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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reparations Can’t Be Real While Slavery Is Still Legal: A Conversation With Vic Mensa

Thank you Decolonizing Love [https://substack.com/profile/122574688-decolonizing-love], Dr. Mary M. Marshall [https://substack.com/profile/21244770-dr-mary-m-marshall], Netta Fei [https://substack.com/profile/155323327-netta-fei], metamorphosic [https://substack.com/profile/323047218-metamorphosic], baby guava [https://substack.com/profile/102879223-baby-guava], and many others for tuning into my live video with vic mensa [https://substack.com/profile/150217935-vic-mensa]! Join me for my next live video in the app. “The idea that in order for me to care about what niggas is going through in America, I gotta ignore what’s going on with Palestine — it’s a false dichotomy.” Y’all, let me start where the conversation started, because the whole thing got kicked off by a tweet, and that tweet is the tired playbook in its purest form. Somebody on Threads typed up that the people screaming AIPAC and Zionist never had a damn word to say about gerrymandering, nothing about voting rights getting gutted, silent on the Congo, silent on Haiti, silent on a dozen other issues bleeding Black communities dry — and then the kicker, you unserious clowns helped put the corrupt predator back in the White House, Jasmine Crockett isn’t the problem, you are. Read that again and let that marinate, because what that post is doing is building a wall between two rooms of the same house, and then charging you rent to stand in either one. Here’s the thing the post doesn’t want you to clock: the person who wrote it claims a view from nowhere, like they’re just neutrally observing that the pro-Palestine crowd doesn’t care about home. But the claimed neutrality is itself a position. The view from nowhere is still a view, and this particular view has a job — its job is to make outright vocal opposition to a genocide that has killed somewhere between 600,000 and a million people the scapegoat for the Democratic Party’s own failures. That’s not analysis, kinfolks. That’s an alibi. So I sat down with Vic Mensa, and I want to tell you why that conversation mattered, because Vic is a Ghanaian Akan brother from Chicago, a revert to Islam, a man who sat in a refugee camp in Palestine, and somebody who came up under the long shadow of Chairman Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party. When two people who actually do the work get in a room, the false binary doesn’t survive contact. It just doesn’t hold up ideologically. It’s a straight fallacy. The Receipts the Algorithm Hides Let me get something out the way for the folks in the back, because I am the people they’re talking about. I’m the one supposedly silent on gerrymandering — except I made content with Jasmine Crockett herself in Austin fighting against gerrymandering. I’ve talked with politicians in Tennessee fighting gerrymandering. I’ve made videos about every single thing that tweet said I’ve never addressed. You just didn’t see them. And that’s the part that’s telling on you. The only time you care about my platform is when you feel like I’m going after the Democratic handlers. The attention economy and the way your algorithm is constructed is telling on you. You’re showing your ass, and you don’t even know it. Two things can be true. I can hold that Jasmine Crockett is a brilliant orator, one of the most effective vocal challengers of Trump, of fascism, of MAGA, of the Republican Party — and I can also hold that she is intimately, integrally intertwined with a global fascist machine through her connections to AIPAC. Both things live in the same body. Naming that is not an attack on Black women. But neoliberalism has so successfully co-opted the Black identity that when you critique the Democratic Party, some folks experience it as you attacking niggas. That conflation is the trap. And I’m not stepping in it. “It’s thinking about how can you stand for Black people and side with individuals perpetuating incarceration for Black people, perpetuating disparities of health care for Black people. It’s not just ‘they go up against Palestinians.’” Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Same corporations, different cages When Vic was in Palestine, he started to peep something that should freeze you in place. The same multinational private prison corporations — CoreCivic, GEO Group — that operate to keep his brothers in prison for 29 years at a time also operate to keep Palestinians detained for decades at a time, and they also operate in South Africa. Same corporations. Same logic. Same flesh treated as fungible across three continents. So when somebody who is politically misinformed at best, and disingenuous and spineless at worst, tells you that what’s happening in Palestine has nothing to do with what’s happening on the south side of Chicago, they’re pissing on us and telling us it’s raining. This is where I want to do the Whitey on the Moon move, because Gil Scott-Heron already wrote the structure of the argument for us. They tell us they can’t fund reproductive justice. (But the rocket money is for Israel.) They tell us they can’t fund HIV research. (But the missile money is for Israel.) Black people fighting for health care right now, and they tell us the well is dry — but they send billions annually to Israel, and what does Israel give its people? Free health care. Vic put it plain: his motto is education is elevation, and he’s over a hundred thousand dollars in debt for his degrees, the unsubsidized loans accumulating interest as we speak. Smart as s**t, and in perpetual debt. The resource allocation contradiction isn’t a side point. It is the point. Fred Hampton already answered this question Vic told me about a Twitter Space — that purgatory — where Chicago brothers and sisters, some he’s met at the street ground level, were telling him that what happens to immigrant populations, be it Latinos, be it Africans, has nothing to do with us, is none of our business, and is counterproductive to the liberation of Black people. So Vic, coming from the school of Chairman Fred Hampton, asked them straight: do you respect Chairman Fred Hampton as a Chicago person? Of course, they say yes. Then how do you feel about the Rainbow Coalition, where Hampton connected the Black Panther Party with the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor white Young Patriots in a show of multiracial proletarian solidarity? Because here’s what having the luxury to ignore the international struggle is a sign of — it’s a sign of how effective the break in the ideological continuation has been. All of our political heroes preached internationalism. Newton fought the crack epidemic and stood with Palestinians. Malcolm talked about Mississippi and couldn’t be contained to Mississippi. The notion that the best thing for Black folks is to denounce solidarity is people trying to emulate a white nationalism that even the white nationalists abandoned, because isolationist theory didn’t work for them either. You cannot vacuum yourself from the rest of the world. And the structural argument is even sharper than the moral one. ICE is now the most funded police entity in the world. You’re going to tell me, a Black person, that the most funded police entity in the world won’t have any impact on Black policing? That’s crazy to me. The white supremacist is trying to overturn the 14th Amendment for birthright citizenship, claiming it’s all about immigrants — but the 14th Amendment comes straight out of the Reconstruction era. That was made about Black folks. So how, in your mind, does the mass deportation agenda overturning birthright citizenship not boomerang back onto you? This means the “mind your business” position isn’t just wrong, it’s self-liquidating. By the time they finish coming for the immigrant, the precedent is already sitting on your neck. “Some people in our community hate drag queens and immigrants more than they love Black people. And that’s the reason why they can be in coalition with white supremacists.” The Black church treats Black gay people the way America treats niggas Vic said something that made me think a thought I’d never quite landed, and I want to give him credit for the framing because it’s how he said it. The way the Black church treats Black gay people is how America treats niggas. The same way white America uses Black cultural representation and Black labor to make America look great, look smooth, look cool — while still mistreating us — is the same way the Black church operates. You can run the choir. You can do the dance. You can be the usher, the chaperone, the musician fueling the whole sanctuary. But you better not ever, ever think we’re cool with your gay s**t. That’s extraction with a smile. That’s the libidinal economy of the sanctuary. And I say this as somebody whose first degree is in African American studies, who grew up in a Black Southern missionary background, who is critical of the Black church and doesn’t identify as Christian today, but who has no smoke for anybody whose faith makes them a better person. Vic, a revert to Islam, said the same contradictions he watches me name in the Black church, he experiences in the mosque — the homophobia rampant in a brilliant imam’s street-corner congregation of former Nation of Islam brothers, Black Stones, Arab cab drivers, and Nigerians. And he was honest in a way most men won’t be: he admitted he felt phony, because he has the privilege to be okay with somebody else’s dehumanization since it doesn’t cost him what it costs them. If they were up there saying Black people are thieves, he couldn’t come back the next day. That’s what intellectual honesty about your own positionality sounds like. Run the receipts on the pre-colonial archive, too. In Akan culture, in Ashanti, there were words for two-spirited and non-binary people forever — a man who is a woman, a woman who is a man — and those words didn’t carry criminalizing weight. So even where we’re actively rejecting colonial domination, transphobia and homophobia are the one piece of the colonizer’s luggage we insist on keeping. We tell ourselves the presence of LGBTQ people is an attack on the Black household, an attack on Black masculinity, like white supremacy planted it there to break us. But that move gives white supremacy more power than it actually has and erases Black queer presence inside the Black radical tradition itself. Patriarchy is a scourge on men, too Vic’s sister gave him a bar I can’t stop turning over. We say white people need to be on the front line combating racism. We say Jewish people need to be combating Zionism. So it would seem that men need to be combating patriarchy — and that’s exactly where it gets sensitive, gets emotional, and where men hit a wall. Because patriarchy emotionally cripples Black men while Black women disproportionately absorb the consequences of that emotional repression and violence. Racism is a scourge on white people; patriarchy is a scourge on us as men. It’s corrosive for us, actually. Look at what happened with Megan Thee Stallion. That’s the perfect depiction of men’s blind allegiance to patriarchy. I watched niggas who have a heart, who have a spine in so many other ways, act like they needed ten trillion forms of ID before they could care that a woman got shot. I got two sisters. If my sister is with some niggas and my sister gets shot, it’s over with — I don’t need a forensic file to know how I feel. What does it mean for a bunch of hyper-masculine gangsta niggas, who’ll tell you all day what they’ll do to another nigga, to suddenly feel so victimized and so sensitive about Meg dancing on somebody that it justified her being shot? Every accusation is a confession. And it’s connected to the religion conversation, because the root of it is Father Abraham having many sons — so many men carry a divine understanding of themselves as patriarchs, and they’ll do anything to sustain that hierarchy of men over women, masculine over feminine. White men, Black men, Native men, Hispanic men — a lot of men genuinely believe patriarchy is divine. Two plus two is four, the sky is blue, birds chirp, and men post the other woman. They think you’re broken if you don’t see it that way. Some of them think male leadership requires male domination, and the only way they know how to perform manhood is to sexually conquer a woman or beat one down. That’s the same logic that hit the woman the Houston PD said was justifiably struck because she said brick when it was a bottle — the law gets used to ratify the violence. If a woman hits me and I pick up something and hit her back, I’m a whole-ass nigga. I’m standing on that, and I’ll take the “simp” and “panderer” think pieces all day. Facts over feelings. “It takes a lot more strength to exercise restraint and to use your mind — which is the very thing they feminize. They gender brilliance as feminine, then call it weakness.” Vic named the part most men hide: even in a boardroom with his own companies, the patriarchal hyper-masculine voice inside says I want to whoop this thing — and it just doesn’t apply. It’s counterproductive. He has to emotionally mature beyond it to accomplish his aim without the need for domination. And here’s the read I want you to keep: physical domination is actually a lower level of strength. The restraint, the use of the mind, the dissection through words — that’s the thing patriarchy feminizes and then dismisses. Which is also why I’m so critical of the “emasculation” conversation. How does somebody else have the power to rhetorically emasculate you? How is your masculinity so flimsy it lives in another person’s mouth? By insisting on that, you are making whiteness — and patriarchy — visible as the fragile thing it is. Kamala, misogynoir, and the refusal to do nuance The Kamala Harris campaign was a layered, m***********g complicated thing, and I refuse to flatten it. It was dominantly steeped in misogynoir, full of anti-Blackness, full of misogyny — I could smell how much niggas hate women throughout, and I heard plenty of women say she was unfit to lead because she’s a woman, which is patriarchy gone subversive, the same way we call Black folks who side with white supremacy pick-mes. And at the very same time, there were entirely valid critiques of her participation in the genocide in Palestine, her record as a prosecutor, her role in mass incarceration. Two things can be true. The public right now doesn’t have the range to hold both, because everything has to be all or nothing, a zero-sum game. So watch the sleight of hand. It is an effective imperialist talking point to blame the failures of a genocidal imperialist state on the anti-imperialists. U.S. sanctions have killed tens of millions over the last several decades, and somehow the people conscious of that are the ones held responsible for the loss — you’re being an insufferable leftist if you can’t look past those dead to focus only on Chicago. As if Newton couldn’t hold the crack epidemic and Palestine at once. As if Malcolm could only talk about Mississippi. How come they blame Jill Stein and Butch Ware louder than they blame Joe Biden for handing her only 107 days? He set her up. He hung her out to dry, and then the failure gets laundered onto everybody with a valid critique. The gutting of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act — 1965 to 2026 — should already tell you that the liberal myth of linear progress is a myth. There’s no straight line that only goes forward. The hood doesn’t abandon you for being imperfect Now I want to be self-critical, because Vic pushed me somewhere honest. The movement is so often ready to discard folks for not being perfect participants — a misstep, not revolutionary enough, the wrong take on one issue. It can be a pretentious, intellectually elitist movement at times, even though I’m fully in it. Vic, as an artist, lived it: when he had controversy, the progressive quasi-leftist circles that rallied around him would dissipate, but the folks who stuck were in the hood — and the hood is at times deeply conservative and deeply revolutionary at once, and it wouldn’t abandon him for a mistake the way the leftist circles would pounce. I would like to also add some important context… Vic and I are speaking from the privilege of being cis-gender straight Black men in hood and I acknowledge that there are people are who are abandoned in the hood. Black women, Black LGBTQ, Black Neurodivergent people are many of times easily abandoned from the hood, by the hood. Mr. Mensa was right to correct my language, so I’ll say it clean: the “Black liberal versus Black leftist” framing too often conflates white leftism with the Black radical tradition. When niggas hear “Black leftism,” they think Marx — and Marx ain’t bad, but there is a Black radical tradition outside the realm of European post-structural thought. The red-pill brothers try to short-circuit Black feminism by saying Black feminists just want to be white women — not realizing Black feminists already duked it out with white feminists about exactly that racism, decades ago, better than the red-pill brother ever could. Same move when a Black liberal tells a Black leftist “you just want to be like white folks.” Hold on. The Black radical tradition — Malcolm, Hampton, the Pan-Africanists — is distinct from white leftism, and pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest, especially when the same person is comfortable with white liberals who are racist as hell. “My only real allegiance is a love for the people. I’m prioritizing Black folks. I’m Black first, I’m leftist second.” Reparations can’t be real while slavery is still legal They’re out here floating reparations for January 6th — a “slush fund” they’re rebranding as anti-weaponization money — while the commonly cited figure for what’s owed to Black Americans is around $14 trillion, and that’s just for unpaid labor, before you even add missed opportunity and opportunity cost. Then go down the list of who has actually received reparations. Confederate slave owners got reparations for their lost “property.” Francophone West Africa is still effectively paying France through the CFA franc, their money held in French banks. Israel received reparations after the Holocaust. Japanese Americans received reparations after the internment camps. Everybody on the ledger — except the African. And that exposes the firm, deeply held belief sitting at the bottom of this: that the African is an inferior human being who doesn’t deserve the same treatment. That’s the permanence of racism Derrick Bell tried to warn us about, and it’s why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse here. But here’s the part that should stop your breath. Reparations cannot be a serious conversation while slavery is still happening, because under the 13th Amendment it is still absolutely legal. Vic’s brother just came home after 29 years for a murder he didn’t commit — someone else did it — and the whole time he was producing capital for the prison. He used to drive a tractor at one of the joints because it let him out the cell, and after COVID, brothers are locked down 23 and 1, 23 hours in a cell under inhumane conditions, so being outside like a human being was something he looked forward to. Vic told me he made the mistake once of asking his brother how it felt to be enslaved, and realized how stupid the question was, because that’s not a metaphor for the man — that’s the literal situation he’s in. In Mississippi you can substantiate billions of dollars off prison labor and the men aren’t getting paid s**t. In Texas TDCJ — my own mama and daddy have been in jail, they’ll tell you — you don’t get paid at all. You get paid three hots and a cot, the roof and the tray. That’s straight-up slavery. So when somebody asks why reparations isn’t a serious conversation, the answer is sitting in plain sight: how do you compensate a harm the state is still actively committing? It’s not ironic that you and I are more likely to be convicted as punishment for a crime — crime itself is a social construct. Watch how the social construct of time bends: an undocumented person is disqualified from manhood in America for going against the law, while a man with 34 felony convictions is the President of the United States. If your register comes up $100 short, that’s an honest mistake. If you take $100 out the till, you going to jail. Same dollar, different bodies, different verdicts. That’s the whole game. How he builds it: claim, warrant, impact Vic asked me my process, so I’ll put it here because it’s the engine under everything above. It starts in debate: claim, warrant, impact. The claim is “yo mama so fat.” The warrant is the because. The impact is why anybody should give a damn. My claim is crime is a social construct; once I lock one warrant, I can sit down and go off. To make an argument you need all three, and most folks online give you a hot claim with no warrant and no impact — that Zionism point was dope, but what’s the impact? My debate coach, a country white man named George Lee out of Oklahoma, used to say if a man talks for nine minutes you can find something to disagree with somewhere. I was the negative, my partner Perfect Prophet Rasheed was the affirmative — he was great at saying yes, I was great at saying hell nah, here go ten reasons. On 60-second TikTok I once stacked 14 arguments in 60 seconds, because debate trained me to find the most efficient way to say the most. Purpose over popularity. Always. And let me be clear since the man is named so much lately: what Charlie Kirk was doing was not debate. As a Hall of Fame college policy debater who won a national championship, I’ll repeat it — that was fishing for clips and a-ha gotcha moments, no argument development, no point-for-point refutation. Content farming. The plaques behind me came from doing the exact opposite of that. So if you want to build the skill, go to the archive: study Davon Love, the first Black person to win a national debate championship, who did it for Towson in 2008 and writes on Substack about how to construct the argument. Go back and learn how Black liberals and Black leftists have always been fighting, going all the way back to the plantation, and figure out where you actually fit. That’s research over MeSearch. The close So back to that tweet. The wall it built — home over there, the world over here — was never real. Vic learned it from a wizened old Bedouin man in a Palestinian refugee camp who asked him, are y’all just voyeurs, is this a field trip, or are you here to go tell the world what you saw? Vic promised that man he’d tell his story, and that promise is why he can’t align with any ideology that supports the destruction of a people, the same way he draws a hard line between revolutionary violence toward liberation and violence in furtherance of domination. My allegiance is a love for the people. Black first, leftist second. And the false choice between caring about niggas here and niggas everywhere isn’t a real choice — it’s a leash, and somebody is holding the other end. Don’t pick it up. Feel me? 5 Key Takeaways 1. The false binary is a leash. “Caring about Palestine” vs. “caring about home” was never a real choice. The same prison corporations, the same fascist machinery, and the same 14th-Amendment precedent connect Chicago, the Congo, and Palestine. Internationalism isn’t a distraction from Black liberation — it’s a precondition for it. 2. Two things can be true. Jasmine Crockett can be a brilliant orator and tied to AIPAC. Kamala’s campaign can be soaked in misogynoir and open to valid critique on Palestine and incarceration. The refusal to hold both — the zero-sum reflex — is how neoliberalism launders accountability. 3. Patriarchy is a scourge on men, too. From Megan Thee Stallion to the boardroom, the demand to dominate is corrosive to the men performing it. Restraint and the use of the mind are strength — the very strengths patriarchy genders as feminine and then dismisses. 4. Reparations can’t be real while slavery is legal. The 13th Amendment relocated slavery into the prison. Everyone from Confederate enslavers to Japanese Americans has been on the reparations ledger except the African — because the conversation requires admitting a harm the state is still actively committing. 5. Claim, warrant, impact — and purpose over popularity. Real argument has all three. Clip-farming and gotcha moments are not debate. Build the warrant, name the impact, and let the analysis stand on its own. Annotated Bibliography & Related Readings RESEARCH OVER MESEARCH These are starting points for the people who want to go past the clip and into the archive. Verify editions and current data yourself before citing — some figures (kill counts, dollar amounts, legal status) shift and should be checked against primary sources. Frank B. Wilderson III — Afropessimism (2020) & Red, White & Black (2010) Wilderson’s frame of gratuitous violence, fungibility, and ontological social death anchors why anti-Black violence isn’t merely economically determined. Useful for the prison-labor and “same corporations” sections — held as descriptive, not prescriptive. Cedric Robinson — Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983) The text for the article’s core correction: the Black radical tradition exists outside European post-structural thought. Robinson’s racial capitalism reframes antiblackness as the engine of surplus value, not an aberration. Patrick E. Johnson — Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008) Directly supports the Black-church-and-queerness section. Johnson documents how Black LGBTQ people are uniquely positioned inside Black Southern church life — indispensable to the music and ministry, yet chastised. Moya Bailey — Misogynoir Transformed (2021) The coinage and framework for reading the Kamala campaign and the Megan Thee Stallion discourse. Centers how anti-Blackness and misogyny compound specifically against Black women. Kimberlé Crenshaw — “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) & The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) The intersectional baseline for the whole pack — gender, sexuality, and class read together inside Blackness rather than as competing single issues. Derrick Bell — Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992) Bell’s permanence-of-racism thesis explains why reparations can’t become serious top-line discourse: the refusal is structural, not an oversight. Huey P. Newton & the Black Panther Party — on the Rainbow Coalition Primary context for the Fred Hampton argument: the BPP’s coalition with the Young Lords and Young Patriots as the historical answer to “why should we care about other communities.” Davon Love — Substack (writings on debate & Black political analysis) Conscious Lee’s named recommendation: first Black person to win a national debate championship (Towson, 2008). Practical guidance on how to construct an argument. The 13th Amendment (1865) — the “except as a punishment for crime” clause Read the text directly. The exception clause is the legal hinge for the prison-slavery argument and for why reparations and abolition are the same conversation. Documentary: 13th (Ava DuVernay, 2016) Accessible companion to the constitutional argument, tracing the line from the 13th Amendment’s loophole through mass incarceration and private prisons. On the CFA franc / Francophone West Africa & France For the reparations ledger section — the monetary arrangement keeping West African reserves in French banks. Verify current figures and reform status before citing. PAID SUBSCRIBER CALL TO ACTION This whole platform runs on you — no corporate backing, no AIPAC money, no dark-money think tank cutting the check. Education is Elevation is funded entirely by paid subscribers, which is the only way I can keep saying purpose over popularity and mean it. If this conversation with Vic gave you a new frame — the false binary as a leash, the 13th Amendment as the reason reparations stays buried, patriarchy as a scourge on men too — then you already know what we do here. We don’t farm clips. We build the warrant and we name the impact. That work takes time, research, and the freedom to say things that won’t be popular. When you go paid, you’re not tipping. You’re funding a free Black critical-thought media that the corporate world will never bankroll, because what we say cuts against their bottom line. You’re also keeping it accessible — the same model is why the debate class I’m building with my debate family will always have a free version alongside the paid one. Accessibility is key. Your subscription is what makes the free tier possible for the next person. 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 14th Amendment Was Never Yours: How Citizenship Was Built In Opposition To Black And Native Humanity

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her) [https://substack.com/profile/2073006-reda-rountree-sheher], Mnera [https://substack.com/profile/18094558-mnera], Farrah Senne [https://substack.com/profile/271955116-farrah-senne], Louis DeVlugt Personal [https://substack.com/profile/189210972-louis-devlugt-personal], Copaganda [https://substack.com/profile/347196593-copaganda], and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I just got done sitting in a convening about immigration with a bunch of pro-immigration workers, and I have thoughts. Before I get into them, though, I want to give a disclaimer, because my grandfather always said the pathway to hell was paved with good intentions, and what I’m about to lay down ain’t about accusing nobody of being nefarious, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally anti-Black, ain’t about accusing nobody of being intentionally engaged in indigenous erasure. This is about impact, not intent. And as the kinfolks know, two things can be true at the same damn time — folks can mean well and still be perpetuating the exact erasure that the empire requires to function. Let that marinate. I sat in that room and listened to a presentation on the 14th Amendment, listened to lawyers grapple with how the current administration is trying to overturn birthright citizenship, listened to scholars walk through how the 14th Amendment is being weaponized against immigrant populations — and the whole time I kept asking the same rhetorical question in my head, the question that has to be the starting point for any serious conversation about citizenship in this country: What does the subject position of being an immigrant or being a citizen mean for the Indian or for the Black? What has the concept of citizenship actually engaged when it comes to what it means to be Native, or what it means to be African American? Because for the folks in the back, the 14th Amendment ain’t just a 2026 immigration story. The 14th Amendment is birthed out of the Reconstruction era. 13th Amendment freed the slaves, 14th Amendment gave citizenship, 15th Amendment gave the right to vote — but only to Black men. You feel me? The presentation didn’t grapple with that. The presentation talked about the 14th Amendment as if it dropped out of the sky and landed in 2026 on the bodies of immigrants, when in actuality this amendment is birthed in blood, birthed in slavery, birthed in Reconstruction, and has been weaponized against the very people it was supposed to protect since the second the ink dried. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Most of us engage with citizenship through a very romanticized, sanitized understanding of what it is. So let me set up some questions, because Research over MeSearch — in 2026, will we say that Black people are citizens? Yes, obviously. African Americans in 2026 are still regarded as citizens. Do we understand that citizenship is supposed to come with the right to vote? Yes. But then what is the concept of citizenship meant for the Black body? It’s never guaranteed any type of safety. It’s never guaranteed what we’re supposed to believe comes with being a citizen. Though Black people are still regarded as citizens in 2026, legally we’re having our voting rights taken away. The very same Supreme Court that says it’s legal to racially profile against immigrant populations when it comes to citizenship is the same Supreme Court that says you have to engage in colorblindness when it comes to creating congressional maps. Let that marinate. Colorblindness is good, Supreme Court says, when it comes to drawing congressional districts that would actually give Black people political representation. But color consciousness is good for the Supreme Court when it comes to enforcing immigration. This illustrates the tension in how the law accounts for indigeneity and Blackness in a completely different way than the other subject positions, and you cannot have an honest conversation about immigration without grappling with this contradiction. And for the Indigenous, the contradiction runs deeper. Do y’all know the 14th Amendment did not apply to Native Americans? Naturalized birthright citizenship did not apply to the Indigenous people of Turtle Island — the people that have been here for thousands of years. Legally speaking, Native Americans did not gain citizenship until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. The 14th Amendment passes in 1868, and Native folks have to wait fifty-six more years to be legally recognized as citizens of the country that was built on top of their bones. And then even when they were granted citizenship in 1924, what did that mean for their humanity? What did that mean for the ongoing genocide they were facing? What did that mean for the boarding schools that were still actively destroying their children? Citizenship for Native Americans has never led to preserving their culture, never led to preserving their customs, never led to seeing their sovereignty, never led to them being able to get regular old rights of being a citizen. The legal concept of citizenship does not give what it’s supposed to give. And we know this because even now, even now, even now — Black people have been regarded as citizens since 1868, and yet how much legally have our citizenship been circumvented and continues to be circumvented regardless of us being seen as naturalized citizens of America? This is where the romanticized framing of “America is a nation of immigrants” starts to crumble under the weight of historical analysis. When Zohran Mamdani says New York was built by immigrants, when Shaboozey says America was built by immigrants, I understand the intent — the intent is to dignify immigrant labor, to push back against the xenophobic right, to remind people that this country’s prosperity was constructed by hands that the empire would now like to deport. I get it. But the impact erases the history of chattel slavery, erases the fact that a bunch of Black people built this country before the Immigration Act of 1965 brought an influx of immigrants to a country that was already built. The milk and honey people came looking for? It was already created — by particular people, under the lash, under the whip, under the auction block. Then there’s the second erasure: when you call this a nation of immigrants, what does that mean for the Indigenous folks who were already here? What does that mean for the people who didn’t migrate, who didn’t choose, whose land was taken from underneath them? You feel me? When you frame the starting point of the American story as immigration, you’ve already erased two subject positions — the people who were forced here in chains, and the people whose land was stolen. This is what Tuck and Yang call the settler’s move to innocence. The phrase “no one is illegal on stolen land” — said with the absolute best of intentions, said by Billie Eilish at the Grammys, said at every progressive rally — has a contradiction baked into it that does the work of indigenous erasure even as it claims to be solidarity. Who was the land stolen from? Do you know the specific tribe that is indigenous to the land you’re standing on when you make this statement? What does it mean for Native sovereignty when you present the starting point of the story as already-stolen land? Because if the land is just abstractly stolen, if the original people are just a hazy concept in the backdrop of your solidarity statement, then the land becomes available for redistribution among non-Native populations, and the Indigenous claim disappears into a vibe. Tuck and Yang argue that settlers reach for these moves to relieve the discomfort of being implicated in colonization without actually giving anything back. The slogan feels radical. The slogan does nothing for land back. The slogan, in fact, makes land back harder, because it converts a specific Indigenous claim into a universal humanitarian one. That ain’t the same thing. I want to be clear about the Afropessimist intervention I’m making here, because some of y’all gonna read this and try to flatten it into Oppression Olympics. That ain’t what this is. Afropessimists like Frank Wilderson and Jared Sexton argue that anti-Blackness is antagonistic to America and to the world, while a lot of other injustices are seen as human conflicts. To understand the difference between a conflict and an antagonism: a conflict can be compromised. An antagonism is always one or the other. The relationship between America and Black suffering, between America and Indigenous genocide — that ain’t a conflict that gets resolved through better policy. That’s the structuring antagonism that makes America possible in the first place. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for Indigenous folks in America or Black folks. Democracy in America is situated upon Black bodies and Native American blood. We don’t get it without that. So when we think about the romanticized ideals around what the law is supposed to do, the ideals don’t grapple with the material reality. The scholar in me and the nigga in me is asking, in the bare bones — what has citizenship guaranteed for the nigga and the native? What has equal protection meant for us? What has political representation in citizenship meant for our plight? And here’s where the antagonism between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous discourse really comes home. After 1965, when you have non-Black, non-white immigrant populations migrating to America, and they want to prove they’re citizens in court, they have historically tethered their citizenship and humanity to whiteness. You go to the courthouse, you stand before the judge, you say “I’m a citizen because I’m white” — showing you the inherent anti-Blackness within the law itself. The law was structured in opposition to particular subject positions getting rights and humanity. So when in 2026 we start talking about immigrant rights, when we start talking about how we’re going to use the law to push back against birthright citizenship being overturned, we have to grapple with the fact that this very legal apparatus, from 1776 to 2026, has been the tool we’re being asked to believe in. And I gotta be honest with y’all — I was around a bunch of lawyers in that room, and it made me think about why I didn’t become a lawyer. I didn’t become one because epistemologically, which is just a fancy word for how we produce knowledge, I could never get down with the idea that the law could be discursively permuted to get whatever ruling we want. The law is very black and white. The more we deny that, the more we have these conversations about immigration rights with this antagonistic tension sitting in the backdrop unaddressed. Two policies in 1965 tell this story plain. The 1965 Immigration Act opens the doors to non-white immigration in significant numbers for the first time. The 1965 Voting Rights Act gives Black people federal enforcement protection for the franchise that should have been ours since 1870. These two policies happen in the same year, and the tension between them has been shaping American political life ever since. Because of redlining, because of the legacy of slavery, because of being systematically excluded from banking — economic opportunities in the Black community got filled by other immigrant populations. Whether we talking about hair weave, whether we talking about the nail industry, whether we talking about beauty supply, whether we talking about food industries throughout America, this is the backdrop of living in the Black community. Black entrepreneurs were not given those opportunities. And me being in LA right now, the 1992 Rodney King riots happened in part because of the tension between these two communities — the Black community and the Asian community. If we gloss over that, act like it’s hunky-dory, whoop-dee-doo, we impact our ability to build genuine coalitions and solidarities. When Shaboozey said America was built by immigrants, it wasn’t just Black folks that was pissed off by that statement. When we make those types of declarations, we alienate particular people from particular communities who can’t f**k with the framing because the framing erases them. Then you got Cesar Chavez, who is iconized as the immigrant rights hero, the patron saint of farmworker organizing. Even before we came out with the fact that he was a rapist, even before we came out with the documentation of his misogyny and patriarchy, we already knew he was anti-Black. We already knew that even though he was on immigrant rights, he would call ICE on undocumented farmers when they were undercutting his union. We have statements of him saying anti-Black s**t. So when L.A. is named after him, when Cesar Chavez is the figure that gets centered in pro-immigration mythology, what does that say about whose humanity is allowed to be complicated? Whose contradictions are forgiven? Whose anti-Blackness is folded into the heroic narrative because the broader project of immigration politics needs him? Two things can be true. Chavez did organizing work. Chavez was anti-Black. Refusing to hold both is what allows the antagonism to keep operating in the dark. And let me tell you about indigeneity in California specifically, because this part don’t get touched enough. Right now in California, there are a bunch of Indigenous folks caught up in immigration politics and immigration law — because they get coded as Mexican, because they get coded as Latin American, because the colonial lens of America sees them as Spanish-speaking subjects rather than as Indigenous peoples of land that was theirs before Spain ever arrived, before the United States ever arrived. Gloria Anzaldúa wrote about this in Borderlands/La Frontera — the Mexicans didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. You hear white conservatives telling Mexican people to go back where they came from, and I’m from Texas, born and raised, living in Texas now, and it makes me cringe every time, because nigga, hear it: they are in their home. You view their sovereignty, you view their indigeneity, through the lens of colonizers — i.e., this used to be a Spanish colony, so I’m going to view everybody in this colony as Spanish subjects, point blank period. So even here in California, you got indigenous folks who can’t even access the law’s protection because the 14th Amendment didn’t give them citizenship, but they’re also Indigenous to California, so the law is already insidious to their bodies. They’re seen as aliens in their own land. They’re seen as immigrants in their own land. Because they were colonized by Spaniards who taught them Spanish, and the white folks here only understand their humanity through the colonial language they were forced to speak. This is what we’re dealing with. A Specific Implication For Education For educators, for curriculum builders, for the folks teaching social studies, civics, history, ethnic studies — this analysis is not an academic exercise. It’s a directive. The current public education curriculum on immigration in this country is a curriculum of liberal flattening. Students are taught that America is a nation of immigrants. Students are taught about Ellis Island as the origin story of American belonging. Students are taught that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship in a way that floats free of slavery and Reconstruction. Students are taught about Cesar Chavez as a saint without being taught about his anti-Blackness. Students are taught about the Civil Rights Movement and the Immigration Act of 1965 as parallel stories of progress without being taught about the structural tensions those two policies set into motion. The result is a generation of well-meaning young people who graduate from high school perfectly equipped to perpetuate Indigenous erasure and anti-Black erasure while believing themselves to be on the right side of history. We have to teach the 14th Amendment with the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach the 1965 Immigration Act with the 1965 Voting Rights Act sitting right next to it. We have to teach Chavez with the Black farmworkers he undermined. We have to teach Anzaldúa, we have to teach Wilderson, we have to teach Tuck and Yang. Otherwise we are producing what Charles Mills called the white moral psychology — a citizenry capable of believing in justice while being entirely incapable of recognizing the structuring antagonisms that make injustice possible. Education is elevation, or it ain’t education at all. Intersectional Material Impacts The folks who get crushed hardest in the gap between pro-immigration discourse and Black/Indigenous critique are, of course, the folks sitting at the intersections. Black immigrants — Haitian, Jamaican, Nigerian, Ethiopian, Somali, Afro-Latine — get hit twice. They get hit by immigration enforcement that racially profiles them as both Black and foreign. They get hit by Black communities that haven’t always made space for them in the freedom struggle. ICE deports Black immigrants at disproportionate rates relative to their share of the immigrant population — that’s documented, that’s empirical. Black women immigrants face the misogynoir Moya Bailey named on top of the xenophobia. Black trans immigrants face all of that plus the medical and legal violence the state reserves for trans folks. Indigenous women in California caught between immigration enforcement and federal Indian law sit at a junction where neither legal regime acknowledges their actual sovereignty. Indigenous trans and two-spirit folks navigate colonial frameworks that erased their cultural roles before the United States existed. Disabled Black and Indigenous folks navigate a citizenship that has never accommodated their material needs. Poor Black folks watching wealthy non-Black immigrants integrate into whiteness in ways they never could. This is what intersectional analysis demands — not symbolic representation, but material outcomes. Crenshaw didn’t give us a vibe. She gave us a tool. Use it. Most of the symbolic wins of pro-immigration politics over the last decade have left Black immigrants, Indigenous immigrants, and the Black and Indigenous communities of the United States in materially worse positions, and that ain’t an accident. That’s the antagonism doing its work while the conflict gets compromised. Closing The Loop So when I sat in that room and listened to that 14th Amendment presentation, what I was hearing was the failure to grapple with the foundational antagonism. The failure to grapple with how the 14th Amendment was birthed in Reconstruction and weaponized in Louisiana v. Callais to gut the Voting Rights Act. The failure to grapple with how citizenship for Native folks wasn’t recognized until 1924, and that recognition was a paper formality on top of ongoing genocide. The failure to grapple with how every “nation of immigrants” slogan does the dual work of erasing Indigenous claims and erasing Black labor. The failure to grapple with how the law itself, from 1776 to 2026, has been structured in opposition to Black and Indigenous humanity. The pathway to hell is paved with good intentions, and the room was full of good intentions, and the impact of those good intentions left without my interventions would have been more Indigenous erasure and more anti-Black erasure, dressed up in the language of progressive solidarity. We have to center Blackness and we have to center indigeneity in these conversations, because if we don’t, we engage in indigenous erasure and erasure of Black suffering, and to me that is the cornerstone of America. America is structured and made possible through Black suffering and the genocide of Native Americans. If we’re talking about defending democracy, we have to deal with how democracy has never guaranteed freedom or safety for us. Land back and reparations have to be married together. We don’t get reparations without the land. The land was built with our bodies. Feel me? Education is elevation. Let that marinate. 5 KEY TAKEAWAYS * The 14th Amendment is a Reconstruction-era artifact, not a free-floating immigration document. Any conversation about birthright citizenship that doesn’t begin with slavery, the 13th-14th-15th Amendment sequence, and the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act is doing erasure work, regardless of intent. * Citizenship has never guaranteed humanity for Black or Indigenous people in America. Black folks have been citizens since 1868 and are still having voting rights stripped. Native folks were not citizens until 1924 and were facing ongoing genocide when the paper formality arrived. Romanticized framings of citizenship as protection collapse under historical examination. * “Nation of immigrants” and “no one is illegal on stolen land” are settler moves to innocence. Tuck and Yang’s framework explains how progressive-sounding slogans can do the work of Indigenous erasure by abstracting away specific tribal claims and converting them into universal humanitarian principles that demand nothing back. * The 1965 Immigration Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act set structural tensions in motion that still shape Black/non-Black immigrant relations. The 1992 Rodney King riots, ongoing tensions over Asian businesses in Black communities, the iconization of Cesar Chavez despite his anti-Blackness — these are not coincidences. They are downstream consequences of policies that did not address racial capitalism’s foundational antagonisms. * Land Back and reparations are not competing projects — they are the same project. Coalition between Black and Indigenous freedom struggles requires honesty about the material differences in subject position, not flattening into a singular “people of color” frame that allows non-Black, non-Indigenous immigrants to skip past the structuring antagonisms that make their inclusion in American life possible. Become A Paid Subscriber Y’all, this is what independent media looks like. No corporate backing. No advertiser telling me what I can and can’t say about Cory Booker or AIPAC or Netanyahu. No editor softening the analysis because a Senator’s office called. Just me, a transcript, a stack of receipts, and y’all. Public broadcasting is being defunded. PBS is on life support. NPR is being structurally hollowed out. The Education Is Elevation Substack is filling the void left by the retreat of public education media — with Pan-African analysis, Southern Black Left framing, and the kind of receipts-based political education they don’t teach in school. Fewer than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Less than 1%. So if this piece taught you something, gave you a frame, or armed you with language for the next argument at the family cookout — become a paid subscriber today. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY / RELATED READINGS Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (2010). The foundational text for understanding the distinction between conflict and antagonism that drives this analysis. Wilderson lays out why anti-Blackness is structuring rather than incidental, and why the Indian, the Black, and the Settler operate as three distinct grammars of suffering. If you read one thing from this list, read this. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). The text that gave us “the border crossed us” and reframed indigeneity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Essential for understanding why California’s Indigenous-but-Spanish-speaking populations get caught in immigration enforcement that has no language for their actual subject position. Tuck, Eve and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (2012). The article that named the “settler moves to innocence” — the rhetorical maneuvers that allow non-Native people to feel implicated in colonization without doing the material work of land return. Required reading for anyone using “stolen land” language. Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008). Sexton’s work on how multiracial discourse can flatten and obscure anti-Blackness is directly applicable to how “people of color” framings function in immigration politics. Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract (1997). The philosophical architecture for understanding why a legal apparatus designed to exclude can never simply be reformed into one that includes. Mills’s account of white moral psychology explains the room I was sitting in. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex” (1989) and “Mapping the Margins” (1991). The foundational texts of intersectional analysis. Read them whole — not the watered-down version that survived corporate diversity training. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). The original articulation of how Black women’s freedom requires the dismantling of interlocking systems of oppression. The reason intersectional analysis is non-negotiable. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (2021). Bailey gave us the term misogynoir. Essential for understanding the specific position of Black women immigrants and how their experience does not collapse into either “Black” or “immigrant” frames alone. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). Hartman on the afterlife of slavery and the law’s relationship to Black flesh. Essential context for why the 14th Amendment cannot do what the legal liberal hopes it can. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). Spillers on the gendered grammar of enslavement. The grammar of citizenship is downstream of the grammar of fungibility. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983). Robinson on racial capitalism — the framework for understanding why anti-Blackness is engine, not aberration. Indispensable. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). Rodney on the global structure that produced the migrations being debated in 2026. The immigrants didn’t come from nowhere. They came from the wreckage Europe and America made. Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004; 2nd ed. 2015). Grande on Indigenous education, sovereignty, and the limits of liberal multiculturalism in addressing Native claims. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). The historical record that the standard American history curriculum erases. Read alongside Howard Zinn but understand that Dunbar-Ortiz does what Zinn could not. King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (2019). King’s work specifically theorizes the meeting point of Black and Native critique — exactly the conversation pro-immigration discourse refuses to have. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]