Education is Elevation

This year marked the sixth annual Juneteenth on the East, our first time at the Zoo Amphitheater in Oklahoma City, Lupe Fiasco headlining, me cohosting once again with my folks Mandii B, my son Zane taking up space on that stage like the stage was built for him. On the surface, that’s a festival recap. Underneath the surface, Oklahoma City is a classroom, and the state of Oklahoma is one of the mo...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Communal trauma. Y’all, let’s name it. It is a shared psychological and emotional wound experienced by an entire group of people, not just isolated individuals. It occurs when a catastrophic event shatters the core identity, the safety, the security, the...

Y’all know I watch these interviews so you don’t have to. On June 28, 2026, Barack Obama sat down with Michele Norris on MS NOW for a special tied to the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, ten days after the ribbon got cut in John Lewis Plaza, six days before this country throws itself a 250th birthday party. Timing matters, kinfolks. The semiquincentennial machine is runni...

Thank you Reda Rountree (she/her) , Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA , Jeanne Elbe , Judy , Dmg , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This week I sat down with somebody I spent years trying to beat: Brian Ontiveros-Kersch, UNT to my OU, fifteen-something rounds against each other, from random little prelims all the way to the elims of the Nationa...

The clip went something like this: every American who is a natural-born U.S. citizen is only a couple generations removed from somebody who wasn’t, go back far enough and every single American is the child of a migrant, this is literally the United States of America, so trying to end birthright citizenship is the most un-American thing you could push for. And on the surface that sound like solidar...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The first person to ever call himself the Queen of Drag in the United States was not a reality TV star or an algorithm’s invention. His name was William Dorsey Swann, and he was born into slavery in Maryland in 1860, which means the man this country now w...

Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Bacon, sausage, ham, and hot dogs — the World Health Organization, the most authoritative health body on the planet, classifies all of them in the same cancer group as cigarettes, and that ain’t no fringe study buried in a corner of the internet, that’s t...

Thank you Mandy Bynum , PJ Schuster , Nick G, A Dude On The Couch , Kerry Shaw , KarenC-Book Collector📚⚖️🗽🗳️🧿♒️ , and many others for tuning into my live video with Feel Good Action ! Join me for my next live video in the app. On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and read what we now call General Order No. 3. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamati...

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...