreted as willful defiance rather than as manifestations of a disability. This creates a cycle of injustice that begins early and compounds over time. When a student is consistently misunderstood, punished for behaviors they cannot control, and denied the support they need, they develop a heightened sensitivity to injustice that is entirely justified by their lived experience. The educational system’s failure to accommodate ADHD students is not merely an oversight but reflects a deeper ideological commitment to standardization and conformity. Schools are designed for the mythical average student, the one who can sit still, pay attention, and follow rules without question. Those who cannot meet these expectations are labeled as problems to be fixed rather than as individuals with different needs and strengths. For Black students with ADHD, this injustice is compounded by racism. Research documents how Black students are less likely to be accurately identified with ADHD and more likely to be disciplined for the same behaviors that would earn their white peers a diagnosis and support. This disparity reflects the intersection of ableism and racism, where Black neurodivergent students are doubly marginalized and doubly misunderstood. The implications for education are profound. If we are serious about educational equity, we must confront the ways in which our educational systems pathologize difference and punish those who do not conform. This requires not just better training for teachers or more inclusive policies but a fundamental rethinking of what we mean by education, success, and belonging. We must recognize that the justice sensitivity of ADHD students is not a pathology to be treated but a reasonable response to an unjust system. The Intersectional Material Weight of Misunderstanding Justice sensitivity is not an abstract concept but has concrete, material consequences for those with ADHD, particularly those who navigate multiple marginalized identities. The emotional and cognitive energy expended on processing injustice takes a real toll, affecting mental health, physical well-being, and material outcomes. Studies have found that the link between ADHD symptoms and mental health challenges is partially mediated by justice sensitivity and rejection sensitivity. In other words, it is not just the symptoms of ADHD themselves that cause distress but the repeated experiences of being misunderstood, rejected, and treated unfairly. This can lead to anxiety, depression, and a sense of hopelessness that compounds the challenges of living with ADHD. The material impacts extend beyond mental health. People with ADHD are more likely to experience financial instability, unemployment, and housing insecurity. This is not because of any inherent deficiency but because they are navigating systems that were not designed for them. The emotional labor of constantly advocating for oneself, explaining one’s needs, and fighting against misunderstanding is exhausting and takes time and energy that could be spent on more productive pursuits. For Black people with ADHD, these material impacts are even more severe. They are navigating not just ableism but racism, facing discrimination in employment, housing, and healthcare that is compounded by their neurodivergence. They are more likely to be criminalized for their behaviors and to encounter the criminal justice system, where their ADHD traits are read as defiance or threat rather than as symptoms requiring support. The material weight of misunderstanding is heavy. It is the weight of being told you are lazy when you are struggling to focus. It is the weight of being accused of not caring when you are trying your hardest. It is the weight of being punished for behaviors you cannot control and then being blamed for the punishment. This weight accumulates over time, creating a cumulative burden that shapes life outcomes in profound ways. Key Takeaways * Justice sensitivity is a recognized feature of ADHD, with research consistently finding that individuals with ADHD experience higher levels of victim justice sensitivity than those without the condition, a response rooted in lived experience and systemic misunderstanding. * Repeated experiences of injustice in educational and social settings create a heightened sensitivity to unfairness, with every new instance of being misunderstood reinforcing the neural pathways associated with detecting injustice. * The classroom is a primary site of injustice for ADHD students, who are more likely to be disciplined, suspended, and expelled while being less likely to receive appropriate accommodations and support. * Intersecting identities compound the injustice, as Black and brown students with ADHD face the double burden of racism and ableism, being less likely to be accurately diagnosed and more likely to be criminalized for their behaviors. * Addressing justice sensitivity requires systemic change, not just individual coping strategies, and means fundamentally rethinking educational and social systems to accommodate neurodivergent needs. Related Readings * Bondü, R., & Esser, G. (2015). Justice and rejection sensitivity in children and adolescents with ADHD symptoms. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 24(2), 185-198. * Schäfer, T., et al. (2012). The kind nature behind the unsocial semblance: ADHD and justice sensitivity. Journal of Attention Disorders. * CHADD. (2024).

  7. Aug 16

    Your Water, Their Server: Inside Oklahoma's $50 Billion Data Center Fight

    The way we talk about data and technology as being an open frontier is still justifying abstraction of Native humanity and Native land the same way it did when it was an actual idea of a land frontier. And in most instances, there is no such thing. It is always a myth. The frontier was never a description of empty land. The frontier was a legal finding. In 1823, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, Chief Justice Marshall imported the doctrine of discovery into American property law and held that Native nations held only a right of occupancy, while ultimate title vested in the discovering sovereign. That is a court deciding, on paper, that people standing on land are not in the way of ownership because they were never owners. Terra nullius is not a geographic observation. Terra nullius is a filing status. So when somebody tells you today that a piece of land is available, ask them what document made it available. Watch how the same trick runs in 2026, in four different agencies, in four different states, in the same calendar year. Exhibit one. In the Black Hills, at Pe’ Sla, a high meadow that Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people describe as the heart of everything that is, a company moved to drill for graphite. Graphite is a critical mineral. Critical minerals go into the batteries and the chips and the cooling infrastructure that make the AI buildout physically possible. In 2016 the United States put more than two thousand acres of that area into trust for four tribes. In 2024 the federal government agreed to protect a two mile radius around a portion of it. And in February 2026 the Forest Service allowed exploration anyway, using a categorical exclusion, which is the administrative device that says a project is too small to require environmental review or public comment. A categorical exclusion is terra nullius with a form number. In late April 2026 the drilling started, and Oglala Lakota youth locked their bodies to the equipment, and the Oglala Lakota Nation Youth Council said, this is not a protest, it is the protection of our spiritual center. In May a federal district court in South Dakota ordered the company to stop, because the Forest Service had unlawfully excluded the project from environmental review and from tribal input. They won. And the reason they had to win in court instead of never being in that position is that almost all hardrock mining on public land in this country is still governed by the General Mining Act of 1872. Eighteen seventy two. Ulysses S. Grant was president. Under that statute a person can stake a claim on public land for a small fee and begin work. Exhibit two. In Pittsburg County, Oklahoma, near McAlester, an Australian company called IREN has been advancing Project Emerald, a proposed 1.2 gigawatt campus on roughly two thousand acres along Highway 69 south of Kiowa, with a figure of fifty billion dollars attached to it. In April 2026 a county review committee formally recommended tax increment finance districts tied to it. Taylor’s point about that area is the one that matters most: the land in question sits where municipal protections do not reach, so it defaults to state regulation, and the state regulation is thin to nonexistent. Her organization found that the rural water district the project would draw from was not even notified in advance. Exhibit three. Statewide, data centers in Oklahoma do not need a water permit. The director of the Oklahoma Water Resources Board said it directly, that if a data center wants to purchase water, it can do that, and it does not get a permit. There is no official count of how many are operating in the state. A development advisory firm lists fifty five facilities. None of them have applied for a water permit, because they buy from municipal or rural systems as a customer, which means the state’s own tracking of its own water has a hole in it exactly the size of the industry that is arriving. This is in a state coming off years of drought, where wheat farmers just took the worst harvest in decades. Exhibit four. The five year ad valorem exemption for manufacturers, which Oklahoma voters approved in 1985, before the commercial internet existed, now covers data centers. A definition written for factories in the Reagan administration became the door. Four agencies. Four states of the paperwork. Same finding every time: this land is available, because our file says so. Apply Voyles here. Traci Brynne Voyles studied uranium mining in Navajo country and gave us the word wastelanding. Her argument is not simply that certain places get polluted more than others. Her argument is that a place has to be rendered as waste in the mind and in the record before it can be treated as waste in practice. The wasteland is produced. It is produced through law, through survey, through economic description, through the quiet consensus that nothing of value is there and nobody of value lives there. Pollution follows the category. The category comes first. Which means the fight over a data center is never actually a fight about a building. It is a fight about a description. And the description is written years before the concrete gets poured. They Over Police You Into a Discount They justify taking over a community for a data center by devaluing the community, and they might do that based off of showing you arrest data. And you know how we going to do it? We going to over police the community to justify over criminalizing the community. And then we can say, hey, listen, developers, this piece of s**t land right here ain’t worth much, it’s a bunch of degenerates, take that s**t. That is wastelanding described by somebody who watched it happen to his own people, without the citation, before the citation. That is the whole apparatus in five sentences. Arrest data is not a measurement of a community. Arrest data is a product of a deployment decision. Where you send officers determines where you find offenses, and the record of offenses then becomes the appraisal, and the appraisal becomes the sale. So look at what the record says about Oklahoma. Black people make up roughly eight percent of Oklahoma’s population and Black women make up roughly twenty percent of the state’s incarcerated women. Native people make up roughly nine percent of the state population and Native women make up roughly thirteen percent of the women’s prison population, imprisoned at about three times the rate of white women, the highest imprisonment rate of any group of women in the state. Roughly two thirds of the women in Oklahoma prisons are mothers. When I was living in Oklahoma I was part of campaigns to bond women out for Mother’s Day and to get incarcerated mothers presents for their kids at Christmas. The women were Black and Native, and some poor white women too, shout out to y’all, you was in there. But the overrepresentation was Black and Native, in a state where we ain’t even the population. That is the ledger the developer reads. And nobody has to write a memo saying so. The devaluation is already sitting in a public database. Then comes the surveillance layer, which Taylor connected to the same fight, and this is where a lot of folks lose the thread. There is a campaign in Oklahoma City to deflock the city. Flock is a company that deploys automated license plate reader cameras as a policing tool, which in practice is continuous surveillance of an entire population’s movement. Norman rejected a Flock contract after residents pushed back on privacy grounds. Moore has it. Oklahoma City has it. Look at the demographic map of those three places and then ask the obvious question. Norman skews whiter. The places that kept the cameras get darker. Why do they get to have more surveillance? Y’all catch that. Simone Browne is the scholar for this. Browne traces surveillance in the United States back through slave passes, lantern laws, and the branded body, and argues that Blackness has functioned as a kind of prototype, that the technologies get developed and refined on the people society has already decided are legitimate to watch, and then those technologies get generalized outward to everybody. Apply Browne here and the data center stops being adjacent to the surveillance question and becomes its infrastructure. They are building surveillance and perfecting surveillance based off of surveilling particular communities, communities that are already policed, already disenfranchised, already getting messed over politically and socially and economically. And here is where Taylor’s friend Ash gets quoted, and it is the cleanest formulation in the whole transcript. When something is free, you are the product. Two things can be true. The data center takes your water and your power and your land, and the data center sells your movement back to you as a public safety service. It is extractive in multiple ways. It is not just pollution, it is extraction, and then it is sold back to you in the form of data. Taylor’s organization has a name for the full circuit. They call it the death cycle of AI. Settler Colonial Legal Trickery In July 2020 the Supreme Court decided McGirt v. Oklahoma. Justice Gorsuch, writing for a five to four majority, held that Congress never properly disestablished the Muscogee reservation, and the reasoning extended to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole reservations as well. Roughly half the land area of the state of Oklahoma was confirmed to still be Indian country. The state predicted the apocalypse. The governor claimed tens of thousands of cases would go unprosecuted. Two years later, in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, a five to four majority written by Justice Kavanaugh held that states retain concurrent criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed by non Indians against Indians in Indian country. McGirt was not overturned. McGirt was narrowed. Gorsuch dissented in terms that are worth reading in full sometime. Here is what I need you to see a

  8. Aug 15

    The Pedagogy of Resistance: Why Black Floridians Must Connect Foreign Policy to the Schoolhouse Doo

    Thank you EasyEdB, Suzie’s World, Kathryn Marsh, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I was sitting down with Angie Nixon, who is running for the United States Senate from the great state of Florida, and I started the conversation by doing two things. The first was making sure yall know who Angie Nixon is and the second was making sure yall understand what the hell the Senate even do. Because I feel like a lot of times we talk about people running for particular offices and it is like what do they do. What is the responsibility that you are campaigning for? And be clear, when I bring on any policymaker or any public figure, your opportunity in the comments section is to let them know exactly how you feel. All I ask is to keep it respectful. I am talking to a black woman so if I feel like it is some textbook mansplaining or textbook sexism, I am going to bash you out the s**t. You see what I am saying? Angie Nixon is currently a state representative in Florida House District 13 located in Jacksonville, Florida, Duval County for all of those residents and everybody that don’t know about Duval. She is a community organizer, a former union organizer, and she opened up a banned bookstore. She wants to become the next United States Senator from the state of Florida where there is the second largest population of black people, nearly 4 million black people. A lot of folks forget about that. We are still in the South. And what the United States Senate does is we put a lot of checks and balances on the president. We do a lot of confirmation, we vote yay or nay in regards to his appointments to the different agencies and things like that. We also do the same when it comes to Supreme Court justices. And as you may know, we try to write legislation on a federal level. She wants to push things like Medicare for all because medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy here in our country. And you got to think about it, literally people are dying or going bankrupt simply because they are trying to stay alive and they don’t have the money. So it is crazy right now and so she just wants to make sure that government is working for people and not against them. I asked her about data centers and she was clear. She is not supportive of them right now. There is not enough information in regards to what they do. For sure they put a strain on our infrastructure. I asked her about PAC money and she said the only PAC money that she accepts are from organizations that work in black and brown communities. She received some money from Rashida Tlaib’s Leadership PAC and she does not accept money from AIPAC and she does not accept money from corporate PACs. She also pushed back against something important because you can say you do not accept money from those folks but if you are accepting money from billionaires that contribute or start PACs you are part of the problem too. Her primary opponent is someone who is accepting money from billionaires that contribute to corporate PACs and accepts money from billionaires that are supportive of the idea which is something she just cannot rock with. She only gets money basically from regular hardworking everyday people. She believes that hardworking everyday people should shape what our communities look like and what our economies look like and therefore she is only going to be beholden to them. When I asked for specific examples of how this corruption plays out, she pointed to Unelected Ashley Moody. Ashley Moody was rewarded with this seat after she allowed 10 million of our dollars that was supposed to go towards the most medically needy kids here in the state of Florida for Medicaid. She allowed that money to be used to actually defeat two ballot initiatives that citizens put on the ballot here in the state of Florida. One would have allowed for recreational marijuana which we could have taxed to allow that revenue to actually go towards public schools or whatever it was that we wanted, maybe early childhood education. The second ballot initiative was getting political interference out of a woman’s right to choose. When she became the U.S. Senator, she decided to vote to end the ACA subsidies and the Affordable Care Act subsidies. Here in the state of Florida we are the number one enrollees on the marketplace. That knocked off basically 300,000 or so folks off of the ACA marketplace here in the state of Florida because they could no longer afford it. It also caused many of our private health insurance premiums to go up. She did this because she received money from healthcare companies and health insurance companies. It is really important to just really follow the money. I also think it is important to know that here in the state of Florida Ron DeSantis did a really expensive political stunt when he was running for president. He opened up Alligator Alcatraz, which we like to refer to as the Everglades Detention Center. He offered no big contracts for Donald Trump’s campaign. The money that they used was our taxpayer dollars that were supposed to go towards ensuring that we had adequate infrastructure in times of natural disasters. They were trying to get reimbursed from FEMA and what we heard was there was a little back and forth and they told them no they were not going to get that money because it became this big spectacle. That is the problem with big money in politics. Not only do I want to overturn Citizens United but I also want to decrease the amount of campaign donations people can have in the first place. I believe that a custodian or a school bus driver should have the same amount of financial influence on a campaign as a billionaire has. I asked her about the impeachment process specifically because the first time Trump was in office he got impeached twice but he didn’t get out of office. From my understanding of the policymaking process that is where the Senate was supposed to come in. The Congress vote to impeach him, they go through those trials and the fact finding and then the Senate vote to remove him. The problem is we didn’t have enough senators with the backbone to actually remove him. Her primary opponent is going around saying that he stood up to Donald Trump before and thank you for that. However he is now saying people asked him will he vote to remove Donald Trump and he said he needs to make sure he has all the information and do the research. Sir, it is right there. He has committed so many impeachable offenses. He has called for the assassination, he has threatened judicial Supreme Court justices, he has usurped power that is supposed to be in the hands of congressional members and senators. He has done so much stuff and so much corruption. It is all there. No one has to worry about whether or not Angie Nixon will vote to remove him because she in fact will. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Schoolhouse Door and the War Chest: Education Policy as Foreign Policy Now let’s get into a little policy. I happen to have a background in education. I have a passion for education. I have a master’s degree in adult and higher education. I know right now our country is experiencing a great assault on higher education and K through 12. As Senator, what type of policies would she put forward specifically in terms of pushing back against project 2025 and more importantly the funding they are taking away? She wants to end for profit prisons and the reason she wants to end for profit prisons is because they are incentivizing people to push our children into the school to prison pipeline instead of educating them at an adequate rate. She lost her cousins, two of them, to the school to prison pipeline and they are now dead as well, killed, even after going to jail and all the things. It is important that we get that WWE lady on up out of the Department of Education because how dare you allow someone who oversaw folks fighting gladiator style to be over the Department of Education. We need to make sure that we are fully funding public education, not allowing these for profit corporate schools that actually oftentimes move to our communities to get money and then send our children back because they can discriminate against them based on their hair, based on disciplinary issues, whatever. They are sending them back behind one or two years behind. Public money should be going towards public schools unless a child has a disability or is in a really low income area. We should not be subsidizing billionaires and millionaires children’s education. We need to make sure that we are teaching true and accurate history. That is not happening in the state of Florida. Florida is ground zero for bad bills that have crossed across the country and then become federalized. We need to be teaching true and accurate history. We also need to be petty just as Donald Trump is when we take back the House and Senate. We need to hold up funding to some of these southern states or any state that decides they do not want to teach true and accurate history. The state of Florida is one of the largest public school systems in the country and our teachers get paid the least. We are the bottom, the 50th in the nation. Teachers need at a minimum all across this country to be getting $65,000 a year minimum. We need to make sure that we are fully funding childcare. She believes we need universal childcare so that we can start that foundation. For every $1 we spend, that puts $3 back into the economy. She believes in free public college or if folks do not want to go that route, we should have programs where we can provide them with trades, a certification. We need to make sure that we are producing the best and brightest and the folks who are actually going to help keep our economy going. She is fully supportive of more mental hea

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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    The Conscious Lee
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    132
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation