Was Homosexuality “Un-African”? The 40+ Societies That Say Otherwise

Was Homosexuality “Un-African”? The 40+ Societies That Say Otherwise

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because you been lost in the sauce of a homophobia that somebody handed you and told you was tradition. Let me say it plain so the folks in the back can hear me. The homophobia a whole lot of us carry around like it’s ancestral is not African. It’s imported. It came off the same boats, through the same missions, behind the same flags as the chains, and then it got rebranded as “our values” so we’d do the policing for free. I. Before Europe Believed The World Was Round, Africa Already Knew Gender Was A Role, Not A Body Long before Europeans set foot on the continent, back when a real lot of them still believed the earth was flat, woman-to-woman marriage was a mainstream, legally recognized institution stretching from the Nuer of South Sudan to the Igbo of Nigeria to the Kuria of Tanzania and Kenya. A woman of wealth and standing could pay the bridewealth, become the legal husband, control the lineage and the property, and her wives could bear children by a chosen male consort, the genitor, whose children belonged to her line and her name. This wasn’t done in secrecy. It was an entire institution, with rites and bride price and public recognition, sitting in the open. Ifi Amadiume, in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, showed that in precolonial Igbo society gender was flexible and was not welded to the sexed body, so a woman could occupy the social role of husband and father, get addressed as such, and wield the authority that came with it. Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, in The Invention of Women, pushed it further and argued that gender as the master category for organizing a whole society was itself a Western imposition mapped onto Yoruba life, which had organized power by seniority and not by what was between your legs. Operationalize that. This means the thing we fight over today, “man” versus “woman” as a fixed biological destiny, was never a universal human fact. It was one cultural arrangement among many, and Africa was running several others at the same time. So anybody who tells you the binary is “just biology” and “just how it’s always been” is wrong on the history. Flat. Two things can be true: bodies are real, and the meanings we stack on top of them are made up. II. It Wasn’t A Footnote — Queen Njinga, The Azande, And A Tomb In Saqqara Queen Njinga, who lived from around 1583 to 1663 and ruled the kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba in present-day Angola, dressed as a king and not as a queen, led her armies in person, took women as wives, and — by the accounts of the very Portuguese who were scandalized by her — kept male concubines. I want to be honest about my sourcing, because that’s the whole brand: much of what we “know” about her intimate life comes filtered through hostile colonial chroniclers like the Capuchin missionary Cavazzi, so I read those accounts for what they reveal about European panic as much as for the facts they claim. The Portuguese were already horrified by her military genius. What disturbed them just as much was her gender and her sexual autonomy, and in their own writing they branded her “unnatural.” That word was load-bearing, because “unnatural” was the moral fuel that justified the whole civilizing mission. Then peep the Azande of Central Africa, the warrior husbands. E. E. Evans-Pritchard documented that Azande warriors married younger men, paid bridewealth in spears to the boy’s family, and the union was socially recognized, not hidden in shame. The anthology that gathers all of this, Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, walks through dozens of these societies across the continent. And go all the way back to the Fifth Dynasty tomb at Saqqara, the resting place of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, two royal manicurists buried nose to nose in the most intimate embrace canonical Egyptian art ever allowed, a pose otherwise reserved for husband and wife. Here’s my honest caveat, because Research over MeSearch means I don’t cook the books to win: scholars still argue whether those two were lovers or twins, and I’m not gonna pretend that debate is settled. But the fact that the most intimate iconography on the wall is two men is itself the data, and it’s data Europe never expected us to dig up. III. Two Things Can Be True — And Pretending They Can’t Is The Colonial Filing System Talking Now here’s where folks get lost in the sauce from both directions. One camp wants to wave female husbandry around like it’s ancient gay marriage, full stop. The other camp, the homophobes, want to say “see, it was never even sexual, so it proves nothing.” Both of y’all are wrong, and the truth is more interesting than either lie. The historians and ethnographers, Amadiume included, stress that most female-husband unions were not primarily erotic. They were kinship, labor, land, and lineage arrangements that handed women access to property and power a rigid patriarchy would otherwise deny them. Two things can be true: female husbandry was mostly about material power and lineage, and the same societies also held open, recognized space for erotic same-gender bonds, like the Azande and Njinga’s court. The thread tying all of it together was never modern “sexual identity.” It’s that gender was a social role you could occupy regardless of the body you were born into, and that domestic and erotic life had more than one legitimate channel to flow through. So watch the move when somebody says “this was just economics, not gay.” That person thinks they’re being neutral and historical. They’re not. Choosing to read only the kinship and erase the erotic, and treating “economic” and “queer” as if they’re opposites, is itself a position. That’s not neutrality. That’s the colonial filing system still doing its job in your mouth, sorting human lives into the boxes Europe built and calling the sorting “objective.” Naming a position as neutral is how power hides. IV. Colonialism Didn’t Just ‘Introduce’ Homophobia — It Installed A System With Three Moving Parts Through the colonization and the enslavement of the continent, Europe didn’t just bring a bad vibe. It installed a system, and the system ran on three specific parts. One: the binary gender system, the one that says a man is a man and a woman is a woman, fixed at birth, no movement, no exceptions. Two: heterosexual marriage as the only legitimate frame, welding sexuality to reproduction and to property inheritance under European legal logic. Three: the criminalization of gender nonconformity, and this is the turn — once the female husband lost her legal recognition, she didn’t just lose a title, she became “deviant,” a criminal, a sinner to be saved or jailed. Charles Mills, in The Racial Contract, gives us the frame: colonial power doesn’t just take land, it decides whose knowledge counts as knowledge, so African ways of organizing gender got reclassified from “wisdom” to “savagery” by people who couldn’t pronounce the names. Saidiya Hartman, writing on the archive, teaches us that the colonial record doesn’t neutrally “lack” evidence of these lives, it actively worked to erase them, so the silence in the archive is not an absence, it’s a crime scene. This also proves the so-called “African values” argument is running on European software. This also proves that the anti-gay criminal codes still on the books across the continent are, in a lot of cases, literally inherited colonial sodomy statutes with the colonizer’s fingerprints still on them. This also proves that when Europe left, it left the homophobia behind like a tenant who skips out on the lease but leaves all his furniture, and we been decorating around it for generations, calling his couch our heirloom. V. Quare vs. Queer — Why E. Patrick Johnson’s Grandmother Is The Theorist We Need For This How you read this whole history depends on the theory you bring to it, so let me get specific about the lens. Queer theory — your Judith Butler, your foundational 1990s canon — did something necessary and I’m giving it its respect: it taught us that gender is performative, that the categories are constructed and can be denaturalized, that the binary is a costume the culture sews and not a fact God handed down. That is exactly the tool that lets me stand here and say the female husband proves gender is a role and not a body. Real talk. But two things can be true: queer theory, for all its brilliance, has a documented habit of floating up into abstraction, treating race and class as discourse instead of as material conditions, and quietly defaulting its imagined queer subject to somebody white, somebody with the luxury to theorize identity instead of the obligation to survive it. Enter E. Patrick Johnson. In 2001, in an essay with the longest, most Southern title in the academy — “Quare” Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother — Johnson takes “quare,” his grandmother’s Southern Black vernacular pronunciation of “queer,” and turns it into a theory. Quare studies is, in his own words, a vernacular rearticulation of queer theory built to hold racialized sexual knowledge, which means it flat-out refuses to talk about queerness as if it floats free of Black skin, working-class money, and grandmother kitchens. Here’s the comparison operationalized: queer theory deconstructs the binary, and quare insists you do that deconstruction while standing in the body, in the bloodline, in the material. And that is precisely the lens female husbandry demands, because female husbandry was never abstract. It was land. It was bridewealth. It was who inherits, who eats, who carries the name into the next generation. You cannot read it right through a theory that treats identity as a free-floating performance and skips straight past the property records. Johnson channels Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, the Black feminist tradition that said the personal is material before it’s anything else, and that is the same intersectional floor I stand on every time I sit down to write. Kimberlé Crenshaw named it, Combahee lived it: you cannot separate the gender from the race from the class, and any theory that asks you to is asking you to read your own ancestors with one eye closed. So here’s the difference in one breath. Quare is queer that never left home. Quare is Southern. Quare is Black. Quare is the grandmother saying “that child is a little quare” with love in her mouth and no diagnosis in her hand. Queer tells you the category is constructed. Quare tells you who paid for the construction and who’s still paying. Feel me? VI. We’re Not Importing Labels — We’re Subtracting The Lie Just for clarity, because somebody always tries it: reclaiming this history is not about importing Western rainbow labels onto Africa and stapling 2026 vocabulary onto people who never asked for it. It’s the exact opposite move. It’s about subtracting the Western homophobia that got imported four centuries ago and dressed up as tradition the entire time. It’s about reclaiming a past that was more diverse, more flexible, and more free than the European archive ever wanted us to find out. So when you stand on a corner and yell “homosexuality is un-African,” understand what you’re actually doing: you are not defending African tradition, you are performing European Christianity, and by saying it out loud you make the whiteness of your own position visible to everybody in earshot who knows the receipts. Every accusation is a confession. The loudest man in the room screaming that queerness is a “Western import” is confessing, without knowing it, that he has no idea his own homophobia is the actual import. So when I said up top that you been lost in the sauce, hear me right — that wasn’t an insult, it was an invitation, back to a history that was bigger, freer, and more yours than the colonizer ever wanted you to know existed. Happy Pride, y’all. Education is elevation. Research over MeSearch.\ Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 5 Key Takeaways 1. Female husbandry and woman-to-woman marriage were mainstream, legally recognized institutions across 40+ African societies — not secret, not marginal, not modern. 2. Precolonial African gender systems decoupled the social role from the sexed body. A woman could be a legal husband and father. “Just biology” is a colonial story, not a universal fact. 3. Two things can be true: most female-husband unions were kinship and property arrangements, and the same societies still made room for openly recognized same-gender intimacy. 4. Colonialism installed homophobia through three mechanisms — the fixed binary, reproduction-bound marriage, and the criminalization of nonconformity — and many of today’s anti-gay laws are inherited colonial statutes. 5. Quare theory (E. Patrick Johnson) reads this history better than queer theory alone, because it keeps race, class, and the material body in the frame instead of floating into abstraction. Become A Paid Subscriber This work runs on no corporate backing, no brand deals dictating what I can and can’t say, no foundation putting a leash on the analysis — just readers like you. Less than 1% of the people who read this actually pay, which means the folks who do are carrying the whole thing on their backs, and I don’t take that lightly. What you’re funding is PBS-depth, independent digital curriculum, built on community expertise instead of a marketing department, filling the void left by the retreat of public-education media that used to do this and walked away from it. If “Education is Elevation” and “Research over MeSearch” mean something to you, then becoming a paid subscriber is how you keep this independent, keep it free of corporate strings, and keep it pointed at our community instead of a sponsor. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the deeper the support, the deeper the work goes. Pull up. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Works Cited and Related Readings 1. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (Zed Books, 1987). The foundational text on Igbo woman-to-woman marriage. Amadiume argues precolonial Igbo gender was flexible and not biologically fixed, so women could occupy male social roles. This is the spine of the “gender is a role, not a body” argument. 2. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997). Argues that gender as the organizing logic of society was a Western imposition onto Yoruba life, which ranked by seniority rather than sexed bodies. Use to show the binary itself is culturally specific, not universal. 3. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities (St. Martin’s Press, 1998). The canonical survey gathering same-gender practices across dozens of African societies, including the Azande warrior husbands and female-husband institutions. The receipts for the “40+ societies” claim. 4. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Sexual Inversion among the Azande,” American Anthropologist 72 (1970). Ethnographic documentation of Azande warriors marrying younger men and paying bridewealth in spears. Read critically — it’s a colonial-era anthropologist — but it records a recognized, public institution. 5. Johnson, E. Patrick. “‘Quare’ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,” Text and Performance Quarterly 21, no. 1 (2001). The origin of quare theory. Johnson critiques queer theory’s neglect of race and class and grounds queerness in the body, vernacular, and material life. The lens for this entire piece. 6. Johnson, E. Patrick, and Mae G. Henderson, eds. Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology (Duke Univ. Press, 2005). Reprints the quare essay and builds out the field. Use for the broader Black queer theoretical tradition that quare opened up. 7. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990). The queer-theory anchor. Gender as performative, the binary as constructed. Necessary tool and necessary foil — quare theory is in conversation (and tension) with exactly this. 8. Cohen, Cathy J. “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3, no. 4 (1997). Bridges queer theory and Black radical politics, insisting queerness be measured against material power, not just identity. Pairs with quare to keep the analysis grounded. 9. Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader (Pambazuka Press, 2011). A pan-African corrective to outsider framings of African sexuality, written largely by African scholars. Essential for centering African voices over the colonial archive. 10. Reeder, Greg. “Same-sex Desire, Conjugal Constructs, and the Tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep,” World Archaeology 32, no. 2 (2000). The scholarly case for reading the Saqqara tomb as a same-sex pairing. Cited honestly alongside the twins counter-reading — the debate is live, and I say so. 11. Nwoko, Kenneth Chukwuemeka. “Female Husbands in Igbo Land: Southeast Nigeria,” The Journal of Pan African Studies 5, no. 1 (2012). A focused account of the status, ritual authority, and gendered standing of Igbo female husbands. Detail for the property-and-power reading. 12. Heywood, Linda M. Njinga of Angola: Africa’s Warrior Queen (Harvard Univ. Press, 2017). The leading modern biography of Njinga, working both Portuguese colonial records and African oral tradition. Use to separate Njinga’s documented life from the hostile chroniclers’ spin. 13. Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008). On the violence of the colonial archive and reading its silences. The basis for treating archival erasure of these lives as a crime scene, not a neutral absence. 14. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997). The epistemology of how colonial power decides whose knowledge counts. Explains how African gender systems got reclassified from wisdom to “savagery.” 15. Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977); Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989). Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Emperor Has No Map: Why Greg Abbott’s “Lock” on Texas Is a Lie They Taught You

Thank you Marcus Flowers [https://substack.com/profile/350776649-marcus-flowers], metamorphosic [https://substack.com/profile/323047218-metamorphosic], Andrea Maria Romandini [https://substack.com/profile/180750354-andrea-maria-romandini], Bluesin’ Bob [https://substack.com/profile/153895067-bluesin-bob], Kristen Morosky Day [https://substack.com/profile/20667654-kristen-morosky-day], and many others for tuning into my live video with Saadia Mirza [https://substack.com/profile/271690943-saadia-mirza]! Join me for my next live video in the app. Y’all want to know how Texas works? Start with the map, because everything else is downstream of the map. When the Republican-led Legislature redrew the congressional lines and the Supreme Court let it ride, they didn’t just shade a few districts redder for the midterms, they reached into a Houston seat that has sent a Black representative to Congress since Barbara Jordan walked through the door in 1973, the first Black woman from the South ever elected to that chamber, and they rearranged the furniture so that two sitting Black Democrats, Al Green and Christian Menefee, had to climb in the same ring and beat the brakes off each other just to survive. Green’s old Ninth got painted Republican, his house got drawn into the new Eighteenth, the new Eighteenth got stuffed with more of Green’s old voters than Menefee’s, and the runoff ended with Menefee taking it close to seventy-thirty. One Black seat. Two Black men. Cannibalism by cartography. Cedric Robinson told us racial capitalism doesn’t need to hate you, it needs to use you, and the cleanest use of Black political power is to make it eat itself. Wilderson says the position of the Black is fungibility, interchangeable, swappable, and when you watch a state map two Black incumbents into one district like they’re the same line item on a spreadsheet, that’s fungibility rendered in ink. That’s the whole game, and the game got played before a single one of us touched a ballot. So let me say the thing plain. Then I’ll come back to it. Y’all Booing the Fans While the Coach Calls the Play Here’s where the misdirection comes in, and I need the folks in the back to hear me. Soon as the Eighteenth got nasty, the timeline filled up with people screaming about AIPAC, about who’s “aligned” with who, about a post AIPAC put out congratulating Menefee like that settles something. Let me be clear for the record the way I was clear when we were live: I have not seen one receipt tying Christian Menefee to AIPAC, and I’m not accusing nobody of nothing. Two things can be true. I can be highly skeptical of every PAC that buys influence in this state, and I can refuse to convict a candidate off a tweet the PAC made about him, not one he made about them. Because think about who actually made the play. You ever watch grown folks lose they whole mind booing the fans in the stands while the coach who called the timeout, drew up the play, and sent it in walks off the field clean? That’s the timeline right now. AIPAC made the post. The party takes the money. The donors set the table. And somehow all the smoke goes to some insufferable leftist with four hundred followers and zero dollars. Where is your smoke for the people with the infrastructure, the funds, and the power to pick who wins, where, and how? Every accusation is a confession, and a movement that spends its rage on the audience instead of the play-caller is confessing it doesn’t actually want to find the play-caller. Texas is the country’s defense-manufacturing backyard, the same Fort Worth line that turns out the F-35, the same oil and gas money that builds the ninety-million-dollar high school football stadiums, and when this country sends “aid” overseas it sends it as weapons, which means whoever holds office in this state sits closer to that pipeline than a senator from Vermont ever will. I’m not telling you that’s a conspiracy. I’m telling you that’s a balance sheet. If you want investigative journalism, follow that money. Don’t follow the broke kid arguing on Threads. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Emperor Has No Map (He Has Yours) Now let’s talk about the lie that’s doing the most damage, the lie of the emperor. Folks really believe Greg Abbott is forever. They say it out they mouth, Abbott got it locked, Texas is red, why even show up. And I get where the feeling comes from, the primary turnout was abysmal, our own people stayed home, schools are closing, and people look at all that and conclude the fix is permanent. That feeling has a name. Berlant called it cruel optimism, except down here it curdled past optimism into something flatter, an internalized impossibility, a learned helplessness the GOP spent thirty years teaching on purpose. So let me hit you with a double bind, the kind we used to run in policy debate. Texas has had exactly three governors since 1995. George W. Bush, Rick Perry, Greg Abbott. Abbott himself is chasing a fourth term that would make him the longest-serving governor in state history, and Texas hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since Ann Richards left in 1995. So when your leadership turns around and blames Democrats for the state of this state, you’ve trapped yourself. Either the Democrats are so all-powerful that their phantom hand reaches through thirty unbroken years of total Republican control of every lever, or your leadership produced exactly the Texas it wanted and is now pissing on us telling us it’s raining. Pick one. Both can’t be true, and neither one lets Abbott off the hook. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but so is the conservatism that’s been driving this car since before some of y’all could vote and still wants the passengers blamed for the wreck. Who has the power to manufacture voter apathy? The party that’s held the wheel for three decades. Not the broke leftist. Not the drag queen. Not the immigrant. Lost in the sauce is the whole electorate that’s been trained to look everywhere except the driver’s seat. The Real Heist Is in the Curriculum Here’s the part where I put my higher-ed degree to work, because consciousness precedes transformation, and they know it better than we do. While y’all were watching the Senate race, the State Board of Education quietly moved a Bible-infused overhaul through a process most people don’t even know exists. Not the Legislature, the Board, the elected fifteen where Republicans hold the majority and the final vote lands this summer while your kids are out of school and you’re too busy keeping them fed to drive to Austin. That’s not an accident, that’s the calendar as a weapon. What’s in it? A reading list that has third graders moving from Charlotte’s Web to the Road to Damascus, the New Testament conversion of Paul, alongside the Prodigal Son and the Golden Rule, lifted straight out of one particular sect of one particular religion and stamped onto every child in a public building. A social studies framework that deemphasizes world history and culture down to a Texas-and-Christianity lens. Then the tell, the part that should make every one of us stand up: when a Black board member moved a plain amendment saying enslaved people were held in bondage because they were Black, the Republican majority voted it down, and when the standards said the Civil War was fought over slavery, Republican members fought that too, floating tariffs and “states’ rights” like we ain’t read this script before. The historian advising the board had to sit there and correct them on the record. Freire called it the banking model, where education deposits obedience instead of withdrawing thought. Sandy Grande and Red Pedagogy remind us the settler curriculum was always about erasing whose land and whose labor built the wealth. So understand what they’re really doing. My people were enslaved in this state. Stephen F. Austin fought to preserve slavery in this state. And the plan is for a Black child in Texas to graduate fluent in Scripture and illiterate about the cotton their great-great-grandmother was forced to pick three counties over. That’s not an oversight. Charles Mills called the racial contract an agreement to misrepresent the world, and a curriculum that can find room for Paul on the road to Damascus but can’t say out loud why a Black body was in chains is the racial contract printed on a syllabus. Don’t sleep on the vouchers stacked right next to it. Abbott’s “Education Freedom Accounts” take public dollars out of the public school your kid actually attends and hand them to families already paying private tuition, and then they got the nerve to tell a small-town parent whose district went from five days a week to four that a trans woman or an immigrant did that to them. The drag queen didn’t drain your school budget. The voucher did. The man who signed it did. For the record, the Ten Commandments mandate, SB 10, that one ran through the Legislature, got blocked by lower courts, then the Fifth Circuit turned around in April and upheld it. So they’re coming at the schoolhouse from both doors at once, the statute and the standards, and they’re betting you only watch one door. Why Small-Town Texas Keeps Voting for the Knife Now I’m from Bryan. I’m from the country. So when I say this I’m talking about home, not looking down on it. Out here, white, Black, and Brown alike, a whole lot of folks already decided nobody’s coming to save them and learned to get it out the mud, and that resignation is the most fertile soil the GOP ever planted in. Republicans walk in and say at least I’ll keep your oil job, drill baby drill, at least I’ll make a man out of your son, while Democrats too often show up sounding like the uppity Yankee who flew down from up north, didn’t read the room, assumes you’re slow, and wants you to read a dissertation before you’re allowed to have dinner. That perception is doing more damage than any single policy, and Republicans have done a sarcastically great job convincing Texans that “the establishment” means Democrats while the actual establishment has run the entire state apparatus for a generation. Same machine runs the good-immigrant, bad-immigrant, good-Negro, bad-Negro binary. Yancy calls it white world-making, the power to decide which version of you gets to be human this week, and a whole lot of folks of color buy the binary thinking they can token they way to safety. You can’t. In this state you will be spent and discarded the second you’re no longer useful, no matter how hard you voted to fit in. Then I have to name what happened to Jasmine Crockett, because intersectionality is not optional in my house. Crockett ran a real race in a brutally short window and lost a primary where she had to fight through respectability politics that James Talarico never had to touch, because she speaks with a Black vernacular a lot of “well-meaning” Christian Texans coded as too loud, too Black, too much. Moya Bailey gave us the word misogynoir for exactly this, the specific contempt aimed at Black women that white women and Black men get to skip. Crenshaw built intersectionality so we’d stop pretending race and gender are separate lines. Talarico can quote Scripture in a sentence and that Bible fluency carries him a long, long way in a state seduced by Christian nationalism across Latino, Black, and white communities alike, and that’s a real advantage, and the structural reason it’s an advantage is misogynoir clearing the runway in front of him while it laid spike strips in front of her. Two roles. Same election. What We Actually Do About It So I’m not gonna leave you in the diagnosis, because diagnosis without prescription is just doom-scrolling with footnotes. One. Show up to the Board of Education. You don’t need a law degree, you don’t need permission, you sign up and you testify in Austin against the curriculum before that summer vote, and you bring three people who never came before. Two. Run the Talarico playbook for Gina Hinojosa. The man didn’t win moderates from a giant televised town hall, he won them in the itty-bitty rooms, in Latino communities, month after month, speaking the language the room actually speaks. We need a senator and we need a governor, and most of Texas still doesn’t know who Gina is. Fix that one conversation at a time. Three. Meet people where they live, not where you wish they lived. Talk that oil job honestly. Talk the broadband that costs the same in my country town as it does in inner-city Houston and runs half the speed. Cookouts, quinceañeras, rodeos, trail rides, that’s the precinct. The tools have to go to the people, and Republicans criminalize socialism, criminalize Black thought, criminalize drag, criminalize independent anything precisely because they know consciousness is the only thing they can’t gerrymander. Four. Vote down the whole ballot, every time, and stop waiting to fall in love. I’m not a vote-blue-no-matter-who person, I’ll tell you straight, we got folks down here wearing blue who govern red. But in Texas right now the menu is apples or the other thing, and abstaining is just letting somebody else order for your kids. Now back to that map. They drew it so two Black men would fight over one chair. But a map is a prediction, not a prophecy, and Wilderson gives us the description of the trap while Afrofuturism gives us the imagination to walk out of it. The question isn’t whether Abbott is the emperor. The question is whether you can picture a Texas where he isn’t, because if you can’t imagine Gina in that mansion, you’ve already conceded the only ground that matters. Research over MeSearch, kinfolks. They’re betting you won’t do the work. Prove them wrong. Y’all be safe. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 5 Key Takeaways 1. The gerrymander, cleared by the Supreme Court, redrew Al Green’s district to lean Republican and forced him into the Houston seat with Christian Menefee — a seat held by a Black representative since Barbara Jordan in 1973 — making two Black Democrats fight for one chair. That’s racial capitalism and fungibility, not coincidence. 2. The “Abbott is the emperor” feeling is engineered apathy. Texas has had three governors since 1995 and unbroken GOP control, which means the only people with the power to manufacture hopelessness are the people who’ve held the wheel for thirty years — not leftists, immigrants, or drag queens. 3. The real heist is in the curriculum: a Bible-infused reading list and a slavery-minimizing social studies framework moving through the State Board of Education with a summer final vote, plus vouchers draining public schools and SB 10’s Ten Commandments mandate upheld by the Fifth Circuit. Watch both doors. 4. Misdirected outrage protects power. Beefing with broke leftists over an AIPAC tweet while ignoring the donors, PACs, and party structure that actually pick winners is confessing you don’t want to find the play-caller. Skepticism of money in politics is healthy; convicting candidates off a tweet is not. 5. The path forward is concrete: testify at the Board of Education before the summer vote, run the Talarico small-room playbook to introduce Gina Hinojosa statewide, meet rural Texans in their own language and spaces, and vote the whole ballot. A map is a prediction, not a prophecy. EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME PAID SUBSCRIBER I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Annotated Bibliography Houston Public Media / Texas Newsroom — “Gina Hinojosa wins Democratic nomination” (March 3, 2026) Confirms Hinojosa as the Democratic nominee for governor facing Greg Abbott in November, and that a fourth Abbott term would make him the state’s longest-serving governor. Anchors the “emperor” framing and the no-Democratic-governor-since-Ann-Richards point. houstonpublicmedia.org Ballotpedia — “Texas gubernatorial election, 2026” Primary and general-election field for governor; used to verify the Abbott vs. Hinojosa matchup and margins. ballotpedia.org NBC News — “Christian Menefee defeats Al Green in TX-18 runoff” (May 2026) Documents that GOP-led redistricting redrew Green’s 9th to lean Republican and forced him into the 18th, where Menefee defeated him; notes the district’s Black representation dating to Barbara Jordan in 1973. nbcnews.com Ballotpedia — “Christian Menefee” / NBC News — “Redistricting pits Democratic colleagues against each other” Details on the redrawn 18th containing more of Green’s old voters, the Turner special election, and the Supreme Court clearing the map. Source of the “cannibalism by cartography” argument. ballotpedia.org; nbcnews.com AP via CultureMap / Washington Post — “Talarico wins Democratic Senate primary over Crockett” (March 3, 2026) Confirms Talarico defeated Crockett and the role his scripture-driven message played; basis for the misogynoir / respectability-politics analysis. Used only as framing, not attributed as candidate quotes. aol.com; washingtonpost.com PBS NewsHour / Axios Austin — “Paxton defeats Cornyn in Senate runoff” (May 26, 2026) Confirms Paxton as the GOP Senate nominee facing Talarico in November. pbs.org; axios.com The Texas Tribune / Victoria Advocate — “Vikki Goodwin wins LG runoff over Marcos Vélez” (May 26, 2026) Confirms Goodwin defeated Vélez for the lieutenant governor nomination and will face Dan Patrick. texastribune.org The Spokesman-Review / Dallas Morning News — “Texas officials give early OK to revamped social studies curriculum, Bible-infused reading list” (April 10, 2026) Primary documentation for the curriculum section: the Texas-centric overhaul, the Bible reading list, the voted-down amendment on why people were enslaved, and Republican members disputing that the Civil War was about slavery. spokesman.com The Texas Tribune / Houston Public Media — State Board of Education reading-list coverage (Jan.–April 2026) Confirms the mandatory reading list (Road to Damascus, Prodigal Son, Golden Rule), the optional Bluebonnet Learning curriculum with its per-student incentive, and the summer final-vote timeline. texastribune.org; houstonpublicmedia.org KERA News / CBS Texas / ACLU of Texas / OSV News — SB 10 (Ten Commandments) coverage (2025–April 2026) Documents SB 10’s passage, the lower-court injunctions, and the Fifth Circuit upholding the law on appeal in April 2026 — the “both doors at once” point. keranews.org; aclutx.org; osvnews.com This is a public episode. 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From Latasha Harlins to Cyrus Carmack-Belton: The Long History of Anti-Blackness in Black-Asian America

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was how the prosecutor opened the case, and the second I heard it I felt that déjà vu hit me in the chest, because we have been here before, kinfolks, we have been standing in this exact spot in the historical record looking at the body of a Black child who took nothing, who was owed an apology and got a bullet instead. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was fourteen years old. Fourteen. He walked into a convenience store on Parklane Road in Columbia, South Carolina, got accused of stealing water he never stole, and when he did what any scared child does — picked up his backpack and walked out — a grown man came out from behind that counter with a pistol and chased him. Cyrus ran so hard he ran out of his shoe. He dropped two cell phones, one his, one his mother’s, and didn’t even stop to pick them up, because you do not stop running when there is a man with a gun behind you. He fell. He got up. He fell again, busted his shin, kept going. They chased that child more than 130 yards off their own property, into a public road, and then the fatal shot. Over water he didn’t take. Let that marinate. And if it sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In 1991, a fifteen-year-old named Latasha Harlins walked into a store in South Central L.A. with money in her hand for a bottle of orange juice that cost a dollar seventy-nine. The store owner, Soon Ja Du, accused her of stealing, grabbed her, and as Latasha turned to walk away, Du shot her in the back of the head. Latasha had the money in her fist when she hit the floor. Du was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the judge gave her probation, community service, and a five-hundred-dollar fine. No prison. That verdict, sitting right next to the Rodney King acquittals, is part of what lit the fuse in 1992. Sophia Nahli Allison’s film A Love Song for Latasha sat with that loss and made us feel the size of it. Thirty-some years later we are watching the sequel, and the script has not changed. So let me be clear about what I’m doing here. I’m not making a “see, them too” video. I’m doing the work I always try to do — research over MeSearch — which means following the structure all the way down instead of stopping at the feeling. Feel me? Adultification Is the Murder Weapon Here is the thing nobody wants to name directly: a fourteen-year-old does not read as a child to the person who shot him. That is not an accident, that is a technology. Wilderson writes about how the Black body functions as fungible — interchangeable, available, a thing to be acted upon rather than a person to be reckoned with — and you apply that here and you see exactly what happened. Cyrus was not seen as somebody’s baby running scared. He was seen as a threat, a suspect, a problem that a grown man with a gun got to solve on the spot. The research on this has a name. Scholars at Georgetown documented how Black children, and Black girls especially, get adultified — perceived as older, less innocent, more responsible for their own harm than white children the same age. Latasha was fifteen and treated like a thief and a fighter instead of a child. Cyrus was fourteen and treated like an armed adult instead of a boy who ran out of his own shoe. And notice the gendered grammar of it, because intersectionality is not a decoration I sprinkle on at the end — Black girls get adultified into “grown” and “fast,” Black boys get adultified into “men” and “threats,” and both translations end with a body. Same machine, different gears. The Model Minority Myth Was Never a Compliment Now, here is where folks get uncomfortable, so stay with me. To understand how a shopkeeper becomes judge, jury, and executioner over a child, you have to understand the position that shopkeeper was handed. The model minority image got manufactured in the mid-1960s — Petersen wrote a whole magazine piece in 1966 holding up Japanese Americans as the success story, the good ones, the ones who worked hard and didn’t make trouble. And the timing was the tell. That was the same decade Black folks were in the streets demanding the country pay what it owed. The model minority myth was built as a rebuke. iMa bE the example, the story said, and if Asians can make it, then Black complaint must be a character flaw rather than a structural fact. Claire Jean Kim gave this its sharpest name: racial triangulation. Asian Americans get valorized relative to Black Americans — “look how well they do” — and simultaneously get marked as permanent foreigners relative to white Americans — “go back where you came from.” Two moves at once. You get held up as proof that the system works and held down as proof that you’ll never fully belong. And the function of being held up is to be aimed. A wedge has to be sharp on one end to do its job, and the job was always to be driven between Black people and everybody else. Yellow Peril Supports Black Power — And Why That Doesn’t Cancel Anything Now I need y’all to hold two things in your hand at the same time, because this is where the lazy analysis falls apart. There is a real, documented, beautiful history of Black and Asian solidarity in this country, and it is not a fairy tale. In 1969, outside the Alameda County courthouse at a Free Huey rally, Asian American activists held signs that read “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” — taking the slur that had been used to make them a danger to white America and turning it into a banner of coalition. Richard Aoki, a Japanese American who’d survived the WWII concentration camps, became a field marshal in the Black Panther Party and helped supply some of its first weapons. Yuri Kochiyama built her whole life on this bridge — she organized alongside Black radicals in Harlem, she was in the Audubon Ballroom and cradled Malcolm X as he was dying, she understood that to be in solidarity meant to show up. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State and Berkeley put Black, Asian, Chicano, and Indigenous students in the same coalition fighting for ethnic studies. That history is real, and I will defend it. And — both things can be true — that history does not cancel, excuse, or balance out anti-Blackness in Asian American communities, and it was never meant to. This is the move I need you to clock: solidarity is not a credit you bank and spend later to buy yourself out of accountability. Kochiyama and Aoki are not a hall pass for Soon Ja Du, or for whoever raised a child to see a Black fourteen-year-old as a threat first and a person never. Holding up the panther-and-tiger banner while refusing to name the anti-Blackness running through your own community isn’t solidarity, it’s nostalgia. The folks who built that solidarity built it precisely by naming the anti-Blackness in their own families, out loud, at the dinner table — that naming was the work, not a betrayal of it. So when I invoke “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power,” I’m not closing the conversation, I’m setting the standard those ancestors actually set, and that standard was accountability, not amnesty. 551 × 700 [https://dvan.org/2019/11/blackpoweryellowperil/] “People of Color” Is a Coordinate, Not a Coalition This is why so many Black folks get skeptical when somebody waves the “people of color” umbrella around, and that skepticism is not divisive, it’s earned. Being shoved under the same term does not mean we have the same relationship to whiteness, and pretending otherwise mostly works to launder the gap. Look at affirmative action. In 2023 the Supreme Court gutted race-conscious admissions in the Students for Fair Admissions cases, and the legal vehicle they drove to do it was Asian American grievance — the claim that Asian students were being wronged by Black access. Having the luxury to be used as the friendly face on a project that strips opportunity from Black students is itself a sign of where you sit in the triangle. I’m not saying anti-Asian discrimination in admissions is fake — two things can be true. I’m saying when the remedy on offer is “so let’s end the thing that helps Black folks,” you should ask who wrote that script and who it actually serves, because every accusation is a confession, and that lawsuit confessed exactly whose interests it was protecting. So here’s the two-role frame, the way I’d run it in a debate round. There’s what the model minority myth says — you’re being honored, you made it, you’re one of the good ones. And there’s what the model minority myth structurally does — it makes you the buffer, the weapon, the proof-of-concept that whiteness points at Black people to say “see, the problem is you.” This means the people clinging to that myth as a compliment are wrong about what it is. By accepting the role of the honored exception, you make whiteness visible — you become the instrument that lets it claim neutrality while doing its dirtiest work through your hands. Back to the Water A jury in Columbia is deciding right now what a Black child’s life was worth. As I write this the defense has rested and closing arguments are about to begin, and I want to be honest with you — the verdict is not the analysis. We have watched the courtroom version of this before. Latasha got a manslaughter conviction and her killer walked out the door. So I’m not going to tell you a verdict will close the wound, because the wound is older than this trial. The wound is a country that built a hierarchy and then handed everybody a position in it — including positions that let one oppressed person stand over the body of a child and call it self-defense. Solidarity is not pretending that hierarchy isn’t there. Solidarity is what Kochiyama and Aoki actually did: name it, in your own house, out loud, and then move. His life was worth less than four bottles of water. That was the prosecutor’s line, and it’s an indictment — but not just of one man. It’s an indictment of every system that taught him to do the math that way. For the folks in the back: the water was never the point. Education is elevation. Let’s keep building. Become a Paid Subscriber I’m an independent educator filling the void left by the retreat of public-education media. I don’t have corporate backing, I don’t have a network cutting me a check, and I don’t answer to advertisers — this work is sustained entirely by readers like you. Right now, under 1% of the folks who follow me are paid subscribers. My goal is to build something with the depth of PBS for the digital age: a sanctuary for people who want to think deeply about shallow s**t and learn for real. And here’s why this piece needs you specifically. A breakdown like this one — holding the killing of Cyrus Carmack-Belton next to Latasha Harlins, naming adultification as a murder weapon, walking the real history of “Yellow Peril Supports Black Power” while refusing to let that solidarity launder present-day anti-Blackness — is exactly the kind of work that gets you flamed online and gets nobody a corporate sponsor. If this piece taught you something, made you sit with something, or gave you language for a conversation you’ve been trying to have — convert that into power. Become a paid subscriber. Keep this work independent, keep it free for the folks who can’t pay, and keep us building a place where research beats MeSearch every single time. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. 5 Key Takeaways * Adultification is a murder weapon, not a metaphor. When a 14-year-old reads as an armed adult and a 15-year-old reads as a thief, the perception itself is the mechanism that ends the life — and it lands on Black boys and Black girls through different gendered channels. * The model minority myth was built as a rebuke to Black struggle. Manufactured in the 1960s, it was never a compliment — it was a wedge, sharpened on one end to be driven between Black people and everyone else. * Black-Asian solidarity is real history, not a hall pass. Aoki, Kochiyama, and the Third World Liberation Front are documented and worth defending — and that legacy does not cancel anti-Blackness; those ancestors set a standard of accountability, not amnesty. * “People of color” is a coordinate, not a coalition. Sharing the umbrella doesn’t mean sharing a relationship to whiteness — see how Asian American grievance was the legal vehicle used to gut affirmative action in 2023. * The verdict is not the analysis. Latasha’s killer walked on probation; whatever a Columbia jury decides, the wound is older than the trial and the math that valued a child below four bottles of water belongs to a whole system. WORKS CITIED AND RELATED READINGS Kim, Claire Jean. “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans.” Politics & Society, 1999. The load-bearing framework for this piece: Asian Americans are simultaneously valorized relative to Black Americans and ostracized as foreign relative to whites. Explains how the “model minority” position functions as a wedge. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010); Afropessimism (2020). Source of the fungibility and gratuitous-violence framing — used descriptively to explain how the Black body is rendered available to be acted upon, not as a prescription for despair. Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. The empirical backbone for adultification — documents how Black children are perceived as older and less innocent than white peers, foundational to the gendered analysis of Latasha and Cyrus. Petersen, William. “Success Story, Japanese-American Style.” The New York Times Magazine, 1966. The origin document of the “model minority” narrative — read it to see the rebuke to Black struggle baked in from the very beginning. Prashad, Vijay. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Beacon Press, 2001. Essential map of the long, entangled history of Afro-Asian exchange and solidarity — grounds the “both/and” refusal to flatten this relationship into either pure unity or pure conflict. Fujino, Diane C. Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance, and a Paradoxical Life (2012); Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama (2005). Definitive accounts of the two figures the solidarity history rests on — read alongside the critical reckoning with Aoki’s contested legacy rather than as hagiography. Stevenson, Brenda. The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender, and the Origins of the LA Riots. Oxford University Press, 2013. The most rigorous historical treatment of the Harlins case and its role in 1992 — indispensable for the gendered, intersectional reading of how a Black girl’s death was adjudicated. Allison, Sophia Nahli. A Love Song for Latasha. Film, 2019 (Netflix). A memory-work documentary that restores Latasha’s humanity against the archive that flattened her — a model for refusing to let Black children exist only as case numbers. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press, 2021. Anchors the claim that adultification and anti-Black harm hit Black women and girls through a distinct, compounded channel — keeps intersectionality operational rather than ornamental. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard / v. UNC, 600 U.S. ___ (2023). The case that ended race-conscious admissions using Asian American plaintiffs — the receipts for how grievance gets routed against Black access under a “people of color” banner. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Are You a Comedian First or a Black Man First? The Kevin Hart Question America Won't Answer

The Set Was Good, Though I sat in my chair and I let Tony Hinchcliffe finish, the way I let everybody finish, and now I’m doing the thing this country keeps confusing for an attack: I’m giving a criticism. Freedom of speech does not equal freedom from critique. No one is above criticism. Nothing is above criticism especially comedy. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom from critique. On May 10th, Netflix ran The Roast of Kevin Hart, and Tony Hinchcliffe, the same MAGA comic who got on a stage at a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden and called Puerto Rico a floating island of garbage, looked out at the crowd and said the Black community was so proud of Kevin, and that George Floyd was, quote, looking up at us all laughing so hard he can’t breathe. He took a man’s dying words, the words a whole planet heard him cry out for his mama with a knee on his neck, and he flipped them into a punchline at a Black man’s celebration. Then weeks go by. George Floyd’s brothers, Terrence and Philonise, say plainly that real pain is not comedy to their family, that at some point y’all have to stop playing with us. And Kevin Hart, who attended George Floyd’s funeral, pulls up to The Breakfast Club and does the one thing that tells you everything. He defended the white man. Not with a fist. With a posture. “It wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture, to our audience,” he says, and then in the same breath, “but Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set or one of the best sets.” “Y’all worried about the joke, but the set was good though. Remove me from it, I didn’t say it, we move on.” That’s not a defense of comedy. That’s a man with more energy and more effort for publicly protecting a white comedian’s craft, than for protecting the humanity of his own people. The people who bought your tickets, attend your shows, and made you visible from the beginning. Two Things Can Be True Now let me be fair, because two things can be true and I’m not here to do what they do to us, which is flatten a whole person into one bad night. Roast comedy is provocation. That’s the genre. Kevin caught it too: they joked about his dead mama, his dead father, put him on a slave ship in a bottle. I’m not pretending he was the only target or that he didn’t take his licks. The question was never whether Tony tells offensive jokes. We know what Tony does. Kevin himself said it: “It’s Tony Hinchcliffe, I don’t expect less.” The question is what do YOU do, Kevin, when the offensiveness stops being a bit about a celebrity and becomes a desecration of a murdered Black man whose family you sat in a pew with. Because here’s the contradiction, and I’ll name it. Kevin Hart felt individually came for, so he came to his own defense, fast, fluent, and on the biggest Black platform in the country. So I have to ask: how come Kevin didnt feel came for when your whole community is being attacked and targeted by that orange man? The same orange man Tony Hinchcliffe campaigned for. The luxury to treat George Floyd as a joke you can “move on” from is a sign that the knee was never on your neck in the way it’s on the rest of ours. The view from the top of the comedy game is a view from nowhere, and a view from nowhere is always, secretly, a view from whiteness. Racial Illiteracy: A Teaching Moment If I was still in the classroom, I’d put Kevin’s interview on the projector and I’d write two words on the board: racial illiteracy. That’s when you lack the ability to read and write situations pertaining to race. Because there is a difference, kinfolks, and it’s the whole ballgame. There’s a difference between a racial joke and being racist. There’s a difference between defending the continuity of comedy and prioritizing humanity. Kevin can read a room for a laugh better than almost anybody alive, that’s his genius, but he could not read this room, this moment, this country, and that illiteracy is not a personal failing as much as it is a learned comfort. Charles Mills called it the epistemology of ignorance, a whole social agreement to NOT know certain things, to misread the racial world in ways that keep the structure comfortable. Tim Wise says privilege costs you clarity. And when Kevin says “remove me from it, I didn’t say it,” he’s reaching for the most American defense there is, the bystander’s plea, the same logic that lets a country watch a murder on video and still ask what the victim did wrong. Pete Davidson put a Charlie Kirk joke in his set too, and Kevin shrugged at that the same way. Notice the pattern: the discomfort only ever flows one direction, away from the powerful and onto the dead who can’t clap back. Every Accusation Is a Confession “Don’t be too sensitive to take a joke,” they tell us. Every accusation is a confession. The people screaming loudest about freedom of speech turn into the most fragile beings on Earth the second the speech gets returned to sender. They’ll desecrate a man who called for his mother as he died and call it edgy, then clutch their pearls when a grieving brother says something vulgar back. They dish out cruelty for laughs and get real uncomfortable when the same energy comes home. They pissing on us and telling us it’s raining. Where is the smoke for Tony, Kevin? You found a paragraph of energy to remind us his set was strong. You had a whole rebuttal ready about your dead parents. So where’s the equal-and-opposite force for the murdered man your industry made into a closer? That silence is not neutrality. Naming neutrality as neutrality is a hustle. Silence in the presence of power is a position, and the position your silence structurally took was Tony’s. This Ain’t a Throwaway And I want to be clear, because I critique from inside the community, not from the bleachers. I’m not throwing Kevin away. I’m not calling him irredeemable. As a matter of fact, I’d love a private conversation about the ways, politically, socially, economically, that a man with his platform and his pockets could pour into Black equality, Black freedom, Black liberation, instead of pouring his protective instinct onto a comic who’d campaign against all three. You a comedian. I’m a critic. I’ma stay in my lane, that’s my ministry. But the lane I’m in says this clearly: you can care about preserving the quality of comedy AND preserving the humanity of Black people. I’m not saying you can’t hold both. I’m asking which one you reached for first, fastest, and hardest. The tape answers for you. By defending him, Kevin, you’re making whiteness visible, you’re showing us exactly whose comfort gets the bodyguard. So here’s the ask, the same one I’d give any of my folks: do better, bro. Pick humanity first next time. Because this ain’t the wrong side of comedy, this is the wrong side of history, and I don’t say that as a threat, I say it as a promise that the receipts keep. Critical Historical Context To understand why a single roast joke detonated the way it did, you have to understand that turning Black death into white entertainment is not a glitch in American culture. It is one of its oldest, most profitable traditions. From the Auction Block to the Punchline Long before Netflix, the spectacle of Black suffering was sold for amusement and instruction. The lynching postcard industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s mailed photographs of murdered Black people as souvenirs and Christmas cards; Without Sanctuary, the archive assembled by James Allen, documents how white families posed and smiled beside the bodies the way Hinchcliffe’s audience laughed beside a dead man’s last words. Saidiya Hartman, in Scenes of Subjection, calls this the spectacular character of black suffering, the way Black pain gets staged, repeated, and consumed until the horror becomes comfortable, even pleasurable, for the watcher. The roast joke is that lineage in a tuxedo. The Minstrel Stage and the Comedy of Black Disposability American comedy itself was, at its commercial founding, blackface minstrelsy, the most popular entertainment form in the 19th-century United States, built entirely on the premise that Black life was a thing to be mocked, mimicked, and made grotesque for white laughter. The genre survived emancipation, survived the cakewalk, survived into film with Birth of a Nation. The throughline from Jim Crow the minstrel character to Jim Crow the legal regime is not a coincidence; the laughter was always part of the machinery of dehumanization. When a modern comic stands on a stage and treats a police killing as a setup, he is not breaking taboo. He is reactivating the founding logic of the form. George Floyd, 2020, and the Largest Protests in U.S. History On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes while Floyd said he could not breathe and called for his mother. His murder set off what historians have called the largest protest movement in American history, with an estimated 15 to 26 million participants across the country in the summer of 2020. The roast joke landed almost exactly six years later, in the same week as the anniversary of his death. Hinchcliffe did not pick George Floyd at random. He picked the single most recognizable symbol of the modern movement against anti-Black state violence and converted it into a closer. The joke was a referendum on whether that movement’s grief still counts. Afropessimism: Why the Joke ‘Works’ Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism gives us the most uncomfortable but clarifying lens. Wilderson argues that anti-Black violence is gratuitous, not provoked, not economically required, not a means to an end, but a structural given. The Black body functions as fungible, an object available for the world’s use, including its enjoyment. The reason the audience could laugh is that, at the level of the libidinal economy Wilderson describes, George Floyd’s death was already available as raw material, already socially dead, already a thing rather than a person whose mourning is sacred. I hold this as descriptive, not prescriptive, alongside the Black Marxist reading that insists this structure can still be fought. But you cannot understand the ease of the laughter without it. The joke was not an aberration. It was the culture telling the truth about itself. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Implication for Education I keep coming back to the phrase racial illiteracy, because it is, at root, an educational problem, and educational problems have educational solutions, which means they also have educational sabotage. Reading and writing situations pertaining to race is a literacy, a teachable skill, the same way phonics and number sense are teachable. We are not born knowing how to locate ourselves inside a structure of power; we learn it, or we are prevented from learning it. The reason a brilliant, quick-witted man like Kevin Hart could read a comedy room flawlessly and misread a racial moment catastrophically is that the second literacy was never required of him to succeed, and may have been actively discouraged, because the more racially literate a Black entertainer becomes, the harder he is to sell to a crowd that wants its Blackness apolitical. Now connect that to this exact moment in American schooling. Across the country, the machinery that teaches racial literacy is being dismantled on purpose. Anti-CRT and ‘divisive concepts’ legislation has passed in a wave of states, restricting how teachers can discuss race, racism, and history. Book bans have stripped Toni Morrison, bell hooks, and the lynching record itself out of classrooms and libraries. Advanced Placement African American Studies was politically gutted in multiple states before it ever reached the students who needed it most. The Department of Education’s capacity to enforce civil rights protections has been hollowed out. The federal retreat from public education media, the slow strangling of the PBS-and-public-broadcasting model that once made deep historical knowledge freely available, leaves a void exactly where racial literacy used to live. So here is the implication, and it’s a verdict. A society that bans the teaching of why the joke is violent will keep producing audiences that laugh. The roast crowd and the school board crowd are the same project. You cannot defund the history of lynching, ban the books that name anti-Blackness, and dismantle the curriculum that builds racial literacy, and then act surprised when a stadium full of people can’t tell the difference between edgy and evil. The classroom and the comedy club are connected by a single wire: what a people is permitted to know about its own death. Intersectional Material Impacts Symbolic harm is never just symbolic. Crenshaw teaches us that the people who fall through the cracks of a single-axis analysis are the ones carrying the heaviest material weight, so let me name who actually pays when George Floyd’s death becomes a punchline and a celebrity shrugs. Black Women and the Mothers Who Are Never the Joke’s Concern George Floyd called for his mother. The roast circuit, the defense of it, and most of the commentary that followed centered men, the comic, the host, the brothers, while the figure at the emotional center of his death, the Black mother, became invisible. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir names how Black women are simultaneously hyper-exposed to violence and erased from its mourning. The material impact: Black women, who led the Movement for Black Lives organizationally and who disproportionately do the unpaid labor of grief, protest, and care after every killing, get neither the protection nor the platform that a male celebrity commands in a single Breakfast Club segment. Class: Whose Comfort the Joke Protects Kevin Hart’s ability to “move on” is a function of his bank account. The Floyd family does not have that exit. The working-class and poor Black communities most likely to be policed the way George Floyd was policed are the ones who watched a member of their own, made wealthy by their dollars, defend the man who mocked their nightmare. Class does not insulate you from anti-Blackness, but it does buy you the option of pretending it isn’t there, and that pretense is purchased on credit borrowed from the people who can’t afford it. Sexuality, Disability, and the Hierarchy of Grievable Death Hinchcliffe’s career is built on a ladder of disposable targets, Puerto Ricans, immigrants, the disabled, the dead, and that ladder is not random. Judith Butler’s question of which lives are grievable maps directly onto who becomes safe to joke about. The same structure that makes George Floyd’s death a punchline makes disabled, queer, and undocumented people punchlines too, because they all sit on the wrong side of the line dividing lives that must be mourned from lives that may be used. An intersectional read refuses to defend Black humanity while leaving everyone else on that ladder behind. White Feminism, White Comedy, Same Complicity And I’ll say it the way I always say it: the “it’s just comedy, don’t be sensitive” defense is the comedy world’s version of White Feminism’s “I didn’t mean it that way.” Liberalism is a hell of a drug. It lets people participate in a structure of harm while reserving the right to feel like good guys, because their intent was neutral. Intent is not the metric. Material outcome is. And the material outcome here is a culture rehearsing, one laugh at a time, that Black death is content. Five Key Takeaways * Defense reveals priority. Kevin Hart found fluent, immediate energy to protect Tony Hinchcliffe’s craft and almost none to protect George Floyd’s memory. What you rush to defend tells the truth about what you value. The set being “good though” was the confession. * Freedom of speech is not freedom from critique. Hearing a joke and criticizing it are both acts of free expression. The comics demanding you not be “too sensitive” to a joke are themselves too sensitive to a critique, which means the sensitivity rule only ever runs in the direction of power. * Racial illiteracy is manufactured, not innate. The inability to read and write racial situations is a learned comfort produced by a society that increasingly bans the very curriculum, books, and public media that would teach the skill. The roast crowd and the book-banning school board are the same project. * The joke is a lineage, not an accident. From minstrelsy to lynching postcards to the roast stage, turning Black death into white entertainment is one of America’s oldest and most profitable traditions. Afropessimism explains why the laughter comes easy: the structure already treats Black death as available material. * Symbolic harm carries material weight. When Black death becomes a punchline and a wealthy celebrity shrugs, the bill is paid by Black mothers erased from the mourning, by poor communities policed like George Floyd was, and by everyone else on Hinchcliffe’s ladder of disposable targets. Center the material outcome, not the intent. Join the Digital Sanctuary and Become a Paid Subscriber Everything you just read — the history of the minstrel stage, the lynching record, Afropessimism, the link between the book ban and the laughing crowd — is exactly the kind of knowledge being stripped out of classrooms and libraries right now. That is not an accident, and naming it out loud is the work. I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Related Readings (Annotated Bibliography) Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman’s foundational analysis of “the spectacular character of black suffering” — how Black pain is staged and consumed — is the single best frame for understanding why an audience can laugh at a recorded death. Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (2020). The accessible, memoiristic entry into Wilderson’s argument that anti-Black violence is gratuitous and the Black body socially fungible. Read as descriptive, not prescriptive. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997). Source of “the epistemology of ignorance” — the organized social agreement to not-know that produces racial illiteracy in otherwise intelligent people. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989). The origin text for intersectionality, essential for seeing who falls through a single-axis read of this controversy. Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey’s full treatment of the term she coined, naming the specific erasure of Black women from the mourning of anti-Black violence. James Allen et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000). The archive of lynching postcards — the historical receipt that proves the spectacle of Black death as white entertainment is centuries deep. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004). Source of the “grievable lives” framework that explains the hierarchy of disposable targets in roast comedy. bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995). hooks on Black rage as legitimate response and on the demand that Black people perform composure for white comfort — directly relevant to the “don’t be sensitive” defense. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993). The definitive history of how American popular entertainment was built on the mockery of Black life, and how that logic persists. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). The racial-capitalism counterweight to Afropessimism — holding both is the discipline. Robinson insists the structure that profits from Black suffering can still be fought and abolished. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Imperial Sugar, Convict Leasing, and Why the Reparations Conversation Has to Include Jim Crow

The Bodies Under The Bulldozer Y’all, let me put you on game. In April 2018, a backhoe in Sugar Land, Texas hit something it wasn’t supposed to hit. The construction crew was breaking ground for a Fort Bend Independent School District career and technical education center, and what they pulled up was bone. By the time the archaeologists finished, they had counted ninety-five bodies, all African American, ages fourteen to seventy, muscularly built but malnourished, with skeletons twisted by repetitive hard labor and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. They got known as the Sugar Land 95. Now here’s the part the city of Sugar Land would prefer you not sit with for too long. Those bodies were not a surprise. A Black man named Reginald Moore, a retired longshoreman who had worked as a corrections officer at the Fort Bend Jester Unit in the 1980s, had been telling Texas authorities for nineteen years that they were going to find those graves. He had the records, the maps, the historical research, the receipts. When he warned the school district they were about to build a school on top of a mass grave of convict laborers, they ignored him. When the bones came up out of the dirt, they initially barred him from the site. Then they let him on a task force and ignored most of his recommendations there too. Reggie Moore is gone now, passed in 2020, but every honest conversation about Sugar Land starts with his work, not with the developers, not with the museum, and damn sure not with Imperial Sugar. Imperial Sugar Is The Oldest Business In Texas. Read That Twice. Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas. The refinery has operated continuously on the same site in Sugar Land since 1843, two years before Texas was even a state. That is the official corporate biography. The crown logo is in the city seal. The town itself is named for the product. The Sugar Land Heritage Foundation will tell you a beautiful story about Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge as visionary founders who built a model company town with paved roads, clean water, hospitals, and schools. Here’s what they leave out. Before Kempner and Eldridge bought the operation in 1906 and 1908, the property belonged to two Confederate veterans named Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis. In 1878, Cunningham and Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population. The entire state prison population. They were not the first growers in Texas to use convict labor, but they were the biggest. Their plantation became notorious across the state as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. The annual mortality rate was three percent, caused by mosquito-borne disease, beatings, and the absence of medical care. Convict labor worked the Ellis Plantation until 1914. Imperial Sugar Company is the oldest extant business in Texas because it was built on a continuous supply of unfree Black bodies for the first seventy years of its existence. The slavery into convict leasing into prison farm pipeline is not adjacent to the brand. It is the brand’s foundation. Convict Leasing Was Slavery With A New Filing System Let me break down what convict leasing actually was, because the Texas curriculum is going to give you maybe one sentence on it if you are lucky. The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. Except. Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. That exception is not a footnote. That exception is the entire blueprint for the post-Emancipation racial economy in the South. After the Civil War, Southern states passed what historians call Black Codes, laws that applied only to African Americans and criminalized things like loitering, breaking curfew, walking alongside railroad tracks, and not carrying proof of employment. The Texas Legislature passed its own version, and the state’s prison population, which had been overwhelmingly white before the war, became overwhelmingly Black almost overnight. Once you had Black bodies inside the prison system, the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause meant the state could rent them out as forced labor to private companies. Cunningham and Ellis bought the contract. The Imperial Sugar property is what they bought it for. Apply Afropessimism here. The slave is not a worker selling labor. The slave is an object whose flesh is fungible. Convict leasing did not just continue slavery’s economics. It continued slavery’s ontology. A Black body inside the Texas penal system in 1878 was structurally the same kind of thing as a Black body on a Mississippi plantation in 1858. The Sugar Land 95 are the receipts. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked into the ground and buried in unmarked pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. The bones tell you what the law did. The bones tell you what the company did. The bones tell you what the state did. The bones tell you what the federal government allowed. The Plantation Did Not End. It Got A New Address. Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for one hundred sixty thousand dollars plus interest. The state continued to grow sugar on the property using convict labor, and the operation became known as the Central Unit prison farm. It stayed open until 2011. The Houston Museum of Natural Science Sugar Land sits inside the main unit of the central prison today. The plantation did not end in 1865. It did not end in 1914. It did not end when the state took over from the private company. It did not end when the Central Unit closed. It changed addresses and changed letterhead. Texas still runs prison farms in 2026, and most of them are located on former plantation land. Incarcerated people, the vast majority of them Black and brown, cultivate the same crops their enslaved and convict-leased ancestors cultivated. They are not paid. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays its prisoners absolutely nothing for their labor. Texas Correctional Industries, the manufacturing arm of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, generates upwards of eighty million dollars a year in revenue from goods and services produced by people working for free. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice itself is reportedly the largest prison system in the United States, with over one hundred forty thousand people incarcerated. Texas Tough is what Robert Perkinson called this system in his book of the same name. The system Cunningham and Ellis built in 1878 did not get dismantled. It got institutionalized. The state cut out the private middleman, took over direct management of the forced labor, and called it rehabilitation. Who Owns Imperial Sugar Today, And Why It Matters Now here is where the contemporary accountability conversation gets sharp. Imperial Sugar is no longer Texas-owned. The Kempner family eventually sold off. The company went public, went through bankruptcy in 2001, and got acquired by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012 for around two hundred three million dollars. In 2022, Louis Dreyfus sold Imperial Sugar to U.S. Sugar Corporation, a privately held agribusiness based in Clewiston, Florida. U.S. Sugar is one of the largest sugarcane producers in the country, with reported annual revenue in the range of one and a quarter billion dollars and operations across more than one hundred eighty thousand acres of Florida farmland. That brand, that crown logo, that two-pound bag of cane sugar sitting in kitchen pantries across the South, all of it is a direct lineal descendant of an operation that leased the entire Texas prison population in 1878 and worked Black men to death in fields the state of Texas now uses to incarcerate their grandsons. The corporate entity changed hands. The brand equity did not. The brand equity is the asset. And the brand equity is built on top of those ninety-five bodies and every body that has not been found yet. The Reparations Argument, Including Jim Crow Most reparations conversations in the United States stop at slavery. The standard objection sounds like this. My ancestors didn’t own slaves. Slavery ended in 1865. That was a long time ago. I shouldn’t have to pay for something I didn’t do. The Imperial Sugar story refutes every move in that argument before the argument even gets to the table. Slavery ended in 1865. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911. That is thirteen to forty-six years after Emancipation. We are not talking about the antebellum cotton kingdom in this case. We are talking about the post-Emancipation, federally sanctioned, state-administered, privately profitable extraction of unfree Black labor from people who were legally citizens of the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment exception clause made it lawful. Jim Crow Black Codes made it inevitable. Imperial Sugar’s predecessor companies made it profitable. The State of Texas made it permanent. The federal government allowed all of it. Apply Charles Mills here. The racial contract is not just a slavery problem. The racial contract is the white supremacist legal architecture that lets the wealth keep flowing forward across centuries while the descendants of the people whose backs built that wealth are told to get over it. Two things can be true. Two things are true. The first thing is that no living person owned a slave. The second thing is that companies, families, and institutions that exist today still hold assets, brand equity, land titles, and accumulated capital that were generated by enslaved and convict-leased labor. Imperial Sugar’s status as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas is itself a transferable asset. That status was purchased by Louis Dreyfus in 2012. That status was sold to U.S. Sugar in 2022. The premium that gets paid for that lineage is the price tag on the convict labor that made the lineage possible. So the reparations argument here is not abstract. It is not historical. It is line-item. Imperial Sugar, as a corporate entity, owes Black Texas. Imperial Sugar’s current parent company, as the holder of that brand, owes Black Texas. The State of Texas, as the entity that wrote the convict-leasing contracts and still runs the prison farms on the same land, owes Black Texas. And the federal government, as the entity that wrote the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause and never closed it, owes Black America. Whitey On The Moon, Sugar Land Edition Gil Scott-Heron asked the question more than fifty years ago and we still ain’t answered it. Was all that money I made last year for, Whitey on the moon? How come ain’t no money here? Whitey on the moon. No hot water, no toilet, no lights, but Whitey on the moon. Substitute the verses for Sugar Land in 2026 and tell me where the lie is. Was all that sugar money made for Sugar Land schools? Imperial Sugar in the master-planned suburb. How come the descendants of the convict laborers are still locked up in Texas prison farms? Imperial Sugar on the supermarket shelf. No reparations, no acknowledgment, no curriculum, but Imperial Sugar in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The luxury to ignore this history is itself a sign of who benefits from the history staying ignored. The view from nowhere, what Arnold Farr calls the epistemology of ignorance, is not neutral. It is structural. When the State of Texas Board of Education debates whether convict leasing belongs in the social studies curriculum, that debate is itself the answer to the reparations question. They know what is in the ground. They have known. The choice to keep it out of the textbook is the choice to keep the wealth flowing forward without the receipts attached. What I Need You To Sit With I am a proud Texan, born and raised in Bryan, which is itself former plantation country. I am product of the Brazos Valley County. I have family dispersed throughout this state. Some of the bodies under that career and technical education center in Sugar Land could be my people. Some of them are definitely somebody’s people. Ninety-four men and one woman, ages fourteen to seventy, worked to death and buried in pine boxes between 1878 and 1911, while a private sugar company turned their bones into brand equity and the State of Texas turned the property into a permanent prison farm. That is not history. That is an open file. That file does not get closed until the receipts get paid. Imperial Sugar is the oldest continuously operating business in Texas. That sentence is a confession dressed up as a corporate fun fact. Every accusation is a confession, and the longevity itself is the accusation. You cannot be the oldest business in Texas without explaining how you survived 1865, 1878, 1914, and every Texas constitution in between. The answer is convict leasing, then prison farms, then brand portability across three corporate parents. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts have never stopped accumulating. They want us to get over slavery, but they damn sure don’t want to let go of them profits. They want us to stop blaming them for what their ancestors did, but they want to hold on tight to what their ancestors left them. Two things can be true. Two things are true. And until the second thing gets reckoned with materially, not symbolically, the first thing is going to keep happening. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Five Key Takeaways These are the load-bearing points. Each one is the bridge between the historical receipt and the contemporary accountability ask. 1. Imperial Sugar’s longevity is itself the indictment The company markets itself as the oldest continuously operating business in Texas, founded in 1843. You cannot operate continuously through the antebellum period, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the twentieth century without a sustained labor supply. The labor supply for the first seventy-plus years of Imperial Sugar’s operation was enslaved people, then convict-leased Black prisoners, then prison-farm laborers after the state took over the property in 1914. Continuous operation is the asset. The asset is built on unfree Black labor. The longevity advertised in the corporate biography is the receipt. 2. Cunningham and Ellis ran the largest convict-leasing operation in Texas history In 1878, Confederate veterans Edward H. Cunningham and Littleberry Ambrose Ellis signed a contract with the State of Texas to lease the entire state prison population to their sugar plantation operation in Fort Bend County. The operation became known as the Hell Hole of the Brazos. Conditions produced an estimated three percent annual mortality rate. When Isaac Kempner and W.T. Eldridge bought the property in 1906 and 1908 and formed Imperial Sugar Company, they bought into a business model already structured by decades of convict-leasing infrastructure, contracts, and accumulated capital. The Imperial Sugar brand is the legal and economic successor to the Hell Hole. 3. The Sugar Land 95 are the evidentiary baseline In April 2018, ninety-five sets of skeletal remains were unearthed at a Fort Bend Independent School District construction site on the former Imperial State Prison Farm property. All were African American. Ages ranged from fourteen to seventy. Bodies were muscularly built but malnourished, with bones misshapen by repetitive hard labor, and buried in plain pine boxes between 1878 and 1911. Activist Reginald Moore had been warning Texas authorities about exactly this site for nineteen years. The Sugar Land 95 are not symbolic. They are forensic. They are the physical evidence that the convict-leasing system documented in the historical record produced the body count documented in the ground. 4. The plantation did not end. It got institutionalized. Imperial Sugar sold the 5,200-acre Imperial Farm to the State of Texas in 1914 for $160,000 plus interest. The state continued sugar cultivation using prison labor on the same property, which operated as the Central Unit prison farm until 2011. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice today runs prison farms on former plantation land across the state, where incarcerated workers, the majority of them Black and brown, cultivate crops without compensation. Texas is one of the few states in the country that pays incarcerated workers nothing. The labor regime that built Imperial Sugar’s wealth has not ended. It has been absorbed into the state. 5. The reparations argument has to include Jim Crow Standard objections to reparations rely on the idea that slavery ended in 1865 and no living person is responsible for what their ancestors did. The Imperial Sugar case refutes the premise. The Sugar Land 95 were buried between 1878 and 1911, decades after Emancipation. The labor that built the brand equity was extracted under Jim Crow Black Codes, the Thirteenth Amendment exception clause, and contracts signed by Confederate veterans with the State of Texas. The brand changed corporate hands three times in the last two decades, sold for $203 million in 2012 and again in 2022, each time at a premium that reflected the company’s lineage and continuous-operation status. The wealth never stopped moving. The receipts never stopped accumulating. The reparations conversation is not asking living people to pay for slavery. It is asking corporate entities and state governments to settle line-item debts that are still actively producing value today. EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER I'm fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. WORKS CITED Sources used to build this piece. Includes journalistic coverage of the Sugar Land 95 discovery, corporate and historical documentation of Imperial Sugar’s lineage, scholarly framing of convict leasing and prison labor, and reporting on contemporary Texas prison labor. Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Confronting Sugar Land’s Forgotten History.’ November 2022. Long-form feature on the discovery of the Sugar Land 95 and the historical context of convict leasing in Fort Bend County. Establishes the documented three percent annual mortality rate on the Cunningham and Ellis plantation, the Hell Hole of the Brazos designation, and the 1878 contract leasing the entire Texas prison population. Provides crucial corporate biography on Kempner and Eldridge’s purchase of the property in 1906 to 1908. Indispensable for understanding the throughline from plantation to convict leasing to Imperial Sugar Company. Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy. ‘Remembering Reginald Moore.’ March 2021. Profile and obituary of Reginald Moore, the retired longshoreman and former Texas Department of Corrections officer whose nineteen-year research effort predicted the location of the Sugar Land 95 mass grave. Documents the city of Sugar Land’s official denial of the convict-leasing history until 2018, and the marginalization of Moore by Fort Bend County officials after the discovery. Required reading on whose research counts and whose does not. Rice University, Woodson Research Center. ‘Reginald Moore Sugar Land Convict Leasing System Research Collection.’ Archival collection of Reginald Moore’s research materials, donated to Rice University and now part of the Woodson Research Center. Includes audio testimony to the Texas State Board of Education on convict leasing in Texas history textbooks, video documentation of Memorial Day 2018 events honoring the Sugar Land 95, and primary source materials on Fort Bend County’s convict-leasing history. The institutional record of Black research that the state initially tried to ignore. Texas State Historical Association. ‘Imperial Sugar Company.’ Handbook of Texas Online. Official corporate biography from the Texas State Historical Association. Confirms the 1843 founding date, the continuous operation claim, and the 1914 sale of the Ellis Plantation to the State of Texas as a prison farm with continued sugar production by convicts. Useful precisely because it is the establishment account, which makes its acknowledgments of convict labor more damning, not less. Texas Observer, Josephine Lee and Michelle Pitcher. ‘Texas Plantation Prisons.’ July 2024. Investigative report on the contemporary Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison farms, documenting that most are located on former plantation land and continue to cultivate the same crops as enslaved and convict-leased workers. Quotes historian Robert Perkinson, author of Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Establishes the institutional continuity between nineteenth-century convict leasing and twenty-first-century unpaid prison labor. Bolts Magazine. ‘They Force You to Work.’ 2026. Reporting on Texas Correctional Industries and the use of unpaid prison labor to undercut private-sector bids. Documents the eighty-million-dollar plus annual revenue generated by goods and services produced by people working for free, and the political organizing in Houston to challenge city contracts with TDCJ. The contemporary line item on the historical bill. Charles Mills. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997. Foundational text on the racial contract as the underlying legal and political architecture of Western liberal democracy. Mills’s framework of the epistemology of ignorance explains how the explicit historical record of convict leasing can sit alongside a public refusal to acknowledge what the record shows. Required philosophical framing for understanding why Imperial Sugar’s biography can be both publicly available and effectively invisible. Frank Wilderson III. Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010. Foundational Afropessimist text. Wilderson’s distinction between the worker and the slave, and his account of the fungibility of Black flesh, provide the analytical scaffolding for understanding convict leasing not as a labor system but as a continuation of slavery’s ontology. Black bodies inside the Texas penal system in 1878 were structurally the same kind of thing as Black bodies on antebellum plantations. Douglas Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name. Anchor Books, 2008. Pulitzer Prize winning history of convict leasing, peonage, and the post-Emancipation re-enslavement of Black Americans across the South from 1865 to World War Two. The most accessible book-length treatment of the system Cunningham and Ellis operated in Fort Bend County. Essential for placing the Sugar Land 95 inside the regional and national pattern. Robert Perkinson. Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire. Picador, 2010. Definitive history of the Texas prison system from its origins to the contemporary period. Documents the institutional continuity between convict leasing and state-run prison farms, the influence of Texas wardens like O.B. Ellis and George Beto on national prison policy, and the persistence of plantation logics inside the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The book everyone debating prison reform in Texas should have read first. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Louis Dreyfus Commodities LLC / Imperial Sugar Company tender offer, 2012. Public corporate records documenting the $6.35 per share, approximately $203 million acquisition of Imperial Sugar Company by Louis Dreyfus Commodities in 2012, including the assumption of $125 million in debt. The receipts on what the brand was worth at one moment in its corporate lineage. Followed by the 2022 sale of Imperial Sugar to US Sugar Corporation, completing the brand’s transition from Texas family ownership to global commodities house to Florida agribusiness conglomerate while the underlying lineage stayed intact. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]