he Man Who Bought the Supreme Court: Leonard Leo, $1.6 Billion, and the Dark Money Maze Explained

he Man Who Bought the Supreme Court: Leonard Leo, $1.6 Billion, and the Dark Money Maze Explained

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Opening: Name the Villain There is a man walking around this country who handpicked the judges deciding whether your grandmama can vote without standing in a four-hour line, whether your daughter controls her own body, whether your kids drink clean water, and whether your nephew gets a fair shot at the university your tax dollars built, and most of y’all could not pick this man out of a lineup. His name is Leonard Leo. Former executive vice president of the Federalist Society, current co-chairman of its board of directors, and the single most consequential unelected man in American law. I almost want to say his name backwards — Leo Leonard — because this man got the whole court moving backwards, and backwards is exactly the direction his investors paid for. Let me put the receipt on the table before anybody accuses me of feelings. Leo was personally instrumental in placing the last three justices on the Supreme Court — Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett — and his fingerprints sit on six of the nine seats when you trace the Federalist Society pipeline back through Roberts, Alito, and Thomas’s confirmation defense operations. Then in 2021, a 90-year-old electronics mogul named Barre Seid handed Leo’s brand-new nonprofit, the Marble Freedom Trust, the entirety of his company Tripp Lite, which the trust promptly sold for $1.6 billion — the largest known political donation in American history, structured so slick that Seid dodged as much as $400 million in capital gains taxes on the way out the door. One political operative. One point six billion dollars. Zero votes cast by you. Feel me? Some of y’all gonna say, iMa bE “the Supreme Court is too conservative is just your opinion.” Two things can be true. “Too conservative” is an opinion. “Leonard Leo controls a $1.6 billion war chest that he used to handpick and confirm the justices who delivered that conservative supermajority” is a documented, tax-filed, ProPublica-and-New-York-Times-verified fact. Facts don’t cancel feelings, kinfolks — facts sit right next to feelings and tell you your feelings been right the whole time. Public confidence in this Court has cratered to historic lows, hovering around one in five Americans in recent polling, and that ain’t because the people are confused. The people can smell capture. The Maze: How Dark Money Stays Dark Leo did not build one organization, because one organization can be tracked, subpoenaed, and shamed. He built a maze. The Judicial Crisis Network ran the attack ads against Merrick Garland and the defense ads for Kavanaugh; in 2020 it rebranded as the Concord Fund. The Judicial Education Project rebranded as the 85 Fund, which also operates under the trade name Honest Elections Project — the same outfit pushing voting restrictions and the independent state legislature theory. CRC Advisors manages the messaging. The Marble Freedom Trust sits on top holding the billion, organized as a trust specifically so it discloses less than a corporation would. Money moves from one pocket to another pocket on the same coat, and every transfer adds a layer of fog between the donor and the damage. Crazy how the maze keeps renovating itself right when the watchdogs get close. After a complaint landed with the D.C. attorney general, the 85 Fund pulled up stakes and re-registered in Texas. Then in January 2026 — yes, this year — the Concord Fund filed articles of termination and dissolved, while new entities like the Lexington Fund and the Publius Fund, formed by the same Leo-network lawyers and carrying the old trade names in their back pockets, started steering millions into state attorneys general races and the 2026 midterms. The organization dies; the money never does. That’s not a charity, y’all. That’s a shell game with a 501(c) stamp on it. Apply Mills here. Charles Mills taught us the racial contract depends on an epistemology of ignorance — a structured, manufactured not-knowing that lets the beneficiaries of domination claim clean hands. Dark money is the epistemology of ignorance with a bank account. The whole design is that you are not supposed to know who paid for the judge who just took your rights, so the ruling lands on you like weather instead of like policy. Naming Leo breaks the spell. The fog is the product. Click The Link Sign now to support SCOTUS REFORM! [https://act.link/gi-yrwcl] Critical Historical Context: This Court Was Never Neutral Now let’s back this thing up, because the folks clutching pearls about “politicizing the Court” are running a tired playbook that depends on you not knowing your history. The Supreme Court has been a political instrument of racial order since before your great-great-grandmother was born. Dred Scott (1857) declared Black people had no rights the white man was bound to respect. United States v. Cruikshank (1876) took the Colfax Massacre — white paramilitaries slaughtering Black Republicans defending a courthouse — and ruled the federal government couldn’t protect Black citizens from private white violence, handing Reconstruction its death certificate. Plessy (1896) blessed apartheid for six decades. Du Bois called the destruction of Reconstruction a counter-revolution of property, and the Court was that counter-revolution’s law firm. The view from nowhere has always been a view from somewhere, and that somewhere has historically been the big house. Here’s the part they really don’t teach, and for the people in the back I need you to hold this one: the Constitution does not set the number of Supreme Court justices. Article III is silent on it. Congress sets the number by simple statute, and Congress has changed it seven times in American history — six justices in 1789, five in 1801, seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863, back down to seven in 1866, and nine again in 1869, where it has sat ever since. Read that 1866 move again. Congress shrank the Court on purpose, specifically to stop President Andrew Johnson — the man busy strangling Reconstruction in its crib — from appointing justices. Court size has been a political tool wielded over questions of Black freedom since Reconstruction itself. So when somebody tells you expansion is some radical, unprecedented scheme, just admit you skipped the nineteenth century. There is no constitutional amendment required. It is an act of Congress. Senator Ed Markey and Representative Hank Johnson’s Judiciary Act would expand the bench from nine to thirteen — one justice per federal circuit, which is exactly how the number was originally pegged in the first place. This means the “institutionalists” are wrong. The two-roles frame applies: what they SAY is that they’re protecting the Court’s legitimacy from politics; what the position structurally DOES is freeze in place a majority that one man’s billion dollars built, and call that freeze “neutrality.” Having the luxury to treat a captured court as settled furniture is a sign of who the capture was never going to hurt. Apply Bell here — Derrick Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis predicts exactly this: every formal gain gets a structural counterattack, and the counterattack always arrives dressed in procedure. What the Supermajority Took: The Receipts Just in case some of y’all still asking what the impact of this conservative supermajority has actually been, let’s run the receipts. They gutted the Voting Rights Act — Shelby County v. Holder (2013) killed preclearance and Brnovich (2021) sanded down what was left of Section 2, and polling places across the Black South started disappearing the very week Shelby dropped. They overturned Roe with Dobbs (2022). They came for your water and air — Sackett v. EPA (2023) stripped Clean Water Act protection from millions of acres of wetlands, and Loper Bright (2024) overturned Chevron deference, kneecapping every federal agency that stands between a polluter and your faucet. They took race-conscious admissions with SFFA v. Harvard (2023). They killed student debt relief for forty-three million borrowers in Biden v. Nebraska (2023). Then they handed presidents broad criminal immunity in Trump v. United States (2024). Every single one of those majorities was assembled, advertised, and defended by money moving through Leonard Leo’s maze. That’s not a court drifting right. That’s a return on investment. Gil Scott-Heron got something for this moment. A rat done bit my sister Nell — but Leonard Leo’s sitting on $1.6 billion. Her face and arms began to swell — and the Concord Fund dissolved itself before the auditors called. I can’t pay no doctor bill, my kids’ school can’t pay no light bill — but one billionaire’s tax-dodged fortune is out here buying state attorneys general like trading cards. Whitey’s not on the moon this time, y’all. Whitey’s on the bench, with lifetime tenure, and your public school’s art program paid the launch costs. Click here Fight Back Against Leo and Sign Petiton [https://act.link/gi-yrwcl] The Education Implication: This Is a Schoolhouse Story I’m an educator, so let me bring this home to the schoolhouse, because court capture is an education story from top to bottom. SFFA tooken race-conscious admissions, and the first enrollment cycles after it showed Black student numbers dropping at selective institutions — the exact doors the Second Reconstruction pried open getting quietly re-locked by judicial decree. Carson v. Makin (2022) and Espinoza (2020) ruled that when states fund private education, they must fund religious schools too, accelerating the voucher pipeline that drains public school budgets in Black and brown districts — and remember, the modern “school choice” movement was born as massive resistance to Brown v. Board, with segregation academies cashing the first vouchers. Biden v. Nebraska kept the boot on borrowers, and Black borrowers — who hold disproportionate debt because our families were systematically stripped of the intergenerational wealth that pays white kids’ tuition — took the hardest hit. Loper Bright gutted the Department of Education’s regulatory muscle right as the department itself was being dismantled politically, which means Title VI civil rights enforcement, Title IX protections, and predatory-college accountability all got softer at once. Then there’s the part nobody connects: the Honest Elections Project — a trade name of Leo’s 85 Fund — pushes the voting restrictions that decide who sits on your school board. The same money that picked your justices is shaping who bans your books. Court capture and curriculum capture are the same project wearing two different suits. Freire told us education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of conformity or as the practice of freedom. Leo’s network understood that better than most of our side did, and they spent three decades and billions acting on it while we were told to wait on the next election. Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Carries the Weight Intersectional analysis is not a garnish on this plate, it’s the plate. Apply Crenshaw here — these rulings don’t land on abstract “Americans,” they converge on bodies sitting at the intersection of race, gender, class, and geography. Dobbs lands hardest on Black women, who already die from pregnancy-related causes at roughly three times the rate of white women, concentrated in the same Southern states that slammed clinic doors the moment the ruling dropped — states where Shelby had already made it harder for those same women to vote the policy out. SFFA lands hardest on Black women, who have been among the most consistent beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions. The Combahee River Collective told us in 1977 that if Black women were free, everybody would be free, because our freedom requires dismantling every system of oppression at once — flip it, and you see why a court built to re-entrench every hierarchy at once finds Black women standing at the center of the blast radius. Class and disability sit in the wreckage too: student debt cancellation killed, agency protections for workers and disabled folks weakened, 303 Creative (2023) opening the door to licensed discrimination against LGBTQ people — and Black queer and trans folks catch that one twice. Environmental deregulation through Sackett and the death of Chevron deference is environmental racism with a gavel, because the fenceline communities breathing the benzene and drinking the lead are Black, brown, Indigenous, and poor — ask Flint, ask Cancer Alley, ask Jackson, Mississippi. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and the purest cut is believing a court can be “depoliticized” while its rulings redistribute life chances upward and whiteward every single term. Two roles, one bench: what they say is originalism; what it does is racial capitalism’s legal department — apply Robinson here, because antiblackness is not a glitch in the accumulation machine, it is the engine. Closing: Convert the Read Into the Ask So here’s where I close the loop on the cartoon villain I opened with. Leonard Leo matters as a name because abstract “court capture” feels like weather, and weather makes people passive — a name makes it personal, traceable, and fightable. The organization Court Defenders and the broader defend-our-courts movement got receipts we can all learn from, and the remedy is sitting in plain sight with two centuries of precedent behind it: Congress has changed the size of the Court seven times, expansion to thirteen justices requires nothing but an act of Congress, and the only thing standing between here and there is political will — which is to say, organized people outlasting organized money. By insisting the Court is neutral, untouchable, and frozen at nine, the institutionalists are making the capture visible — they’re telling on the whole arrangement, because you only sanctify the referee after your team bought him. Every accusation is a confession: the same crowd that screamed “court packing” spent thirty years and $1.6 billion literally packing the court. Don’t let them piss on us and tell us it’s raining. Learn the history. Say the man’s name. Support the organizers doing court-reform work. The facts are sitting right next to your feelings, kinfolks, and they’re both telling you the same thing. Education Is Elevation. Five Key Takeaways * One unelected man, six of nine seats. Leonard Leo — former Federalist Society executive VP, current board co-chair — was instrumental in seating the last three justices and shaping the pipeline behind six of the nine, then took control of a $1.6 billion dark money war chest, the largest known political donation in U.S. history. * Dark money is designed fog. The Judicial Crisis Network became the Concord Fund, the Judicial Education Project became the 85 Fund (a.k.a. Honest Elections Project), the Concord Fund dissolved in January 2026 while the Lexington Fund picked up the bag — the maze exists so you can’t connect the donor to the damage. * The Court was never neutral. From Dred Scott to Cruikshank to Plessy to Shelby, the Supreme Court has repeatedly served as the legal department of racial order — “Reconstruction in reverse” is the pattern, not the exception. * Court expansion is normal American history. The Constitution does not set the Court’s size; Congress has changed it seven times — including shrinking it in 1866 specifically to block Andrew Johnson — and the Markey–Johnson Judiciary Act (nine to thirteen, one justice per circuit) requires only a simple act of Congress, not an amendment. * Education is the battlefield. SFFA, Carson v. Makin, Biden v. Nebraska, and Loper Bright form a coordinated judicial assault on educational access, public school funding, debt relief, and civil rights enforcement — while the same network’s voting-restriction arm shapes who controls your school board. Become a Paid Subscriber: Fund the Counter-Curriculum Let me keep it all the way real with y’all before you close this tab. You just read a piece that named Leonard Leo, traced $1.6 billion through a maze of dissolving nonprofits, pulled the 1866 receipt that your civics class never handed you, and connected the bench to the schoolhouse to your grandmama’s polling place. Leo’s side spent three decades and billions building an infrastructure to control what courts decide and — through vouchers, book bans, and school board capture — what children learn. The counter to captured infrastructure is independent infrastructure. That’s what this is. 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: The Receipts Shelf Books * W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935) — the counter-revolution of property, and the Court’s role in killing the First Reconstruction. * Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992) — why every gain triggers a structural counterattack. * Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (1997) — the epistemology of ignorance; dark money as manufactured not-knowing. * Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) — racial capitalism as the engine, not the glitch. * Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016) — the donor infrastructure Leo plugged into. * Senator Sheldon Whitehouse with Jennifer Mueller, The Scheme: How the Right Wing Used Dark Money to Capture the Supreme Court (2022) — the capture, mapped from inside the Senate. * Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (2008) — how the Federalist Society farm system was built. * Amanda Hollis-Brusky, Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2015) — the network’s intellectual supply chain. * Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy (2018) — the post-Shelby landscape on the ground. * David Daley, Antidemocratic: Inside the Far Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections (2024) — Leo, the Honest Elections Project, and the election-law front. * Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) — the analytic for reading who carries the rulings’ weight. * The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) — interlocking systems, and why Black women’s freedom is the measure. Investigations & Primary Documents * ProPublica — “We Don’t Talk About Leonard” series and the original reporting (with The Lever) confirming the $1.6 billion Seid-to-Marble Freedom Trust transfer (2022–2023). * The New York Times — Kenneth P. Vogel & Shane Goldmacher, first report on the record-setting Seid donation (August 2022). * OpenSecrets — ongoing reporting on the Leo network, including the 2026 reporting on the Concord Fund’s dissolution and the Lexington Fund’s midterm spending. * NOTUS — 2026 reporting on the Leo network’s reorganization ahead of the midterms. * Rolling Stone — Andrew Perez’s reporting on the 85 Fund’s Texas re-registration and the Publius/Lexington Fund formations (2024). * U.S. Senate Democrats, “Captured Courts” report (2020) — the official map of the dark money judicial pipeline. * The Judiciary Act (Markey–Johnson) — bill text and one-pagers via congressional offices. * United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013); Dobbs (2022); SFFA v. Harvard (2023); Biden v. Nebraska (2023); Sackett v. EPA (2023); Loper Bright (2024); Trump v. United States (2024) — read the rulings, not just the headlines. 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]

Before the Binary: How Igbo Women Became Sons, Inherited Land, and Ran Families

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A male daughter in precolonial Igbo society was a daughter who was socially accepted as a son. See, before there was a missionary, before there was a governor, before the priesthood, before the binary, Africa had more than two ways of being, and the people who lived those ways did not treat them as scandals or secrets or sins, they treated them as systems, rooted in kinship, spirit, and survival. Survival of our ancestors. Don’t you ever forget that. Now before I go any further, I want to state this clearly: this is not me romanticizing the continent, this is me telling you what existed there before the Europeans showed up, with receipts, with citations, with the anthropological record sitting right next to the analysis, because the slogan around here is Research over MeSearch and I intend to keep it that way. Understand? Here go the thesis, so ain’t no confusion later: the concept of the male daughter is central to deconstructing colonial gender norms because it reveals the historical flexibility of gender and exposes the way Europeans taught us that their gender roles were natural, when the record shows those roles were normalized over time, specifically by violence. Sit with that. If the binary was natural, they wouldn’t have needed missionaries, magistrates, warrant chiefs, and criminal codes to enforce it. You don’t pass laws against things that don’t exist. What the Institution Actually Was The history of male daughters in Nigeria is a documented example of precolonial gender flexibility, one that sits entirely outside the Victorian framework, and it was captured most rigorously by the Nigerian anthropologist Ifi Amadiume in her 1987 study of the Igbo town of Nnobi, titled Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Apply Amadiume here. She demonstrated that in Igbo social organization, gender was a social category that could be decoupled from biological sex, meaning a daughter could be socially repositioned as a son, and once that repositioning happened, the community treated it as real, because it was real. A male daughter is not a metaphor. A male daughter is not a mistake. A male daughter was a social role in Igboland where a woman could become a son, inherit land, lead a family compound, hold ritual and political authority, and participate in lineage governance, which is everything the European said a woman couldn’t do. When a family had no surviving male heir, or when a daughter possessed exceptional leadership qualities, she could be designated to fill the structural position of a son, keeping the lineage, the land, and the ancestral obligations intact. Think about what that means. The role was strategic, it was flexible, it was contextual, and it answered a material question, which is who holds the land and who carries the lineage, with a social answer instead of a biological one. Then there’s the related practice that often went hand in hand with it: the female husband. This was a position where a woman of means and standing could marry a wife, establish a household, secure children for her lineage with the help of a man in a procreative role, and exercise the full social authority of a husband. The marriage was the institution. The authority was the point. Amadiume documented women in Nnobi who accumulated wealth, took titles, married wives, and ran economic operations that colonial officers later refused to even recognize on paper, because their paperwork only had two boxes and African life didn’t fit in either one. Gender as a Social Construct, Demonstrated When we say gender is a social construct, we are literally saying that depending on which society and which moment in history you’re talking about, people built gender differently, and the male daughter illustrates that with precision. In this system, a person’s ability to perform a role, like managing a household, inheriting property, or carrying leadership, mattered more than their physical sex. The genitalia did not dictate the function. The function was assigned by the community according to need, capacity, and circumstance, which means the Igbo were operating a grounded, homegrown theory of gender centuries before a single Western feminist seminar ever convened. Most of y’all been taught that the strict two-gender system is the neutral default of human civilization, the view from nowhere, just the way things are. Just admit that’s a position. Claiming the binary is natural is not the absence of an ideology, it is an ideology, one with a shipping date, a port of entry, and a paper trail running through mission schools, Native Courts, and the Criminal Code. Naming that claimed neutrality as a position is the whole ballgame, because once the binary has a history, it stops being destiny. How They Dismantled It: Two Roles, One Confession Watch the two-roles frame, because the colonizers had a script and a function and they were never the same thing. What they said: we are bringing civilization, salvation, and proper family order to a dark continent. What the position structurally did: it dismantled African systems of land tenure, lineage authority, and gender flexibility so that colonial administration and extraction could run smoothly through a single, legible, male head of household. Crazy how ‘civilization’ always seems to end with somebody else holding your land. The mechanics were specific. Missionaries branded the male daughter and the female husband as primitive and demonic, which justified throwing the devil on us. Mission schools taught Igbo girls domesticity and submission while teaching boys administration and authority, manufacturing the Victorian household one classroom at a time. Colonial Native Administration appointed warrant chiefs, men, only men, handpicked for cooperation, to replace governance systems where women had held real institutional power through their own assemblies and organizations. Then the legal system finished the job: British-derived criminal codes criminalized intimacy ‘against the order of nature,’ and inheritance law was restructured around the male heir, which made the male daughter not just disfavored but legally illegible. These folks hoodwinked us. They finessed us into believing women were divinely subordinate, then they pointed at the wreckage of the systems they destroyed and called the wreckage ‘African tradition.’ Every accusation is a confession. They called African gender systems unnatural while running an empire that required guns, courts, schools, and churches to make their own gender system stick. If your ‘natural order’ needs that much artillery, it was never natural, it was enforced. This also proves the second thing: the closet itself was an import. The down low was an import. These roles were not secrets in precolonial Igboland, they were public institutions with names, rules, and ceremonies, and it took colonial violence to convert openness into shame. This Means the ‘Un-African’ Crowd Is Wrong Now let me address the folks who love to say queerness and gender fluidity are Western imports corrupting the continent. This means you are wrong, flatly, and the receipts are not close. Scholars like Marc Epprecht and the collection assembled by Stephen Murray and Will Roscoe have documented same-sex intimacy and gender diversity across the continent long before contact, from woman-to-woman marriage among the Igbo, Nandi, and Lovedu, to the mudoko dako among the Lango that I covered earlier in this series. What actually arrived on the boat was the criminalization. Political scientists Enze Han and Joseph O’Mahoney ran the comparative analysis and found that former British colonies are significantly more likely to criminalize homosexuality today precisely because Britain wrote those laws into colonial penal codes. Nigeria’s Criminal Code provision punishing ‘carnal knowledge against the order of nature’ is British law in African clothing, and the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act was built on top of that colonial scaffolding, not on top of Igbo cosmology. So the next time you hear somebody declaring what’s African and what’s un-African, ask them if they picked up a history book or if they’re just regurgitating what the missionary taught their great-granddaddy. iMa bE: ‘we are defending traditional African values.’ Cool. Then defend the male daughter, defend the female husband, defend the women’s assemblies, because those are the traditions, documented and dated. What you’re actually defending is Victorian England with a Lagos zip code, and by calling that colonial residue ‘tradition’ while calling our actual traditions ‘Western,’ you are making whiteness visible, you’re just making it visible inside your own mouth. The ask is simple: read Amadiume before you legislate. Western Feminism Doesn’t Own This Critique Either This history also challenges the universality that Western feminist theory has tried to dominate us with, and I say that as somebody who has read the first wave, the second wave, and the third wave. Amadiume wrote her book partly as a confrontation with white feminist scholars who treated African women as a pile of victims waiting on European theory to rescue them. Apply Oyěwùmí here too: in The Invention of Women, she showed that among the Yoruba, seniority, not gender, organized social life until colonization translated everything into the European two-box system. María Lugones names the whole apparatus the coloniality of gender, meaning the binary and the racial hierarchy arrived as one package, installed together, enforced together. Operationalize that: you cannot decolonize race and keep the colonizer’s gender system, because they came off the same boat, signed by the same hands, blessed by the same church. Liberalism is a hell of a drug, and one of its favorite highs is letting Western feminism critique patriarchy while leaving the colonial origins of that patriarchy unexamined, because examining them would implicate the same empires that funded the universities. African societies had their own grounded theories of gender, encoded in language, kinship, and social structure, and recovering them is not an academic exercise, it is a toolkit, one that supports present-day arguments for the rights and dignity of diverse gender and sexual identities across Africa and the diaspora, especially against folks who like to ordain oppression onto bodies that don’t conform. The Women Fought Back Lastly, don’t let the near disappearance of the male daughter read as passive surrender, because the resilience of Igbo women is equally crucial to this history. Igbo women had a practice called ‘sitting on a man,’ documented by Judith Van Allen, where women would mass at the compound of a man who violated community norms, singing, dancing, banging on his walls, and refusing to leave until accountability happened. Collective discipline, institutionalized. In 1929, when colonial Native Administration moved toward taxing women, tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women rose up in the Ogu Umunwanyi, the Women’s War, sitting on warrant chiefs across the southeast, and colonial forces answered organized, largely nonviolent women with bullets, killing dozens. Then there’s Ahebi Ugbabe, documented by historian Nwando Achebe, a woman in colonial Nigeria who became a warrant chief and then a female king, the only one in the colonial record, which tells you the older logic of flexible gender did not die quietly, it kept breaking through the concrete. So let me close the loop where I opened it. A male daughter was a daughter socially accepted as a son, and that single sentence detonates the claim that the binary is universal, natural, or divine. The rigid dichotomous system of man and woman is not a universal, it is the result of a specific historical process that was pushed onto us by violence, and the people pushing it needed armies, courts, classrooms, and pulpits to make it hold. Africa had more than two ways of being. The record says so. Education Is Elevation. Critical Historical Context The timeline matters, so let’s lay it down clean. Precolonial Igbo society was decentralized, organized through lineages, age grades, title societies, and village assemblies rather than kings and standing armies, and within that structure women held institutionalized power: they ran market networks, held their own assemblies (the mikiri), took titles, and exercised collective enforcement through practices like sitting on a man. The male daughter and female husband institutions sat inside that architecture as lineage-preservation technologies, ensuring land and ancestral obligation could pass through a daughter when no son survived. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 carved the continent on paper, and Britain consolidated control over what became Nigeria through the early 1900s, formally amalgamating the northern and southern protectorates in 1914. Indirect rule arrived with it: warrant chiefs, Native Courts, and a colonial legal order that recognized only male authority, which meant women’s political institutions were not just ignored, they were structurally deleted from governance. Mission Christianity supplied the moral software for the operation, recasting flexible gender roles as sin and superstition, while mission education trained girls for Victorian domesticity. The Criminal Code transplanted British prohibitions on intimacy ‘against the order of nature’ into Nigerian law, where that colonial scaffolding still stands, reinforced rather than repealed by the 2014 Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act. The 1929 Women’s War was the loudest answer to all of it, and the colonial commissions that followed were forced to admit they had never understood, or cared to understand, the women’s institutions they had bulldozed. That admission is the whole case file. Colonial Implication of Education Here go the part where I put my educator hat all the way on. The erasure of the male daughter from curriculum is not an oversight, it is the maintenance phase of the same colonial project, because a student who learns that the gender binary has a shipping date can no longer be told it’s eternal, and students who can historicize power are harder to govern with myths. Mission schools were the original delivery system for Victorian gender ideology in Igboland, teaching girls submission and boys administration, which means schooling itself has always been a front in this fight, never a neutral bystander. The view from nowhere doesn’t run a classroom. Map that onto right now. The same legislatures passing ‘divisive concepts’ laws, gutting African American Studies frameworks, and pulling books on African and queer history off library shelves are running the mission school playbook with updated branding: control what children can know about the construction of race and gender, and you control what adults will accept as natural. A curriculum that includes Amadiume next to the standard civics unit produces students who ask who benefits from the categories, and that question is precisely what the censorship is designed to prevent. This is why independent educational media matters, why I build full packages with bibliographies instead of hot takes, and why community-funded curriculum is not a luxury, it is infrastructure for intellectual self-defense. Teach the male daughter and you teach students that social arrangements are made by people, which means they can be remade by people. That’s the implication, and it’s also the threat, depending on which side of the desk you’re sitting on. Intersectional Material Impacts Intersectional analysis is the default around here, not a garnish, so let’s name who carries the material weight of this history. Apply Crenshaw: the colonial deletion of the male daughter was simultaneously a gender operation and a property operation, because when inheritance was restructured around the male heir, African women lost land, and land is wealth, and wealth compounds across generations. The Combahee River Collective taught us that systems of oppression are interlocking, and this is the textbook case: race, gender, religion, and property law moving as one machine. * Land and wealth: Women who could once inherit as male daughters were converted into legal dependents, and across the continent today, women perform a massive share of agricultural labor while holding a fraction of documented land title, a gap with a colonial paper trail. Dispossession is not a vibe, it’s a ledger. * Bodies and criminalization: British-derived sodomy provisions and their modern reinforcements expose queer Africans, and disproportionately poor and gender-nonconforming people who cannot buy privacy or exit, to arrest, extortion, mob violence, and exile. Apply Bailey’s misogynoir framework to who gets policed hardest at the intersection of Blackness, womanhood, and nonconformity. * Authority and governance: The warrant chief system deleted women’s assemblies from formal politics, and the underrepresentation of African women in land boards, courts, and legislatures today is the long tail of that deletion, not a natural distribution of ambition. * Diaspora echoes: Apply Spillers: the same colonial order that ungendered captive African flesh in the hold of the ship policed gender conformity on the continent, two arms of one body. Black women and Black queer folks in the diaspora inherit both operations at once, fighting respectability politics that are, at root, Victorian mission-school curriculum passed down as culture. * Class and labor: Hold the Black Marxist frame alongside the Afropessimist one: dismantling flexible gender wasn’t just ideological housekeeping, it organized households into units legible for taxation, wage labor, and extraction. Antiblackness and patriarchy were not aberrations in the colonial economy, they were the engine and the transmission. Become a Paid Subscriber: Keep This History Alive 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. 5 Key Takeaways * The male daughter was a real, documented Igbo institution, recorded by Ifi Amadiume in Nnobi, where a daughter was socially repositioned as a son to inherit land, lead the family, and carry the lineage. Not a metaphor, not a mistake, a system. * Precolonial Igbo society decoupled biological sex from social function: capacity and circumstance assigned roles, not genitalia, which proves the rigid binary is a specific historical product, not a human universal. * Colonialism dismantled these systems deliberately, through missionaries, mission schools, warrant chiefs, male-only inheritance law, and British-derived criminal codes, then rebranded the wreckage as ‘African tradition.’ * Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import: the criminalization arrived in British penal codes, the closet arrived with the shame economy of the church, and modern laws stand on that colonial scaffolding. * Igbo women resisted, from sitting on a man to the 1929 Women’s War to Ahebi Ugbabe becoming a female king, which means this history is a record of fightback, not just loss, and recovering it is present-tense political equipment. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Related Readings: A Working Bibliography * Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. Zed Books, 1987. * Amadiume, Ifi. Re-Inventing Africa: Matriarchy, Religion and Culture. Zed Books, 1997. * Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. * Lugones, María. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007. * Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. Palgrave, 1998. * Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Ohio University Press, 2008. * Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Pambazuka Press, 2011. * Van Allen, Judith. “’Sitting on a Man’: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women.” Canadian Journal of African Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1972. * Achebe, Nwando. The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe. Indiana University Press, 2011. * Han, Enze, and Joseph O’Mahoney. British Colonialism and the Criminalization of Homosexuality. Routledge, 2018. * Ihejirika, Chidera. “F**k Your Gender Norms: How Western Colonisation Brought Unwanted Binaries to Igbo Culture.” gal-dem. * Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989. * Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. * Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987. * Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Bogle-L’Ouverture, 1972. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Queer African History They Never Taught You: Uganda’s Mudoko Dako, Explained

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A effeminate man in northern Uganda before the colonizers pulled up was called a Mudoko Dako, and that wasn’t a slur, that wasn’t a scandal, that wasn’t something whispered behind a granary — it was a recognized place in the community, a distinct gender status among the Lango people and their neighbors the Teso and the Karamojong, with rights, roles, and yes, marriages. A lot of y’all are lost in the sauce of Western heteronormativity, so let me say it plain before we go any further: there were men in precolonial Africa who wore women’s clothes, did women’s work, lived as women, and legally married men, and no elder raised a spear in protest. Let that marinate. The word Dako in the Lango language means woman. The Mudoko Dako were assigned male at birth, understood by their communities to be womanized men, and they cooked, they cleaned, they cared for children, they worked the land — not in shame, not in hiding, but in full view of the village. Some so fully embodied their lived womanhood that they simulated menstruation. This ain’t me freestyling. This is in the colonizer’s own paperwork: British anthropologist Jack Herbert Driberg documented all of it in The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda in 1923, describing how these men dressed in the manner of women, took on women’s traditional roles, and were folded into family life. Crazy how the same empire that wrote this down in its field notes turned around and wrote laws pretending it never existed. Ugandan law professor Sylvia Tamale, former dean of the law faculty at Makerere University, puts the receipt in one sentence: “During precolonial times, the ‘mudoko dako,’ or effeminate males among the Langi of northern Uganda, were treated as women and could marry men.” Treated as women. Could marry men. No social sanction. Tamale has spent her career documenting that gender across precolonial African societies was less a cage and more a landscape, and she calls the “homosexuality is un-African” line what it is — a tired fable that the historical record demands we bury. Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe’s Boy-Wives and Female Husbands (1998) stacks example after example across the continent. The scholarship is not thin. The amnesia is manufactured. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Critical Historical Context: Gender as Spiritual Technology Here’s the context your textbook skipped, and it matters because it explains what colonialism actually destroyed. Across a range of African societies, gender-crossing wasn’t just tolerated as a private quirk — it was often read as evidence of spiritual capacity. People who could move between masculine and feminine presentation were understood to live in more realms than just the human one, and that ability to transgress the boundary made them candidates for sacred work: spiritual healers, diviners, mediums consulted by chiefs, soldiers, and war captains, instrumental in politics and justice. Among the Lugbara, transgender mediums carried messages between the human and spirit worlds; the chibados of Angola were male diviners who lived as women; the Bunyoro of Uganda held religious roles for men who dressed as women. Feminine dress could signal that a healer was that day inhabiting the side of themselves that speaks to ancestors, open for the community’s problems. The only consistent grounds for sanction wasn’t the gender-crossing itself — it was using spiritual power for harm, cursing and tricking your neighbors instead of helping them. Feel me? The line wasn’t drawn at who you were. The line was drawn at what you did to the community. Then comes the break, and the break happened twice. On the plantations of Brazil, the Caribbean, and the American South, enslaved Africans carried these understandings out of context — and when an enslaver saw somebody cross-dressing, somebody moving between genders the way their tradition sanctified, that person was punished, and the punishment did double work: it brutalized a body and it severed a chain of ancestral memory, oral storytelling, and tradition that could no longer be passed on. Back on the continent, the empire ran the same play with different personnel: enslavers and administrators left missionaries and priests behind to westernize the villages, teaching that indigenous gender structures were ungodly and demonic in the name of Jesus, while the law handled the hardware. In 1861 the British Empire wrote Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature” — and then photocopied it across the empire, and Uganda got its version in the 1902 colonial penal code, which outlawed non-conforming gender expression and same-sex relationships as “gross indecency.” Some of y’all might be asking, what the hell is a penal code? I’ll tell you what it is: it’s the moment a community’s memory becomes a crime scene. You don’t just outlaw the practice. You outlaw the remembering. Now run the math. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates — the majority of these laws trace straight back to colonial penal codes. Britain decriminalized at home in 1967 and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code; it upgraded it, most recently with the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act, which carries the death penalty for “aggravated homosexuality.” Crazy how Robert Mugabe could call homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote and his own ancestors never needed. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease was never the queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute — and a generation of post-colonial leaders have continued to perpetuate it, pissing on us and telling us it’s raining, calling the eraser “tradition” and the tradition “foreign.” Then Came the Penal Code Then came 1902. The British brought they beans-and-toast colonial ways to the shores of the Nile and stamped the word “illegal” onto love, importing a penal code built from the same imperial template London had been rolling out since 1861 — “carnal knowledge against the order of nature,” “gross indecency,” the whole catalog of Victorian disgust dressed up as law. Missionaries handled the software while the penal code handled the hardware: one taught the village that its own traditions were demonic, the other made sure anybody who remembered different could be caged. That’s how you break a chain of ancestral memory. You don’t just outlaw the practice, you outlaw the remembering. Now run the math with me. As of 2026, roughly 61 to 64 countries still criminalize same-sex relations, about 31 of them in Africa, and the majority of those laws are inherited directly from European colonial penal codes — more than half of criminalizing countries are former British colonies or protectorates. Europe decriminalized at home and left the cage standing in the colonies. Uganda didn’t just keep the 1902 code, it upgraded it: the 2023 Anti-Homosexuality Act carries the death penalty for what it calls “aggravated homosexuality.” Robert Mugabe called homosexuality “un-African” and a white disease while enforcing a sodomy law that white men wrote. Every accusation is a confession. The white disease isn’t queerness, kinfolks. The white disease is the statute. Who Wrote the “Gay Agenda”? (Hint: It Wasn’t Gay Folks) When I first got into the conscious community as a youngster, I was told the “gay agenda” was an attack on the Black family, and it took me years to clock that the phrase itself has a birth certificate, and it’s white. The “gay agenda” as a political weapon was built by the white evangelical right: Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign cast gay people as predators coming for your kids, and in 1992 a religious-right outfit literally released a propaganda video titled The Gay Agenda that got mailed to members of Congress and circulated at the Pentagon to kill gay folks’ standing in public life. Then they exported the product line. In March 2009, American evangelicals — including Scott Lively, a man who built a career claiming gay people orchestrated the Holocaust — ran a conference in Kampala warning Ugandans about the “gay agenda” threatening their families. Months later, Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill hit parliament, the one the world called the “Kill the Gays” bill, the direct ancestor of the 2023 law with death sentences in it. So when somebody Black repeats “gay agenda” talk, they are running white Christian nationalist software on Black hardware — using a script written by the same people whose ancestors wrote the penal codes, to push Black queer folks out of families, out of churches, out of organizing spaces, and into isolation that gets people killed. Two things can be true: you can have questions about anything you want, and you can refuse to let Anita Bryant’s ghost ventriloquize your mouth. Black queer people — and Black queer women and femmes catch the worst of it, like Bailey’s work on misogynoir keeps showing us — are not the agenda. They are the kinfolk. The agenda was always somebody else’s, and we were never on the committee. If You Missed the Female Husbands Piece This is the second entry in what’s turning into a Pride Month series, and if you missed the first one, go back and read the female husbandry package — women across African societies who took wives, headed households, and held lineage and property through marriages the community fully recognized, from the Igbo and Nuer traditions to figures like Njinga and the Kuria practice that continues today. Put the two histories side by side and the picture gets undeniable: women marrying women over here, men living as women and marrying men over there, both sanctioned, both ordinary, both older than the empire that called them deviant. Queerness and Black folks been together since before colonialism, feel me — the question was never whether queer Africans existed, the question is who profited from making you forget they did. The Community Rises Again So this Pride Month, when you raise a flag or speak a name, remember the Mudoko Dako — remember that before the code there was a community, and the community rises again. The creator does not make mistakes, and nature loves the variation, and the multiplicity of how we show up has always been ingrained in our humanity. You should really show this to somebody who still believes effeminate men in our community came from the European. Show them the 1923 field notes. Show them the 1902 statute. Then ask them which one came first, the queer Africans or the law against them. I’ll wait. Happy Pride Month, y’all. Education is elevation. If you want the sources from this piece, they’re all linked below for the community. Shidd — if this work feeds you, become a paid subscriber and keep it independent. The Implication for Education This is where it lands in my lane, because the mudoko dako didn’t disappear from history by accident — they disappeared by curriculum. The same colonial project that wrote the penal codes wrote the syllabi: mission schools on the continent taught children that their grandparents’ gender traditions were demonic, and Western schools taught everybody else that Africa had no queer history at all, so two continents got educated into the same amnesia from opposite directions. Then look at right now: book bans pulling Black and queer history off shelves, “divisive concepts” laws making teachers afraid to say what Driberg published in 1923, state boards — including the one I just wrote about in Texas — overhauling curriculum to sand the edges off of exactly this kind of knowledge. When a Black child never learns that the mudoko dako existed, the “un-African” lie gets installed at the root, and when a Black queer child never learns it, school becomes one more institution telling them they’re a foreign object in their own lineage. Paulo Freire taught us that education is never neutral — it either functions as an instrument of liberation or an instrument of conformity — and a curriculum that erases the mudoko dako isn’t neutral, it’s the 1902 penal code still doing its job with a whiteboard instead of a courtroom. Restoring this history is not a niche Pride Month garnish. It is curriculum repair. Intersectional Material Impacts: Who Pays the Price Today Let’s be clear that this is not an abstract debate about heritage, because the colonial inheritance bills somebody every single day, and intersectionality — Crenshaw’s frame, the Combahee River Collective’s lived analysis — tells us the invoice doesn’t get split evenly. In Uganda and across the 31 African countries still criminalizing, the laws don’t just threaten prison: they collapse HIV prevention and treatment outreach because showing up to a clinic becomes evidence, they license landlords to evict, employers to fire, mobs to act with impunity, and they hit queer women and gender-nonconforming people with a double exposure — criminalized for their sexuality, then disciplined again by patriarchal family structures that the colonial church helped harden. In the diaspora, the same “gay agenda” logic — a script literally authored by the white evangelical right and exported to Kampala by American preachers in 2009, months before Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill hit parliament — gets recycled in our own communities, and the material outcomes follow: Black queer youth pushed out of homes and overrepresented among the homeless, Black trans women facing some of the highest rates of violence in the country, Black queer women and femmes catching what Moya Bailey named misogynoir from outside the community and inside it at the same time. Two things can be true: anti-Blackness structures the whole terrain, like Wilderson would remind us, and within Blackness, gender and sexuality decide who gets the least shelter on that terrain. Centering Black women’s and Black queer folks’ material outcomes — housing, healthcare, safety, family — over symbolic representation is the whole assignment. A flag in June don’t pay rent in July. 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 * The Mudoko Dako were a recognized gender status, not a tolerated exception. Among the Lango, Teso, and Karamojong of northern Uganda, feminine men lived as women, held women’s roles, and legally married men — documented in Driberg’s 1923 ethnography and affirmed by Sylvia Tamale’s scholarship. * Homophobia, not homosexuality, is the colonial import. Uganda’s criminalization begins with the 1902 colonial penal code, built from Britain’s 1861 Section 377 template — there was no indigenous law against the mudoko dako to inherit. * The erasure was a two-front operation. Plantation punishment broke ancestral memory in the diaspora while missionaries and penal codes broke it on the continent — same empire, two theaters, one amnesia. * The “un-African” claim collapses under its own receipts. More than half of the countries still criminalizing same-sex relations are former British colonies; leaders defending these laws are defending London’s legislation, not Africa’s traditions. * The material costs are intersectional and current. Criminalization collapses healthcare access, licenses eviction and violence, and lands hardest on Black queer women, femmes, and trans people — on the continent and in the diaspora alike. HARD ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Related Readings (Bibliography) Driberg, Jack Herbert. The Lango: A Nilotic Tribe of Uganda. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923. — The primary ethnographic documentation of the mudoko dako. Tamale, Sylvia, ed. African Sexualities: A Reader. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011. — Foundational collection on sexuality scholarship from the continent. Tamale, Sylvia. “Homosexuality Is Not Un-African.” Political Research Associates / Al Jazeera America, 2014. — The essay containing her mudoko dako statement quoted above. Murray, Stephen O., and Will Roscoe, eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands: Studies in African Homosexualities. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. — Continent-wide survey including the Lango material. Amadiume, Ifi. Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books, 1987. — Igbo flexible gender; the companion text to the female husbandry piece. Oyěwùmí, Oyèrónkẹ́. The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. — Yoruba society before the Western gender binary. Epprecht, Marc. Heterosexual Africa? The History of an Idea from the Age of Exploration to the Age of AIDS. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. — How the myth of an exclusively straight Africa was constructed. Human Rights Watch. This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism. New York: HRW, 2008. — The legal paper trail from Section 377 to the colonies. Kaoma, Kapya. Globalizing the Culture Wars: U.S. Conservatives, African Churches, and Homophobia. Somerville: Political Research Associates, 2009. — The documented export of the “gay agenda” playbook, including the 2009 Kampala conference. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1970. — For the education-is-never-neutral frame. 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]

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

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

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

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