Education is Elevation

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

  1. 10h ago

    Oct. 7th, Friday Night Lights, Oil Field Money, and the Bombs Over Gaza: It Was Always One Ledger

    How much money do you need to blow up a 12 year old in Gaza? How much funding do you need to blow up a pregnant woman in the West Bank? How much? How much do you need? Today is October 7th, 2026, the third anniversary of the attack on Israel, and I know a bunch of Zionists are pissed off when they hear folks like me talk about this day, because we don’t center Israeli victimization as the beginning, the middle, and the end of the story. Let me be precise, because precision is the whole point of this work. On October 7th, 2023, roughly 1,200 people were killed in Israel and about 250 were taken captive, and those were human beings with names and mothers and futures, and I will never be the kind of scholar who has to pretend otherwise in order to tell the truth about everything else. Two things can be true. The killing of civilians is a crime no matter whose passport they hold, and October 7th did not fall out of a coconut tree, it is part of an ongoing structure of dispossession that has been happening in Palestine since before 1948. Shout out to the Balfour Declaration, shout out to the partition of Palestine, shout out to all the various congresses that Theodor Herzl and the founders of political Zionism convened to decide whose land was available. Three years later, the Gaza Health Ministry counts more than 73,600 Palestinians killed as of September 2026, a number that has kept climbing even after the October 2025 ceasefire, with well over 1,000 killed in so called ceasefire violations alone. Three years later, I still have not heard one elected official in Texas tell me how much a 12 year old costs. My psyche, the chemistry of my heart and how it connects to my brain, how I view the world, will forever be changed, because seeing a parent pick up the limbs of their child and put them in a bag will never let you see the world the same again. Most of y’all saw that footage too. Most of y’all scrolled past it because the algorithm put a dance challenge right underneath it, and that is its own kind of violence, the violence of being trained to keep it moving. October 7th, 2023 changed the geopolitics forever because it forced into the open the people who have always been able to dictate the narrative of being seen as the benevolent good people, the ones who deserve to exist and deserve to defend themselves, and it showed us how they deploy that narrative while blowing up Muhammad and blowing up Miriam in Gaza and in the West Bank. We never hear anybody on cable news ask whether Palestine can exist, or should exist, or whether Palestinians have a right to defend themselves. That question is not even allowed in the room. Today is about me reflecting on how much I have learned about Palestinians, how much I have learned about the Middle East, how much I have learned about American imperialism, and how much it solidified what young George Lee already suspected. Young little George in Bryan, Texas, sitting in a high school classroom, thought the world was so evil. I was right. The people in power who got me to think about Muslims as inherently criminal and inherently terroristic were the very people who had figured out how to manufacture terrorism in a way that got seen as legitimate. We even had headlines warning that 2023 was on pace to be the deadliest year for Palestinians in the West Bank, and those headlines ran before October 7th, not after it. The bodies were already stacking up while the world was looking the other way. That is what we mean by unmitigated, gratuitous violence, violence justified by Israel and America and the French and the English, all of them saying that Muslims and Palestinians are who we ought to worry about. They have manufactured so much terror that they have convinced the rest of the world that opposing colonial order is terrorism, and that colonial terrorism is just foreign policy. Research over MeSearch. Let’s get into the archive. Herzl Had a Shopping List: Uganda, Argentina, and the Colony That Called Itself a Homeland October 7th forced me to go back through the archive, and the archive does not stutter. In 1896, Theodor Herzl published Der Judenstaat, and in it he weighed two candidate sites for a Jewish state, Palestine or Argentina, like a man comparing listings on Zillow. In 1897, he convened the First Zionist Congress in Basel. In 1902, he wrote to Cecil Rhodes, the same Cecil Rhodes whose name is literally stamped on the colony of Rhodesia, asking for his support and describing his plan as something colonial, which is why he thought Rhodes would understand it. In 1903, the British colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain offered land in East Africa, the so called Uganda Scheme, which actually sat in what is now Kenya, and the Zionist movement debated it until the Seventh Congress rejected it in 1905. Sit with that. Israel could have been in Argentina. Israel could have been in East Africa. The founders held conference after conference to figure out where this Jewish homeland should go, and they landed on Palestine because the religious ties to Judaism could generate global sympathy and a story the West already knew how to tell. Crazy how the land was never the starting point. The project was the starting point, and the land was chosen to fit the project. Herzl even confided to his own diary in June 1895 that the penniless local population would need to be spirited across the border. Then in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote “The Iron Wall,” and he said the quiet part as loud as anyone ever has: no native people in history has ever voluntarily accepted colonization, so the settlers would need a wall of force the natives could not break. On my livestream I credited that line to Herzl, and I want to correct the record, because receipts matter. It was Jabotinsky. Herzl wrote the business plan. Jabotinsky wrote the security memo. Same company. Apply Sayegh here. In 1965, the Palestinian scholar and diplomat Fayez Sayegh published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, and his argument was that Zionism was not an exception to European colonialism, it was one of its last and most efficient expressions, a settler project designed not to rule the native population but to replace it. That is the difference between Britain in India and Britain in Australia. One colony wants your labor. The other colony wants your absence. Wolfe would later call this the logic of elimination, but Sayegh had already written it down while Jim Crow was still the law in Bryan, Texas. Then came the paperwork that made the colony official. On November 2nd, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour promised a national home for the Jewish people in a land Britain did not own, inhabited by people Britain did not ask. On November 29th, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 recommended partition, handing roughly 56 percent of Mandate Palestine to a Jewish population that made up about a third of its residents and owned a small fraction of its land. Then in 1947 and 1948 came the Nakba, the catastrophe, when roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled and hundreds of villages were emptied and erased. On December 11th, 1948, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, affirming that refugees wishing to return to their homes should be permitted to do so. Nearly 78 years later, that return has never been honored. Preventing civilians from returning home is a violation of international humanitarian law. You cannot justify the Nakba. You cannot justify forcing hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes and never letting them come back. Now do the root cause analysis. Hamas was founded in December 1987, at the start of the First Intifada, growing out of an Islamist charity network that Israeli authorities had tolerated through the 1970s and 1980s as a counterweight to the secular PLO. On air I said 1984, and the accurate date is 1987, but the point lands even harder with the correct date: the Israelis were murdering, obliterating, and stealing Palestinian land for four decades before Hamas existed. So when somebody tells you the bombing of Gaza is a response to Hamas, ask them what the Nakba was a response to. Ask them what Deir Yassin was a response to. Watch them get quiet. Every State Is Debatable Except One: The Playbook With a Laminated Cover I would argue October 7th deconstructed the Zionist playbook, because it forced us to sit with and debate what it means for Israel to exist, especially if that existence is predicated on Palestinian dispossession. If your existence as a state is made possible through genocide, we have to ask the question: does your existence actually need to look like that? Notice I said the state. Not the people. A state is a political arrangement, a set of borders and laws and armies, and questioning how a state was built is something political science does every single day. You can criticize America. You can criticize Germany. You can criticize Venezuela. You can criticize Nigeria. You can stand in a lecture hall and argue the Soviet Union should never have existed in the form it took, and nobody calls campus police. Ahh, but criticize Israel, and all of a sudden you must be engaging in some form of antisemitism. That is the playbook that insulates one state from the ordinary scrutiny every other state receives, and its whole power comes from collapsing three different things into one: Jewish people, the religion of Judaism, and the government of Israel. This means the people who collapse those categories are the ones doing something dangerous. Let me say this as somebody who is vehemently against antisemitism. When a government claims to act in the name of every Jewish person on earth, and then uses the very real history of Jewish suffering in Europe to justify the suffering of Palestinians now, it puts a target on Jewish people everywhere who never signed off on any of it. Every accusation is a confession. The ones screaming that criticism of Israel endangers Jews

  2. 1d ago

    Found Responsible for Rape, Back on the Field: LSU Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

    Trigger warning for everybody that has experienced sexual violence. We talking about sexual violence for educational purposes only, and I need y’all to take care of yourselves while you read this. The Group Chat Is the Confession Have y’all heard the news? CBS News New York obtained more messages from the group chat of the seven Cornell men accused of drugging and raping a woman for hours inside the Chi Phi fraternity house, and kinfolks, they are not good. According to the lawsuit, while this young woman was being assaulted, somebody in that chat asked if the “shop” was “still open,” somebody answered yeah with a devil emoji, and somebody else added a yeah of their own, which means that instead of stopping it, grown men with Ivy League student IDs was referring to a human being as a store with its lights on. Just utterly disgusting, awful behavior, and I want to sit in that word for a second, shop, because the language is the evidence, the language tells you exactly how they saw her, not as a classmate, not as somebody’s daughter, not as a person with a future, but as inventory. Let me give you the receipts, because here at Education Is Elevation it’s Research over MeSearch. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, was 20 years old in October 2024 when she went to the Chi Phi house at Cornell. Her 101 page civil complaint, filed in Manhattan in September 2026, alleges she was pressured into ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol until she was incapacitated, that around 1:42 in the morning one member posted in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was free sex upstairs, and that more men came into the room over the next several hours, with the assault ending somewhere around 5:45 that morning. On stream I said seven hours, and the filing actually describes more than four, which don’t make it better, it makes it a timeline. Crazy how the punishment was the part that went viral. The complaint says Cornell suspended the men, then let some of them “mitigate their conduct” by writing essays, and her lawyer says only two of the seven were expelled. Essays. Somebody’s daughter left that campus and never came back, and some of the men accused of breaking her got a writing assignment. One of the men named in the suit reportedly went on to work at a Wells Fargo branch in Charlotte and was let go only after Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced on September 28, 2026, that he was reopening the case and taking it to a grand jury. Think about that. If he got a degree from Cornell, he was not out here struggling, he was able to go live his best life for two whole years while she carried it, and the bank didn’t flinch until the cameras did. Now I want to be precise, because precision is power. No criminal charges have been filed against any of these men, at least two of them deny the allegations through their lawyers, and the civil claims have not been tested in court. Two things can be true. Every man named in that suit is entitled to his day in court, and the institution that let “essays” stand in for accountability is entitled to none of our benefit of the doubt, because the institution already had its day, and it spent it protecting itself. Born From the Movement, Raised by the General Counsel To understand how we got here, we gotta go back. Title IX was a major federal civil rights law passed in 1972, signed by Richard Nixon on June 23 of that year, written into being by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color ever elected to Congress, alongside Representative Edith Green, with Senator Birch Bayh carrying it in the Senate. It was modeled after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means this law is the direct progeny of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, it is the grandchild of the lunch counter and the consciousness raising circle at the same time. Most of y’all don’t know the Black women’s history sitting underneath that. On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24 year old Black mother, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, when six white men kidnapped her at gunpoint and raped her. The NAACP sent its best investigator to Abbeville, a young woman named Rosa Parks, and Parks helped build a national campaign around Recy Taylor more than a decade before anybody knew her name from a bus. Two separate all white, all male grand juries refused to indict. Historian Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street makes the argument plain: the civil rights movement was, in no small part, a movement against the sexual violence Black women survived, and the Montgomery organizing infrastructure was built by women who had been fighting rape long before they ever fought segregated seating. So when people act like campus sexual assault is a “women’s issue” separate from civil rights, they are erasing the very women who made the civil rights movement possible. Then came the legal ladder. In Alexander v. Yale (1980), Yale students argued for the first time that sexual harassment was sex discrimination under Title IX, with a young Catharine MacKinnon advising. In Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), the Supreme Court said students could sue for money damages. In Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), LaShonda Davis, a fifth grader in Georgia, gave us the rule that schools are liable when they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment they know about. In 1990, after Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm in 1986, Congress passed the Clery Act forcing colleges to report campus crime. Then the 2011 Dear Colleague letter pushed schools to act, the 2017 administration rescinded it, the 2020 rule rewrote the whole process around live hearings and cross examination, the 2024 rule tried to widen protections again, and on January 9, 2025, a federal court in Kentucky vacated the 2024 rule entirely, which put the country right back on the 2020 framework that governs today. So here’s what I know as somebody with a degree in adult and higher education, as somebody that has been faculty and staff at multiple different universities and different entities and elements. In a lot of these institutions, sadly, the Title IX office that was created for gender equity, for making sure women can participate fully in education, functions in practice to make sure the university is not sued. In too many places, the office only exists to protect the institution from the assailant’s liability, not to protect the student from the assailant. Let me say that again for the folks in the back. It protects the institution from the assailant, not the woman from the assailant. Cornell’s own numbers tell on it. A student who shared her story on campus said that after she was assaulted her freshman year and reported it, she learned someone else had already reported the same man, and later found out they weren’t the only two. Cornell’s own Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault, launched after this 2024 incident, reported that a 2025 campus survey found 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men experienced sexual assault during their time at Cornell. An earlier survey cited in The Cornell Daily Sun found only 38% of respondents even knew how to file an official complaint. That is a communication breakdown at best, and at worst it’s a design feature, because what you can’t find, you can’t file, and what you can’t file, can’t be counted against you. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Purple and Gold Probation Let me get around here real quick, because this is the part that really pissed me off, and I’m only saying it in a humorous way to keep from saying it in a violent way. At LSU, the university’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape. Let me repeat that slowly, the university found him responsible, this ain’t a rumor, this ain’t a TikTok, this is the institution’s own finding. LSU suspended him for a year. He appealed. The university kept the finding of rape and then reversed the suspension, swapping it for two years of “disciplinary probation without restrictions,” which let him right back onto the team. According to reporting from the coverage I was reading, this was a Black woman, and from what’s been reported the young man has not been publicly named, a criminal investigation is open with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney, and no charges have been filed. So you mean to tell me a university can look at the evidence, say yes, he raped her, and then say, but we need him on Saturdays? That is not discipline, that is a depth chart. We see how the system of white supremacy and capitalism always sides with patriarchy when patriarchy is profitable, and when the profit is a Black man’s body on a football field, the system will even protect a Black man against a Black woman, because in that moment he’s not a man to them, he’s a revenue stream. That’s on Anita Hill and that’s on Clarence Thomas, and I’ll say more about that in another video. LSU also got a history here that should make all of us uncomfortable, because this ain’t the first time the institution has been caught choosing the program over the victim. The 2021 Husch Blackwell investigation into LSU found years of mishandled sexual misconduct reports involving athletes, and the people who reported it were too often the ones who paid. Same school, same playbook, same tired ending. Protecting Women From Ghosts While the Wolves Get Scholarships Now here go the contradiction that I need y’all to sit with. Louisiana, the state where LSU sits, passed its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2022 to “protect women” from trans athletes, and the governor at the time let it becom

  3. 2d ago

    Auburn Gets $436 Million. Tuskegee Gets $15 Million. Let's Do the Math

    Thank you Nora Lyn St. Clair, PJ Schuster, Jen Champion, Heather A Murphy, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Huey P. Newton said power is the ability to define phenomena and make them act in a desired manner, and I told the students at Tuskegee University that quote governs my life, so let’s define the phenomenon real quick before somebody else defines it for us. In late September 2025, Frank “Chris” Lee beat the incumbent mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama in a runoff by 1,002 votes to 929, a margin of 73 votes, and he credits the students of Tuskegee University for showing up, and when I sat on that livestream and looked at the room, the mayor said it out loud, we probably got that many people in this room right now. Seventy three people. Like, that’s not a statistic, kinfolks, that’s a classroom, that’s a step show, that’s the line at the cafe on a Tuesday, and that classroom decided who runs the city. Most of y’all were taught to treat the local race like it don’t count, so let me say it the way I said it on stream. I think it’s a part of the intelligent design to make it where we always sensationalizing the national federal races and make it where we view the local races as the meaningless games. For us that watch the NBA, we know it’s like 82 games, and most of us don’t give a damn about the 82 games, we only care about if you’re going to make the playoffs. Then we apply that same sports culture to politics and wonder why we alienated from how our own communities is ran. Ahh, but here’s the part they don’t put on the poster: Tuskegee is the place where the state of Alabama proved, in writing, that it understood the small games better than we did. In 1957 the legislature took a square city and redrew it into a figure with 28 sides to cut Black voters out of the municipal elections, and in 2026 the legislature took the congressional district Tuskegee sits in and redrew it from roughly 48 percent Black voting age population to 40 percent. Same pen, different century, same intelligent design. This is about a city that was born from a vote, carved up over a vote, and is now being told again that its vote is a rounding error. It’s also a pack about what happens after the vote, because I said something in that room that I need to stand on: I’m rocking with Mayor Lee, hell yeah I am, and if he don’t deliver what he said he would, y’all should be on his helmet. Two things can be true.I. A City Born From a Vote Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Before there was a Tuskegee Institute there was a deal, and the deal was electoral. In 1880, Lewis Adams, a formerly enslaved tinsmith and one of the most respected Black men in Macon County, sat down with two white Democratic candidates, W. F. Foster and Arthur L. Brooks, and made them an offer that every organizer in this room should study: I can deliver the Black vote in Macon County, what will you deliver back. Foster and Brooks won, and in February 1881 the Alabama legislature passed the act creating a normal school for Black teachers in Tuskegee with a $2,000 annual appropriation for salaries. Booker T. Washington arrived that summer and opened the school on July 4, 1881. Sit with that, because it means the most famous Black school in the South was not a gift, it was a receipt. Lewis Adams understood in 1880 what I was trying to explain on stream in 2026, that politics is who gets what, when, where, and how, a definition I took from my own college coursework by way of Harold Lasswell, and that the vote is a currency you spend for something specific. Lewis Adams did not have a parasocial relationship with Foster. He had a contract. Crazy how the state has honored that contract ever since in the smallest possible font. The original appropriation was $2,000 a year. The appropriation bill for fiscal year 2026 sends Tuskegee University $15,816,579 from the Education Trust Fund, and the bill’s own text explains that Tuskegee’s relationship to the state is unique, that the state holds seats on the Tuskegee board and the State Superintendent of Education sits as an ex officio voting member, and that because Tuskegee is both private and state related it should not be funded the way the state’s public universities are funded. Hold that sentence in your pocket. We are coming back to it with a calculator. II. Twenty Eight Sides By the 1950s the Black residents of Tuskegee had turned the institute into the most educated Black electorate in the Deep South, and the Tuskegee Civic Association, led by the sociologist Charles G. Gomillion, spent years pushing Black faculty, staff, and townspeople through a Macon County registration board that met rarely and rejected often. As the registered Black vote inside city limits climbed toward 400, the white political class did the math, and they did not like the math. So in 1957 state Senator Sam Engelhardt, who also chaired the White Citizens Councils of Alabama, pushed Act 140 through the legislature. Act 140 redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee from a square into a 28 sided figure that, by the plaintiffs’ allegations, removed all but four or five of the roughly 400 Black voters from the city while removing not a single white voter. The institute itself ended up outside the city it built. The Tuskegee Civic Association answered with a selective buying campaign, a boycott of white merchants in the new, whiter downtown, and with a lawsuit argued by Fred Gray, the same Fred Gray who represented Rosa Parks and would later represent the men of the syphilis study. On November 14, 1960, the Supreme Court decided Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had spent years telling the Court to stay out of the “political thicket” of districting, wrote that the state could not use its power over municipal lines as an instrument to fence Black citizens out of the vote. The 28 sided city was struck down. Gomillion is the hinge case that opened the door to Baker v. Carr two years later and to the whole architecture of voting rights litigation that followed. This means the folks who tell college students that districting is boring are wrong. Districting is the oldest weapon in the Tuskegee story, and the people who drew Act 140 were not confused about what they were doing. They were small games specialists. III. Same Pen, Different Century Let’s run the 2026 receipts in order, because this is the part that’s on your ballot November 3. In 2023, in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court order finding that Alabama’s congressional map likely diluted Black voting power and required a second district where Black voters had a real opportunity to elect their candidate. The legislature drew a second map that still did not comply, and a federal panel appointed a special master who drew a new 2nd District stretching from Mobile through Montgomery and the Black Belt to the Georgia line, a district that for the first time pulled Tuskegee and Macon County out of the bottom of a Republican district run from Anniston. In 2024 Shomari Figures won that seat with 54.6 percent of the vote, and Alabama sent two Black representatives to Congress for the first time in its history. Then came Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026, which gutted the race conscious remedy under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Gov. Kay Ivey, who had said she opposed redistricting before the 2026 elections, called a special session for May 4. The legislature went back to its 2023 lines. The Supreme Court then released Alabama from the court ordered map, the state postponed the primaries for four districts, and on August 11 Republicans nominated state Rep. Rhett Marques, endorsed by Trump, to take on Figures in a district where the Black voting age population drops from 48 percent to 40 percent and where Trump would have won by 14 points in 2024. The Cook Political Report moved the race to Lean Republican in June. Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved it from Likely Republican to Leans Republican in September, and the reason they gave is the whole sermon: Black turnout could be relatively strong across the South partly in response to Callais itself. So when the mayor stood up and said that if you live in Tuskegee and change your registration you can have a direct impact, he was not hyping, he was reading the forecast. Then he said the line that every student in that room should tattoo on the back of their hand: they are not counting your votes, they have already factored out that you all don’t care about congressional elections, you all live in Georgia, Louisiana, you don’t pay attention. The map was drawn on the assumption of your absence. Crazy how a 40 percent district is “safe” only if the 18 to 22 year olds sitting inside it keep acting like guests. Shout out to the student moderator who brought numbers to that conversation, because that’s research over mesearch in practice, and we gotta tighten the numbers up so nobody can shuck and jive around them. The district Figures won in 2024 went for him 54.6 to 45.4. The new lines would have gone for Trump by 14. That’s the swing the legislature bought with a pen. The moderator was also right that the 2024 results inside Macon County are lopsided Democratic, and the mayor clarified the arithmetic better than any consultant could: Figures is going to win Tuskegee by a huge percentage either way, but 3,000 votes versus 10,000 votes out of Tuskegee is what moves the districtwide number from 46 to 51. The percentage is not the weapon. The raw count is. IV. The Small Games Decide the Playoffs Apply Guinier here. In The Tyranny of the Majority (1994), Lani Guinier described voting rights in three generations. The first generation was access, the fight to get on the rolls at all, the fight the

  4. 3d ago

    Amy Cooper Called 911 and Got Served. Sonya Massey Called 911 and Got Shot.

    A little old white lady clutched her purse when a Black man stepped onto the elevator, and in that one second she did more sociology than most PhD programs do in a whole decade, because she wrote his entire life off his skin, wrote the beginning, wrote the ending, and convicted him before the doors even closed, and she ain’t never even met him. Today we ain’t talking about her purse. Today we talking about who taught her how to read. You ever been found guilty of a crime that ain’t even happened yet? Convicted by a side eye, sentenced by the clutching of a purse, no trial, no jury, no evidence but your own skin. My grandpa always said your skin is your sin, and if you Black in America you ain’t got to imagine that, that’s just a regular old Tuesday. White supremacy don’t always show up in a hood holding a torch, sometimes it shows up in a cardigan on the elevator holding the purse a little tighter, sometimes it shows up jogging past you and crossing the street, same system, different uniform. Yancy did not invent this feeling, Black folks been living it since the auction block, but he named it with precision. In his 2008 essay “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism,” and later in Black Bodies, White Gazes, Yancy walks us into the elevator and describes the click of the car door locks, the clutched purse, the woman who suddenly needs to stare at the floor numbers, and he argues that none of that is a private feeling, it is a learned way of seeing that whiteness rehearses so often it starts to feel like instinct. Peep the third edition of that book, released in July 2025, because it adds a whole new chapter on George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Sonya Massey, and Kayla Moore, which tells you the elevator keeps getting new passengers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Power Is Who Holds the Pen Huey P. Newton told us that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner, so sit with that for a minute, because power ain’t just about who got the guns and the money, power is also about who gets to define, who gets to identify, and who gets to say what a thing is before the thing ever gets to be itself. Today’s phenomenon is what Yancy calls the elevator effect and what I call getting your whole biography written by a stranger who don’t know you from a can of paint in under a few seconds. It’s the moment a Black body enters a space and the space decides who you are before you do, the purse clutches, the door locks click, the security guard starts his little stroll behind you in the store, nobody said a word, yet a whole conversation just happened and you wasn’t allowed to talk in it. The Ignorance Ain’t an Accident, It’s an Achievement The system behind the purse is whiteness operating as a whole knowledge system, and the key term comes from philosopher Charles Mills: the epistemology of ignorance. Epistemology is the study of knowing, which to me is just a fancy word for how do you know what you know. If you believe Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, that’s an epistemological understanding of the world, and if you believe girls wear pink and boys wear blue, that’s one too. Academia likes to throw a bunch of syllables at you to confuse you, but don’t worry, Education Is Elevation and I got you. Mills argued in The Racial Contract (1997) that the contract requires white folks to sign on to an inverted epistemology, a structured agreement to misread the world and then call the misreading neutral, objective, common sense. Peep that. The ignorance ain’t an accident, it’s an achievement, it gets taught, funded, rehearsed, and graded, and it’s built into the intelligent design of how America perceives Black bodies. Yancy shows us what that misknowing does to being. He describes the Black body under the white gaze through what I’m calling the ontology of surfaces, meaning whiteness looks at Black skin and believes the surface is the depth, that everything worth knowing about you is pinned onto your epidermis. Sartre said existence precedes essence, you live first and become who you are after, and Yancy says whiteness flips that script for Black folks, so essence precedes existence and the verdict arrives before the person does. Fanon felt the same thing on a train in 1952 when a child pointed and said “Look, a Negro!” and he watched himself get turned into an object in real time. The not knowing already did its homework, already prescribed a reality for you that was never meant for you, it was built to cover up for what they refuse to know. Same Gaze, Different Sentences Now here’s what that means for your neighbors, because you gotta make sure your neighbor is good, and this gaze don’t read every Black body the same way. It reads Black men as threat, which is why the purse clutch. It reads Black women through what Dr. Moya Bailey named misogynoir, which is why Serena Williams told reporters at Wimbledon in 2018 that she had been drug tested more than any other top American player, male or female, five out of competition tests in the first half of that year alone, and why Black women’s pain gets dismissed in delivery rooms. It reads Black children as grown, what I call the adultification of our Black children, which is why the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found in 2017 that adults see Black girls as less innocent and more adult than white girls starting at age five. Five, y’all, five. Phillip Goff and his colleagues found the same thing for Black boys starting around age ten, with police overestimating their age by about four and a half years. Tamir Rice got twelve years on this earth and about two seconds of assessment. The gaze reads Black disabled and neurodivergent folks as noncompliant, which is why Elijah McClain is not with us today. Same gaze, different sentences. That’s why I always say we need a multiplicity of Blackness, because white supremacy has different ways of texturizing Blackness, different ways of positioning Black folks and magnetizing violence onto us, and down South we bury Black trans women at rates that should make the whole country ashamed, because their Blackness and their transness and their womanness collide in front of the same gaze. We see this in the law too. You won’t find the word slavery in the original Constitution, yet we know what the three fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause was doing, and you won’t find the word Black in it either, yet we know who it wasn’t written for. That’s whiteness at power, mapped onto legislation, mapped onto bodies, and mapped onto the phone in a white woman’s hand. Receipt Number One: She Knew What Product She Was Ordering May 25, 2020, the Ramble in Central Park. Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher and Audubon board member, asks Amy Cooper, no relation, to leash her dog in an area where leashes are required. She tells him she is going to call the cops and tell them there’s an African American man threatening her life, and then she does exactly that, and on the recording her voice climbs into panic as if somebody had laid a hand on her, and nobody did. Now watch what she did, because this part is important and Yancy illustrates it perfectly. She announced his race first. She knew exactly what product she was ordering when she dialed 911, and she understood that the state would deliver it. Christian Cooper put it best when he told NPR she was threatening to bring the machine down on his head. Crazy how that same day, about a thousand miles west in Minneapolis, that same machine put a knee on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. Same day. Same machine. Different zip code. Here’s the receipt on the receipt. Amy Cooper was charged with a misdemeanor for filing a false report, completed five therapy sessions in a restorative program, and the Manhattan DA dismissed the charge and sealed the file in February 2021. Five sessions. Meanwhile states and cities had to write whole new laws, New Jersey, California, San Francisco’s CAREN Act, just to say out loud that weaponizing 911 against Black folks is a harm, which tells you the law never saw it as one on its own. Receipt Number Two: Sonya Massey Dialed the Same Number Two things can be true. 911 is a weapon in a white woman’s hand, and 911 is a death sentence in a Black woman’s hand. July 6, 2024, Springfield, Illinois. Sonya Massey, a 36 year old Black mother, calls 911 because she thinks there’s a prowler outside her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrive. Inside her kitchen, she moves a pot of hot water off the stove, and Deputy Sean Grayson shoots her in the face. In October 2025 a jury convicted him of second degree murder, and on January 29, 2026, a judge sentenced him to 20 years. At sentencing, her mother Donna Massey told the court that she is now afraid to call the police herself. Sit with the mirror image. Amy Cooper called the police and the state showed up to serve her. Sonya Massey called the police and the state showed up and read her as the threat in her own kitchen. Same number. Same dispatcher. The only variable was whose body was holding the phone. That’s not safety, that’s a racial sorting machine wearing a badge. The Definition Ain’t Mine Now let’s name the system. White supremacy runs on its favorite fuel, antiblackness. When I say white supremacy, I mean a synergistic system of privileges, presumptions, institutions, and enforcement that positions whiteness as the norm, the neutral, and the supreme, and that benefits white people individually and institutionally whether they asked for it or not. That’s damn near Yancy, so take it up with the academics, not me. That’s bigger than Amy Cooper and bigger than a purse on the elevator. Who has the power? White people, individually and institutionally, wealthy and poor. Yancy is

  5. Sep 29

    They Killed Reading Rainbow on Purpose, Now They Want One More Chance

    Thank you Dear Masculinity, Cee Cee@611974, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. To all my parents out there, if your kid is asking you for one more chance, what has transpired before they asked you that? They did something bad. They did something wrong. They are acknowledging there was a shortcoming, an expectation you had as a parent that they did not meet, and now they are standing in the kitchen saying, give me one more chance. To all my teachers, my professors, my former teachers and former professors, if a student comes to your office hours asking for one more chance, what are they saying? They are saying they failed the objective at hand and they want one more opportunity, and the acknowledgement of failing is sprinkled all up in there. So on Tuesday, September 15, 2026, on the All In podcast, when Chamath Palihapitiya asked the Vice President of the United States what message folks need to hear before November, JD Vance fixed his mouth to say this: “Give us another chance, or give us another couple of years, to continue to work on the amazing things that we’ve been doing for the past two years.” GiVe Us AnOtHeR cHaNcE. Now watch what happened in the middle of that sentence, because CNN caught it and so did everybody with ears. He said “another chance,” heard himself, and swerved into “or, another couple of years.” That swerve is the whole essay. The first draft of the thought was the truth, and the second draft was the spin. Democratic Senator Brian Schatz called it the most mind boggling midterm pitch he had ever heard, Hakeem Jeffries translated it as Republicans admitting they failed and asking for another chance anyway, and even the Maddow blog asked the only question that matters: if you want more time, explain what you did with the time you already had. Like, think about the syllabus. They gave us a syllabus, basically. Lower prices, cheaper groceries, cheaper gas, the golden age, all of it laid out on day one like the professor who promises you’re gonna love this class. Two years later the professor is asking the students not to drop the course. There is a power differentiation between what they are doing and what they are saying, and the power differentiation just flipped, because now the professor is the one in office hours. I can already hear the maggots in my comment section: play the whole clip, you’re playing it out of context. Hey, I encourage you to play the entire clip. The fuller version has him saying “don’t give power to the people who cause the problems that we’re fixing” right before the plea, and “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” right after it. The burden of proof is on you to show me what in that context changes the meaning. Adding “the other side is worse” to “give us another chance” don’t erase the confession, it just adds a second excuse. That’s the student saying, yeah I failed, but have you SEEN the other kids’ grades? Research over MeSearch. So let’s grade the homework. The Dog Ate the Homework As a former professor, I knew a student was chicken s**t when they came to my class and fixed their lips to tell me, “Mr. Lee, Mr. Lee, the reason I don’t have my homework is because my dog ate it.” I know the dog don’t got that jurisdiction over your homework. Now turn on the TV in Texas. I’m just trying to enjoy some football, I’m just trying to watch Chip and Joanna with my wife, and what they show me? Horribly baked, bad creativity political ads that spend millions to tell me trans people and immigrants are the reason my life costs what it costs. The dog ate the homework, and the dog is always a trans woman or a man from Venezuela. Most of y’all saw the Ken Paxton ad by now. On September 8, 2026, the Paxton campaign posted a thirty second spot called “King James,” where an AI generated James Talarico writes in and reads from a fictional “King James Talarico Bible.” FactCheck.org found the disclaimer in tiny print about twenty seconds in. Talarico’s answer was clean: they don’t have any real attacks, so they’re firing up their data centers and making up fake ones. Crazy how the same party selling you “protect the children” can’t even pay a human being to shoot the commercial. Donors, y’all ain’t pissed that one of the most expensive Senate races in history is buying AI slop with your checks? If my editor used AI on my s**t, I would just use AI and skip the editor. I was in Detroit doing work with The Root, packing my bag to come back to Houston, and every ad break was Hasan Piker. Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for Senate in Michigan, has been calling Piker Abdul El Sayed’s “running mate,” and the Senate Republicans’ account posted that the two of them are “a socialist package deal.” Hasan Piker is a streamer who lives in California and is not on the ballot in Michigan. The person on the ballot is Mike Rogers, whose side is asking Michigan for another chance while he runs against a man who ain’t running. That’s the dog eating the homework in two states at once. Why the Scapegoat Is Always Cheap In 1978, Stuart Hall and his colleagues at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies published Policing the Crisis, a study of how Britain went into a full blown panic over “mugging” in 1972 and 1973. Mugging, as a label, was imported from American crime reporting, and what it named was mostly ordinary street robbery that had not suddenly exploded. What Hall and his coauthors found was that the panic arrived exactly when the British state was losing its ability to deliver the postwar promise of rising wages and stable work. When a government can no longer win consent by delivering the goods, Hall argued, it starts winning consent by delivering a threat. The folk devil in that case was the young Black man in the inner city, and the solution sold to the public was law and order. A party that promised cheaper groceries and delivered ground beef up more than twenty percent in a single year cannot win on the syllabus, so it has to win on the dog. George said it plain on air: “It’s a low effort political issue for them. They ain’t got to spend no money. They ain’t got to go rally against no entity that has any power.” That is Hall’s argument about why the folk devil is always drawn from the powerless. You cannot run an ad against the meatpacking cartel, because the meatpacking cartel buys ads. You can run an ad against a trans woman, because she can’t. All they got to do is convince the general public that they have stopped trans women from entering the WNBA, when the WNBA ain’t the thing that’s costing you. Meanwhile the President expanded the low tariff quota for Argentine beef trimmings by 80,000 metric tons in February 2026, then announced a 90 day tariff holiday on up to 300,000 metric tons of imported beef in August, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, which is not a leftist organization, said flooding the market with foreign beef is not how you rebuild the American herd. The Texas cattle rancher is being undercut by an “America First” president’s favor to Argentina, and the ad he sees at halftime is about a drag queen. This also proves the Hall move works both ways. The panic is not just a distraction, it’s a transfer. Every dollar of attention you spend on the folk devil is a dollar of attention the powerful didn’t have to defend. Take the human trafficking example George raised, because this one is personal for every Texan with a cousin. In the third special session of 2023, Texas passed Senate Bill 4, which took effect February 6, 2024, and set a ten year mandatory minimum for smuggling of persons. The penalty can be reduced if the person you’re transporting is a close relative, and advocates from the Tahirih Justice Center to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center warned that Texas’s definition of smuggling is broad enough that giving a friend a ride to church or the doctor could be charged. Now sit that next to the same political coalition slow walking the Epstein files. They will build a ten year cage for the church ride and hold the door open for the billionaire’s jet. Does that tell you they care about human trafficking? Does it? In 2015, when Donald Trump rode that escalator down and said Mexico was sending “rapists,” he had already been doing business for decades with non Mexican bad people who came to this country and made his s**t. Every accusation is a confession, and every folk devil is a receipt for what the accuser is hiding. Take a Look, It’s in a Book, Then They Took the Book Now we switch gears, because the confession JD Vance made about groceries is the same confession the federal government made about reading twenty years ago. It just took longer to show up on the report card. Reading Rainbow premiered on PBS in 1983, produced out of WNED in Buffalo with Nebraska ETV, hosted by LeVar Burton, the same brother who six years earlier had carried Kunta Kinte on his back in Roots. The show’s premise was never phonics. Each episode took one children’s book, let LeVar take you somewhere that book lived, and then let real children review books for other children. It was built to fight the “summer slide,” the reading loss that piles up when school’s out, and the method was joy. Get the kid to love the book, and the kid does the rest. In 1995, the Clinton Department of Education created the Ready To Learn grant, which funded PBS children’s programming aimed at school readiness. Then in January 2002, George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind, and the whole federal apparatus reorganized around what could be measured. After 2005, the Ready To Learn money was aimed much more narrowly at programs that taught literacy skills, phonics, and spelling. The last original Reading Rainbow aired November 10, 2006. Reruns ran until August 28

  6. Sep 25

    What Is the Legal Right Way to Be a War Criminal? | The Chop Up Show

    Thank you Lynette, Laurel Fairchild, Jen Champion, Leanna, FREEFREEPALESTINE🇵🇸, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I came in hot on Nolan Wells, and I’m not apologizing for it. On Monday, September 21, 2026, Jackson County District Attorney Angel Myers McIlrath went on Facebook with a video and a redacted grand jury report and told the public that a 23 member grand jury had unanimously returned a no true bill in the death of an eighteen year old Black boy, after 132 subpoenas and 43 witnesses. No indictments. No charges. Now peep the calendar. Nolan would have turned nineteen that same week, and the day before the announcement his mother posted that all she wanted for her birthday was a hug from her son. So I asked my cohosts straight up: is that intentional, or are we reaching? Toya said probably coincidence, then immediately made the sharper point, which is that the timeline itself is the tactic. Investigations get stretched out until they slide out of the public purview, and once the outrage cools, in her words, a lot of tricky s**t gets to happen without garnering so much outrage. That’s why she likes and shares every “we won’t forget Nolan Wells” post she sees, because she knows the intent is for us to stop making noise. Domo agreed on coincidence and then named the other trap, which is that people will go to war over intentionality while the actual evidence sits right there unread. So let’s read the evidence, because the receipts don’t need my speculation to be damning. The grand jury wrote that the position, the condition, the time of discovery, and the location of Nolan’s body were “consistent with drowning.” Hold that phrase. Then hold this one from the same report: the State of Mississippi Chief Medical Examiner and the family’s independent pathologist both said the cause and manner of death were undetermined, and that drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion. Undetermined. Then on Thursday, September 24, the same day we recorded, Ben Crump’s team walked through the state’s own autopsy on a press call. Attorney Liza Park said the state’s report showed no fluid or debris in the airway, no water in the lungs, no water in the stomach, and two contusions about two inches each on the back of Nolan’s head, with Dr. Roger Mitchell’s independent exam finding no white blood cells at the injury, which Park read as the injury happening shortly before he died. Forensic examiner Andrew Garrett pulled more than a million digital artifacts off Nolan’s phone, Snapchat, Instagram, GPS, Apple Health, and said he couldn’t speak to intent, but from a digital standpoint, things were deleted. That’s why I asked it the way I asked it on air: how do you drown with no water in you? If you were found in water with none in your lungs, the most boring explanation is that you weren’t breathing when you went in. Now I’m not a pathologist, and I’ll be honest with y’all that a drowning can sometimes present without much fluid, which is exactly why the forensic folks call it a diagnosis of exclusion. Crazy how that cuts, though. A diagnosis of exclusion means you land on drowning only after you rule everything else out. The report didn’t rule everything else out. It said “consistent with,” and then it said “exonerate.” Here’s the DA’s own line, and I need y’all to sit with it: “In addition to bringing prosecutions against the guilty, the grand jury must also exonerate those who have been falsely accused.” She also told the public that Nolan bought his own alcohol with a fake ID, that Nolan “chose to stay on the island,” and she spent a whole chunk of her statement going at Ben Crump by name. I called it legal gaslighting on the show, and I’m standing on it. Apply Razack here. In Dying from Improvement, Sherene Razack studies the inquests and inquiries Canada holds when Indigenous people die in custody, and what she finds is that the official inquiry is not a neutral search for cause, it’s a storytelling ritual. It produces a narrative where the dead person’s own choices, habits, and pathologies explain the death, and where the institutions and the people standing nearby walk out clean, even caring. Her title is the punchline: the dead are dying from improvement, dying of their own failure to be improved by the state. Crazy how the Jackson County report reads like it came straight out of her archive. The dead boy bought liquor. The dead boy chose to stay. The friends loved him. The allegations were false. The grand jury must also exonerate. Razack would tell you that last move ain’t a side effect of the inquiry. It’s the product. The living walk out with innocence certified by the state, and the dead walk out with a story about himself he never got to contest. This is why I said on the show, and I’m going to keep saying it, from here on out, you’re going to hear me say a lot of, this is why identity politics matter. The liberals and the left keep telling us we need to move away from identity, and I’m telling you that’s a privilege y’all can afford and we can’t. Historically, the local governments in places like Mississippi are known for covering s**t up. That ain’t a vibe, that’s the archive, from Emmett Till’s acquitted killers to the three civil rights workers dug out of an earthen dam in Neshoba County in 1964. The one tool Black families used to have against the county was the federal government, specifically the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice, and that tool got turned around and pointed back at us. Under Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Civil Rights Division joined a lawsuit against UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine in January 2026, issued a finding in May that it discriminated against white and Asian applicants, and sent a similar letter to Yale’s medical school. Nolan’s family has asked for an independent DOJ review. Just admit which one of those two requests this Civil Rights Division was rebuilt to answer. Two things can be true, and Domo made sure I held both. It’s true that a 23 person grand jury heard a mountain of evidence, including testimony from the family’s own pathologist, and it’s true that “no true bill” is not the same thing as “nothing happened.” Mississippi has no statute of limitations on murder, and the report itself says a future grand jury can take up new evidence. The case ain’t closed. It’s shelved. There’s a difference, and the family knows it. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. II. They Don’t See Us as People: The Panel vs. Stacey Patton Then I pushed us somewhere most shows won’t go. A lot of folks have been running Nolan’s story through adultification, the idea that Black children get treated like adults and denied the protections of childhood. I brought Dr. Stacey Patton into the room, because in 2021 she published the sharpest rebuttal to that whole thesis, and her title said it plainly: Black children are not being killed because they’re “adultified,” they’re being murdered because they’re Black. Drawing on Toby Rollo’s work on the child/human binary, Patton argues the adultification thesis is a trap, because it perpetuates the myth of protected childhood and invites Black communities to go beg for white protection for Black bodies. Her history flips the script. White supremacy never adultified us, it did the opposite. Douglass wrote that his enslaver’s son could grow into a man while he stayed a minor his whole life. Under that logic we are, in Patton’s phrase, the children of children, permanently infantilized, irrational, correctable by force. So begging the state to see Nolan as a boy is begging for a protection that was never built for him. So I asked the panel: can two things be true, or does this critique have teeth? Toya took it seriously and said childhood is ultimately a question about humanity, about who gets innocence, nurture, and a future, and that those things been reserved for white children since the plantation, where a Black child’s only assigned purpose was to grow into labor as fast as possible. In her words: “Who gives a s**t about innocence? Hurry up, get up, pick your s**t up.” There’s never been an investment in protecting Black childhood because Black people were never granted access to humanity in the first place. Domo said the critique stops a bit short, and he’s right. Patton is correct that the problem ain’t age, it’s Blackness, but the deeper claim underneath both frames is that they don’t see us as people at all. That’s why the world isn’t asking in unison what happened to Nolan Wells. If it was a white boy on that island, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Then we reached for Orlando Patterson’s three constituent elements of slavery from Slavery and Social Death: gratuitous violence, natal alienation, and general dishonor. Natal alienation is the kicker here, the severing of the enslaved from any recognized lineage, so that a child belongs to no one who can legally protect him. My piece of it was what I called the adult matrix, a time matrix. They call a grown Black man “boy” when they want him small and call a Black teenager a grown man when they want him dangerous. They move the clock on us whenever the clock is useful. This means the adultification crowd and the Patton crowd are describing the same machine from two different sides: the age was never the point. The age is a dial, and somebody else’s hand is on it. III. The Mother Is the Jurisdiction This is where the episode got intersectional without anybody announcing it, and I want to slow down here. I made sure the audience knew what Nolan’s mother, Christine Wells Wonsley, has been carrying. On August 5, 2026, the Mis

  7. Sep 22

    Deleted Texts, Missing Keys, Bruised Skull, "Consistent With Drowning": What the Grand Jury Skipped

    Christine Wonsley posted on Sunday, September 20. All she wanted for her birthday was to hug her son and hear his jokes. That Wednesday before, Nolan would have turned 19. Monday night the Jackson County District Attorney’s office released the grand jury report, and the report told her, in writing, that her boy chose to stay on that island, that he went in the water, and that the questions she and her husband have been asking since July are, and I’m quoting the state of Mississippi here, solely the result of public clamor and private malice. Sit with the timing. Nobody at that DA’s office had to release an eight page document the week of a dead child’s birthday and the day after his mother’s. They chose the week. They chose the words. Then folks will look at y’all sideways for saying Mississippi don’t care about Black children. Research over MeSearch, so let me walk it. The Frame Everybody Reached For, and Why Patton Says Put It Down The first thing a lot of us did when this story broke was reach for adultification. Essence caught outlets calling Nolan a man while his friends of the same age got called teens, and that trick is real, I clocked it too. Nolan was 18 by the calendar and a child by every other measure, a college kid on a boat on the Fourth of July. Ahh, but here’s where I want y’all to slow down, because the scholar most people would cite on this is actually the one telling us to drop it. Stacey Patton is not an adultification theorist. Patton, with Toby Rollo, wrote the sharpest rebuttal of that whole thesis back in 2021, and the title says it plain: Black Children Are Not Being Killed Because They Are Adultified, They’re Murdered Because They’re Black. Her argument is that the adultification thesis is both mistaken and a counterproductive trap, because it perpetuates the myth of protected childhood and invites Black communities to seek white protections for Black bodies. Patton’s read of the history is that white supremacy never adultified us, it did the opposite. Slavery was a denial of Black adulthood. Douglass said his master’s son could grow into a man while he had to stay a minor his whole life. Under that logic Black youth are the children of children, and childhood was never a protected category anyway, it was a category of the irrational, the ones who can be struck and confined without consent. So begging the state to see Nolan as a boy is begging for a protection that was never built for him. Apply Patton here. The question was never whether Jackson County would see an 18 year old as a child. The question is why a Black body pulled out of the Gulf starts from a presumption of accident while everybody else on that trip starts from a presumption of innocence. That’s not adultification. That’s the racial contract, Mills would say, the agreement that some deaths require an explanation and some deaths are the explanation. Then go one layer deeper with her, because Patton and Rollo don’t just reject the conclusion, they go after the receipts. The study everybody cites for adultification, Goff’s Essence of Innocence, showed cops and college students photos of boys already tagged as suspects in felonies and asked them to guess ages and rate innocence. Patton’s point is that the method bakes in the answer. If you tell a participant a ten year old is suspected of a carjacking, that participant is gonna age him up just to avoid saying something absurd, and if you ask a police officer to explain why he shot a child, that officer is gonna swear the child looked grown and looked armed, because that’s what a police officer says. Patton says we already know not to believe the “he looked armed” line, so why do we take the “he looked older” line on faith and build a whole theory on it? The age inflation ain’t a perception error, it’s a strategic threat inflation after the fact, the same move as calling a bruised child’s mother malicious after the fact. Feel me. That’s what makes her critique bigger than a semantics fight. If you accept adultification, you’re accepting the cop’s own alibi as the diagnosis, and you end up asking the state that killed the child to please recognize him as a child next time. Patton wants us out of that loop entirely. Black youth don’t need to be recategorized. The order that categorizes them needs to fall. No Foul Play Is a Verdict Before the Autopsy Two things can be true, so let me put both on the table. First truth. The things that fueled this family’s suspicion were not internet fantasy. His parents said messages had been deleted off his phone when they found it, after tracking it to a friend’s house the day his body was found. Crump says the friends claimed Nolan was talking to a young lady, and the young lady said Nolan told her he was getting back on the boat with the boys. That’s a contradiction at the center of the whole “he chose to stay” story. The family alleged his friends were reluctant to turn over his keys. The autopsy noted a 12 inch by 8 inch area of red discoloration in the soft tissue at the back of his head, and both the state medical examiner and the family’s independent pathologist found the cause and manner of death undetermined. The grand jury itself conceded drowning is a diagnosis of exclusion. So when the DA says “consistent with drowning,” understand what that phrase does. It means nothing else was proven. It does not mean drowning was. Then there’s the opening move, which is the one nobody wants to talk about. The Jackson County Sheriff’s Office initially investigated this as a death, not a homicide, and his parents said law enforcement moved too quickly assuming no foul play while being slow to communicate with them. That first classification is the original sin. It decides what gets preserved, whose phone gets pulled that night versus that week, who gets separated for interviews and who gets to ride home together and get their story straight. You can’t un ring that bell with 132 subpoenas two months later. Second truth, and I’m saying this on the record because credibility is the only currency we got. Not everything held. That enhanced 911 audio TMZ put out, the one folks swore had somebody asking if he was dead, a digital forensics expert said he could not corroborate it, and the TMZ version was 20 seconds longer than the original with a different digital fingerprint. Then the DA said Crump’s own team, after the independent autopsy and hundreds of tips, advised her office they had no evidence of a crime. If your argument is that the state covered up a murder, that’s the wall you hit, and I’m not gonna pretend it ain’t there. Like, here’s the thing though. My argument was never that I know somebody killed Nolan Wells. My argument is what the state did with a Black family’s grief once it decided nobody did. Same Old Script, New Toilet Mississippi didn’t invent this move for Nolan. Mississippi has been running this exact play since before his grandmama was born, and the play goes: Black person turns up dead, local authorities announce no foul play before the body is cold, the autopsy comes back undetermined, and the family gets told they’re the problem. Emmett Till, Tallahatchie County, 1955. The founding text. An all white jury took about an hour, the killers sold their confession to Look magazine for a few thousand dollars, and Mississippi wrote the rule that a Black child in the water is a matter of opinion. Willie Andrew Jones Jr., Scott County, 2018. A 21 year old found hanging in the yard of his white girlfriend’s family. The sheriff said suicide inside of days. The family has never accepted it. Rasheem Carter, Smith County, 2022. Carter was reported missing October 2 after he went to police for help and called his mother frantic that white men in three trucks were pursuing him. His head was severed from his body and his spinal cord was recovered in a separate area. Then a day after finding his remains the Smith County Sheriff’s Department posted that it had no reason to believe foul play was involved. The medical examiner ruled cause and manner undetermined. A man with no head, undetermined. The sheriff only walked it back after Carter’s family and Crump accused authorities of stonewalling them for more than four months. Tiffany Carter said something at that press conference that Christine Wonsley could have said this week: “I am overwhelmed with the oppression that this state have caused in our lives.” Dexter Wade, Jackson, 2023. Hit by an off duty officer’s cruiser, buried by the city in a numbered pauper’s grave while his mother filed missing person reports for months. The state didn’t kill him and hide it. The state just didn’t think his mother needed to know. Dau Mabil, Jackson, 2024. Vanished on a walk, pulled from the Pearl River weeks later. No foul play first, questions second. Rankin County, 2023. Michael Corey Jenkins was handcuffed and shot in the mouth, and his attorney said local authorities filed false charges to try to blame the shooting on him. It took a federal courtroom to do what Jackson County’s neighbors wouldn’t. Now put Nolan Wells at the bottom of that list and read the grand jury’s language again. “Public clamor and private malice” is just the 2026 edition of “no reason to believe foul play was involved.” Crazy how the paperwork changes and the sentence don’t. I’m gonna be precise for the folks in the back, because the ops will try to use this against us. Till and Rankin County are proven homicides. Jones, Carter, Mabil, and now Wells are officially undetermined. That is exactly the point. The claim isn’t that every one of these was a murder. The claim is that Mississippi’s system produces “undetermined” for Black bodies with a consistency that should itself be under investigation. The Threshold Here’s the two roles frame, what the grand jury says versus what the gran

  8. Sep 21

    Every Opening Act Quit Ed Sheeran's Tour. Macy Gray Defended the Man Who Made Them.

    Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Macy Gray, respectfully, you are wrong as two left shoes for the comments you left under my post concerning the Ed Sheeran tour. Now as a Southern man that was taught to have respect for my elders, even when you think they are wrong, I hope you do not take this as condescending or patronizing, because I’m about to use my transferable skills of being a professor of adult and higher education, as well as having a master’s in human relations, to illustrate to you point for point why you were wrong. Not to slam dunk on you. To do what I was trained to do, which is take a comment, break it into its claims, and check every one of them against the record. Because here is the thing about what you wrote, Ms. Gray. You did not leave an opinion. You left a series of claims that can be tested, and then you put the word OPINION in all caps on top of them like a tarp over a leaking roof. Then you hoped nobody would look under the tarp. Ahh, but somebody looked.. Let me read it back to you the way you wrote it. You started off by saying, why does he have to sabotage his story just so y’all can understand? You went on to say, neither his opinion or Macklemore’s is going to fix Israel. You said, I want to see any one of you turn down playing in stadiums, employing thousands of people, making millions of dollars, just to take a side in a war that’s been going on since the 50s. Then you said, you think Ed Sheeran is going to make a dent? What have you ever done for Palestine? Y’all can’t wait to tear somebody down. Four moves. Every one of them is going to get graded. Move One: “Why does he have to sabotage his story?” Ms. Gray, Ed Sheeran did not sabotage anything. A billionaire sabotaged Ed Sheeran, and Ed Sheeran let him. Let’s put the timeline on the table so we are working from the same facts. Macklemore opened for Sheeran at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5, 2026. He wore a keffiyeh, he said the words Free Palestine, he performed Hind’s Hall while footage from Gaza played on the screens, and he told the Jewish folks in the building, in his own words, that criticism of a state is not criticism of a people. That is what happened on that stage. Then Pink reposted a StopAntisemitism story demanding he be removed from the tour, and a week later she wrote a three part statement saying she never asked for anybody to be silenced. Two things can be true. She amplified the call to remove him, and then she said she never asked for it. We call that shucking and jobbing. Then Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and Gillette Stadium, got on the phone with Sheeran. By Macklemore’s own account, and Sheeran’s cousin and the reporting since have not contradicted it, Kraft told Sheeran that if Macklemore was on the bill, the Foxborough shows on September 25 and 26 were off, and that he had rallied other stadium owners to hold the same line. Kraft’s own statement said the quiet part in public: Gillette Stadium, he said, would not provide a platform for what he called hate speech, and he cited Macklemore’s stage material as the reason. On September 14 the promoter, Messina Touring Group, announced that venues had refused to host the tour with Macklemore on the lineup and that Macklemore would not be performing on the remaining U.S. dates. Sheeran said the decision was the promoter’s. The promoter said it was the venues’. The venues are owned by billionaires. Follow the money and you find the mouth. Then here is the part you skipped, Ms. Gray. Every single remaining opening act quit. Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Beoga, Lukas Graham. All of them. Sheeran walked out in Philadelphia on September 19 with no openers, cried on stage, said he had made mistakes, and told the crowd he never wanted to be an activist musician. Ticket resale prices dropped to 42 dollars. That is not Macklemore sabotaging Ed Sheeran’s story. That is what happens when you let a stadium owner write your set list. The sabotage came from the top of the building, not from the opening act. So when you ask why should Ed Sheeran have to sabotage a successful tour, the honest question is why should a billionaire get to sabotage a successful tour where an artist was already exercising freedom of speech with his artistry, and why did you decide the artist was the problem? Move Two: “It’s just an opinion” This is the move that made me want to teach. See, the thing about opinions, Ms. Gray, is they are non falsifiable, meaning they cannot be proven true or false. An opinion is, I believe jazz is better than R&B. You feel me? That is subjective. Nobody can run a test on it. What you wrote is not that. What you wrote is a set of empirical claims, and empirical claims can be checked. So let me check them. You said it is a war that has been going on since the 50s. The number is 1948. In Arabic it is called the Nakba, the catastrophe, and it is not an opinion. Between late 1947 and 1949 roughly 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes, more than 400 villages were depopulated and destroyed, and on April 9, 1948, at Deir Yassin, over 100 villagers were killed by Irgun and Lehi fighters in a massacre that sent panic through the countryside and accelerated the flight. Their descendants are still refugees to this day, registered with UNRWA in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. When you say the 1950s, you are not stating a position. You are stating a date, and the date is wrong. So everything you built on top of that date is built on sand. You said, neither his opinion or Macklemore’s opinion is going to fix Israel. Ms. Gray, Israel is not the one that needs fixing. Gaza is rubble. Here is what the courts, not the activists, the courts, have said. In January 2024 the International Court of Justice found it plausible that Israel’s conduct in Gaza violated the Genocide Convention and ordered provisional measures. In July 2024 the same court issued an advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end. In November 2024 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare. In September 2025 the UN Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza. Those are not opinions. Those are findings by bodies with jurisdiction, rules of evidence, and judges. You can disagree with them, but you cannot call them an opinion and walk away. You said every president has tried to end it. Every president has armed one side of it. Since the 1970s the United States has been the principal supplier of weapons to Israel, and under the 2016 memorandum of understanding the floor is 3.8 billion dollars a year through 2028, before the supplemental packages since October 2023 that pushed it into the tens of billions. That is your tax dollars, Ms. Gray. Mine too. When you say every president has tried to end it, the arms ledger says every president has funded it. Apply Mills here. Mills calls this white ignorance, and he is careful to say it is not stupidity, it is a structure, a way of not knowing that gets protected because knowing would cost something. The word “opinion” in your comment is the tarp. It is the mechanism that lets a person with access to every fact I just listed say “who’s to say” and keep their brunch reservation. So no, Ms. Gray. What you wrote was not an opinion. It was misinformation. Move Three: “I want to see any of you turn down a stadium” Ms. Gray, we all got options and choices. When you say you want to see anybody turn down a stadium, playing in front of tens of thousands of people, employing thousands of people, making millions of dollars, you are trying to provoke an emotional response, and you are pretending the thing you are describing has never happened. It has happened. It has happened so many times that there is a whole shelf of history about it, and most of it was written by Black artists. Historical context, the part they skip in the group chat Start with Paul Robeson. In 1950 the State Department revoked his passport because he would not stop speaking about colonialism, lynching, and the Soviet Union in the same breath. His income went from over 100,000 dollars a year to a few thousand. Concert halls cancelled. Record labels dropped him. He did not get his passport back until 1958. That is a man who did not turn down a stadium. The stadium got taken from him, and he kept singing anyway. Then Harry Belafonte. He funded SNCC out of his own pocket, bailed out Freedom Riders, and in 1968 guest hosted The Tonight Show for a week and put Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy on the couch. Belafonte did not have to do any of that. He had the stadiums. He used them. Then 1985. Steven Van Zandt organized Artists United Against Apartheid, 49 artists including Miles Davis, Gil Scott Heron, Run DMC, Bonnie Raitt, and Bruce Springsteen, and they recorded Sun City, a song whose entire message was I ain’t gonna play there. Sun City was a resort in the Bophuthatswana bantustan where the apartheid government paid Western entertainers millions to play so the world would believe things were normal. The United Nations kept a register of entertainers who took the money. Some of the biggest names in music were on that list. The artists who refused lost checks. The artists who played got their names published as collaborators. That is the exact choice you just said nobody makes, Ms. Gray. Whole careers were built on making it. Then the part that matters most for this conversation, because it is the Black and Palestine part. Fischbach documents that in the summer of 1967, right after the Six Day War, SNCC published a newsletter with a two page piece on Palestine, and the price was im

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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
    148
  • Rating
    Explicit
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    © The Conscious Lee
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