Education is Elevation

The Conscious Lee

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

  1. 1d ago

    "Pattern Recognition" Is Just Racism With a Spreadsheet | Loomer, the EEOC, and the Ledger They Burned

    Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 5 Key Takeaways * “Pattern recognition” is an 1896 technology, not a 2026 one. Frederick Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies used post 1890 census data to turn the effects of racist law into a “fact” about Black people. Loomer’s line (”some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition”) is that book in one sentence. The pattern is always built by the people citing it. * Race is legible for injury and illegible for remedy. On July 21, 2026, Trump’s EEOC voted 2 to 1 to eliminate the EEO1 through EEO6 reports, the only routine federal count of race and sex in the workplace. Five weeks later a presidential advisor listed seven Black women by race and sex and called them ghetto b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s. They just voted to stop counting who to pay. * The outrage is not about antisemitism, it’s about 2024. A bipartisan resolution, a New York Times op ed, and a demand for a floor vote on Hasan Piker, a streamer in nobody’s administration. No statement from Josh Gottheimer on Laura Loomer. The resolution is Democratic resentment toward the pro Palestine left with a bill number. * “Slavery predates capitalism” is fire predating the arsonist. Nobody said capitalism invented slavery. Marx (Capital ch. 31), Williams (1944), Du Bois (1935), and Robinson (1983) said capitalism turned African chattel slavery into the founding stone of a continental economy. Foster and Loomer did the same thing: detach the record from the concept, then declare the concept clean. * Blame runs to the people with the power. No leftist set the campaign budget, canceled the primary, or refused the Palestinian speaker at the DNC. Either the leftists had the power to decide the election (so their position was popular) or they didn’t (so they aren’t to blame). It’s hot or it’s cold. It can’t be warm. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Colorblind When You Ask for Justice, 20/20 Vision When They Want to Insult You Hey, the Chop Up Show was just me and Domo this week, Toya getting her internet fixed, and y’all know when it’s the two of us we ain’t going nowhere fast. For the folks that’s not that familiar, me and Domo come from a policy debate background, we are very well polished in the policymaking process, and we happen to know a theory or ten when it comes to how the world works and how values get inscribed into it. So when the week give us Laura Loomer calling Black women ghetto b*****s, the Democratic Party still arguing about Hasan Piker, Kmele Foster telling Jemele Hill on CNN that slavery predates capitalism, and Abdul El Sayed on The Breakfast Club saying he a capitalist, we don’t get to just react. We got to read. Now here’s what I want y’all to hold onto while you read, because it’s the throughline and it’s the title. On camera I said it plain: at the same time this administration is telling corporations they need to be colorblind and voting to get rid of the demographic data that we use to prove discrimination, one of their own advisors is going around calling people Black b*****s. They know who to call Black b*****s, though. Feel me? That’s not a contradiction. That’s the design. Race is legible when the state wants to injure you and illegible when you want a remedy. You can be seen well enough to be called ghetto and not seen well enough to be counted. Same eyes. Same week. Then the second half of the show, the capitalism half, is the same move with a different costume. Kmele Foster told Jemele Hill that slavery is older than writing so it can’t be bound up with capitalism. The Democratic establishment tells you the leftists cost Kamala the election while the people who ran the campaign get to be an act of reason. Every one of these is the same technology: detach the record from the concept, keep the verdict, burn the ledger. Read the pattern, destroy the receipts. That’s the whole essay. Everything below is just the receipts they hoping you don’t pull. What She Actually Said, With Dates Let’s start with the clip, because a lot of folks heard about it and didn’t sit with it. On Friday, August 28, 2026, Laura Loomer, a far right activist and a Trump ally who is widely described as an informal advisor, somebody who is documented, or alleged depending on who you ask, to show up at the White House and when she leave, decisions is made and people is fired, posted a video on X naming five Black women: Florida Democratic Senate nominee Angie Nixon, Representatives Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley, former Representative Cori Bush, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that they were all “ghetto, entitled, race obsessed, destructive black B*****S who are completely unfit for the power they hold.” She used the slur five times in one post. In the clip we played on the show she went further down the line: Fani Willis, Jasmine Crockett, Candace Owens, Wes Moore, and then the line that’s the reason this essay exists. “Are you starting to see a pattern here? Some people call it racism. I call it pattern recognition. And guess what? Pattern recognition and profiling keeps you safe.” The trigger, for the record, was Nixon’s floor speech against resolutions honoring Charlie Kirk. Loomer called her a “ghetto black communist b***h,” mocked her speech as “Ebonics,” and said she needed her “leash” tugged. When the backlash came she doubled down on Sunday: “Is she ghetto? Yes. Is she black? Yes. Is she a communist? Yes. I spoke the truth.” By that week she had run the same exact sentence at Representative LaMonica McIver. Marjorie Taylor Greene, of all people, said she “1000 percent” denounced it and called it racist. Ben Crump, Wes Moore, Ro Khanna, and Charlamagne’s Donkey of the Day all lined up. Nixon, who had just scored an upset win in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, answered on X: “When referring to me, it’s Representative Angie Nixon. However, after November 3rd, YOU CAN CALL ME SENATOR!” So that’s the record. Now hold it next to the rest of what she said, because the framing is doing more work than the slur. Before she got to “ghetto black b*****s,” she said, and I’m quoting the clip: “If you are offended by stereotypes, then maybe, just maybe, you need to start policing your own community. If I don’t want people thinking that all Jews are a bunch of globalists, maybe I should be calling out the progressive Jews who are funding radical left causes. That’s what I do. I self police the Jewish community.” Then: “It’s time for other Black people to start policing the Black community.” Every accusation is a confession, y’all. She told you exactly what she is. She is a police. She polices her own community for the benefit of the people who hate her community, and she is asking Black people to become deputies in the same department. That’s the ask. The slur is just the uniform. Pattern Recognition Is the Oldest Word for Racism With a Spreadsheet Most of y’all heard “pattern recognition” and heard a tech word, a 2026 word, something a Silicon Valley MF say about AI. Nah. That word is from 1896. Apply Muhammad here. In The Condemnation of Blackness, Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces how, right after the 1890 census, the first census to sort prisoners by race in a way that let people build a national argument, a Prudential Insurance statistician named Frederick L. Hoffman published Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman took arrest and mortality data, stripped it of every condition that produced it (convict leasing, vagrancy statutes, all white juries, no doctors, no sewers), and presented the raw number as a racial trait. Black people were not being arrested more because the law was built to arrest them. Black people were criminal, look at the pattern. Muhammad’s whole book is about how that statistical move became the common sense of the twentieth century, how Irish and Italian and Polish crime got explained by poverty and environment and got Progressive Era social work, while Black crime got explained by Blackness and got police. The number was the same kind of number. The interpretation split by race. That is pattern recognition. That is what she meant. When Loomer lists seven Black women with wildly different politics, from Ayanna Pressley to Candace Owens, and says “do you see the pattern,” she is doing Hoffman. She is taking a category she constructed (Black women who talk in public) and presenting the category as the evidence. Like Domo said on air, she was not condemning stereotypes. She was saying this is why stereotypes exist. That’s Hoffman’s thesis. The stereotype is a data point. The data point is the Black person. Then Fields and Fields give you the flip. Racecraft is when the action of racism gets converted into a fact about race. Somebody discriminates against you (verb, they did it) and it comes out the other end as a pattern about you (noun, you are it). “Some people call it racism, I call it pattern recognition” is racecraft with a name tag on. She is describing her own act of profiling and attributing the profile to the people she profiled. Now let me give y’all the counterhistory, because Black folks have always known that the answer to a bad count is a better count, not no count. Ida B. Wells, 1892, Southern Horrors, and 1895, A Red Record. What did she do? She counted. She took the white press’s own lynching reports, tallied them, and showed that the “pattern” of Black men raping white women was a lie in the majority of cases and that the actual pattern was economic competition and political terror. Du Bois, 1899, The Philadelphia Negro, the first serious sociological survey in this country, done be

    "Pattern Recognition" Is Just Racism With a Spreadsheet | Loomer, the EEOC, and the Ledger They Burned

  2. 3d ago

    The Confederates Wrote a Whole Book Called "Cotton Is King." Jeff Mead Should Read It.

    “African Americans built this nation. You built this nation. You know, you’re just starting to get real credit for that. We all built it. But you were such a massive part of it, bigger than you were given credit for. Does that make sense?” That’s what his lord and savior Dukie Donald said. That is not a paraphrase and it is not a meme. That is the White House transcript from October 4, 2019, the Young Black Leadership Summit, Candace Owens in the room, the President of the United States telling a ballroom full of Black conservatives that our people built this country and that we are only now getting credit for it. Now let’s get back to this man making these historical claims. Jeff Mead, two million plus followers on TikTok, been running a whole series on Abdul El Sayed since El Sayed won the Democratic nomination for Senate in Michigan, decided the way to get El Sayed was to get us. El Sayed said we built this country. Mead’s response was a number. In 1860, he says, only 10 to 12 percent of the GNP came from slave labor, the highest documented year was 16 percent, so the vast majority of how this country was built was not slave labor, so when you hear somebody say this country was built on the backs of slaves, no it wasn’t, and El Sayed is just pandering for the Black vote. What y’all seen right there is an example of when you think deeply about shallow s**t, you start making ahistorical claims. So let me do what I do. Historical context first, then the present, then the two things that can be true, then the receipts on the pandering charge, because that one is going to boomerang on him so hard it’s going to knock the hat off his head. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Number Is a Twentieth Century Instrument Retrofitted Onto a Nineteenth Century Crime Start with the word he leaned on. GNP. Gross National Product. Mead told his audience to think of it like GDP today. Fine. Here is what he did not tell them: nobody in 1860 was computing a GNP. The concept did not exist. Simon Kuznets built the first national income accounts for the United States Senate in 1934, in the middle of the Depression, because the federal government needed a single number to describe an economy it was trying to rescue. Everything anybody says about the GNP of 1860 is a modern reconstruction, most of it tracing back to the economic historian Robert Gallman, who spent decades in the 1960s and 1970s back filling estimates from census returns and farm output records so that economists could argue about the antebellum economy in twentieth century units. That matters because the specific numbers Mead recited line up with one paper. Paul Rhode, an economist at the University of Michigan, published “What Fraction of Antebellum US National Product Did the Enslaved Produce?” in Explorations in Economic History in 2024. Rhode’s bottom line is that the enslaved produced roughly the same share of GNP as their share of the population. That population share was 16.8 percent in 1800, falling to 12.6 percent in 1860 as European immigration poured into the North. So the “highest documented” year Mead is bragging about is not some anomaly at the peak of King Cotton. It is 1800, when the enslaved were a bigger slice of the country. The number tracks the headcount. The number was always going to track the headcount, because the number was built out of the headcount. Sit with what Rhode’s finding actually says, because Mead read it upside down. Four million people who were paid nothing, owned nothing, could not sell their labor to the highest bidder, could not move to the city, could not go to school, could not patent a cotton gin, could not buy the land they cleared, produced output at the same rate as the free population of the wealthiest republic on earth. That is not evidence that slavery was marginal. That is evidence of the most extractive labor system in the hemisphere running at full population efficiency while its workers were held as property. Then there is the thing the flow number cannot see at all. GNP is a flow. It measures what got produced in a year. “Built” is a stock word. It asks what got accumulated, what got financed, what got founded. Look at the stock. By 1860 the roughly four million enslaved people in the United States were carried on the books at somewhere between three and four billion dollars. Roger Ransom, Richard Sutch, and Steven Deyle have all run the arithmetic, and the conclusion is the same each time: enslaved human beings were the largest single financial asset in the country, worth more than all the railroads and all the factories in the United States combined. The average slaveholder held close to two thirds of his wealth in people, not land. The richest counties per capita in the nation in 1860 were not in Massachusetts. They were in the Mississippi and Louisiana cotton belt. When Mead says the vast majority of how this country was built was not slave labor, he is describing one year’s output and calling it a foundation. Jennifer Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery shows that the modern habit of thinking about Black people as quantities, as a percentage, as a headcount, as a fraction of an output table, did not arrive after slavery to evaluate it. It arrived with slavery to run it. The ship manifests, the insurance schedules, the bills of lading, the appraisals that listed a woman and her “increase,” those were the first national accounts. They counted us before they counted the cotton. So when a Black man stands in front of two million people and uses a percentage as a verdict on whether his own ancestors count, he is not doing economics. He is doing the ledger’s job for it, for free, which is a kind of poetry if you think about it, because free is exactly the rate the ledger always preferred. King Cotton Was Not a Metaphor, It Was a Senate Speech Now the archive, because the archive is where this man gets embarrassed by dead white men. James Henry Hammond, senator from South Carolina, stood on the floor of the United States Senate on March 4, 1858, and told the North that if the South stopped shipping cotton for three years, England would topple and carry the whole civilized world down with her. His line was “Cotton is king.” He was not describing 5 percent of anything. He was describing leverage. Two years later E. N. Elliott put together a whole volume of the pro slavery intelligentsia under the title Cotton Is King, and Pro Slavery Arguments, building on David Christy’s 1855 tract of the same name. This is the book I held up. This is the book those Confederate flag toting folks that want to keep us on the plantation wrote about themselves. They were not saying slavery was a minor input. They were saying slavery was the load bearing wall of the Atlantic economy, and they were saying it to justify seceding from the country Mead thinks they barely helped build. Brian Schoen’s The Fragile Fabric of Union (2009) traces exactly how that confidence worked. The Deep South believed the cotton trade was essential to the European economy because for most of the antebellum period it was, and that belief is what gave the planter class the nerve to walk out of the Union and expect Britain and France to come running. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) puts the global frame on it: by 1860 raw cotton was 61 percent of the value of everything the United States exported, and it was picked by enslaved hands. Cotton was the raw material that fed the mills of Lancashire and Lowell, and the mills of Lancashire and Lowell were the Industrial Revolution. That is the “central rise of modern global capitalism” argument, and you do not have to accept every number in the New History of Capitalism to accept that the men who ran the cotton economy said, in print, on the record, that they were the reason the modern world had a textile industry. Now here is where I am going to be more honest than Mead was, because Research over MeSearch means the other side gets its best day in court. Economists Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode have spent years arguing that the New History of Capitalism overreached. Edward Baptist’s claim in The Half Has Never Been Told that cotton accounted for almost half of American economic activity in 1836 was bad accounting, double counting inputs as outputs, and it has been roundly criticized. Cotton exports themselves were under 5 percent of GDP for most of the antebellum period. Corn, grown mostly by free labor, was worth more than cotton in most years. Gavin Wright, in a 2022 Journal of Economic Perspectives piece, argues that slavery was not necessary for cotton production and that the slave South was, if anything, a drag on the region’s long term development. Mark Stelzner and Sven Beckert answered with a 2024 paper in the Economic History Review using a different method that credits enslaved workers with a larger contribution to output and especially to growth. This is a live fight among serious people. I am not going to pretend it isn’t. Two things can be true. It can be true that Baptist’s half of the economy figure was wrong, and it can be true that Mead’s use of the corrected figure is a lie. The reason is that “how much of one year’s output” was never the question El Sayed was answering. The question was who built the country, and the country is not a year’s output. The country is a Constitution with a three fifths clause, a fugitive slave clause, and a twenty year protection for the international slave trade written into Article I. The country is a Capitol dome and a White House raised by enslaved workers hired out by their owners for five dollars a month, a fact Congress finally put on a plaque in Emancipation Hall in 2012. The country is a slave market at the foot of Wall Street, established by the city of New York in 171

  3. 4d ago

    The U.S. Is the ONLY Country That Never Ratified the Rights of the Child. Here's the List.

    Thank you Samantha Paige (she/they), zink, Darnell Martin, Rebel Guest, Dmg, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Brother Malcolm Told Us Where the Courtroom Was Before I get into what happened in Switzerland I need to pay a debt, because this trip does not exist without a man who never got to make it. On April 3, 1964, in Cleveland, Malcolm X stood up at Cory Methodist Church and told a room full of Black folks that they had been fighting in the wrong courtroom. Civil rights, he said, keeps the whole struggle inside the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam. You are asking the man who is violating you to also be the judge. Human rights, though, is a different jurisdiction. Human rights are the rights you were born with, and the moment you frame the case that way you can carry it to the United Nations and put the United States in the dock in front of the whole world. That is the argument of “The Ballot or the Bullet” that people skip past when they only quote the title. Then he did what he said. On June 28, 1964, he founded the Organization of Afro American Unity, modeled on the Organization of African Unity, with the explicit purpose of internationalizing the struggle. Three weeks later, on July 17, 1964, he was in Cairo at the OAU summit handing African heads of state a memorandum asking them to bring the condition of 22 million Black Americans before the United Nations. He spent the last year of his life flying between Africa and Harlem building that case. He was assassinated on February 21, 1965, before he could file it. I’m a former national championship winning policy debate coach and hall of fame college policy debater, that spent years running Afro pessimist critiques of civil society in rounds. I know the arguments about why the UN is a colonial instrument, why the state cannot be reformed into recognizing Black humanity, why appealing to the international order is appealing to the same order that built the plantation. I still believe a lot of that as description. Malcolm believed a lot of that too. Then he went to Cairo anyway, because he understood something that took me a flight to Geneva to feel in my body: the value of the human rights forum is not that it will save you. The value is that it forces the state to be seen refusing to save you, on a record it does not control, in front of people it cannot intimidate. That is the work I went to Switzerland to continue. Not because I think Geneva is Wakanda. Because Malcolm told us where the courtroom was, and in November 2025 the United States refused to show up to it, and somebody had to be in the room to write that down. Why I Was There Let me zoom in for a minute, y’all. I did not go to the United Nations for me. I went because two people invited me to come capture what they were doing, and what they were doing was putting the reproductive health of Black women, pregnant people, and multiply marginalized folks in this country into the international record while our own government was actively trying to erase it. Pearl Ricks, who uses they and them pronouns, is the executive director of the Reproductive Justice Action Collective in New Orleans and a cofounder of the Choice Congregation Church. Pearl is an artist and, in their own words, a full human being who refuses to forget that while doing advocacy and care work. Kiana Lewis is a full spectrum community doula with over 25 years of birth work, born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, seventeen years in Texas, and now between the two. She founded the Holy Ho Institute, a reproductive justice sanctuary in Dallas, she serves as interim executive director of the historic Jamaa Birth Village in Ferguson, Missouri, and she is cochair of the National Network of Abortion Funds. She entered this work, as she said on my stream, as a Black queer birth worker. Neither of them is a diplomat. Neither of them has a law degree. Pearl told me in Geneva that they had to leave college because it was giving depression and broke. That is important, because the United Nations has a word for who they are, and the word is civil society. I looked it up, because I know how my audience is. According to the UN, civil society is the third sector of society, distinct from both government and business, the realm of organized voluntary activity by citizens. Which means the doula in Dallas and the organizer in New Orleans are not guests in that building. Structurally, they are one of the three legs the whole thing stands on. What the Universal Periodic Review Actually Is Huey P. Newton once said that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner. So before we get into the phenomenon, let me define it, because most people in the U.S. have never heard of it and that is not an accident. The Universal Periodic Review, or UPR, is a process of the UN Human Rights Council in which every single member state, all 193, has its human rights record reviewed by the other member states on a cycle of roughly four and a half years. Every country. The rich ones. The powerful ones. The ones that position themselves as defenders of democracy and human rights. That is the entire point of the word universal. No country is supposed to be above scrutiny. Here is how it works, in Kiana’s words on my stream, because she explained it better than the website does. The government being reviewed submits a national report on what it is doing to protect human rights. Other governments examine the record and make recommendations, which can cover racial discrimination, reproductive rights, policing, incarceration, LGBTQ rights, health care, housing, voting rights. The country under review can accept, note, or respond to each recommendation, and ideally it acts on them before the next cycle. The process is not a world court. It cannot force anybody to change a law. What it does is put violations into an international record, allow governments to question one another, and allow civil society to introduce evidence that the official government narrative leaves out. In Kiana’s phrasing: hey, I know this is what our government told you, but this is what our experience is on the ground. That civil society evidence has a name. It is called a stakeholder submission, or in the language of the people who do this work, a shadow report. Pearl put it plainly: anything a government does not want to talk about, it is going to omit. Anything a government wants to change the facts on, the shadow report gives us the opportunity to tell the truth about. Pearl and Kiana, with the Reproductive Justice Action Collective, Birthmark Doulas, Ipas, and a coalition of other organizations, spent the better part of a year interviewing people, talking to legislators, and reviewing policy to produce a submission titled Diminishing Reproductive and Bodily Autonomy in the United States. It documents restrictions on freedom of movement, abortion access, and the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes, whether that outcome is a miscarriage, an abortion, or a stillbirth. Pearl noted something that mattered to them: in a global venue they were able to degender the language, to talk about pregnant people and bodies capable of pregnancy, and to bring a reproductive justice lens that refuses to put trans people, intersex people, or immigrants on the chopping block to protect somebody else. Now here is the phenomenon. The fourth cycle review of the United States was scheduled for November 7, 2025. Civil society organizations had already filed 155 submissions documenting arbitrary detention, abuse of immigrants, regression on sexual and reproductive rights, systemic racial discrimination. The government’s national report was due in August. On August 28, 2025, the chief of the UPR branch announced that the United States had withdrawn from its own review. On November 7, the chair of the Human Rights Council opened the session, the U.S. delegation’s seats were empty, the interactive dialogue could not proceed, and the Council adopted by consensus a decision expressing regret and urging the U.S. to resume cooperation. No UN member state had ever failed to be reviewed since the process began in 2008. Israel boycotted its own review in 2013 and came back the same year. The United States, which participated actively in its first three reviews, including in 2020 after it had already left the Human Rights Council once, is now the only country on Earth to simply not show up. Kiana described what that felt like. A group of them had gone to Geneva for the presession in the fall of 2025 because they had an inkling the government might not participate, and they were there to testify anyway. In the middle of a session, in the middle of a testimony, a note came through that the United States would not be participating. She said it felt disrespectful, and not to the UN. It felt disrespectful to the people whose lives were in the reports. To the people being criminalized, denied health care, living in state violence. She remembers sitting with a delegate, she thinks Norway or Chile, and telling them: even if the United States decides not to show up, you cannot not still name the atrocities. You cannot leave the citizens of the United States alone with this administration. It is not safe. I’m a educator. I come from the academic space. When I hear the word review, I understand what a peer review is. I understand what it means when you pull out of one. It means you do not want your claims checked. It means you would rather have your work uncited than refereed. That is not a technicality to me. That really means something. The Same Year, Three Times Here is where the historian in me needs to slow the room down, because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a neutral document that fell out of the sky. It was adopted by the UN General Assembly on December 10, 1948, the day after my birthday, in the ashes of the Second Wo

  4. 5d ago

    14,000 Small Businesses Became Criminals Overnight. This Is What "Pro Business" Means.

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I’m going to be telling y’all about the intricacies of policymaking and how politics is nothing but who gets what, when, where, and how. That definition is not mine. A political scientist named Harold Lasswell put it in the title of a book in 1936, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How, and ninety years later it is still the most honest sentence anybody has ever written about government. Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say politics is about values. It doesn’t say politics is about the flag or the family or the Founders. It says politics is a distribution problem. Somebody is getting something, somebody is deciding when, somebody is deciding how, and the only question that matters for you and your people is which side of that ledger your name is on. So when you tell me you don’t do politics, you’re telling me you don’t care about who gets what, when, where, and how. You’re telling me you don’t care if your neighbor good. Do you care if your neighbor good? Is your neighbor good? Do you care? Right now, we’re about to have a conversation about the THC ban in Texas, and I want to start where they always start, with morals, ethics, and public health, because that’s the wrapping paper. A lot of our laws in this country is justified by saying it is about how it can keep us safe, how it is about protecting our unalienable rights, that being life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and saying that the only way you can have your unalienable rights taken away from you is if you infringe upon somebody else’s rights. That’s the Jefferson deal, that’s the civics class version. Then what they’re trying to convince us now is that eating an edible is taking away the unalienable rights of somebody. The question you should ask yourself is, for whom? Because in any other instance, if I’m able to pay somebody to get them to do something, it’s called a bribery. In America, it’s called lobbying. The Receipts: Follow the Money From the Distributor to the Dais Let me lay the paper on the table, because my motto is facts over feelings, Research over MeSearch. The hemp derived THC market in Texas grew out of a loophole in the 2019 state law that mirrored the 2018 federal Farm Bill, and by the time the legislature came back in 2025 that loophole had turned into roughly 8,300 retail outlets by the sponsors’ own count, and by the Department of State Health Services’ count today, about 14,000 licensed consumable hemp retailers statewide. Gummies, drinks, vapes, pre rolls, Delta 8, Delta 9, THCA flower, all of it sold in gas stations and smoke shops in every county in Texas. Two specific industries watched that happen and did not like what they saw. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick made Senate Bill 3, a near total ban on consumable hemp derived THC, one of his top priorities for the 2025 session, called the products dangerous, said they were putting Texas children at risk, and courted Republicans in both chambers to pass it. A flyer circulating that spring from the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas backed a full ban and cited, in its own words, the need to preserve a level playing field for Texas beer distributors. Read that again. Not a level playing field for Texans. For beer distributors. Then the money. Texas campaign finance records show John Nau, the beer distribution executive behind Silver Eagle Distributors, one of the largest Anheuser Busch distributors in the country, gave $250,000 to Patrick’s campaign on April 12, 2024. The Beer Alliance of Texas PAC gave $25,000 to Texans for Dan Patrick on December 2, 2024. That is at least $275,000 from a major beer distributor and a beer industry political committee in the run up to the session where Patrick tried to eliminate the beer industry’s fastest growing competitor. Other reviews of his filings put the alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical total higher. Texas Democrats and Vikki Goodwin, the Democratic nominee running against Patrick this November, have been saying the quiet part in press releases all summer. Now here is where the political literacy comes in, because the transcript version of this story and the paper version of this story diverge on one detail and you need to know the difference so nobody can use it against you. SB 3 passed both chambers. Patrick then spent weeks publicly pressuring Governor Greg Abbott to sign it. Abbott vetoed it at the last minute, on June 22, 2025, just before the deadline that would have let it become law without his signature, and called it likely unconstitutional. That was a major setback for Patrick. But the ban still happened. Abbott issued Executive Order GA 56 in September 2025 directing the health department and the alcohol commission to crack down using authority they already had. Senate Bill 2024 banned cannabinoid vapes that same month. A total THC testing rule that counts THCA took effect March 31, 2026 and cleared smokable flower off the shelves. Then the Texas Supreme Court in May 2026 let the Department of State Health Services reclassify every hemp derived THC except low dose Delta 9 as a Schedule I controlled substance, and that scheduling notice took effect July 31, 2026. A federal judge in Galveston denied the industry’s emergency request on August 10. So on July 30, a small business had a building full of Delta 8, Delta 10, THCP, and THCA flower that was legal inventory, and on July 31 that same building was a felony. So no, the bill did not “pass” in 2026. Something worse happened. The bill failed, the people won on paper, and then the outcome got delivered anyway through an executive order, an agency rule, and a court. That is the lesson. When you talk about protecting democracy, defending democracy, you have to ask yourself, what are you defending and what are you protecting? We democratically, and I say we loosely, but in Texas we democratically elected Dan Patrick. Dan Patrick is supposed to be going in line that allows for us to democratically vote on certain things. He purposely circumvented the policymaking process at the expense of Texas constituents for big tobacco and big alcohol, man. He don’t care for working class people. What the Market Actually Said Capitalist contradictions. These folks taught us that capitalism says the consumers dictate the market. Capitalism says that free market competition is what is good. So let me tell you what the consumers said. On July 28, 2026 the headlines ran everywhere, and the tabloids ran it loudest, that for the first time more Americans use marijuana daily or nearly daily than drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes at that frequency. The source under the headline is not a tabloid. It is the federal government’s own National Survey on Drug Use and Health, released by SAMHSA in July, and the numbers for 2025 are 21.4 million daily or near daily marijuana users, 19.9 million daily cigarette smokers, and 17.2 million daily or near daily drinkers. Alcohol is still used by more people overall, 129 million past month drinkers against 43.8 million past month marijuana users, so two things can be true. But the daily customer, the customer that pays the bills, has moved. A Carnegie Mellon researcher named Jonathan Caulkins found the crossover with alcohol first in the 2022 data, and found that per capita daily use had gone up fifteen fold since 1992. If you have consumers that are now starting to buy and consume more THC than tobacco and alcohol, I believe the market has made its choice. When the industry can go and use its money to go against constituents, what are we talking about then in terms of the free market? Here is the part that should make every libertarian in Texas sick. A lot of people don’t know what socialism and communism is, and they make these very bastardized ideas of what they think it is, and all they’re doing is actually describing capitalism and the current thing we’re in now. They believe that socialism allows for the government to dictate what industries and what businesses is able to have an advantage within the market. Oh s**t, capitalism is doing the same thing in America? A state agency picking which intoxicant you’re allowed to buy, at the request of the incumbent intoxicant’s distributors, is not the free market. It is the state as a bouncer for the beer truck. And then the “will of the people” argument, since Patrick loves to invoke it. When I said on camera that over 70% of Texans want legal marijuana, I was rounding up from real numbers and I’m going to give you the real numbers because Research over MeSearch means correcting yourself in public. The University of Houston Hobby School’s 2025 survey of 1,200 Texans found 62% support legalizing recreational marijuana for adults, 69% support decriminalizing possession, and 79% support medical marijuana, and that medical number includes 75% of Republicans. The UT Texas Politics Project poll from spring 2025 found 84% of registered voters want possession legal under some circumstances and only 15% want it illegal under every circumstance. In the March 2026 Democratic primary, a nonbinding proposition on legalization passed 80 to 20. That 70% I said is the floor for decriminalization and the ceiling is higher. Now, in the interest of two things being true, that same Hobby School poll found 55% of Texans supported banning the unregulated hemp derived products specifically, and Patrick posted that number the day it came out. He was right that people are uneasy about gas station gummies with no dosing standard. What he did with that unease is the tell. The people said regulate it. He said ban it, and hand the customers back to the distributors who paid for his campaign. Guess which one preserves a level playing field for beer. The Lieutenant Governor Has More Power Than the Governor, and H

  5. Sep 1

    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

  6. Aug 31

    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

  7. Aug 28

    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

  8. 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

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

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  • Creator
    The Conscious Lee
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    136
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © The Conscious Lee
  • Show Website
    Education is Elevation