Education is Elevation

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The Most Honest Acre in America The lawn looks like nothing. That’s the point. A flat green silence out front, mowed to the same height as the neighbor’s, asking for nothing, saying nothing. But the landscape in this country is shaped by colonialism, and...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Yesterday I was standing in front of AT&T headquarters in Dallas, 10,000 signatures in my hand, asking one company to reinstate the very initiatives that once gave my community inclusivity, resources, access, and opportunity. I need y’all to sit with the...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. How E. Patrick Johnson took the most celebrated theory of identity in the academy and asked it the one question it kept refusing to answer — whose body are we actually talking about? “Queer theory already covers all of that — once you accept that gender i...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. When I was in college, sitting in a philosophy class before I had the vocabulary of Mills and Wilderson and Hartman to lay over it, I learned the one lesson that has organized everything I have studied since, which is that the law in this country has alwa...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Opening: Name the Villain There is a man walking around this country who handpicked the judges deciding whether your grandmama can vote without standing in a four-hour line, whether your daughter controls her own body, whether your kids drink clean water,...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A male daughter in precolonial Igbo society was a daughter who was socially accepted as a son. See, before there was a missionary, before there was a governor, before the priesthood, before the binary, Africa had more than two ways of being, and the peopl...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. A effeminate man in northern Uganda before the colonizers pulled up was called a Mudoko Dako , and that wasn’t a slur, that wasn’t a scandal, that wasn’t something whispered behind a granary — it was a recognized place in the community, a distinct gender...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Female husbandry is one of the oldest same-gender-loving institutions on the African continent, documented in more than 40 societies both ancient and contemporary, and I already know good and well that half of y’all reading this ain’t know that, because y...

Thank you Marcus Flowers , metamorphosic , Andrea Maria Romandini , Bluesin’ Bob , Kristen Morosky Day , and many others for tuning into my live video with Saadia Mirza ! Join me for my next live video in the app. Y’all want to know how Texas works? Start with the map, because everything else is downstream of the map. When the Republican-led Legislature redrew the congressional lines and the Supre...

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...

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 1...

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 Am...

Thank you Decolonizing Love , Dr. Mary M. Marshall , Netta Fei , metamorphosic , baby guava , and many others for tuning into my live video with 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 conversatio...

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her) , Mnera , Farrah Senne , Louis DeVlugt Personal , 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...

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-to...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The same Supreme Court that said racial profiling is okay when it comes to immigration is the same Supreme Court that said you better not use race when it comes to congressional maps. Name something more insidious. Name one thing in the modern legal lands...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the table for y’all real quick. Netanyahu, the sitting Prime Minister of Israel, sits down for an interview and gets asked a direct question about whether it’s time to reset the financial relationship between Israel and the United States. The m...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Let me set the scene for y’all real quick. Donald Trump stands in front of a room full of schoolchildren and says, with a straight face, that Iran was two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, that the United States had to send B2 bombers to “obliterat...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. May 8, 2024: The Day the Cory Booker Beef Got Personal I want to take y’all back. All the way back. Because folks be acting like my critique of Cory Booker started yesterday, started when he climbed up on the Senate floor for 25 hours, started when the AI...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Y’all know I don’t be playing about Research Over MeSearch. So before anybody tries to make this about feelings, let me put the receipts on the table first. National Center for Education Statistics, 1997. Government data. Over 20,000 households surveyed....

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I asked Dr. Dontá Morrison a question I knew was going to be uncomfortable. I told him it was uncomfortable on purpose. When somebody says “that’s gay as AIDS,” what is that? And he didn’t blink. He called it ignorance at its finest. He pointed out that h...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. On May 4, 2026, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos served as honorary co-chairs of the Met Gala. According to reporting, they put up at least $10 million to sponsor the event, with some sources citing the figure as high as $20 million. The night raised a...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Y’all already know how this goes. Somebody with a microphone, a Black face, and a national platform spends years telling us he’s one of us, then turns around and starts auditioning for the very people who built this country on our backs. That’s where we a...

Thank you Great Society’s “New Frontier” , Selda , Bob Barnett , Jody Medina Precit , Sonja Kuhn , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Education is elevation, y’all. Let me set the table real quick before I get into this drama, this mess. I came across a clip of Candace Owens and Laura Loomer going back and forth, and before we even unpack this...

Thank you LeftieProf , Lynette , Lo Is , zink , Sherell , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. I had a conversation this week with Kimba White Dupree — educator, radio host at WBOK in New Orleans, womanist, mother, lifelong New Orleanian — and we sat with something most folks won’t sit with. We talked about colorism. Not the TikTok version. Not...