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

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]

From Latasha Harlins to Cyrus Carmack-Belton: The Long History of Anti-Blackness in Black-Asian America

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

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

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