Education is Elevation

The 14th Amendment Was Never Yours: How Citizenship Was Built In Opposition To Black And Native Humanity

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her) [https://substack.com/profile/2073006-reda-rountree-sheher], Mnera [https://substack.com/profile/18094558-mnera], Farrah Senne [https://substack.com/profile/271955116-farrah-senne], Louis DeVlugt Personal [https://substack.com/profile/189210972-louis-devlugt-personal], Copaganda [https://substack.com/profile/347196593-copaganda], and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I just got done sitting in a convening about immigration with a bunch of pro-immigration workers, and I have thoughts. Before I get into them, though, I want to give a disclaimer, because my grandfather always said the pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, and what I’m about to lay down ain’t about accusing nobody of being nefarious, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally anti-Black, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally engaged in indigenous erasure. This is about impact, not intent. And as the kinfolks know, two things can be true at the same damn time — folks can mean well and still be perpetuating the exact erasure that the empire requires to function. Let that marinate. I sat in that room and listened to a presentation on the 14th Amendment, listened to lawyers grapple with how the current administration is trying to overturn birthright citizenship, listened to scholars walk through how the 14th Amendment is being weaponized against immigrant populations — and the whole time I kept asking the same rhetorical question in my head, the question that has to be the starting point for any serious conversation about citizenship in this country: What does the subject position of being an immigrant or being a citizen mean for the Indian or for the Black? What has the concept of citizenship actually engaged when it comes to what it means to be Native, or what it means to be African American? Because for the folks in the back, the 14th Amendment ain’t just a 2026 immigration story. The 14th Amendment is birthed out of the Reconstruction era. 13th Amendment freed the slaves, 14th Amendment gave citizenship, 15th Amendment gave the right to vote — but only to Black men. You feel me? The presentation didn’t grapple with that. The presentation talked about the 14th Amendment as if it dropped out of the sky and landed in 2026 on the bodies of immigrants, when in actuality this amendment is birthed in blood, birthed in slavery, birthed in Reconstruction, and has been weaponized against the very people it was supposed to protect since the second the ink dried. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Most of us engage with citizenship through a very romanticized, sanitized understanding of what it is. So let me set up some questions, because Research over MeSearch — in 2026, will we say that Black people are citizens? Yes, obviously. African Americans in 2026 are still regarded as citizens. Do we understand that citizenship is supposed to come with the right to vote? Yes. But then what is the concept of citizenship meant for the Black body? It’s never guaranteed any type of safety. It’s never guaranteed what we’re supposed to believe comes with being a citizen. Though Black people are still regarded as citizens in 2026, legally we’re having our voting rights taken away. The very same Supreme Court that says it’s legal to racially profile against immigrant populations when it comes to citizenship is the same Supreme Court that says you have to engage in colorblindness when it comes to creating congressional maps. Let that marinate. Colorblindness is good, Supreme Court says, when it comes to drawing congressional districts that would actually give Black people political representation. But color consciousness is good for the Supreme Court when it comes to enforcing immigration. This illustrates the tension in how the law accounts for indigeneity and Blackness in a completely different way than the other subject positions, and you cannot have an honest conversation about immigration without grappling with this contradiction. And for the Indigenous, the contradiction runs deeper. Do y’all know the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans? Naturalized birthright citizenship did not apply to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island — the people that have been here for thousands of years. Legally speaking, Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. The 14th Amendment passes in 1868, and Native folks have to wait fifty-six more years to be legally recognized as citizens of the country that was built on top of their bones. And then even when they were granted citizenship in 1924, what did that mean for their humanity? What did that mean for the ongoing genocide they were facing? What did that mean for the boarding schools that were still actively destroying their children? Citizenship for Native Americans has never led to preserving their culture, never led to preserving their customs, never led to seeing their sovereignty, never led to them being able to get regular old rights of being a citizen. The legal concept of citizenship does not give what it’s supposed to give. And we know this because even now, even now, even now — Black people have been regarded as citizens since 1868, and yet how much legally have our citizenship been circumvented and continues to be circumvented regardless of us being seen as naturalized citizens of America? This is where the romanticized framing of “America is a nation of immigrants” starts to crumble under the weight of historical analysis. When Zohran Mamdani says New York was built by immigrants, when Shaboozey says America was built by immigrants, I understand the intent — the intent is to dignify immigrant labor, to push back against the xenophobic right, to remind people that this country’s prosperity was constructed by hands that the empire would now like to deport. I get it. But the impact erases the history of chattel slavery, erases the fact that a bunch of Black people built this country before the Immigration Act of 1965 brought an influx of immigrants to a country that was already built. The milk and honey people came looking for? It was already created — by particular people, under the lash, under the whip, under the auction block. Then there’s the second erasure: when you call this a nation of immigrants, what does that mean for the Indigenous folks who were already here? What does that mean for the people who didn’t migrate, who didn’t choose, whose land was taken from underneath them? You feel me? When you frame the starting point of the American story as immigration, you’ve already erased two subject positions — the people who were forced here in chains, and the people whose land was stolen. This is what Tuck and Yang call the settler’s move to innocence. The phrase “no one is illegal on stolen land” — said with the absolute best of intentions, said by Billie Eilish at the Grammys, said at every progressive rally — has a contradiction baked into it that does the work of indigenous erasure even as it claims to be solidarity. Who was the land stolen from? Do you know the specific tribe that is indigenous to the land you’re standing on when you make this statement? What does it mean for Native sovereignty when you present the starting point of the story as already-stolen land? Because if the land is just abstractly stolen, if the original people are just a hazy concept in the backdrop of your solidarity statement, then the land becomes available for redistribution among non-Native populations, and the Indigenous claim disappears into a vibe. Tuck and Yang argue that settlers reach for these moves to relieve the discomfort of being implicated in colonization without actually giving anything back. The slogan feels radical. The slogan does nothing for land back. The slogan, in fact, makes land back harder, because it converts a specific Indigenous claim into a universal humanitarian one. That ain’t the same thing. I want to be clear about the Afropessimist intervention I’m making here, because some of y’all gonna read this and try to flatten it into Oppression Olympics. That ain’t what this is. Afropessimists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton argue that anti-Blackness is antagonistic to America and to the world, while a lot of other injustices are seen as human conflicts. To understand the difference between a conflict and an antagonism: a conflict can be compromised. An antagonism is always one or the other. The relationship between America and Black suffering, between America and Indigenous genocide — that ain’t a conflict that gets resolved through better policy. That’s the structuring antagonism that makes America possible in the first place. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for Indigenous folks in America or Black folks. Democracy in America is situated upon Black bodies and Native American blood. We don’t get it without that. So when we think about the romanticized ideals around what the law is supposed to do, the ideals don’t grapple with the material reality. The scholar in me and the nigga in me is asking, in the bare bones — what has citizenship guaranteed for the nigga and the native? What has equal protection meant for us? What has political representation in citizenship meant for our plight? And here’s where the antagonism between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous discourse really comes home. After 1965, when you have non-Black, non-white immigrant populations migrating to America, and they want to prove they’re citizens in court, they have historically tethered their citizenship and humanity to whiteness. You go to the courthouse, you stand before the judge, you say “I’m a citizen because I’m white” — showing you the inherent anti-Blackness within the law itself. The law was structured in opposition to particular subject positions getting rights and humanity. So when in 2026 we start talking about immigrant rights, when we start talking about how we’re going to use the law to push back against birthright citizenship being overturned, we have to grapple with the fact that this very legal apparatus, from 1776 to 2026, has been the tool we’re being asked to believe in. And I gotta be honest with y’all — I was around a bunch of lawyers in that room, and it made me think about why I didn’t become a lawyer. I didn’t become one because epistemologically, which is just a fancy word for how we produce knowledge, I could never get down with the idea that the law could be discursively permuted to get whatever ruling we want. The law is very black and white. The more we deny that, the more we have these conversations about immigration rights with this antagonistic tension sitting in the backdrop unaddressed. Two policies in 1965 tell this story plain. The 1965 Immigration Act opens the doors to non-white immigration in significant numbers for the first time. The 1965 Voting Rights Act gives Black people federal enforcement protection for the franchise that should have been ours since 1870. These two policies happen in the same year, and the tension between them has been shaping American political life ever since. Because of redlining, because of the legacy of slavery, because of being systematically excluded from banking — economic opportunities in the Black community got filled by other immigrant populations. Whether we talking about hair weave, whether we talking about the nail industry, whether we talking about beauty supply, whether we talking about food industries throughout America, this is the backdrop of living in the Black community. Black entrepreneurs were not given those opportunities. And me being in LA right now, the 1992 Rodney King riots happened in part because of the tension between these two communities — the Black community and the Asian community. If we gloss over that, act like it’s hunky-dory, whoop-dee-doo, we impact our ability to build genuine coalitions and solidarities. When Shaboozey said America was built by immigrants, it wasn’t just Black folks that was pissed off by that statement. When we make those types of declarations, we alienate particular people from particular communities who can’t f**k with the framing because the framing erases them. Then you got Cesar Chavez, who is iconized as the immigrant rights hero, the patron saint of farmworker organizing. Even before we came out with the fact that he was a rapist, even before we came out with the documentation of his misogyny and patriarchy, we already knew he was anti-Black. We already knew that even though he was on immigrant rights, he would call ICE on undocumented farmers when they were undercutting his union. We have statements of him saying anti-Black s**t. So when L.A. is named after him, when Cesar Chavez is the figure that gets centered in pro-immigration mythology, what does that say about whose humanity is allowed to be complicated? Whose contradictions are forgiven? Whose anti-Blackness is folded into the heroic narrative because the broader project of immigration politics needs him? Two things can be true. Chavez did organizing work. Chavez was anti-Black. Refusing to hold both is what allows the antagonism to keep operating in the dark. And let me tell you about indigeneity in California specifically, because this part don’t get touched enough. Right now in California, there are a bunch of Indigenous folks caught up in immigration politics and immigration law — because they get coded as Mexican, because they get coded as Latin American, because the colonial lens of America sees them as Spanish-speaking subjects rather than as Indigenous peoples of land that was theirs before Spain ever arrived, before the United States ever arrived. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about this in Borderlands/La Frontera — the Mexicans didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. You hear white conservatives telling Mexican people to go back where they came from, and I’m from Texas, born and raised, living in Texas now, and it makes me cringe every time, because nigga, hear it: they are in their home. You view their sovereignty, you view their indigeneity, through the lens of colonizers — i.e., this used to be a Spanish colony, so I’m going to view everybody in this colony as Spanish subjects, point blank period. So even here in California, you got indigenous folks who can’t even access the law’s protection because the 14th Amendment didn’t give them citizenship, but they’re also Indigenous to California, so the law is already insidious to their bodies. They’re seen as aliens in their own land. They’re seen as immigrants in their own land. Because they were colonized by Spaniards who taught them Spanish, and the white folks here only understand their humanity through the colonial language they were forced to speak. This is what we’re dealing with. A Specific Implication For Education For educators, for curriculum builders, for the folks teaching social studies, civics, history, ethnic studies — this analysis is not an academic exercise. It’s a directive. The current public education curriculum on immigration in this country is a curriculum of liberal flattening. Students are taught that America is a nation of immigrants. Students are taught about Ellis Island as the origin story of American belonging. Students are taught that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship in a way that floats free of slavery and Reconstruction. Students are taught about Cesar Chavez as a saint without being taught about his anti-Blackness. Students are taught about the Civil Rights Movement and the Immigration Act of 1965 as parallel stories of progress without being taught about the structural tensions those two policies set into motion. The result is a generation of well-meaning young people who graduate from high school perfectly equipped to perpetuate Indigenous erasure and anti-Black erasure while believing themselves to be on the right side of history. We have to teach the 14th Amendment with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach the 1965 Immigration Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach Chavez with the Black farmworkers he undermined. We have to teach Anzaldúa, we have to teach Wilderson, we have to teach Tuck and Yang. Otherwise we are producing what Charles Mills called the white moral psychology — a citizenry capable of believing in justice while being entirely incapable of recognizing the structuring antagonisms that make injustice possible. Education is elevation, or it ain’t education at all. Intersectional Material Impacts The folks who get crushed hardest in the gap between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous critique are, of course, the folks sitting at the intersections. Black immigrants — Haitian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali, Afro-Latine — get hit twice. They get hit by immigration enforcement that racially profiles them as both Black and foreign. They get hit by Black communities that haven’t always made space for them in the freedom struggle. ICE deports Black immigrants at disproportionate rates relative to their share of the immigrant population — that’s documented, that’s empirical. Black women immigrants face the misogynoir Moya Bailey named on top of the xenophobia. Black trans immigrants face all of that plus the medical and legal violence the state reserves for trans folks. Indigenous women in California caught between immigration enforcement and federal Indian law sit at a junction where neither legal regime acknowledges their actual sovereignty. Indigenous trans and two-spirit folks navigate colonial frameworks that erased their cultural roles before the United States existed. Disabled Black and Indigenous folks navigate a citizenship that has never accommodated their material needs. Poor Black folks watching wealthy non-Black immigrants integrate into whiteness in ways they never could. This is what intersectional analysis demands — not symbolic representation, but material outcomes. Crenshaw didn’t give us a vibe. She gave us a tool. Use it. Most of the symbolic wins of pro-immigration politics over the last decade have left Black immigrants, Indigenous immigrants, and the Black and Indigenous communities of the United States in materially worse positions, and that ain’t an accident. That’s the antagonism doing its work while the conflict gets compromised. Closing The Loop So when I sat in that room and listened to that 14th Amendment presentation, what I was hearing was the failure to grapple with the foundational antagonism. The failure to grapple with how the 14th Amendment was birthed in Reconstruction and weaponized in Louisiana v. Callais to gut the Voting Rights Act. The failure to grapple with how citizenship for Native folks wasn’t recognized until 1924, and that recognition was a paper formality on top of ongoing genocide. The failure to grapple with how every “nation of immigrants” slogan does the dual work of erasing Indigenous claims and erasing Black labor. The failure to grapple with how the law itself, from 1776 to 2026, has been structured in opposition to Black and Indigenous humanity. The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions, and the room was full of good intentions, and the impact of those good intentions left without my interventions would have been more Indigenous erasure and more anti-Black erasure, dressed up in the language of progressive solidarity. We have to center Blackness and we have to center indigeneity in these conversations, because if we don’t, we engage in indigenous erasure and erasure of Black suffering, and to me that is the cornerstone of America. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for us. Land back and reparations have to be married together. We don’t get reparations without the land. The land was built with our bodies. Feel me? Education is elevation. Let that marinate. 5 KEY TAKEAWAYS * The 14th Amendment is a Reconstruction-era artifact, not a free-floating immigration document. Any conversation about birthright citizenship that doesn’t begin with slavery, the 13th-14th-15th Amendment sequence, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act is doing erasure work, regardless of intent. * Citizenship has never guaranteed humanity for Black or Indigenous people in America. Black folks have been citizens since 1868 and are still having voting rights stripped. Native folks were not citizens until 1924 and were facing ongoing genocide when the paper formality arrived. Romanticized framings of citizenship as protection collapse under historical examination. * “Nation of immigrants” and “no one is illegal on stolen land” are settler moves to innocence. Tuck and Yang’s framework explains how progressive-sounding slogans can do the work of Indigenous erasure by abstracting away specific tribal claims and converting them into universal humanitarian principles that demand nothing back. * The 1965 Immigration Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act set structural tensions in motion that still shape Black/non-Black immigrant relations. The 1992 Rodney King riots, ongoing tensions over Asian businesses in Black communities, the iconization of Cesar Chavez despite his anti-Blackness — these are not coincidences. They are downstream consequences of policies that did not address racial capitalism’s foundational antagonisms. * Land Back and reparations are not competing projects — they are the same project. Coalition between Black and Indigenous freedom struggles requires honesty about the material differences in subject position, not flattening into a singular “people of color” frame that allows non-Black, non-Indigenous immigrants to skip past the structuring antagonisms that make their inclusion in American life possible. Become A Paid Subscriber Y’all, this is what independent media looks like. No corporate backing. No advertiser telling me what I can and can’t say about Cory Booker or AIPAC or Netanyahu. No editor softening the analysis because a Senator’s office called. Just me, a transcript, a stack of receipts, and y’all. Public broadcasting is being defunded. PBS is on life support. NPR is being structurally hollowed out. The Education Is Elevation Substack is filling the void left by the retreat of public education media — with Pan-African analysis, Southern Black Left framing, and the kind of receipts-based political education they don’t teach in school. Fewer than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Less than 1%. So if this piece taught you something, gave you a frame, or armed you with language for the next argument at the family cookout — become a paid subscriber today. 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 / RELATED READINGS Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010). The foundational text for understanding the distinction between conflict and antagonism that drives this analysis. Wilderson lays out why anti-Blackness is structuring rather than incidental, and why the Indian, the Black, and the Settler operate as three distinct grammars of suffering. If you read one thing from this list, read this. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The text that gave us “the border crossed us” and reframed indigeneity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Essential for understanding why California’s Indigenous-but-Spanish-speaking populations get caught in immigration enforcement that has no language for their actual subject position. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2012). The article that named the “settler moves to innocence” — the rhetorical maneuvers that allow non-Native people to feel implicated in colonization without doing the material work of land return. Required reading for anyone using “stolen land” language. Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008). Sexton’s work on how multiracial discourse can flatten and obscure anti-Blackness is directly applicable to how “people of color” framings function in immigration politics. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The philosophical architecture for understanding why a legal apparatus designed to exclude can never simply be reformed into one that includes. Mills’s account of white moral psychology explains the room I was sitting in. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The foundational texts of intersectional analysis. Read them whole — not the watered-down version that survived corporate diversity training. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). The original articulation of how Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of interlocking systems of oppression. The reason intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey gave us the term misogynoir. Essential for understanding the specific position of Black women immigrants and how their experience does not collapse into either “Black” or “immigrant” frames alone. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman on the afterlife of slavery and the law’s relationship to Black flesh. Essential context for why the 14th Amendment cannot do what the legal liberal hopes it can. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Spillers on the gendered grammar of enslavement. The grammar of citizenship is downstream of the grammar of fungibility. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Robinson on racial capitalism — the framework for understanding why anti-Blackness is engine, not aberration. Indispensable. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Rodney on the global structure that produced the migrations being debated in 2026. The immigrants didn’t come from nowhere. They came from the wreckage Europe and America made. Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004; 2nd ed. 2015). Grande on Indigenous education, sovereignty, and the limits of liberal multiculturalism in addressing Native claims. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The historical record that the standard American history curriculum erases. Read alongside Howard Zinn but understand that Dunbar-Ortiz does what Zinn could not. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019). King’s work specifically theorizes the meeting point of Black and Native critique — exactly the conversation pro-immigration discourse refuses to have. 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]

When Mexican Kids Bust a Pinata of Two Flags: Indigenous Solidarity, Settler Colonialism, and What School Won't Teach

Y’all see them children in Mexico busting a pinata with two flags on it — Israeli and American? That image symbolize so much that we got a really young package today, kinfolks. And I already know a lot of people gon’ see this and be infuriated because they wanna believe these children being indoctrinated. But let me hold this one up to the light real quick: if your kid can be a Confederate-flag-toting white supremacist sucker out here at the lake on the back of a F-150, then these kids over there can also be conscious of how these countries impacting their livelihood. Two things can be true, feel me? Symbolism is intentional. Always. And when I see them two flags taped together on a pinata, I ain’t seeing random teenage angst — I’m seeing children doing what their elders been doing for generations: naming the structural relationship that’s stealing their air. So before y’all get to clutching them pearls, let that marinate for a second. Here’s the thing most of us don’t know about. I like to believe a lot of us are consciously aware — no pun intended — of how America exploits and criminalizes our southern neighbor Mexico. But the relationship between Mexico and the Israeli settler-colonial project? Most of y’all lost in the sauce on that one. So lemme walk through the receipts. The struggle of Palestinians resonate with Mexico despite 7,000 miles between them and despite distinct geopolitical surroundings. Why? Because the violent consequences of settler colonialism in Palestine conjure up the post-colonial trauma that’s already living in Mexican soil. Patrick Wolfe said it plain — settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Robinson 83 tells us racial capitalism don’t work without antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as its engine, not as accidents. So when two settler projects start trading tools, it ain’t coincidence. It’s the family business. Look at Pegasus. Pegasus is a spy web developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, and as journalist Anthony Lowenstein documents, it was tried and tested in occupied Palestine before it ever touched a Mexican phone. Designed to be covertly and remotely installed on iOS and Android. Designed to harvest you in your sleep. And then exported. Lowenstein calls it an exported occupation, and that phrasing matter — because once it’s been deployed and proven in the field, Israeli companies promote them tools as battle-tested and occupied Palestine, which then becomes a sales pitch for any government trying to criminalize the folks just trying to get their immigration on. This means the surveillance regime that disappears Palestinian journalists is the same surveillance regime that’s tracking Mexican human rights defenders. Same technology. Same logic. Same vendor. Just admit it: that’s not parallel oppression, that’s the same machine running two shifts. Now lemme show y’all why there’s a statue of Yasser Arafat in Mexico City — because that question alone shut down most American history teachers I know. Arafat was the Palestinian politician and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in trying to establish a free Palestinian state. He kept close diplomatic relations with Mexico his whole life. In 1975, he met with then-Mexican President Luis Echeverria — the President flew to Cairo to meet him and soon established diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year, the PLO established an information office in Mexico City. By 1995, that office got elevated to an official delegation. Then in 2000, Arafat met with then-Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green, who paid an official visit to Gaza City and invited him to Mexico on behalf of the president. He passed in 2004. And soon after his death, the government of Mexico City placed a memorial in his honor. Crazy how that’s the part of Mexican diplomatic history that don’t make it into the news cycle when folks wanna debate Mexican-American identity. They’ll show you Cinco de Mayo and a margarita but they won’t show you the Arafat statue. Wonder why. Now let me close this loop by going back home to Texas, because y’all know I’m a Bryan, TX, boy and I got receipts for the local too. When we talk about remembering the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, the reason Stephen F. Austin was beefing with Santa Ana is because they had a little agreement in settler solidarity that went bad. Santa Ana had even agreed Anglo settlers could come in — under the condition they convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and not bring enslaved people. Austin and them broke the deal. So the Texas Revolution wasn’t liberation, it was a settler franchise dispute. Two colonial powers arguing over who get to extract from indigenous land and Black bodies. iMa bE the one to say it: remembering the Alamo without remembering that context is just remembering the slave power. Most of y’all lost in the salsa of settler colonialism so heavy that you don’t even view Mexican people as indigenous folks of Turtle Island. You view them as immigrant subjects of Mexico. But the Conquistadors — Hernandez, Cortez and nem — was settlers. Mexico is a settler-colonial state laid on top of indigenous land just like the United States. Sandy Grande talks about how settler colonialism requires the disappearance of the indigenous, not just from the land but from the imagination. So when you call a Mixtec grandmother an immigrant, you’re not making a statement of geography. You’re making whiteness visible by erasing her ancestral claim to a continent. Charles Mills in 1997 calls this the racial contract — a tacit agreement that the world is white people’s to allocate. Then you got Europeans believing this country was theirs to conquer, both the Spanish and the English, just like them folks over yonder way across the pond believe it’s their God-given right to have the land because it was promised to them 3,000 years ago. Sounds like God only come down to tell white folks this is your land, huh? Every accusation is a confession. Every theology of conquest is an admission that the conquest required theology to justify it. Apply Wilderson here for a second. Afropessimism gon’ tell us the Black is figured as fungible and socially dead — not analogous to indigenous dispossession, but structurally entangled with it. Robinson 83 close the loop: racial capitalism uses antiblackness as essential engine of surplus value AND uses indigenous dispossession as essential engine of land accumulation. They run together. Which means Palestinian children buried under rubble, Mexican migrants tracked by Pegasus, and Black Houstonians criminalized by predictive policing tools developed by the same defense contractors — we all caught in different rooms of the same house. And this is also where the intersectional material impacts hit different. Crenshaw 89 told y’all the experience at the intersection ain’t additive, it’s structurally distinct. So an indigenous Mexican woman crossing the border ain’t just experiencing xenophobia plus sexism plus colorism — she’s experiencing a specific weaponization of all three under a surveillance infrastructure shipped from Tel Aviv to Mexico City to Texas. Combahee told us in 77 that if Black women were free, it would mean everybody else would have to be free. Apply that here: if indigenous women of the Americas were free of settler-colonial surveillance, the whole regime collapse. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir framework still apply too, even at this scale. Because who gets surveilled hardest by these tools when they hit U.S. soil? Black women organizers. Indigenous women water protectors. Trans women of color reporting on ICE. The Pegasus-style tools don’t just go to foreign governments — they get repackaged for domestic departments. That ain’t paranoia. That’s procurement records. Now lemme name the contradiction and let it hang. The same federal budget that claim it can’t afford universal pre-K, can’t afford Medicaid expansion, can’t afford reparations study, somehow always got billions for foreign military aid that loops back into surveillance contracts that get pointed at the American working class. Gil Scott-Heron said it best in 1970 and it still apply: Was all that money I made last year for billion-dollar defense aid? How come ain’t no money here for the kids in Bryan or Brownsville or Brooklyn? Whitey on the moon. Whitey on the border. Same flight plan. Having the luxury to ignore the Mexico-Israel surveillance pipeline is a sign of citizenship privilege. Naming neutrality on it is itself a position. Bell 91 talked about interest convergence — the dominant class only support justice for the marginalized when it serves their own interests. The reason these two settler projects bond is because their interests already converged a long time ago. The reason American media don’t wanna talk about it is because that interest convergence is the load-bearing wall of the empire. By doing the work of pretending Mexico is just an immigration story and Palestine is just a foreign policy story, the media is making whiteness visible — visible as the third party in the room directing the conversation. So them children with the pinata? They wasn’t being indoctrinated. They was educated. They was doing in public what their elders been doing for generations — naming the structural relationship between two settler-colonial projects that don’t see them as fully human. The bell didn’t dismiss them, the truth did. Education is elevation. Two things can be true: you can love your country and still tell the truth about its alliances. You can grieve every Israeli child and still grieve every Palestinian child. You can love Mexico and still call out the Mexican state’s complicity. You can be American and still know America selling Mexico Israeli surveillance is not freedom, it’s a franchise. Just admit it. And then do something about it. Critical Historical Context Timeline of Mexico-Palestine-Israel Relations * 1947–48: Mexico abstains on UN Resolution 181 (the partition of Palestine), one of the few Latin American countries not to vote yes. That ain’t an accident — it’s continuity with Mexico’s earlier 1930s diplomatic resistance to fascism and its post-revolutionary commitment to non-intervention (the Estrada Doctrine, 1930). * 1975: President Luis Echeverria flies to Cairo and establishes diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year the PLO opens an information office in Mexico City — the first such office in the Western Hemisphere outside of Cuba. * 1975: Same year, Mexico votes for UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. The U.S. responded by organizing a Jewish-American tourism boycott of Mexico, which Mexico’s economy felt immediately. The Echeverria government walked the vote back diplomatically — receipt of how economic coercion shapes Global South solidarity. * 1995: PLO office in Mexico City elevated to official delegation status. * 2000: Foreign Minister Rosario Green visits Gaza City and formally invites Arafat to Mexico on behalf of the President. * 2004: Arafat passes. Mexico City government places a memorial bust of him in Parque Tlatelolco — itself the site of the 1968 Mexican state massacre of student protesters. The placement is intentional symbolism: anti-imperial martyrs alongside victims of state violence. * 2017: First Pegasus revelations published showing Mexican government surveilled journalists, lawyers, and activists investigating the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students. The same spyware later linked to surveillance of Jamal Khashoggi’s circle before his murder. * 2021–present: Forensic Architecture, Citizen Lab, and Amnesty International continue documenting Pegasus deployments across Mexico, including against the families of the Ayotzinapa students and against human rights defenders working on femicide and disappearance cases. The Pre-1492 Frame Most American schooling treat 1492 like a starting pistol and not a crime scene. Indigenous nations across what is now Mexico — Mexica, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huichol, Yaqui, Raramuri, Purepecha, Otomi — had governance, trade, astronomy, agriculture, codices, and diplomacy. The conquistadors didn’t bring civilization, they brought a particular structure for extracting it. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks both argue that decolonization can’t be a metaphor — it requires material return of land, governance, and economy. Stephen F. Austin, Santa Anna, and the Real Texas Revolution This is the Bryan, TX, hometown receipt. Stephen F. Austin negotiated with Mexico in the 1820s to bring Anglo settlers into Coahuila y Tejas under three conditions: convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and don’t bring enslaved Black people. Austin and them broke all three — particularly the slavery clause. The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 was, at its root, a settler franchise dispute over whether the slave economy would expand westward. Remember the Alamo means remember the slave power. Bryan, TX, is named for William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin. That heritage is concrete in my hometown’s street signs. Pegasus and the Exported Occupation Anthony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (2023) documents how Israeli surveillance, weapons, and crowd-control technology gets battle-tested in the occupied territories and then exported. NSO Group’s Pegasus is the most famous example, but it’s part of a broader supply chain — Elbit drones, Cellebrite phone-cracking, AnyVision facial recognition. The U.S.-Mexico border has been a primary buyer. Customs and Border Protection has contracted with multiple Israeli defense firms for tower surveillance systems along the Rio Grande. This means the same towers watching Palestinians in Hebron got cousins watching folks in Brownsville. A Specific Implication for Education Here’s the part I want educators, parents, and students to sit with. American K-12 curriculum teach Mexico and Palestine in two completely separate boxes — Mexico goes in the immigration and Spanish-language box, Palestine goes in the Middle East conflict box. By design, those two boxes don’t touch. And as long as they don’t touch, the surveillance pipeline, the arms pipeline, and the settler-colonial logic stay invisible to the next generation of voters and taxpayers. Freire told us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that banking education — where students are treated as empty containers for state-approved facts — is itself a tool of oppression. The fragmentation of these histories is banking education at the geopolitical scale. The fix is problem-posing pedagogy: let students put the maps side by side, let them follow the procurement records, let them ask why a Mexico City statue of Arafat is something they never heard about. This means as an educator I’m asking three things of teachers, librarians, and homeschooling parents reading this: * Teach Pre-Columbian Mexico as indigenous history, not as Spanish history. Use Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun. Use Patrisia Gonzales’s Red Medicine. * Teach the Texas Revolution with primary sources from Mexican archives, not just the Austin–Houston narrative. The Texas State Library has the original Mexican land grants in Spanish — use them. * Teach surveillance literacy. Students should know what Pegasus is, what Cellebrite is, what predictive policing software is in their own district’s budget. Naming the tools is the first step in resisting them. If you a public school teacher in Texas, I already know — y’all working under a hostile curriculum regime where this kind of teaching can cost you your job. That’s not an accident either. The same political coalition pushing book bans and CRT panic is the same coalition that benefits from these histories staying separate. Their fear is itself the receipt. Education is elevation. They know it. That’s why they fight it. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Black Communities in the United States Border-tested surveillance technology don’t stay at the border. Predictive policing software, facial recognition, and stingray cellphone trackers piloted along the Rio Grande get redeployed in Black neighborhoods in Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, and Detroit. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters both document how surveillance infrastructure built for one racialized population gets adapted to police another. Black folks pay for the pipeline twice — once as taxpayers funding foreign military aid, again as targets of the tech when it comes home. Indigenous Women in Mexico Mexico’s femicide crisis — over 10 women killed daily — overlaps directly with the deployment of Pegasus against the journalists and human rights defenders investigating it. When the state spyware get pointed at the people documenting the violence, the violence accelerate. Indigenous women in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero — already at the intersection of class, race, gender, and language exclusion — bear the heaviest cost. Crenshaw’s intersection ain’t a metaphor here, it’s a coroner’s report. Palestinian Women and Children Every Pegasus contract signed by a foreign government is revenue that funds the next iteration of the tool deployed in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian women — particularly Palestinian women journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh — have been systematically targeted. The pipeline don’t just flow Israel-outward. It flows back, with the revenue strengthening the original occupation. Black and Brown Migrants at the Border Haitian migrants in Del Rio. Honduran asylum seekers in Brownsville. African migrants routed through Tapachula. They all encounter the same Israeli-designed surveillance towers, the same Israeli-trained ICE units, the same biometric capture systems first beta-tested on Palestinians. The migrant body becomes the laboratory subject for the next export. Working-Class Americans of All Colors The taxpayer dollars that fund the foreign military aid, the border contracts, and the domestic policing tools come out of the same budget that don’t have money for public schools, libraries, mental health care, or rural hospitals. Whitey on the moon, whitey on the border, and ain’t no money here. Robinson 83 told us racial capitalism don’t just hurt the racialized — it disciplines the white working class too, by making sure their wages and services stay subordinate to the war machine. 5 Key Takeaways * Mexico and Palestine are linked by a documented surveillance pipeline. Pegasus and related Israeli-developed spyware were battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported to the Mexican government, where they have been used against journalists, human rights defenders, and the families of the disappeared. This is what Anthony Loewenstein calls exported occupation, and it is a structural relationship, not a coincidence. * Mexico’s diplomatic history with Palestine is older and deeper than American media admits. The Yasser Arafat memorial in Mexico City, the 1975 PLO office, and Foreign Minister Rosario Green’s official visit to Gaza City are all part of a Global South solidarity tradition that predates the contemporary moment. * Mexican people are indigenous people of Turtle Island, not immigrant subjects. Calling them otherwise is settler-colonial amnesia. The conquistadors were settlers; the Texas Revolution was a settler franchise dispute over the slave economy; and the modern U.S.-Mexico border is itself a settler-colonial line drawn through indigenous nations like the Tohono O’odham. * The intersection matters materially. Indigenous Mexican women, Palestinian women, Black women in U.S. cities, and migrant women at the border are all surveilled by the same supply chain of tools and trained operators. Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Combahee’s analysis of interlocking oppressions are not abstract — they describe a procurement system. * Public education is the battlefield. The fragmentation of Mexico and Palestine into separate curriculum boxes is itself an ideological tool. Teaching these histories together — and teaching surveillance literacy alongside them — is a precondition for any meaningful resistance. Education is elevation. Always was. 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. Annotated Bibliography / Related Readings Loewenstein, Anthony. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso, 2023). The definitive contemporary text on how Israeli surveillance and weapons technology gets battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported globally, including to Mexico. Required reading for understanding the Pegasus pipeline. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (Cassell, 1999). Wolfe’s foundational argument that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that it operates through the logic of elimination. The frame that makes the Mexico-Palestine parallel legible. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed, 1983). Robinson’s articulation of racial capitalism as a system that requires antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as engines, not aberrations. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke, 2010). Afropessimist framework distinguishing Black social death from the Settler/Native antagonism — crucial for thinking the entanglement without collapsing the distinction. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (Cornell, 1997). Mills’s argument that white supremacy operates as a global political system through a tacit racial contract — the philosophical scaffolding for understanding settler solidarity. Crenshaw, Kimberle. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989). The original intersectionality essay. The frame for analyzing how indigenous women, Palestinian women, and Black women experience structurally distinct harm at the intersection. Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). Black feminist statement establishing the interlocking nature of oppression and the principle that the freedom of Black women requires the dismantling of all oppressive systems. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed (NYU Press, 2021). Bailey’s elaboration of misogynoir as a structural force, applicable to how surveillance targets Black women organizers domestically. Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Grande’s argument for indigenous-centered education and her critique of settler-colonial schooling structures. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota, 2014). Coulthard’s argument against the politics of recognition and for material decolonization. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (Decolonization, 2012). The essay every educator should read before using the word decolonize. Insists on material land return. Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford, 2019). Centers Nahuatl-language sources to tell Mexica history from indigenous perspective rather than Spanish chroniclers. Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Arizona, 2012). Indigenous Mexican women’s traditional knowledge as resistance to colonial medicine. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke, 2015). Browne’s argument that modern surveillance was built on the technologies of policing Black bodies — applicable to how border tech gets domestically redeployed. 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]

From Plessy to Callais: How the Supreme Court Mastered the Art of Weaponizing Race While Banning Race Consciousness

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. Name something more insidious. Name one thing in the modern legal landscape that exposes the architecture of pale supremacy more cleanly than that. I’ll wait. Because here’s the thing kinfolks, this ain’t a contradiction. A contradiction is when two things accidentally don’t line up. This is a strategy. This is racial illiteracy weaponized at the highest court in the country, and the only way you don’t see it is if you ain’t been trained to see it, or worse, you been trained to look away. Let me lay it out plain so the folks in the back can hear me. In 2023, the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, telling Black, Brown, and Indigenous students that race could no longer be considered in college admissions because, supposedly, the Constitution is color-blind. That same court, two years later, in cases dealing with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and now Louisiana v. Callais, has been busy gutting the ability of states to draw majority-Black congressional districts, again leaning on the language of color-blindness. Then turn around, that same bench gives federal immigration agents the green light to use race and ethnicity as a factor in stopping, questioning, and detaining people who look, sound, or are presumed to be Latino, Indigenous, or otherwise non-white. Crazy how that works, right? The Two-Roles Frame: What They Say vs. What Their Position Structurally Does iMa bE the first one to tell you, the Supreme Court will say with a straight face that they are simply applying neutral principles of constitutional interpretation. That’s the stage rhetoric. That’s the press release. But Wilderson talks about how antiblackness operates through gratuitous violence and fungibility, where the Black body is rendered both hyper-visible when targeted and invisible when seeking protection. Apply that here. Apply Mills 1997 on the racial contract. The court isn’t being inconsistent. The court is being perfectly consistent with the actual function of American jurisprudence, which is to preserve a racial hierarchy while denying that any such hierarchy exists. Two things can be true. The Supreme Court can claim to be color-blind. And the Supreme Court can be the most racially literate institution in the country when it comes to maintaining white power. This means the conservative legal movement is wrong when they tell us this is about principle. It also proves that having the luxury to call yourself color-blind is itself a position. Claimed neutrality is a position. A loud one. By doing color-blindness in front of cameras, you are making whiteness visible to anybody who knows how to read. Historical Context: This Ain’t New, This Is the Pattern For the folks who think this started with the Roberts Court, let me give you some historical context. The American legal tradition has always been bifurcated when it comes to race. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited citizenship to free white persons, requiring the law to know exactly what whiteness was. In the Chinese Exclusion Case of 1889, the Supreme Court said the federal government could exclude people on the basis of race because national sovereignty demanded it. Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 said separate but equal was constitutional, requiring the state to racially classify every citizen at the train station while pretending the classification was harmless. Korematsu v. United States in 1944 said the federal government could intern Japanese Americans on the basis of ancestry, and that ruling has never been formally overturned, only narrowed. The Insular Cases from the early 1900s established that Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and other colonized people were foreign in a domestic sense, building a whole jurisprudence around using race to distinguish full citizens from subjects. Then in the post-Civil Rights era, the same court that finally said in Brown 1954 that segregation was unconstitutional turned around and in Milliken v. Bradley 1974 said cross-district desegregation remedies were too much. In Bakke 1978, Justice Powell invented the diversity rationale that allowed limited use of race in admissions, but only as long as it was framed as helping white students get exposure to non-white students. In Shelby County v. Holder 2013, Chief Justice Roberts gutted the preclearance provision of the Voting Rights Act by famously declaring that things have changed. Then in 2023, that same court took the diversity rationale and threw it in the trash. And now in 2025, in Trump-era immigration enforcement cases, the court has signaled that racial and ethnic appearance can factor into reasonable suspicion when federal agents are looking for undocumented immigrants. Derrick Bell 1980 told us about interest convergence. Civil rights gains for Black folks only happen when they align with the interests of white elites. The retreat from those gains happens the moment that alignment breaks. We’re watching the retreat in real time. The Mastery of Pale Supremacy: A Working Definition What I’m calling the mastery of pale supremacy is this. It’s the institutional ability to weaponize race consciousness when it benefits the dominant group, and simultaneously demand racial color-blindness when racial consciousness would benefit anybody else. It is two doctrines held in the same hand, deployed by the same nine justices, justified by the same Constitution, depending entirely on which direction the racial flow benefits. Charles Mills called this an epistemology of ignorance. White ignorance about race is not the absence of knowledge. It is a structured, produced, defended way of not-knowing that allows the system to keep functioning. The Supreme Court has perfected this. They know exactly when to see race and exactly when to pretend it doesn’t exist. Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays Now let’s talk about who actually bleeds when these decisions come down, because this is where intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Crenshaw 1989 gave us the framework, Combahee 1977 gave us the politics, Moya Bailey gave us the language of misogynoir. When we lose race-conscious admissions, the data from California after Proposition 209 and from Michigan after Proposal 2 shows us exactly what happens. Black women in particular get pushed out of selective STEM and pre-professional pipelines at higher rates than Black men, because Black women were disproportionately the ones using those pathways to escape both racial and gender wage gaps. When voting maps get redrawn to dilute Black voting power, the immediate material consequences fall hardest on Black women in the South, who are the most consistent Black voters and whose policy priorities, things like Medicaid expansion, maternal health funding, public school funding, get traded away first. Black maternal mortality is already four times the rate of white maternal mortality. Diluted political power means even less leverage to demand state-level policy that could actually save Black women’s lives. On the immigration side, when ICE and Customs and Border Protection get the green light to use racial appearance as reasonable suspicion, the people most likely to be stopped, detained, separated from their children, and deported are not abstract immigrants. They are Latina mothers, Indigenous women from Central America fleeing climate and cartel violence, Afro-Latino people who get racially profiled twice over, queer migrants whose asylum claims hinge on demonstrating credible fear in conditions designed to break them down. Spillers’ work on the ungendering of the Black diasporic body under captivity applies here too, because the racialized state treats migrant women’s bodies as fungible and disposable in ways that echo, not coincidentally, the logic of the slave ship. Hartman called it the afterlife of slavery for a reason. Robinson’s Black Marxism reminds us none of this is aberration. Racial capitalism requires a racialized underclass, and the legal system’s job is to manage which bodies belong in that underclass at any given moment. When the economy needs cheap migrant labor that can be threatened with deportation, the court makes race legally legible to immigration enforcement. When the economy needs to keep Black political power suppressed so that wealth doesn’t get redistributed through democratic means, the court makes race legally illegible to voting rights enforcement. Same court. Same logic. Different application. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Implication for Education: This Is Why We Need Critical Pedagogy Here’s where I bring this home to education, because Education is Elevation ain’t just a tagline. The implication of this Supreme Court racial double standard for education is direct and devastating. When you ban race-conscious admissions while simultaneously allowing racial profiling, you create a generation of students who are legally invisible as racialized subjects when they try to access opportunity, but hyper-visible as racialized subjects when they try to exist in public. Freire 1968 told us the banking model of education is designed to deposit ruling-class ideology into students. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and the tradition of Black critical pedagogy from Carter G. Woodson through bell hooks tells us we have to actively counter that deposit with what hooks called education as the practice of freedom. But how can teachers do that when curriculum is being gutted? Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and others are passing laws that ban discussion of structural racism in K-12 classrooms while university DEI offices are being defunded. The same political coalition pushing color-blind constitutionalism at the Supreme Court is also pushing color-blind curriculum in public schools. The strategy is to legally and pedagogically erase the very analytical tools students would need to understand what the court is doing to them. That’s not an accident. That’s racial illiteracy by design. Just admit it. The goal is to produce citizens who cannot read the racial structure of the world they live in, so they cannot organize against it. The Southern Black Left Tradition Says What Now Ella Baker would tell us the answer to a Supreme Court that has abandoned us is what it has always been. Group-centered leadership, mass-based political education, and movement infrastructure that doesn’t depend on the federal government to legitimate Black humanity. Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t wait on the court to declare her tired of being sick and tired. She built the Freedom Farm. The Southern Negro Youth Congress in the 1930s and 40s organized through Jim Crow without expecting the Supreme Court to save them. SNCC, Cooperation Jackson, Black Workers for Justice in the Carolinas, they all built infrastructure on the assumption that the federal government would either be a hostile or indifferent actor. We are returning to that political reality, and we need to return to that political tradition. Where Is the Smoke Where is the smoke for a court that uses race as a sword when it wants to surveil us and as a forbidden category when we want to be represented? Where is the bipartisan outrage at racial profiling becoming federal policy? Where are the Democrats who told us they would expand the court, codify voting rights, pass meaningful immigration reform? The silence is loud, and that silence is also a position. Most of the political class is shucking and jobbing while the legal foundation of multiracial democracy is being dismantled in front of us. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise: the wrong side of history is being decided right now, and we get to decide whether we name it clearly or whether we let the next generation inherit the same fog. So when y’all see headlines saying the Supreme Court ruled this way on immigration and that way on voting rights, don’t read those as two separate stories. Read them as the same story, told twice, by the same authors, to the same end. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. That’s not inconsistency. That’s the mastery of pale supremacy. Now you see it. Now you can teach it. Now you can organize against it. Education is Elevation. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 5 Key Takeaways * The court is not inconsistent, it is strategic. Allowing racial profiling in immigration enforcement while banning race-conscious admissions and voting maps is not a contradiction. It is the precise function of a legal system designed to preserve racial hierarchy while denying that hierarchy exists. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance. The court has mastered it. * Color-blindness is itself a racial position. Claimed neutrality is never neutral. By demanding the law not see race in voting maps and admissions while granting itself permission to see race at the border, the court is performing whiteness as the unmarked default. Naming this is not paranoia. It is racial literacy. * The material impacts are intersectional and they fall hardest on Black and Brown women. From STEM pipeline collapse after affirmative action bans, to Black maternal health outcomes worsening as Black political power gets diluted, to migrant women being targeted by racial-profile-driven enforcement, the people who lose first and worst are the people Crenshaw, Combahee, and Moya Bailey told us to look for. * This is interest convergence in reverse. Derrick Bell taught us civil rights gains require alignment between Black interests and white elite interests. We are watching that alignment break in real time. The retreat from race-conscious remedies is happening exactly because elite interests no longer require the compromise that produced those remedies in the first place. * The Southern Black Left tradition gives us the playbook. Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, the SNCC, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Cooperation Jackson. None of them waited on the federal government to validate Black humanity. The response to a court that has abandoned multiracial democracy is mass political education, group-centered leadership, and independent movement infrastructure. Research over MeSearch. Become a Paid Subscriber If the Supreme Court is mastering pale supremacy in plain sight, somebody has to be in the room mastering racial literacy in return. That’s what this work is for. Education is Elevation isn’t just a tagline. It’s a direct response to the fact that the institutions that used to do this work, public media, public universities, K-12 social studies departments, are being defunded, defanged, or scared into silence. 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 and Works Cited Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press. The foundational text for understanding how Western political philosophy and law are built on an unstated racial agreement that grants moral and political personhood to whites while denying it to non-whites. Mills’ framework is essential for reading the Supreme Court’s so-called inconsistencies as actually consistent applications of the racial contract. Bell, Derrick A. (1980). Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma. Harvard Law Review, 93(3), 518-533. Bell’s argument that civil rights gains for Black people only occur when those gains align with the interests of white elites. Indispensable for understanding why the current Supreme Court is dismantling civil rights protections now that the Cold War-era interest convergence has expired. Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. (1989). Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 139-167. The article that gave us intersectionality as legal theory. Required reading for understanding why Black women and women of color absorb the compounded harm of Supreme Court rulings that treat race and gender as separable categories. Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. Robinson’s argument that racial capitalism is not a deviation from capitalism but its constitutive logic. The Supreme Court’s racial double standards make sense only when read through Robinson’s framework. Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. Wilderson’s articulation of Afropessimism and the structural position of Blackness as social death. His framework explains how Black bodies are simultaneously hyper-visible to state violence and invisible to state protection. Hartman, Saidiya V. (2007). Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hartman’s concept of the afterlife of slavery, where the political and economic conditions of slavery persist in the present, frames how we should read current Supreme Court rulings as direct continuations of antebellum and Reconstruction-era jurisprudence. Combahee River Collective. (1977). A Black Feminist Statement. The foundational statement of Black feminist politics that demands simultaneous analysis of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Essential for reading the intersectional fallout of voting rights rollbacks and affirmative action bans. Spillers, Hortense J. (1987). Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book. Diacritics, 17(2), 65-81. Spillers’ theorization of how the captive Black body is ungendered under chattel slavery and how that ungendering persists in American legal and cultural grammar. Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. Bailey’s articulation of misogynoir, the specific anti-Black misogyny faced by Black women, is the precise lens needed to understand who absorbs the compound harm of the Supreme Court’s current direction. hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge. hooks’ framework for liberatory pedagogy and why education that ignores structural racism reproduces it. Freire, Paulo. (1968). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum. Freire’s banking model of education and his framework for critical consciousness are essential for understanding what the anti-CRT movement and color-blind constitutionalism are actually trying to prevent. Grande, Sandy. (2004). Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought. Rowman & Littlefield. Grande extends critical pedagogy through Indigenous political thought and exposes how settler-colonial logics shape American education policy and curriculum. Ransby, Barbara. (2003). Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision. University of North Carolina Press. The definitive biography of Ella Baker and the most rigorous account of group-centered leadership as an alternative to top-down, court-dependent civil rights strategy. López, Ian Haney. (2006). White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race. NYU Press. A history of how American courts have legally constructed whiteness, including the prerequisite cases of the early 20th century, directly relevant to today’s racial profiling jurisprudence. Burnham, Linda, & Patterson, Tiffany Ruby (Eds.). Selected works on the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Black Workers for Justice, Cooperation Jackson, and the Southern organizing tradition. Essential primary and secondary sources for the Southern Black Left tradition that informs movement strategy in this current moment. 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]

Pissing On Our Leg And Calling It Rain: The Netanyahu Wean-Off Speech, Decoded

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the table for y’all real quick. Netanyahu, the sitting Prime Minister of Israel, sits down for an interview and gets asked a direct question about whether it’s time to reset the financial relationship between Israel and the United States. The man on the receiving end of $3.8 billion a year in U.S. taxpayer money. And his answer? He says yes, but he wants 10 years to do it. Then he picks the word “wean.” In my whole life of living, I ain’t never heard of nobody having to be weaned off of nothing but babies and breastfeeding and them fiends and pipes. Shidd, that’s a tell. That’s not the vocabulary of a sovereign equal partner. That’s the vocabulary of dependency dressed up in diplomatic cologne. And the question we need to be sitting with is simple: why does he need 10 years to do it? How come he can’t just end it now? If you ever heard somebody say you trying to piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining — that’s the example right there. The man is announcing a divorce and reserving a decade of conjugal visits in the same breath. Yealp. Clip One: Netanyahu In His Own Words [00:00:00 — 00:00:53] PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU Interviewer: “Do you believe it’s time for the state of Israel to reexamine and possibly reset its financial relationship to the United States, meaning what the United States provides to Israel on an annual basis?” Netanyahu: “Absolutely. And I’ve said this to President Trump, I’ve said it to our own people, their jaws dropped. I want to draw down to zero the American financial support, the financial component of the military cooperation that we have, because we receive $3.8 billion dollars a year. I think that it’s time that we weaned ourselves from the remaining military support… Let’s start now and do it over the next decade, over the next 10 years. But I want to start now. I don’t want to wait for the next Congress. I want to start now.” “I want to draw down to zero the American financial support… it’s time that we weaned ourselves…” — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Now hold up. Notice the framing. He says he told Trump. He says he told his own people. He says their jaws dropped. That right there is the rhetorical sleight of hand — he’s positioning himself as the brave reformer breaking the news to a room full of dependents. Apply Farr here: the supposed neutral position of “well, we just receive this aid because we’ve always received it” is itself a position. Acting like the $3.8 billion is gravity, like it just falls from the sky, is the view from nowhere. He’s naming the policy AS a choice for the first time, and acting like that itself is the brave act. Two things can be true. One: it IS notable that the sitting Prime Minister of Israel is on record saying draw it to zero. Two: a 10-year off-ramp on $3.8 billion annually is $38 billion more dollars before we hit zero. That’s not weaning. That’s a payment plan. Shidd, that’s a mortgage. Clip Two: Then Cory Booker Showed His Ass [00:01:27 — 00:01:46] U.S. SENATOR CORY BOOKER (D-NJ) Interviewer: “Cory, you would vote to approve arms sales for Israel in a future entanglement if you thought that was necessary?” Booker: “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.” “Again, we have a long-standing commitment to Israel having a qualitative military edge. I will continue to support that.” — Senator Cory Booker Read that again. The head of state of the receiving country is in public saying wean us off. The U.S. Senator from New Jersey — a Black Democrat who built his whole brand on moral clarity and Harriet Tubman quotes — is in public saying nah, keep the pipeline open, qualitative military edge forever, amen. This means Booker is wrong. Flatly. By his own framing of “long-standing commitment,” he’s defending a status quo that the head of the supposedly-benefiting country just said in public he wants to end. You ain’t more committed to Israel than the Prime Minister of Israel, kinfolks. That ain’t commitment, that’s a contract. And having the luxury to ignore that contradiction — having the luxury to walk into that interview, hear the question, and answer with autopilot AIPAC talking points while Netanyahu is on the other clip saying “start now” — that’s the sign of a politician who knows his funding stack doesn’t require him to engage with the actual policy debate. The presumed-neutral “qualitative military edge” line is a position. It’s a position that says: my donors will be happier if I never have to vote no. Where Is The Smoke For The Lobby? Let’s name what’s actually moving here. The U.S. and Israel signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2016 — negotiated under Obama — that locks in $38 billion over 10 years (FY2019–FY2028). That’s $3.3 billion annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500 million annually for missile defense cooperation. Israel is the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since World War II. Over $260 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. That’s the receipt. That’s not opinion. That’s Congressional Research Service paper. Now layer in the lobby. AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — and its affiliated United Democracy Project super PAC spent more than $100 million in the 2024 cycle alone to defeat candidates who criticized U.S. policy toward Israel. Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush. Receipts. They didn’t lose because their constituents fired them. They lost because a PAC parachuted in from outside their districts to dump the juice trash on their primaries. So when Cory Booker says “long-standing commitment,” translate that. The commitment ain’t to Israeli security policy — because if it was, he’d be following the Prime Minister’s lead. The commitment is to the funding pipeline that keeps his own seat safe. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making the money trail visible. He’s telling on himself. Whitey On The Moon, 2026 Edition Gil Scott-Heron told us in 1970. Let me update it for the folks in the back. “A rat done bit my sister Nell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. Her face and arms began to swell… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. I can’t pay no doctor bills… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel. No hot water, no toilet, no lights… with $3.8 billion a year to Israel.” The Prime Minister of Israel says wean. Cory Booker says feed. Meanwhile public health funding for Black HIV outcomes got cut. The CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention took a hit. Title X providers serving Black women in the South got defunded. Pell Grants for the poorest students got squeezed. The IRS unit auditing billionaires got gutted. Two things can be true. One: Israel’s security policy is Israel’s business. Two: when the head of that state tells you in public he wants to end the U.S. money and your Senator says no — your Senator ain’t defending Israel, he’s defending the lobby that defends his seat. Lost in the sauce. Why 10 Years? What’s He Trying To Finish? Now here’s the part I want y’all to sit with. Netanyahu doesn’t want to wean off tomorrow. He wants 10 years. So the question I had — and I asked it out loud in the script — is what could he possibly try to accomplish within 10 years that he absolutely needs that aid for? I wonder. This ain’t a threat, this is a promise: the timeline is the policy. The amount of the aid matters less than the duration he’s asking to keep it locked in. A man who actually wanted to end the dependency would say zero next fiscal year. A man who wants to lock in current funding through the next two U.S. presidential cycles, through the 2026 conflict posture with Iran, through whatever territorial questions remain unsettled — that man asks for a decade. And how much of this announcement is timeliness for the election cycle? How much is preventative damage control? Because Netanyahu knows the Overton window is shifting. Younger Democrats won’t cosign endless funding. Younger Republicans of the America-First variety are skeptical of foreign aid period. So he gets ahead of the wave by announcing the wean — and locks in 10 more years of payments before the wave breaks. That’s not naivete on his part. That’s strategy. Showed his ass on the timing. And This Is Where It Comes Home For Us I’m not here to tell y’all how to vote on foreign policy. I’m here to name a contradiction. Cory Booker has stood on stages quoting Harriet Tubman, talking about love, talking about T-Bone, talking about beloved community. And when given an opportunity — with the receiving country’s own Prime Minister publicly asking for the off-ramp — to align his vote with that off-ramp, he punted. This is the distinction between Black Liberal and Black Leftist that I keep trying to draw for y’all. The Black Liberal performs morality on stage and votes the donor preference at the desk. The Black Leftist — think Ella Baker, think SNCC, think Fannie Lou Hamer, think the Combahee River Collective — says material conditions over symbolic representation, every time. Hamer was sharecropping in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and she still understood that U.S. foreign policy and U.S. domestic poverty are the same budget. Every dollar that goes one place doesn’t go another. By doing what he’s doing, Booker is making whiteness visible. He’s making the bipartisan consensus visible. He’s showing that the so-called Democratic alternative on this specific issue is functionally identical to the Republican position. Liberalism is a hell of a drug. The Ask Here’s what I want from y’all. Don’t just clip the Netanyahu sound bite and act like Israel got a sudden case of fiscal humility. Read the timeline. Ten years is a $38 billion appropriation disguised as a press release. And don’t let Cory Booker get away with the “long-standing commitment” shucking and jobbing. Ask him directly: when the head of state of the country receiving the aid is asking publicly to end the aid, why are you to the right of that head of state? Whose commitment are you actually serving? Because at the end of the day, the man pissing on your leg telling you it’s raining ain’t always wearing the keffiyeh. Sometimes he’s wearing the lapel pin and quoting Harriet Tubman. Education is elevation. They got to stop this. 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 1. Netanyahu — not a critic of Israel, the Prime Minister of Israel — publicly called for ending the $3.8 billion in annual U.S. military aid. His framing of “weaning” is the language of dependency, not partnership. 2. Netanyahu’s 10-year timeline is the actual policy. A real exit would be immediate. A 10-year wean is a $38 billion lock-in disguised as reform — strategically timed before the political consensus shifts further. 3. Cory Booker’s response — days later, on the same topic — is functionally to the right of Netanyahu’s own position. “Qualitative military edge” is the donor-class neutrality position, not a policy analysis. 4. AIPAC and its United Democracy Project super PAC spent over $100 million in the 2024 cycle defeating Black progressive incumbents like Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Booker’s position is not ideological; it’s electoral self-preservation. 5. This is the test case for distinguishing Black Liberal performance from Black Leftist material analysis. Foreign aid and domestic underfunding are the same budget — Fannie Lou Hamer understood this in 1969. The question for 2026 is whether our elected Democrats do. Become A Paid Subscriber Y’all, this is what independent media looks like. No corporate backing. No advertiser telling me what I can and can’t say about Cory Booker or AIPAC or Netanyahu. No editor softening the analysis because a Senator’s office called. Just me, a transcript, a stack of receipts, and y’all. Public broadcasting is being defunded. PBS is on life support. NPR is being structurally hollowed out. The Education Is Elevation Substack is filling the void left by the retreat of public education media — with Pan-African analysis, Southern Black Left framing, and the kind of receipts-based political education they don’t teach in school. Fewer than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Less than 1%. So if this piece taught you something, gave you a frame, or armed you with language for the next argument at the family cookout — become a paid subscriber today. 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 Congressional Research Service. (2024). U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel. CRS Report RL33222. — The definitive Congressional source on the aid relationship. Documents the 2016 MOU ($38 billion over FY2019–FY2028) and Israel’s status as the single largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid since WWII. U.S. Department of State. (2016). Memorandum of Understanding Between the Government of the United States of America and the Government of Israel Reached September 14, 2016. — The original MOU text. Locks in $3.3B annually in Foreign Military Financing plus $500M annually for missile defense cooperation. OpenSecrets. (2024). Pro-Israel: Top Contributors to Federal Candidates and Outside Spending Groups. — Tracks AIPAC and United Democracy Project spending in the 2024 primary cycle, including the $14.5M against Jamaal Bowman and $8.5M against Cori Bush. Robinson, Cedric J. (1983). Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press. — Foundational text on racial capitalism. Explains why critiquing U.S. military expenditure abroad is part of, not separate from, critiquing capital accumulation at home. Hamer, Fannie Lou. (1971). “It’s in Your Hands.” Speech delivered to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. — Hamer’s analysis of how military spending and poverty programs share the same federal budget. Foundational Southern Black Left text on foreign policy and material conditions. Wilderson, Frank B. III. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press. — Afropessimist framework for reading how Black political figures get positioned as moral cover for structurally anti-Black policy consensus. Useful frame for analyzing Booker’s role. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. (1991). “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, 43(6). — Required reading for understanding how Black women voters in NJ and elsewhere bear the material cost of Booker’s foreign policy votes through cut domestic programs. Mearsheimer, John J. & Walt, Stephen M. (2007). The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. — The mainstream IR text documenting the structural influence of AIPAC and affiliated organizations on U.S. congressional voting patterns. Controversial but well-cited. Scott-Heron, Gil. (1970). “Whitey On The Moon.” Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Flying Dutchman Records. — The original budget-priority critique. Updated and applied throughout this piece. Bailey, Moya. (2021). Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. NYU Press. — Frame for understanding how Black women critics of U.S. foreign policy — from Angela Davis to Cori Bush — get specifically targeted and primaried out, while Black male Democrats like Booker get protected by the same lobby. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. 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]

Iran Was Never Two Weeks Away — Empire Just Needed a New Bedtime Story

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the scene for y’all real quick. Donald Trump stands in front of a room full of schoolchildren and says, with a straight face, that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, that the United States had to send B2 bombers to “obliterate” their nuclear capacity, that Israel would have been gone, that Iran would have come for Europe and then us because — and I quote — “these are sick people.” Kinfolks, that ain’t a foreign policy briefing. That’s a catechism. That’s American empire teaching its young. And the same people who clutch their pearls about a drag queen reading Where the Wild Things Are to a kindergarten class will sit a sitting president down in front of children and let him narrate a fairy tale where the United States is the dragon-slayer, Iran is the dragon, and $200 billion in bombs is the moral of the story. Every accusation is a confession. They’ll scream about indoctrination while they’re literally indoctrinating. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, but imperial conservatism is the parent compound. Three Concepts Doing the Heavy Lifting Before I get into the receipts, let me lay down the framework so we’re all reading from the same hymnal. Three concepts run through everything Trump said in that room, and if you don’t name them, you can’t see them. American Hegemony — The structural arrangement where the United States — through military power, dollar dominance, and institutional control — sets the terms of what is permitted on the planet. Hegemony isn’t just being strong. It’s being the one country that gets to decide who else is allowed to be strong, who is allowed to defend themselves, who is allowed to have what. When Trump says Iran was “two weeks” from a weapon, the unspoken second half of that sentence is: and that decision belongs to us. American Imperialism — The actual practice — the bombs, the bases, the sanctions, the regime-change wars, the proxies. Imperialism is hegemony with a body count. The B2 bomber Trump bragged about isn’t a metaphor. It’s the imperial fist that makes the hegemonic argument feel like common sense. Du Bois told us imperialism abroad and white supremacy at home are the same project wearing different uniforms. Rodney told us how it underdevelops. Lenin gave us the economic mechanics. Pick your lens — the violence is the same. American Exceptionalism — The mythology that makes the first two feel righteous. The idea that America is uniquely good, uniquely chosen, uniquely qualified to bomb other people for their own protection. Exceptionalism is the lullaby that sings empire to sleep. It’s what lets a man stand in front of children and describe killing as obliteration as protection as love. It’s the religion of the project. Now watch how all three move through that clip like blood through an artery. Hegemony: Who Gets to Decide Who Has What “”They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.”” Stop. Right there. The factual problem with this statement is one thing — and I’ll get to that — but the structural problem is bigger. Trump is not asserting a fact. He’s asserting a permission structure. The United States possesses thousands of nuclear warheads. Israel possesses an undeclared arsenal it has never even admitted to. The United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea — they all have them. Iran does not. And the sentence Trump is delivering to those children is not “nuclear weapons are dangerous.” It’s “that country in particular is not allowed to have what we have.” That is hegemony in its purest form. It’s the assumption — unspoken, unquestioned, taught to children before they can spell the word — that the United States is the referee, the umpire, the parent in the room, and every other sovereign nation is a child who has to ask permission. Iran could spend the next thousand years pointing out that the U.S. is the only country to ever drop a nuclear weapon on civilian populations, and the hegemonic frame would still hold: we can be trusted with it. They cannot. Why? Because we said so. Because we wrote the rules. Because we have the bombers to enforce the rules we wrote. That’s the whole argument. There is no other argument. And here’s where it gets sneaky. Hegemony works best when nobody has to defend it out loud. When a president can stand in front of children and just assume that Iran having a weapon is unthinkable while the U.S. having thousands is unremarkable — and nobody in the room interrupts to ask “wait, why?” — that’s when you know the hegemonic frame has done its job. It has become the water the fish doesn’t see. Imperialism: The Body Count Behind the Bedtime Story “”Remember we sent that beautiful B2 bomber in and we blew up their nuclear potential. It was obliterated.”” Beautiful. He called the bomber beautiful. To a room of children. Y’all hear that and don’t flinch, you’re already gone. That word is doing imperial work — it’s the aestheticization of violence, the conversion of mass destruction into pageantry. The same move every empire in history has made when it needed its civilians to applaud the deaths of foreign civilians. Rome had its triumphs. Britain had its parades. America has its B2s and its words like “surgical” and “obliterate.” Let’s stay with that word for a second. Obliterate. To remove all trace. To wipe from existence. Said casually, in front of children, about a bombing campaign in a country containing roughly 90 million human beings, many of whom are children just like the ones in that room. Trump made a point earlier in the clip about the welfare of American kids — fair enough, every child’s welfare matters. But ask yourself the question I want hanging in the air for the rest of this article: “Where is the smoke for the Iranian children? Where is the smoke for the Lebanese children? Where is the smoke for the Palestinian children whose deaths the same B2 bombers and the same $200 billion budget directly underwrite?” That question — the simple question of whose children count as children — is the one American imperialism cannot survive. Which is why it is never, ever asked in front of American children. They are taught instead that the bombers are beautiful. They are taught that obliteration is a happy ending. They are taught a vocabulary in which our violence is defense and their existence is the threat. Frantz Fanon called this the manichaean structure of the colonial world — a world cut in two, where one side is human and the other side is the enemy of humanity. Trump didn’t invent it. He’s just the current narrator. And here’s the receipt for what this actually costs. According to publicly available cost estimates of the U.S. military’s recent Iran operations and the broader regional posture, we are looking at roughly $200 billion in defense and adjacent expenditures tied to that confrontation. Two hundred. Billion. Dollars. Now I want y’all to sit with that number while I tell you what else $200 billion could have bought: * Universal childcare in the United States, with billions left over. * Full restoration of the National Park Service budget for years. * Significant expansion of the Housing Choice Voucher program, addressing real material need. * Renewable energy tax credits at the scale needed to meaningfully decarbonize. * SNAP and food security programs that lift millions of children out of food insecurity. * Medicaid expansion in every state that has refused it, covering the working poor who get pissed on and told it’s raining. Compare us to the other countries of the Global North — Germany, France, the Nordics, Canada — and we don’t compare. They have universal healthcare. They have paid family leave measured in months and years, not days. They have childcare that doesn’t cost a second mortgage. We have B2 bombers. That is the imperial trade. That is the deal the American working class — Black, Brown, white, all of us — has been forced into for the better part of a century: empire abroad, austerity at home. MLK said it plain in 1967 at Riverside Church: “a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Fifty-nine years later, we are still approaching. We are practically there. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Exceptionalism: The Lullaby That Sings Empire to Sleep “”And they would have trained their sights on Europe first and then us because they’re sick people. These are sick people.”” This is the part that gives the game away. This is the part that should make every parent watching go cold. Because what Trump is doing in this exact sentence is teaching schoolchildren that an entire nation of people — a country of 90 million, with poets and grandmothers and college students and tired bus drivers and kids their age — are sick. Not led by a sick regime. Not victims of a brutal government. Sick. The people themselves. Sick. Y’all, that is the oldest move in the imperial playbook. Dehumanize the population so the bombing of the population becomes not just permissible but morally required. Edward Said wrote a whole book about this called Orientalism, and if you have not read it, please do. The construction of the “sick” Eastern other against the rational, healthy Western self is not Trump’s invention — it is the foundational rhetoric of every European empire that ever colonized a Muslim-majority country, and the United States inherited the script the way a son inherits his father’s suits. And the move is doubled. Notice that Trump frames the bombing as protecting the children in the room — “maybe we wouldn’t all be here right now.” That’s exceptionalism doing its laundering. The violence becomes love. The bomber becomes the bodyguard. The empire becomes the parent. And the child in the room is taught that the people on the receiving end of those bombs are not children at all — they are the threat the parent is protecting them from. This is how you grow a generation that does not flinch. This is how you raise an electorate that will fund the next war. This is how you make a permanent imperial public. And to be crystal clear about it — because I know somebody in the comments is about to try me — two things can be true. The Iranian state under the Islamic Republic has done real harm to its own people, especially women, especially queer people, especially religious minorities, especially the Kurdish community. I am not romanticizing that regime. I have never. What I’m telling you is that American imperialism does not get a pass to bomb 90 million people because their government is repressive. By that logic, half the planet should be on the receiving end of a B2 — including, frankly, us. The repression of a government does not transfer guilt to a population. That is exceptionalism’s most violent sleight of hand, and it is the one being performed in front of children in this clip. The Lie Inside the Lesson Now let me come back to the factual claim. “They would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks.” This is not true. This has not been the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community at any point in the public record. Iran’s nuclear program — to the extent it ever crossed into weapons-grade enrichment — was assessed by U.S. intelligence and the IAEA to be months to years from a weapon, with significant scientific and engineering steps remaining between enrichment and a deliverable warhead. The “two weeks” figure is a rhetorical device. It is a small lie designed to manufacture a big consent. It is the same lie, in a new dress, that we were told about Iraqi WMDs in 2003. Same lie. New target. Same B2s. And the audience for the lie is what makes it especially obscene. These are children. They cannot vote. They cannot fact-check. They cannot push back. They are a captive audience the way a congregation is a captive audience, and the man at the pulpit knows it. He chose them. He chose the setting. He chose the language. He told them the bombers were beautiful and the people were sick and the math worked out to you are safer because we killed them. That is not foreign policy. That is liturgy. Where Do We Go From Here?? So what do we do with this, kinfolks? A few things. One. Name it. When you see a politician — any politician, of any party — frame a foreign military intervention as a moral certainty in front of children, name the three things at work: hegemony, imperialism, exceptionalism. Use the words. Take them off the shelf and put them in your mouth. The empire requires that its operating system remain unnamed. Naming it is sabotage. Two. Demand the receipts. Every time somebody tells you about the threat that justified the bombing, ask them where the intelligence assessment is. Ask them where the IAEA report is. Ask them what the diplomatic alternative was. Ask them whose children are not in the protected category. The questions are the resistance. Three. Connect the budget to the body. That $200 billion is not abstract. It is the childcare you don’t have, the rent you can’t pay, the asthma inhaler your kid can’t afford, and it is also the family in Tehran that no longer exists. Same dollar. Same decision. Same empire. The Southern Black Left has been telling us this since SNCC was running freedom schools in Mississippi while LBJ was burning villages in Vietnam. Fannie Lou Hamer said it plain. Ella Baker said it plain. We have the canon. Read it. Four. Protect the children — and I mean all of them. The ones in the classroom Trump was talking to. The ones in Tehran. The ones in Gaza. The ones in Beirut. The ones in Bryan, Texas. If your politics protects some children and pours bombs on others, your politics is the problem the children are eventually going to have to clean up. Education is elevation. This man is a fool. The lesson he taught those kids was the most expensive one this country still teaches: that some lives are protected by being told other lives don’t count. We have to teach a different lesson. We have to be the different lesson. This ain’t no threat, this is a promise. Why This Work Lives Here This piece — and every piece in this Substack — exists because independent Black media is one of the last places where this kind of analysis can be done without a corporate hand on the steering wheel. There is no sponsor telling me to soften the imperialism critique. There is no editor telling me to balance the Iranian children against the American ones as if the math were ever balanced. There is no boardroom. There is just me, the work, and y’all. Public broadcasting is being defunded. Local journalism is being gutted. The educational media that used to do this work — the Mr. Rogers, the PBS specials, the Bill Moyers conversations — has been quietly starved out. What’s left is a void, and somebody has to fill it. That’s what this Substack is. That’s what Education Is Elevation is. Fewer than 1% of the folks following me across platforms are currently paid subscribers. If you’ve read this far and the analysis matters to you — if you want it to keep coming, deeper, longer, without anybody’s leash on it — become a paid subscriber today. It is the difference between this work continuing and this work disappearing. It is how we build the alternative classroom these children deserve. Research over MeSearch. Always. 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 1. Trump’s classroom remarks operationalized three distinct but linked concepts — American hegemony (who gets to have what), American imperialism (the bombs that enforce hegemony), and American exceptionalism (the mythology that makes both feel righteous). Naming all three is a prerequisite for resisting any of them. 2. The “two weeks from a nuclear weapon” claim is not supported by the public record of U.S. intelligence assessments or IAEA reporting on Iran’s program. It is a rhetorical device structurally identical to the 2003 Iraqi WMD claim — a small lie engineered to manufacture a large consent. 3. Approximately $200 billion tied to the Iran operation and adjacent regional posture represents an explicit opportunity cost. The same sum could fund universal childcare, expanded SNAP, Medicaid expansion, housing vouchers, and renewable energy infrastructure. The military-versus-social-uplift trade-off MLK named at Riverside Church in 1967 is still the binding constraint on American material life in 2026. 4. Describing an entire population of roughly 90 million Iranians as “sick people” is a textbook Orientalist move — the construction of the irrational Eastern other against the rational Western self — and it dehumanizes the target population in advance of the violence inflicted upon them. Two things can be true: the Iranian state is repressive AND the population is not collectively guilty. 5. Children are a captive rhetorical audience and using them as the venue for imperial catechism is a calculated choice. Independent Black-led media is one of the last places where this dynamic can be named without corporate or institutional pressure to soften the critique — which is why the paid-subscriber model is structural, not optional. WORKS CITED OR REFERENCED Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. The foundational text for understanding how the West constructs the Middle East as inherently irrational and threatening to justify domination. Indispensable for reading the “sick people” framing in Trump’s remarks. Du Bois, W.E.B. “The African Roots of War.” The Atlantic Monthly, May 1915. Du Bois’s argument that European imperialism and American racial capitalism are the same project, written on the eve of World War I and still describing 2026. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications, 1972. Rodney’s framework for understanding how imperial extraction at the periphery enables consumption at the core — the structural skeleton beneath the $200 billion comparison. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. The chapter “Concerning Violence” lays out the manichaean structure of the colonial world. Required for understanding how a president can call an entire population “sick” with a straight face. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence.” Speech delivered at Riverside Church, New York, April 4, 1967. King’s explicit naming of the U.S. as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” and the tying of foreign war to domestic poverty. The speech the establishment still pretends he never gave. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Robinson’s racial capitalism framework — the engine that makes both imperialism and domestic austerity profitable to the same class of people. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hartman’s analysis of how violence becomes “care” in the imperial and slaveholding imagination — the rhetorical move Trump performs when he frames bombing as protection. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. The intersectional framework that demands we ask which children the imperial budget protects and which children it kills — and refuse the false choice between them. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York: NYU Press, 2021. Bailey’s analysis is essential for tracking how the same exceptionalist mythology that justifies bombing Iran also writes Black women in the U.S. out of the category of “protected children” the empire claims to defend. Combahee River Collective. “A Black Feminist Statement.” 1977. The original argument that all the systems of domination are connected — and that the work of any one of them requires the work of all of them. The Southern Black Left’s intersectional north star. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. 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