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

Beschrijving

Y’all see them children in Mexico busting a pinata with two flags on it — Israeli and American? That image symbolize so much that we got a really young package today, kinfolks. And I already know a lot of people gon’ see this and be infuriated because they wanna believe these children being indoctrinated. But let me hold this one up to the light real quick: if your kid can be a Confederate-flag-toting white supremacist sucker out here at the lake on the back of a F-150, then these kids over there can also be conscious of how these countries impacting their livelihood. Two things can be true, feel me? Symbolism is intentional. Always. And when I see them two flags taped together on a pinata, I ain’t seeing random teenage angst — I’m seeing children doing what their elders been doing for generations: naming the structural relationship that’s stealing their air. So before y’all get to clutching them pearls, let that marinate for a second. Here’s the thing most of us don’t know about. I like to believe a lot of us are consciously aware — no pun intended — of how America exploits and criminalizes our southern neighbor Mexico. But the relationship between Mexico and the Israeli settler-colonial project? Most of y’all lost in the sauce on that one. So lemme walk through the receipts. The struggle of Palestinians resonate with Mexico despite 7,000 miles between them and despite distinct geopolitical surroundings. Why? Because the violent consequences of settler colonialism in Palestine conjure up the post-colonial trauma that’s already living in Mexican soil. Patrick Wolfe said it plain — settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. Robinson 83 tells us racial capitalism don’t work without antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as its engine, not as accidents. So when two settler projects start trading tools, it ain’t coincidence. It’s the family business. Look at Pegasus. Pegasus is a spy web developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, and as journalist Anthony Lowenstein documents, it was tried and tested in occupied Palestine before it ever touched a Mexican phone. Designed to be covertly and remotely installed on iOS and Android. Designed to harvest you in your sleep. And then exported. Lowenstein calls it an exported occupation, and that phrasing matter — because once it’s been deployed and proven in the field, Israeli companies promote them tools as battle-tested and occupied Palestine, which then becomes a sales pitch for any government trying to criminalize the folks just trying to get their immigration on. This means the surveillance regime that disappears Palestinian journalists is the same surveillance regime that’s tracking Mexican human rights defenders. Same technology. Same logic. Same vendor. Just admit it: that’s not parallel oppression, that’s the same machine running two shifts. Now lemme show y’all why there’s a statue of Yasser Arafat in Mexico City — because that question alone shut down most American history teachers I know. Arafat was the Palestinian politician and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in trying to establish a free Palestinian state. He kept close diplomatic relations with Mexico his whole life. In 1975, he met with then-Mexican President Luis Echeverria — the President flew to Cairo to meet him and soon established diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year, the PLO established an information office in Mexico City. By 1995, that office got elevated to an official delegation. Then in 2000, Arafat met with then-Mexican Foreign Minister Rosario Green, who paid an official visit to Gaza City and invited him to Mexico on behalf of the president. He passed in 2004. And soon after his death, the government of Mexico City placed a memorial in his honor. Crazy how that’s the part of Mexican diplomatic history that don’t make it into the news cycle when folks wanna debate Mexican-American identity. They’ll show you Cinco de Mayo and a margarita but they won’t show you the Arafat statue. Wonder why. Now let me close this loop by going back home to Texas, because y’all know I’m a Bryan, TX, boy and I got receipts for the local too. When we talk about remembering the Alamo and the Texas Revolution, the reason Stephen F. Austin was beefing with Santa Ana is because they had a little agreement in settler solidarity that went bad. Santa Ana had even agreed Anglo settlers could come in — under the condition they convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and not bring enslaved people. Austin and them broke the deal. So the Texas Revolution wasn’t liberation, it was a settler franchise dispute. Two colonial powers arguing over who get to extract from indigenous land and Black bodies. iMa bE the one to say it: remembering the Alamo without remembering that context is just remembering the slave power. Most of y’all lost in the salsa of settler colonialism so heavy that you don’t even view Mexican people as indigenous folks of Turtle Island. You view them as immigrant subjects of Mexico. But the Conquistadors — Hernandez, Cortez and nem — was settlers. Mexico is a settler-colonial state laid on top of indigenous land just like the United States. Sandy Grande talks about how settler colonialism requires the disappearance of the indigenous, not just from the land but from the imagination. So when you call a Mixtec grandmother an immigrant, you’re not making a statement of geography. You’re making whiteness visible by erasing her ancestral claim to a continent. Charles Mills in 1997 calls this the racial contract — a tacit agreement that the world is white people’s to allocate. Then you got Europeans believing this country was theirs to conquer, both the Spanish and the English, just like them folks over yonder way across the pond believe it’s their God-given right to have the land because it was promised to them 3,000 years ago. Sounds like God only come down to tell white folks this is your land, huh? Every accusation is a confession. Every theology of conquest is an admission that the conquest required theology to justify it. Apply Wilderson here for a second. Afropessimism gon’ tell us the Black is figured as fungible and socially dead — not analogous to indigenous dispossession, but structurally entangled with it. Robinson 83 close the loop: racial capitalism uses antiblackness as essential engine of surplus value AND uses indigenous dispossession as essential engine of land accumulation. They run together. Which means Palestinian children buried under rubble, Mexican migrants tracked by Pegasus, and Black Houstonians criminalized by predictive policing tools developed by the same defense contractors — we all caught in different rooms of the same house. And this is also where the intersectional material impacts hit different. Crenshaw 89 told y’all the experience at the intersection ain’t additive, it’s structurally distinct. So an indigenous Mexican woman crossing the border ain’t just experiencing xenophobia plus sexism plus colorism — she’s experiencing a specific weaponization of all three under a surveillance infrastructure shipped from Tel Aviv to Mexico City to Texas. Combahee told us in 77 that if Black women were free, it would mean everybody else would have to be free. Apply that here: if indigenous women of the Americas were free of settler-colonial surveillance, the whole regime collapse. Moya Bailey’s misogynoir framework still apply too, even at this scale. Because who gets surveilled hardest by these tools when they hit U.S. soil? Black women organizers. Indigenous women water protectors. Trans women of color reporting on ICE. The Pegasus-style tools don’t just go to foreign governments — they get repackaged for domestic departments. That ain’t paranoia. That’s procurement records. Now lemme name the contradiction and let it hang. The same federal budget that claim it can’t afford universal pre-K, can’t afford Medicaid expansion, can’t afford reparations study, somehow always got billions for foreign military aid that loops back into surveillance contracts that get pointed at the American working class. Gil Scott-Heron said it best in 1970 and it still apply: Was all that money I made last year for billion-dollar defense aid? How come ain’t no money here for the kids in Bryan or Brownsville or Brooklyn? Whitey on the moon. Whitey on the border. Same flight plan. Having the luxury to ignore the Mexico-Israel surveillance pipeline is a sign of citizenship privilege. Naming neutrality on it is itself a position. Bell 91 talked about interest convergence — the dominant class only support justice for the marginalized when it serves their own interests. The reason these two settler projects bond is because their interests already converged a long time ago. The reason American media don’t wanna talk about it is because that interest convergence is the load-bearing wall of the empire. By doing the work of pretending Mexico is just an immigration story and Palestine is just a foreign policy story, the media is making whiteness visible — visible as the third party in the room directing the conversation. So them children with the pinata? They wasn’t being indoctrinated. They was educated. They was doing in public what their elders been doing for generations — naming the structural relationship between two settler-colonial projects that don’t see them as fully human. The bell didn’t dismiss them, the truth did. Education is elevation. Two things can be true: you can love your country and still tell the truth about its alliances. You can grieve every Israeli child and still grieve every Palestinian child. You can love Mexico and still call out the Mexican state’s complicity. You can be American and still know America selling Mexico Israeli surveillance is not freedom, it’s a franchise. Just admit it. And then do something about it. Critical Historical Context Timeline of Mexico-Palestine-Israel Relations * 1947–48: Mexico abstains on UN Resolution 181 (the partition of Palestine), one of the few Latin American countries not to vote yes. That ain’t an accident — it’s continuity with Mexico’s earlier 1930s diplomatic resistance to fascism and its post-revolutionary commitment to non-intervention (the Estrada Doctrine, 1930). * 1975: President Luis Echeverria flies to Cairo and establishes diplomatic relations with the PLO. Later that year the PLO opens an information office in Mexico City — the first such office in the Western Hemisphere outside of Cuba. * 1975: Same year, Mexico votes for UN Resolution 3379 equating Zionism with racism. The U.S. responded by organizing a Jewish-American tourism boycott of Mexico, which Mexico’s economy felt immediately. The Echeverria government walked the vote back diplomatically — receipt of how economic coercion shapes Global South solidarity. * 1995: PLO office in Mexico City elevated to official delegation status. * 2000: Foreign Minister Rosario Green visits Gaza City and formally invites Arafat to Mexico on behalf of the President. * 2004: Arafat passes. Mexico City government places a memorial bust of him in Parque Tlatelolco — itself the site of the 1968 Mexican state massacre of student protesters. The placement is intentional symbolism: anti-imperial martyrs alongside victims of state violence. * 2017: First Pegasus revelations published showing Mexican government surveilled journalists, lawyers, and activists investigating the 43 disappeared Ayotzinapa students. The same spyware later linked to surveillance of Jamal Khashoggi’s circle before his murder. * 2021–present: Forensic Architecture, Citizen Lab, and Amnesty International continue documenting Pegasus deployments across Mexico, including against the families of the Ayotzinapa students and against human rights defenders working on femicide and disappearance cases. The Pre-1492 Frame Most American schooling treat 1492 like a starting pistol and not a crime scene. Indigenous nations across what is now Mexico — Mexica, Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huichol, Yaqui, Raramuri, Purepecha, Otomi — had governance, trade, astronomy, agriculture, codices, and diplomacy. The conquistadors didn’t bring civilization, they brought a particular structure for extracting it. Sandy Grande’s Red Pedagogy and Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks both argue that decolonization can’t be a metaphor — it requires material return of land, governance, and economy. Stephen F. Austin, Santa Anna, and the Real Texas Revolution This is the Bryan, TX, hometown receipt. Stephen F. Austin negotiated with Mexico in the 1820s to bring Anglo settlers into Coahuila y Tejas under three conditions: convert to Catholicism, learn Spanish, and don’t bring enslaved Black people. Austin and them broke all three — particularly the slavery clause. The Texas Revolution of 1835–36 was, at its root, a settler franchise dispute over whether the slave economy would expand westward. Remember the Alamo means remember the slave power. Bryan, TX, is named for William Joel Bryan, nephew of Stephen F. Austin. That heritage is concrete in my hometown’s street signs. Pegasus and the Exported Occupation Anthony Loewenstein’s The Palestine Laboratory (2023) documents how Israeli surveillance, weapons, and crowd-control technology gets battle-tested in the occupied territories and then exported. NSO Group’s Pegasus is the most famous example, but it’s part of a broader supply chain — Elbit drones, Cellebrite phone-cracking, AnyVision facial recognition. The U.S.-Mexico border has been a primary buyer. Customs and Border Protection has contracted with multiple Israeli defense firms for tower surveillance systems along the Rio Grande. This means the same towers watching Palestinians in Hebron got cousins watching folks in Brownsville. A Specific Implication for Education Here’s the part I want educators, parents, and students to sit with. American K-12 curriculum teach Mexico and Palestine in two completely separate boxes — Mexico goes in the immigration and Spanish-language box, Palestine goes in the Middle East conflict box. By design, those two boxes don’t touch. And as long as they don’t touch, the surveillance pipeline, the arms pipeline, and the settler-colonial logic stay invisible to the next generation of voters and taxpayers. Freire told us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that banking education — where students are treated as empty containers for state-approved facts — is itself a tool of oppression. The fragmentation of these histories is banking education at the geopolitical scale. The fix is problem-posing pedagogy: let students put the maps side by side, let them follow the procurement records, let them ask why a Mexico City statue of Arafat is something they never heard about. This means as an educator I’m asking three things of teachers, librarians, and homeschooling parents reading this: * Teach Pre-Columbian Mexico as indigenous history, not as Spanish history. Use Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun. Use Patrisia Gonzales’s Red Medicine. * Teach the Texas Revolution with primary sources from Mexican archives, not just the Austin–Houston narrative. The Texas State Library has the original Mexican land grants in Spanish — use them. * Teach surveillance literacy. Students should know what Pegasus is, what Cellebrite is, what predictive policing software is in their own district’s budget. Naming the tools is the first step in resisting them. If you a public school teacher in Texas, I already know — y’all working under a hostile curriculum regime where this kind of teaching can cost you your job. That’s not an accident either. The same political coalition pushing book bans and CRT panic is the same coalition that benefits from these histories staying separate. Their fear is itself the receipt. Education is elevation. They know it. That’s why they fight it. Thanks for reading Education Is Elevation! This post is public so feel free to share it. Black Communities in the United States Border-tested surveillance technology don’t stay at the border. Predictive policing software, facial recognition, and stingray cellphone trackers piloted along the Rio Grande get redeployed in Black neighborhoods in Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, and Detroit. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters both document how surveillance infrastructure built for one racialized population gets adapted to police another. Black folks pay for the pipeline twice — once as taxpayers funding foreign military aid, again as targets of the tech when it comes home. Indigenous Women in Mexico Mexico’s femicide crisis — over 10 women killed daily — overlaps directly with the deployment of Pegasus against the journalists and human rights defenders investigating it. When the state spyware get pointed at the people documenting the violence, the violence accelerate. Indigenous women in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero — already at the intersection of class, race, gender, and language exclusion — bear the heaviest cost. Crenshaw’s intersection ain’t a metaphor here, it’s a coroner’s report. Palestinian Women and Children Every Pegasus contract signed by a foreign government is revenue that funds the next iteration of the tool deployed in Gaza and the West Bank. Palestinian women — particularly Palestinian women journalists like Shireen Abu Akleh — have been systematically targeted. The pipeline don’t just flow Israel-outward. It flows back, with the revenue strengthening the original occupation. Black and Brown Migrants at the Border Haitian migrants in Del Rio. Honduran asylum seekers in Brownsville. African migrants routed through Tapachula. They all encounter the same Israeli-designed surveillance towers, the same Israeli-trained ICE units, the same biometric capture systems first beta-tested on Palestinians. The migrant body becomes the laboratory subject for the next export. Working-Class Americans of All Colors The taxpayer dollars that fund the foreign military aid, the border contracts, and the domestic policing tools come out of the same budget that don’t have money for public schools, libraries, mental health care, or rural hospitals. Whitey on the moon, whitey on the border, and ain’t no money here. Robinson 83 told us racial capitalism don’t just hurt the racialized — it disciplines the white working class too, by making sure their wages and services stay subordinate to the war machine. 5 Key Takeaways * Mexico and Palestine are linked by a documented surveillance pipeline. Pegasus and related Israeli-developed spyware were battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported to the Mexican government, where they have been used against journalists, human rights defenders, and the families of the disappeared. This is what Anthony Loewenstein calls exported occupation, and it is a structural relationship, not a coincidence. * Mexico’s diplomatic history with Palestine is older and deeper than American media admits. The Yasser Arafat memorial in Mexico City, the 1975 PLO office, and Foreign Minister Rosario Green’s official visit to Gaza City are all part of a Global South solidarity tradition that predates the contemporary moment. * Mexican people are indigenous people of Turtle Island, not immigrant subjects. Calling them otherwise is settler-colonial amnesia. The conquistadors were settlers; the Texas Revolution was a settler franchise dispute over the slave economy; and the modern U.S.-Mexico border is itself a settler-colonial line drawn through indigenous nations like the Tohono O’odham. * The intersection matters materially. Indigenous Mexican women, Palestinian women, Black women in U.S. cities, and migrant women at the border are all surveilled by the same supply chain of tools and trained operators. Crenshaw’s intersectionality and Combahee’s analysis of interlocking oppressions are not abstract — they describe a procurement system. * Public education is the battlefield. The fragmentation of Mexico and Palestine into separate curriculum boxes is itself an ideological tool. Teaching these histories together — and teaching surveillance literacy alongside them — is a precondition for any meaningful resistance. Education is elevation. Always was. BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher, my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Annotated Bibliography / Related Readings Loewenstein, Anthony. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Verso, 2023). The definitive contemporary text on how Israeli surveillance and weapons technology gets battle-tested in occupied Palestine and exported globally, including to Mexico. Required reading for understanding the Pegasus pipeline. Wolfe, Patrick. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (Cassell, 1999). Wolfe’s foundational argument that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that it operates through the logic of elimination. The frame that makes the Mexico-Palestine parallel legible. Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed, 1983). Robinson’s articulation of racial capitalism as a system that requires antiblackness and indigenous dispossession as engines, not aberrations. Wilderson, Frank B. III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke, 2010). Afropessimist framework distinguishing Black social death from the Settler/Native antagonism — crucial for thinking the entanglement without collapsing the distinction. Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract (Cornell, 1997). Mills’s argument that white supremacy operates as a global political system through a tacit racial contract — the philosophical scaffolding for understanding settler solidarity. Crenshaw, Kimberle. Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989). The original intersectionality essay. The frame for analyzing how indigenous women, Palestinian women, and Black women experience structurally distinct harm at the intersection. Combahee River Collective. The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977). Black feminist statement establishing the interlocking nature of oppression and the principle that the freedom of Black women requires the dismantling of all oppressive systems. Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed (NYU Press, 2021). Bailey’s elaboration of misogynoir as a structural force, applicable to how surveillance targets Black women organizers domestically. Grande, Sandy. Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004). Grande’s argument for indigenous-centered education and her critique of settler-colonial schooling structures. Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minnesota, 2014). Coulthard’s argument against the politics of recognition and for material decolonization. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor (Decolonization, 2012). The essay every educator should read before using the word decolonize. Insists on material land return. Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (Oxford, 2019). Centers Nahuatl-language sources to tell Mexica history from indigenous perspective rather than Spanish chroniclers. Gonzales, Patrisia. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (Arizona, 2012). Indigenous Mexican women’s traditional knowledge as resistance to colonial medicine. Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Duke, 2015). Browne’s argument that modern surveillance was built on the technologies of policing Black bodies — applicable to how border tech gets domestically redeployed. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe [https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

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]

27 mei 20264 min

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]

26 mei 20261 h 14 min

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