Education is Elevation

About Education is Elevation

Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. theconsciouslee.substack.com (https://theconsciouslee.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

The Conscious Lee

Category

education · news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

11 Feb 2025

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

147 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   6 Oct 2026

   Found Responsible for Rape, Back on the Field: LSU Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

   Trigger warning for everybody that has experienced sexual violence. We talking about sexual violence for educational purposes only, and I need y’all to take care of yourselves while you read this. The Group Chat Is the Confession Have y’all heard the news? CBS News New York obtained more messages from the group chat of the seven Cornell men accused of drugging and raping a woman for hours inside the Chi Phi fraternity house, and kinfolks, they are not good. According to the lawsuit, while this young woman was being assaulted, somebody in that chat asked if the “shop” was “still open,” somebody answered yeah with a devil emoji, and somebody else added a yeah of their own, which means that instead of stopping it, grown men with Ivy League student IDs was referring to a human being as a store with its lights on. Just utterly disgusting, awful behavior, and I want to sit in that word for a second, shop, because the language is the evidence, the language tells you exactly how they saw her, not as a classmate, not as somebody’s daughter, not as a person with a future, but as inventory. Let me give you the receipts, because here at Education Is Elevation it’s Research over MeSearch. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, was 20 years old in October 2024 when she went to the Chi Phi house at Cornell. Her 101 page civil complaint, filed in Manhattan in September 2026, alleges she was pressured into ketamine, marijuana, and alcohol until she was incapacitated, that around 1:42 in the morning one member posted in a Snapchat group called “Chi Phi Actives” that there was free sex upstairs, and that more men came into the room over the next several hours, with the assault ending somewhere around 5:45 that morning. On stream I said seven hours, and the filing actually describes more than four, which don’t make it better, it makes it a timeline. Crazy how the punishment was the part that went viral. The complaint says Cornell suspended the men, then let some of them “mitigate their conduct” by writing essays, and her lawyer says only two of the seven were expelled. Essays. Somebody’s daughter left that campus and never came back, and some of the men accused of breaking her got a writing assignment. One of the men named in the suit reportedly went on to work at a Wells Fargo branch in Charlotte and was let go only after Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten announced on September 28, 2026, that he was reopening the case and taking it to a grand jury. Think about that. If he got a degree from Cornell, he was not out here struggling, he was able to go live his best life for two whole years while she carried it, and the bank didn’t flinch until the cameras did. Now I want to be precise, because precision is power. No criminal charges have been filed against any of these men, at least two of them deny the allegations through their lawyers, and the civil claims have not been tested in court. Two things can be true. Every man named in that suit is entitled to his day in court, and the institution that let “essays” stand in for accountability is entitled to none of our benefit of the doubt, because the institution already had its day, and it spent it protecting itself. Born From the Movement, Raised by the General Counsel To understand how we got here, we gotta go back. Title IX was a major federal civil rights law passed in 1972, signed by Richard Nixon on June 23 of that year, written into being by Representative Patsy Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color ever elected to Congress, alongside Representative Edith Green, with Senator Birch Bayh carrying it in the Senate. It was modeled after Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which means this law is the direct progeny of the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, it is the grandchild of the lunch counter and the consciousness raising circle at the same time. Most of y’all don’t know the Black women’s history sitting underneath that. On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor, a 24 year old Black mother, was walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, when six white men kidnapped her at gunpoint and raped her. The NAACP sent its best investigator to Abbeville, a young woman named Rosa Parks, and Parks helped build a national campaign around Recy Taylor more than a decade before anybody knew her name from a bus. Two separate all white, all male grand juries refused to indict. Historian Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street makes the argument plain: the civil rights movement was, in no small part, a movement against the sexual violence Black women survived, and the Montgomery organizing infrastructure was built by women who had been fighting rape long before they ever fought segregated seating. So when people act like campus sexual assault is a “women’s issue” separate from civil rights, they are erasing the very women who made the civil rights movement possible. Then came the legal ladder. In Alexander v. Yale (1980), Yale students argued for the first time that sexual harassment was sex discrimination under Title IX, with a young Catharine MacKinnon advising. In Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools (1992), the Supreme Court said students could sue for money damages. In Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education (1999), LaShonda Davis, a fifth grader in Georgia, gave us the rule that schools are liable when they are “deliberately indifferent” to harassment they know about. In 1990, after Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered in her Lehigh University dorm in 1986, Congress passed the Clery Act forcing colleges to report campus crime. Then the 2011 Dear Colleague letter pushed schools to act, the 2017 administration rescinded it, the 2020 rule rewrote the whole process around live hearings and cross examination, the 2024 rule tried to widen protections again, and on January 9, 2025, a federal court in Kentucky vacated the 2024 rule entirely, which put the country right back on the 2020 framework that governs today. So here’s what I know as somebody with a degree in adult and higher education, as somebody that has been faculty and staff at multiple different universities and different entities and elements. In a lot of these institutions, sadly, the Title IX office that was created for gender equity, for making sure women can participate fully in education, functions in practice to make sure the university is not sued. In too many places, the office only exists to protect the institution from the assailant’s liability, not to protect the student from the assailant. Let me say that again for the folks in the back. It protects the institution from the assailant, not the woman from the assailant. Cornell’s own numbers tell on it. A student who shared her story on campus said that after she was assaulted her freshman year and reported it, she learned someone else had already reported the same man, and later found out they weren’t the only two. Cornell’s own Presidential Task Force on Campus Sexual Assault, launched after this 2024 incident, reported that a 2025 campus survey found 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men experienced sexual assault during their time at Cornell. An earlier survey cited in The Cornell Daily Sun found only 38% of respondents even knew how to file an official complaint. That is a communication breakdown at best, and at worst it’s a design feature, because what you can’t find, you can’t file, and what you can’t file, can’t be counted against you. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Purple and Gold Probation Let me get around here real quick, because this is the part that really pissed me off, and I’m only saying it in a humorous way to keep from saying it in a violent way. At LSU, the university’s own Title IX process found a football player responsible for sexual assault and forcible rape. Let me repeat that slowly, the university found him responsible, this ain’t a rumor, this ain’t a TikTok, this is the institution’s own finding. LSU suspended him for a year. He appealed. The university kept the finding of rape and then reversed the suspension, swapping it for two years of “disciplinary probation without restrictions,” which let him right back onto the team. According to reporting from the coverage I was reading, this was a Black woman, and from what’s been reported the young man has not been publicly named, a criminal investigation is open with the East Baton Rouge District Attorney, and no charges have been filed. So you mean to tell me a university can look at the evidence, say yes, he raped her, and then say, but we need him on Saturdays? That is not discipline, that is a depth chart. We see how the system of white supremacy and capitalism always sides with patriarchy when patriarchy is profitable, and when the profit is a Black man’s body on a football field, the system will even protect a Black man against a Black woman, because in that moment he’s not a man to them, he’s a revenue stream. That’s on Anita Hill and that’s on Clarence Thomas, and I’ll say more about that in another video. LSU also got a history here that should make all of us uncomfortable, because this ain’t the first time the institution has been caught choosing the program over the victim. The 2021 Husch Blackwell investigation into LSU found years of mishandled sexual misconduct reports involving athletes, and the people who reported it were too often the ones who paid. Same school, same playbook, same tired ending. Protecting Women From Ghosts While the Wolves Get Scholarships Now here go the contradiction that I need y’all to sit with. Louisiana, the state where LSU sits, passed its Fairness in Women’s Sports Act in 2022 to “protect women” from trans athletes, and the governor at the time let it become law without even signing it. Louisiana loves to say they want to protect women from trans people in sports. They want to protect women in the category of people they claim are trying to erase them. Hey, listen. A woman was raped at LSU, by the university’s own finding, and they suspended the player and then reinstated him. I genuinely ask: how do we have more energy for make believe threats to women when it comes to trans people than for the real threats to women when it comes to sexual assault and violence? In December 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker told the Senate that he knew of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among roughly 510,000 college athletes. Fewer than ten. Then on February 5, 2025, the White House signed an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” and the NCAA changed its policy the next day. Meanwhile a 35% assault rate for undergraduate women at one Ivy League school produced a task force and a press release. This means the folks running the “protect women” campaign are wrong about where the danger is, and they know it, because if you actually cared about women’s safety you would follow the numbers, and the numbers lead to the frat house, not the locker room. As men, a lot of us sensationalize trans women in sports because we believe our daughters should never have to play against a trans woman because that’s not fair. Why do you care more about fairness in competitive climates than you care about sending your daughter to a college where she can be raped by somebody in a fraternity? I promise you the Greek system in America has been a breeding ground for sexual violence toward women, white women, Black women, Asian women, Latina women. Go to any big campus, especially the Power Four schools, the ones that is the university of the state, and I guarantee there is a long legacy of women that have been fucked over by the institution because the institution was protecting the same face. One time, Macy Gray hopped in my comment section and asked me, basically, if y’all gonna protect trans women in the WNBA, what are y’all doing for the real women? My point was, there is no trans woman in the WNBA, but I let it go. Then I had to tell her, the “real women” in the WNBA been telling you what they worried about. They worried about the league not giving them their equitable share of the revenue compared to how the NBA treats its laborers. They worried about the summer of 2025, when men threw sex toys onto WNBA courts in game after game because they thought it was funny to mock women’s sexuality in their own workplace. So right here we have the victimization pattern: instead of dealing with what’s in front of you, you’d much rather deal with hypotheticals. You don’t want to deal with the unethical billionaire, you want to deal with the hypothetical ethical billionaire. You don’t want to deal with the actual sexual assault threat in front of your face, you want to deal with the potentiality of what if a trans woman was in the WNBA. That’s how I know y’all use women’s sports as an aha gotcha moment, and that’s how I know y’all don’t really mean it. Power Hates a Name Tag To me, this is all about power. One of the first literature bases that taught me how to understand the power of labeling, the power of going unnamed, and the power of going uncategorized is whiteness studies. Richard Dyer, in his 1997 book White, argued that whiteness secures its power by passing as the default, the unmarked norm, the thing that represents “just people” while everybody else gets a label. Apply Dyer here. Power always wants to go unnamed and unidentified, which is why it has always been treated like a crime, in different ways, to speak truth to power, because the moment you name the thing, you make it visible, and visible power can be held to account. That’s the whole architecture of rape culture, too. The rapist wants to be “a good kid who made a mistake.” The fraternity wants to be “a brotherhood.” The university wants to be “a community.” Nobody wants to be named. A part of gaslighting is linguistically disarming you, making sure you don’t even have the language to describe what you’re going through, because if you can’t name it, you can’t fight it. That’s the reason Project 2025, in its very foreword, calls for deleting terms like “gender equality,” “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and “reproductive health” from every federal rule and regulation. That’s the reason they go after books and words and whole fields of study. The fight over vocabulary is a fight over who gets to name the harm. Think about it like this. When they’re recalling lettuce and garlic and onion powder and baby food and dog food, remember we got food safety law in this country in the first place because, in the early 1900s, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed what the Chicago meatpacking barons was putting in the can. Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day in 1906, the ancestors of today’s FDA, because everybody knew that if a company didn’t have to worry about feeding you rat pellets, and wasn’t regulated for it, they gonna feed you rat pellets. The deregulation agenda flips that. In spring 2025, the USDA withdrew its proposed rule to crack down on salmonella in poultry. Then somebody in my comment section said salmonella is “a personal problem.” A personal problem. It ain’t the problem of the corporations, bro, it’s a personal problem for the people eating it. Crazy how it’s never a personal problem for the right people. When El Chapo moving weight, they don’t say it’s a personal problem for the fiends. Well, actually they do, depending on who the fiend is. Y’all know the difference between the crack epidemic and the opioid epidemic. The Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986 punished crack 100 times harsher than powder cocaine, and it took until 2010 to bring that down to 18 to 1, while the opioid crisis got framed as a public health emergency with treatment money attached. One got rehabilitation, the other got criminalization. That’s just what that is. Same logic with proximity. It blows my mind how rich people can be in proximity to a bunch of thugs and Epsteins and never be seen as an accessory, but when poor people are seen in proximity to a gang, that proximity is an affiliation. My boy Zero once said association brings about simulation: hang out with a fiend, you’ll become a dope fiend. I thought it was just a bar when I was younger, but it’s a theory of power. So if some rinky dink Cornell students and a no name LSU player can get away with sexual violence, what you think the billionaires in the Epstein class get away with? What you think for them? Mr. Montgomery’s Question and the Statute of Limitations on Somebody’s Soul Somebody in the chat, Mr. Montgomery, asked me a question, and I’m glad he did, because it brings this whole thing home. He said, iMa bE, “Stopping individual behavior is nigh impossible, there are already laws that should prevent those behaviors, so what further action would you desire be taken against students from two years ago?” When the Me Too movement went viral in October 2017, a lot of people asked the exact question you asked. What’s the point? Why now? Why you wait so long? Here’s what the record shows: the student journalists at The Cornell Daily Sun been pushing on this case since 2024, the woman reported to campus police within weeks, and her lawyer says police had the Snapchat messages and never followed up, while the district attorney says those messages never reached his office. So the “delay” was not her silence, the delay was the system passing the file around like a hot plate. My answer is simple. I think that if you rob anybody of their livelihood and their sanity and their peace, then you should go to jail. Even the State of New York agrees that time ain’t an alibi: in 2006 New York eliminated the statute of limitations for first degree rape entirely, and in 2019 it extended the window for second degree rape to 20 years and third degree rape to 10. Two years is not even close to the line. So the legal answer to “why now” is “because the law says now is still on time.” A lot of us have trouble seeing the humanity in women because it’s like a nebulous woman that exists out there somewhere. So let me make it personal. If your sister or your mother or your auntie was violated by a man, and she tried to get charges brought for two years, and two years later they’re finally brought, do you think those charges are just? I think they would be just. If somebody broke into your house, stole your s**t, and robbed your sense of peace, and two years later the police found them, would you feel like two years transpiring means they no longer deserve consequences for robbing you? How is it that our law has more capacity to criminalize an individual for stealing property than for stealing a person’s personhood? This is where the debate coach in me comes out. Mr. Montgomery’s question presents itself as neutral, just a reasonable question, but claimed neutrality is itself a position. The question plays two roles: what it says is “what’s the remedy,” and what it does is put the burden back on the victim to justify her own pain. That’s exactly why so many women feel discouraged from coming forward, because they will be trivialized this way, asked “so what do you want?” as if wanting accountability is greedy. And this comment fits so ugly poetically into my analysis about whiteness and power, because power is strongest when it goes unnamed, and asking a survivor to justify the timing is just another way of asking her to stop naming it. What I know as an advocate for women and gender equality is that most sexual assault offenses go unreported. Repeat that: most sexual assault offenses go unreported. Follow it up with another data point that’s not my feelings, it’s the facts: the majority of the men who are reported go uncharged and unconvicted. RAINN’s long cited analysis of federal data estimates that out of every 1,000 sexual assaults, only about 310 are reported to police and only about 25 end with the perpetrator incarcerated. So when we talk about it as an error of judgment, or boys will be boys, or so much time has passed and now he got a family and a career, how does any of that center what happened to her? The Syllabus Says Consent, the Sanction Says Essay Let me speak directly to higher education, because this is my field. When a university lets students “mitigate” an alleged gang rape with essays, it is teaching a lesson to every student on that campus, and the lesson is that the conduct code is a writing prompt. Sociologists Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan, in Sexual Citizens (2020), studied Columbia undergraduates and showed that campus assault is shaped by what they call “sexual geographies,” meaning who controls the space, the alcohol, and the door. Apply Hirsch and Khan here. When a fraternity owns the house, supplies the substances, and runs the group chat, the institution has outsourced its most dangerous geography to the people with the least incentive to police it. Peggy Reeves Sanday saw it back in 1990 in Fraternity Gang Rape, after a 1983 incident at the University of Pennsylvania: brotherhood rituals can turn a woman into the shared object through which men prove loyalty to each other. A group chat that says “shop still open” is that ritual with Wi Fi. Crazy how Cornell is also the birthplace of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Black Greek letter fraternity, founded on that very campus on December 4, 1906, because Black students were shut out of white social life. Two things can be true: Black Greek life was born from exclusion and has given us leaders and service for over a century, and every Greek organization, ours included, has to answer for hazing, coercion, and the culture of protecting the brother over the person harmed. Accountability can’t be selective, or it ain’t accountability. Now the policy…. Because a federal court vacated the 2024 Title IX rule in January 2025, campuses are back on the 2020 framework, which requires live hearings with cross examination in higher education and narrows what counts as harassment to conduct that is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.” That means a survivor at Cornell or LSU today can be forced to relive her worst night under questioning by her alleged attacker’s advisor, while the institution calls the process “fair.” Pair that with a Department of Education whose Office for Civil Rights has been gutted by staffing cuts, and you get campuses grading their own homework with nobody checking the grade. K through 12 is where it starts, though. Davis v. Monroe County was about a fifth grader, LaShonda Davis, which tells you the culture is learned long before freshman orientation. Meanwhile a growing number of states restrict or require opt in permission for sex education, and consent instruction gets swept up in fights over “parental rights,” which means a lot of boys arrive at college with a playbook from porn and a group chat and no vocabulary for consent. If we can mandate standardized testing in third grade, we can mandate consent education in middle school. A child who learns to name consent at 12 is a man who can recognize its absence at 20. Too Black to Be Believed, Too Woman to Be Protected This is where intersectionality ain’t optional, it’s the whole analysis. Historian Treva B. Lindsey, in America, Goddam (2022), documents how violence against Black women and girls is both constant and invisible, how Black women are least likely to be believed and most likely to be blamed. Apply Lindsey here. When the LSU case involves a Black woman, she faces a double bind: report a Black man and some folks in our own community call her a traitor feeding the old white myth of the Black rapist, stay silent and the institution gets to pretend nothing happened. Angela Davis named that myth in Women, Race and Class (1981), showing how the lie of the Black rapist was used to justify lynching while the actual rape of Black women by white men went unpunished. Both histories live in that LSU case at the same time. The receipts on Black women’s credibility go back generations. Joan Little, a Black woman in a North Carolina jail, killed the white jailer who sexually assaulted her in 1974, and she became the first woman in U.S. history acquitted on the defense that she used deadly force to resist sexual assault, in 1975. In October 1991, Anita Hill testified about Clarence Thomas in front of an all white, all male Senate Judiciary Committee, and she got interrogated like a defendant. A month later, 1,603 Black women bought an ad in The New York Times titled “African American Women in Defense of Ourselves.” That’s how we learned to protect ourselves when the institution would not. The material impacts are real. A survivor who drops out, like Jane Doe did, loses tuition, credits, scholarships, and the earnings premium of a degree, and Black women already carry more student debt than any other group. Survivors with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, face sexual assault at rates far above everybody else and get believed even less. Men can be sexually assaulted too, and patriarchy tells them it would make them less of a man to say so, which keeps them silent. Trans women, the very people politicians claim to be protecting women from, reported being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives at a rate of 47% in the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey. So the people being used as the boogeyman are some of the people most likely to be harmed. Every accusation is a confession. A Working Definition, Since Somebody Asked I’m giving you a working definition of rape culture because here at Education Is Elevation, it’s all about giving you the language, the ability to say what you mean and mean what you say. Rape culture is a societal environment where sexual violence is normalized, trivialized, or excused through prevailing attitudes about gender, power, and sexuality. The term came out of the radical feminist organizing of the 1970s, including New York Radical Feminists’ 1974 Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. Its key characteristics are victim blaming, normalization and trivialization, rape myths, and gender stereotypes. Victim blaming holds survivors responsible for their assault based on their clothing, behavior, or consumption of alcohol, rather than holding the perpetrator accountable. What did you have on? What time was it? Why was you over there? One of my good friends and mutuals, Raven, a Cornell alum, class of 2020, talked about how it’s understood that women going to frat houses should watch themselves so they don’t get raped, instead of saying rapists shouldn’t rape. We put the onus on the victim. We put it on Black people to not be victims of racism. We put it on women to not be victims of sexism. We put it on gay people to not be victims of homophobia, and on trans people to not be victims of transphobia. Power always wants to pervert the individual that’s calling it out. It wants the perpetrator of the violence to be seen as the victim of the violence. Then there’s normalization. Think about the casual ways we talk about dominating somebody in sports and competition. “Man, we raped them.” “I’m gonna take your s**t.” We even sexualize how we talk about beating people. A lot of people have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the s**t you used to get away with saying to women 15 years ago is not gonna fly now, and it’s the same energy as the folks crying about how they can’t tell racist jokes anymore. Back in your day you could say “go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich” and call it humor. We now live in a time where we are more conscious, we have more literacy, we have more ability to call s**t out. So to my fellow dudes: if you violate a woman in 2018 and in 2027 she starts talking about it, you don’t get to be the victim, fam. Me Too Started With Black Girls, Not Hollywood Lastly, I don’t want to leave you in the pit, because Afropessimist despair is a description, not a prescription. Tarana Burke built Me Too in 2006 through her work with Black and brown girls who survived sexual violence, more than a decade before the hashtag went viral, and her framework was “empowerment through empathy.” In her memoir Unbound (2021), Burke makes clear the movement was never about destroying men, it was about survivors finding each other and finding language. That’s the counterweight. Before any courtroom gets it right, survivors been building their own institutions of belief: the Black women who organized for Recy Taylor, the 1,603 who signed for Anita Hill, the Cornell Sun students who refused to let this story die. My granny used to say, if you gonna be a man, you gotta stand in responsibility for your actions. I’d say if you gonna be a good human being, a person of principle, you have to be held accountable for your actions. So why do we act like gender violence against a woman has an expiration date? Look at the dialogue around these women at Cornell and LSU, how they’re being berated, how they’re being chastised, how they’re being forced to relive their trauma, how they got people defending their abuse and justifying their assault, and ask yourself: if a woman was already violated, what would encourage her to bring that person to justice after she’s seen how everybody else gets treated? See, Sanday reminds us that brotherhood can be built on the shared body of a woman nobody bothered to see as a person, and Lindsey teaches us that the women least likely to be believed have always been the ones building the movements that protect everybody else. Your individual self determination matters, and it will not make you immune from how systems position you. You can be a go getter, you can engage in commerce, you can engage in trade, and the system will still decide whose pain counts. You can want to learn more about sexual assault, more about patriarchy, more about misogyny, more about consent, and still have to fight people who say a man shouldn’t be held accountable for how he violated someone’s consent. I hope that we can become people that not only knew better, but that do better, and people that want to encourage each other to do better. BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TODAY Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession. I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I’m independent with no corporate sponsor and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. If every one of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: become a paid subscriber. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue; the choice is yours. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Five Key Takeaways * The language is the evidence. Calling a woman a “shop” in a group chat is not a joke, it is a confession of how the men in that chat saw her: as inventory, not a person. Rape culture always shows up in the vocabulary before it shows up in the courtroom. * Title IX was born from the civil rights movement, and Black women built that movement fighting rape. From Recy Taylor in 1944 to Anita Hill in 1991, the women least protected by the law did the most to create it. * The danger to women is in the frat house, not the locker room. The NCAA president counted fewer than 10 trans athletes among roughly 510,000, while one Ivy League survey found 35% of undergraduate women assaulted. Policy energy that ignores that math is politics, not protection. * Two years is not an alibi. New York has no statute of limitations for first degree rape and a 20 year window for second degree. “Why now” is a question the law already answered: now is still on time. * Power hates a name tag. Whiteness, patriarchy, and institutions all keep power by staying unnamed. Naming consent, naming rape culture, and naming the institutions that cover for it is how accountability starts. Works Cited and Related Readings * Burke, Tarana. Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement. Flatiron Books, 2021. * Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991). * Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race and Class. Random House, 1981. See “Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist.” * Dyer, Richard. White. Routledge, 1997. * Hirsch, Jennifer S., and Shamus Khan. Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. W. W. Norton, 2020. * Lindsey, Treva B. America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. University of California Press, 2022. * McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Knopf, 2010. * New York Radical Feminists (Noreen Connell and Cassandra Wilson, eds.). Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women. Plume, 1974. * Sanday, Peggy Reeves. Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus. NYU Press, 1990; 2nd ed. 2007. * Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Doubleday, 1906. Law and policy * Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. § 1681. * Alexander v. Yale, 631 F.2d 178 (2d Cir. 1980). * Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, 503 U.S. 60 (1992). * Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, 526 U.S. 629 (1999). * Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act (1990). * Tennessee v. Cardona (E.D. Ky., Jan. 9, 2025), vacating the 2024 Title IX rule. * Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” (Feb. 5, 2025). * Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025), Foreword (2023). Reporting on this case * PBS NewsHour / AP: Prosecutor reopens probe into Cornell gang rape allegations (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/prosecutor-reopens-probe-into-cornell-gang-rape-allegations-after-accuser-files-lawsuit) * NPR via TPR: Prosecutors are reopening a Cornell fraternity rape case (https://www.tpr.org/news/2026-09-28/prosecutors-are-reopening-a-cornell-fraternity-rape-case-heres-what-we-know) * Finger Lakes 1: Lawsuit accuses Cornell, Greek organizations and students (https://www.fingerlakes1.com/2026/09/21/lawsuit-accuses-cornell-greek-organizations-and-students-in-alleged-2024-sexual-assault/) * IBTimes: Lawsuit says Chi Phi men could cut penalties with essays (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/cornell-student-lawsuit-chi-phi-alleged-rape-1822212) * IBTimes: “Shop still open?” texts emerge (https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/prosecutors-reopen-cornell-sexual-assault-investigation-1822961) * TMZ: Accused fraternity brother no longer at Wells Fargo (https://www.tmz.com/2026/09/28/accused-cornell-fraternity-brother-diego-sarabia-no-longer-at-wells-fargo/) * Law Commentary: LSU found football player responsible for rape, reduced suspension (https://www.lawcommentary.com/articles/lsu-football-player-rape-title-ix-suspension) * WAFB / Gray News: LSU player accusation prompts criminal investigation (https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2026/09/23/lsu-football-player-accused-sexually-assaulting-student-prompts-criminal-investigation-da-says/) This is a public episode. 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2. 

   5 Oct 2026

   Auburn Gets $436 Million. Tuskegee Gets $15 Million. Let's Do the Math

   Thank you Nora Lyn St. Clair (https://substack.com/profile/538932610-nora-lyn-st-clair), PJ Schuster (https://substack.com/profile/106448962-pj-schuster), Jen Champion (https://substack.com/profile/237012681-jen-champion), Heather A Murphy (https://substack.com/profile/200342652-heather-a-murphy), and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. Huey P. Newton said power is the ability to define phenomena and make them act in a desired manner, and I told the students at Tuskegee University that quote governs my life, so let’s define the phenomenon real quick before somebody else defines it for us. In late September 2025, Frank “Chris” Lee beat the incumbent mayor of Tuskegee, Alabama in a runoff by 1,002 votes to 929, a margin of 73 votes, and he credits the students of Tuskegee University for showing up, and when I sat on that livestream and looked at the room, the mayor said it out loud, we probably got that many people in this room right now. Seventy three people. Like, that’s not a statistic, kinfolks, that’s a classroom, that’s a step show, that’s the line at the cafe on a Tuesday, and that classroom decided who runs the city. Most of y’all were taught to treat the local race like it don’t count, so let me say it the way I said it on stream. I think it’s a part of the intelligent design to make it where we always sensationalizing the national federal races and make it where we view the local races as the meaningless games. For us that watch the NBA, we know it’s like 82 games, and most of us don’t give a damn about the 82 games, we only care about if you’re going to make the playoffs. Then we apply that same sports culture to politics and wonder why we alienated from how our own communities is ran. Ahh, but here’s the part they don’t put on the poster: Tuskegee is the place where the state of Alabama proved, in writing, that it understood the small games better than we did. In 1957 the legislature took a square city and redrew it into a figure with 28 sides to cut Black voters out of the municipal elections, and in 2026 the legislature took the congressional district Tuskegee sits in and redrew it from roughly 48 percent Black voting age population to 40 percent. Same pen, different century, same intelligent design. This is about a city that was born from a vote, carved up over a vote, and is now being told again that its vote is a rounding error. It’s also a pack about what happens after the vote, because I said something in that room that I need to stand on: I’m rocking with Mayor Lee, hell yeah I am, and if he don’t deliver what he said he would, y’all should be on his helmet. Two things can be true.I. A City Born From a Vote Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Before there was a Tuskegee Institute there was a deal, and the deal was electoral. In 1880, Lewis Adams, a formerly enslaved tinsmith and one of the most respected Black men in Macon County, sat down with two white Democratic candidates, W. F. Foster and Arthur L. Brooks, and made them an offer that every organizer in this room should study: I can deliver the Black vote in Macon County, what will you deliver back. Foster and Brooks won, and in February 1881 the Alabama legislature passed the act creating a normal school for Black teachers in Tuskegee with a $2,000 annual appropriation for salaries. Booker T. Washington arrived that summer and opened the school on July 4, 1881. Sit with that, because it means the most famous Black school in the South was not a gift, it was a receipt. Lewis Adams understood in 1880 what I was trying to explain on stream in 2026, that politics is who gets what, when, where, and how, a definition I took from my own college coursework by way of Harold Lasswell, and that the vote is a currency you spend for something specific. Lewis Adams did not have a parasocial relationship with Foster. He had a contract. Crazy how the state has honored that contract ever since in the smallest possible font. The original appropriation was $2,000 a year. The appropriation bill for fiscal year 2026 sends Tuskegee University $15,816,579 from the Education Trust Fund, and the bill’s own text explains that Tuskegee’s relationship to the state is unique, that the state holds seats on the Tuskegee board and the State Superintendent of Education sits as an ex officio voting member, and that because Tuskegee is both private and state related it should not be funded the way the state’s public universities are funded. Hold that sentence in your pocket. We are coming back to it with a calculator. II. Twenty Eight Sides By the 1950s the Black residents of Tuskegee had turned the institute into the most educated Black electorate in the Deep South, and the Tuskegee Civic Association, led by the sociologist Charles G. Gomillion, spent years pushing Black faculty, staff, and townspeople through a Macon County registration board that met rarely and rejected often. As the registered Black vote inside city limits climbed toward 400, the white political class did the math, and they did not like the math. So in 1957 state Senator Sam Engelhardt, who also chaired the White Citizens Councils of Alabama, pushed Act 140 through the legislature. Act 140 redrew the boundaries of Tuskegee from a square into a 28 sided figure that, by the plaintiffs’ allegations, removed all but four or five of the roughly 400 Black voters from the city while removing not a single white voter. The institute itself ended up outside the city it built. The Tuskegee Civic Association answered with a selective buying campaign, a boycott of white merchants in the new, whiter downtown, and with a lawsuit argued by Fred Gray, the same Fred Gray who represented Rosa Parks and would later represent the men of the syphilis study. On November 14, 1960, the Supreme Court decided Gomillion v. Lightfoot, 364 U.S. 339, and Justice Felix Frankfurter, who had spent years telling the Court to stay out of the “political thicket” of districting, wrote that the state could not use its power over municipal lines as an instrument to fence Black citizens out of the vote. The 28 sided city was struck down. Gomillion is the hinge case that opened the door to Baker v. Carr two years later and to the whole architecture of voting rights litigation that followed. This means the folks who tell college students that districting is boring are wrong. Districting is the oldest weapon in the Tuskegee story, and the people who drew Act 140 were not confused about what they were doing. They were small games specialists. III. Same Pen, Different Century Let’s run the 2026 receipts in order, because this is the part that’s on your ballot November 3. In 2023, in Allen v. Milligan, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court order finding that Alabama’s congressional map likely diluted Black voting power and required a second district where Black voters had a real opportunity to elect their candidate. The legislature drew a second map that still did not comply, and a federal panel appointed a special master who drew a new 2nd District stretching from Mobile through Montgomery and the Black Belt to the Georgia line, a district that for the first time pulled Tuskegee and Macon County out of the bottom of a Republican district run from Anniston. In 2024 Shomari Figures won that seat with 54.6 percent of the vote, and Alabama sent two Black representatives to Congress for the first time in its history. Then came Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026, which gutted the race conscious remedy under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Gov. Kay Ivey, who had said she opposed redistricting before the 2026 elections, called a special session for May 4. The legislature went back to its 2023 lines. The Supreme Court then released Alabama from the court ordered map, the state postponed the primaries for four districts, and on August 11 Republicans nominated state Rep. Rhett Marques, endorsed by Trump, to take on Figures in a district where the Black voting age population drops from 48 percent to 40 percent and where Trump would have won by 14 points in 2024. The Cook Political Report moved the race to Lean Republican in June. Sabato’s Crystal Ball moved it from Likely Republican to Leans Republican in September, and the reason they gave is the whole sermon: Black turnout could be relatively strong across the South partly in response to Callais itself. So when the mayor stood up and said that if you live in Tuskegee and change your registration you can have a direct impact, he was not hyping, he was reading the forecast. Then he said the line that every student in that room should tattoo on the back of their hand: they are not counting your votes, they have already factored out that you all don’t care about congressional elections, you all live in Georgia, Louisiana, you don’t pay attention. The map was drawn on the assumption of your absence. Crazy how a 40 percent district is “safe” only if the 18 to 22 year olds sitting inside it keep acting like guests. Shout out to the student moderator who brought numbers to that conversation, because that’s research over mesearch in practice, and we gotta tighten the numbers up so nobody can shuck and jive around them. The district Figures won in 2024 went for him 54.6 to 45.4. The new lines would have gone for Trump by 14. That’s the swing the legislature bought with a pen. The moderator was also right that the 2024 results inside Macon County are lopsided Democratic, and the mayor clarified the arithmetic better than any consultant could: Figures is going to win Tuskegee by a huge percentage either way, but 3,000 votes versus 10,000 votes out of Tuskegee is what moves the districtwide number from 46 to 51. The percentage is not the weapon. The raw count is. IV. The Small Games Decide the Playoffs Apply Guinier here. In The Tyranny of the Majority (1994), Lani Guinier described voting rights in three generations. The first generation was access, the fight to get on the rolls at all, the fight the Tuskegee Civic Association fought at a registration board that barely opened its doors. The second generation was dilution, the fight over how lines are drawn so that Black votes are packed into one district or cracked across several until they are “wasted,” which is Act 140 in 1957 and the 2026 redraw both. The third generation, the one most people never get to, is governance, the question of what Black voters actually get once their candidate is seated, whether the representative stays accountable to the people who sent them or becomes, in Guinier’s language, a role model with no leverage, one Black face in a room built to outvote them. The mayor gave the clearest third generation example I’ve heard from an elected official. There are five members on the city council plus the mayor, and he said with four votes somebody could come in and change the name of Tuskegee if they wanted to. If the wrong people moved in and organized a voting bloc and got their four people elected, Tuskegee might change its identity. Most of y’all heard that as a warning about outsiders. I heard Guinier. That’s what a majoritarian system does, it hands the whole institution to whoever controls 50 percent plus one, which is exactly why the folks who drew Act 140 wanted a city council without Black voters, and why the people who redrew AL 02 wanted a congressional seat that Black Belt turnout alone can’t carry. Lasswell gives you the definition, Guinier gives you the stages, and the student in the room gave you the question: how do we encourage people who think their vote doesn’t matter. Here’s what I said and I’ma stand on it. Our vote matters so much that it impacts whether we get salmonella in our lettuce. Our vote matters so much that it impacts whether y’all are able to even learn about Booker T. Washington, or whether the country is able to learn about Carter G. Woodson. My grandma deserves to be able to afford insulin, so I got to figure out what policy is impacting the cost of insulin. Every single thing that happens to us, whether it’s my mama on drugs or people eating sleep for dinner or bombs blown up over Baghdad, there’s a policy and a policymaker, probably a lobbyist, probably a bureaucracy, probably an interest group behind it. They complicate politics in a way that causes voter apathy. We gotta simplify it. Then I said the part I need everybody in the back to hear. A lot of us as Black people are used to being acted upon. We ain’t used to being the actors. V. On His Helmet This is where the third generation turns into a posture. We have too many parasocial relationships happening in politics. Does Chris Lee remind me of a cousin, an uncle, a brother? Yes. That’s not the capacity I was talking to him in. I was talking to him in the capacity of a public official, and after you vote for a person who gets in office, you got to put that magnifying glass on them, you got to act like the mama checking whether you did your chores. You told me you was going to do this. If you don’t do it, you getting grounded. Charles Payne helps us name what the mayor already built. In I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Payne distinguishes the mobilizing tradition, big events, big speeches, big turnout days, from the organizing tradition, the slow work of building people who can act for themselves long after the speaker leaves town. Apply Payne here. The 73 votes were mobilizing. The Tuskegee City Ambassador Program, which the mayor described as student led, with students in internships, students in blazers with the city seal, students bringing him problems like a 45 minute ambulance response to a medical emergency on campus, that’s organizing, and that’s the infrastructure that makes the helmet possible. You can’t hold a man accountable from the outside of a building you never walked into. Then, to his credit, the mayor turned the helmet on himself. This position belongs to the people, he said, I’m just a vessel. Follow the money, he said, and he told them his political science professor taught him the real golden rule: whoever has the gold rules. He said he’s proud he didn’t have big donors pulling public strings, and he said he thought he was coming in with a magic wand and found out it takes replacing personnel, taking resistance, and time. Two things can be true. That transparency is real, and it’s also the exact moment the students should write his promises down with a date next to them, because a vessel that nobody checks becomes a bucket with a hole in it. Here’s the receipt that shows what the third generation looks like when it works. When the company running the dialysis center in Tuskegee decided to shut down the local operation and send patients to surrounding areas, the mayor said Figures came down, they pulled up on the company, and Figures called the higher ups to make sure the company did what it said it would do. Somebody please tell me what a 14 point Trump district does for a dialysis patient in Macon County. The orange man up in D.C., his ability to do what he wants to us these last two years is going to be predicated off the local elections. Keep that in mind in these midterms, because these local elections could be decided by five votes, 100 votes, 70 votes. VI. A Town With a College, a College Town, and a Calculator I asked the mayor to break down the difference between Auburn, a college town, and Tuskegee, a town with a college, for the folks who don’t know Alabama, and he started with the obvious: Tuskegee is about 95 percent Black. He said the federal posture toward the city has been benign neglect, represented for decades by people the community did not vote for, so what motivation did they have to let infrastructure money trickle down. He said Auburn 40 years ago was in worse shape than people remember and took advantage of what he called strategic favor. Then he said he didn’t have the exact numbers. Bet. Let me hand him the calculator. For fiscal year 2026, the Auburn University System is appropriated $436.3 million from the Education Trust Fund, out of roughly $1.95 billion in total operating appropriations. Tuskegee University is appropriated $15.8 million. Then the legislature passed a supplemental from the Advancement and Technology Fund this spring that sends Auburn University $30.6 million and Tuskegee University $990,360. That’s not a gap, that’s a canyon with a gift shop. Ahh, but it gets more specific. Tuskegee is an 1890 land grant university, and land grant funding runs on a match: Washington sends formula money for agricultural research and extension, and the state is supposed to match it. On March 6, 2024, Senators Stewart and Beasley introduced SB 189, which would have required $475,470,075 from the Education Trust Fund to Tuskegee over ten years to make the university whole for the state match it never got from 1987 through 2020, calculated against what Tuskegee would have received if its per student state funding matched Alabama’s 1862 land grant university. That bill was read once, referred to the Senate Finance and Taxation Education Committee, and has sat there ever since. Meanwhile the annual Tuskegee appropriation earmarks “at least $2,000,000” for the agricultural research and extension state match, and somebody in Montgomery calls that generosity. Whitey on the Moon, kinfolks. The state found $30.6 million in one supplemental for one Auburn campus. The state could not find the first dollar of a $475 million debt it owes the school it created by statute in 1881 off a Black vote. When the mayor says “if I had one wish, it probably would be to bring a hospital,” and when he says the building we were sitting in used to be a hospital where Black babies were born to Black nurses and Black doctors, understand that the absence is not an accident of the market. It’s a budget line. The mayor said it himself: a hospital is a business, it shouldn’t be like that, but in this capitalistic system somebody’s got to pay for the doctors and the MRI machines. Just admit the state already decided who that somebody is. This also proves the mayor’s other point, the one he made almost in passing: if you don’t own it, then you don’t have control over it. He said the city and Black developers have been quietly acquiring property so the wrong people can’t get their hands on it the way the wrong people could get their hands on four council seats. I’m with it, and I’m also going to keep that helmet handy, because I told that room the other half of what I’ve seen across Alabama: a lot of city municipals and mayors sell out their constituents for outside profits. Y’all ain’t got time for that. VII. Sammy Younge Was Registering Voters Too Apply Williamson Lott here. In Jim Crow Campus, Joy Ann Williamson Lott shows that Southern state governments treated higher education, Black and white, as an instrument for maintaining the racial order, using appropriations, board seats, and loyalty pressure to keep campuses in line, while students kept turning those same campuses into bases for movement work. Tuskegee is a textbook case with the textbook written into the appropriation bill. The state funds Tuskegee one year at a time, through a standalone bill that must pass every session, with state appointees on the board and an operations plan and audited statements required before a dollar is released. That’s not just oversight. That’s a leash with a reporting requirement. So when the mayor said the university is “private, but quasi public when it comes to state funding,” he was naming the exact mechanism Williamson Lott studies. Then when he said that for years the campus and the local government “operated in silos,” maybe because the mayor didn’t get along with the president at the time, apply Eddie Cole. In The Campus Color Line, Cole shows that college presidents have always been political actors, managing what their campuses can say and do on race to protect funding and standing with the state. A university president who depends on an annual appropriation from a supermajority legislature has every incentive to keep the campus quiet and the city at arm’s length, and a city that depends on that campus as its economic base, the mayor’s words, “you all are the economic base of this city,” pays the price for that distance in ambulances and potholes. Now let me tell the students who they are standing on, because this is the part the brochure leaves out. On January 3, 1966, Sammy Younge Jr., a Tuskegee Institute student and Navy veteran who worked with SNCC and the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League registering Black voters in Macon County, was shot and killed by a white gas station attendant after he tried to use a whites only restroom. James Forman called him the first Black college student to die in the Black liberation movement. Days later, SNCC issued its statement opposing the war in Vietnam and named Sammy Younge in it, connecting a Black veteran killed at home for demanding a toilet to a government asking Black men to die abroad. An all white jury in Lee County acquitted the man who killed him. Tuskegee students marched downtown, and that same year Macon County elected Lucius Amerson sheriff, the first Black sheriff in the South since Reconstruction. Six years later the city elected Johnny Ford its first Black mayor. That’s who the 73 votes belong to. When the mayor told students to put Rockefeller Hall and their room number on the registration form instead of the generic campus address, because a form with the wrong address gets thrown out and nobody calls you back, and when he said out of state students can’t register online in Alabama and have to fill out a paper form with a pen, which he joked half of y’all haven’t touched in years, understand that every one of those barriers is a descendant of the board that met twice a month and rejected Tuskegee faculty with PhDs. The paperwork is the registration board now. Fill it out like Sammy Younge is grading it. Here’s what I told the student who asked for one action item besides registering. Ask yourself what you want in the next two semesters, and who you need to talk to, what you need to engage, what you need to do to get it. Excuse my French, if the s**t don’t matter in five years, don’t do it. I’m not the person I was when I was in y’all’s seat in 2012, 2013. I spent time learning how the world works and figuring out how to get what I wanted from it based on the tools I had access to. Right now we got a lot of us lost in the sauce for quick results, and because so many of us are lost in the sauce, we don’t recognize that most things happen over time and require information before you respond. Before you act, collect some data, do some research, understand the who, what, when, where, and how. Then act. The last thing on education. The young man who described tutoring a fifth grader using first and second grade worksheets asked how students leave a lasting impact when they can’t be there 24/7. The mayor told him the truth: he has watched kids he drove home every day go on to do great things, and he has watched some of them get killed, including the homicide near Howard Road the day after students were there tutoring. Those two facts sit side by side in the same city that holds a world class research university, and that is the education problem in one sentence. The answers are literally inside these gates, the mayor said, the architecture students who could draw plans for residents who can’t afford an architect, the professors who want to turn the city’s waste into fuel. The gates have just been closed from both sides. VIII. The Women Who Ran the Clipboard Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee on February 4, 1913. Most of the country remembers her for a seat. Danielle McGuire’s At the Dark End of the Street remembers her for a clipboard. In 1944, a decade before the bus, Parks was sent by the Montgomery NAACP to Abbeville, in Henry County, to investigate the gang rape of Recy Taylor, a young Black mother and sharecropper, by a group of white men who were never convicted. McGuire argues that Black women’s organizing against sexual violence, the fight for bodily integrity, is the buried root of the Alabama movement, and that the movement’s public memory turned a network of tough, strategic women into a single tired seamstress. That same erasure was sitting right in front of us on the stream. The questions that drove the policy conversation came from women like Deirdre Newcomb, a double major in aerospace engineering and political science and a member of the NAACP, who asked for one action item for every young person listening. The person who closed the event, who told the room the forms were in the back and that it takes less than three minutes, was the NAACP’s press and publicity chair, a Black woman whose name the transcript didn’t even catch. The mayor credited the Greeks, the campus NAACP, and the organizations with clipboards. That’s correct, and it’s also how the story gets told every time, with the men at the mic and the women at the folding table, and then fifty years later the folding table is where the history actually happened. Now take the lens from the ballot to the body, because the mayor and the students kept circling the same three things: no hospital, a dialysis center the company tried to close, and no mental health facility. Apply Harriet Washington. In Medical Apartheid, Washington documents the Tuskegee study, run by the U.S. Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972 on roughly 600 Black men in Macon County, about 399 with syphilis and about 201 without, who were never told they had the disease and were kept from penicillin even after it became the standard cure in the late 1940s. It’s remembered as a study of men. It was also a study that let the disease reach their wives and children, which is why the federal health benefits program created after Fred Gray’s lawsuit was later extended to wives, widows, and offspring. The study ended only after Jean Heller’s AP story in July 1972. Clinton apologized in 1997. Washington’s point is that medical abuse is not only a scandal, it is a structure, and the structure shows up as absence. When the mayor says the city has no hospital, when kidney failure hits Black Americans at several times the rate of white Americans and the dialysis provider decides Tuskegee isn’t worth the overhead, when a student asks about mental health and the mayor says plainly there’s no facility here and that the root is often poverty, the bodies carrying that absence are disproportionately Black women. Black women are the caregivers who drive the dialysis patient to the next county, the mothers taking off work, the grandmothers whose insulin I was talking about. Intersectionality is not a vibe here. It’s a mileage log. Then flip the gender lens to the young men in the room, because the betting conversation was about them. The gambling apps market hardest to young men, and they praying on y’all. They hope instead of sending your Pell Grant money to your mama and daddy, you put $5 on a player getting this many dunks, $10 that some Auburn player makes this tackle. Watch a football game or a basketball game and count how long it takes before they encourage you to bet. The same economy that won’t fund a hospital is spending millions to make sure a 19 year old in Rockefeller Hall has a sportsbook in his pocket. IX. They Sold Us Dog Racing to Keep the Schools Open The mayor brought up a race nobody thinks about, a seat on the Macon County Racing Commission, and he said it’s the entity that oversees the money from VictoryLand in Shorter, which started as greyhound racing and is basically a casino now. He’s right that it’s not sexy and he’s right that it matters, and the history explains why. According to former Mayor Johnny Ford’s own account, in December 1982 the Macon County Board of Education announced that schools would be closing for lack of funding, and that was the beginning of dog racing in Macon County. VictoryLand opened in 1984. At its peak around 2010 it employed roughly 2,500 people. Then the state raided it, seized its electronic bingo machines and cash, closed it for years, fought it all the way to the Alabama Supreme Court, and left Macon County with the bill while, Macon County leaders argued, similar operations elsewhere kept running. Live racing ended in 2011. Today the floor runs historical horse racing machines. Look at what that sequence teaches. A Black Belt county was left so underfunded that gambling got sold to it as school money, then the state treated that same gambling as a crime when Macon County did it. Every accusation is a confession. Now in 2026 a super PAC backed by DraftKings and FanDuel, the American Conservative Fund, spent more than $9.3 million in Alabama’s Republican primaries backing 17 legislative candidates and winning at least 12, shaping the next legislature before it ever votes on lottery or sports betting. Alabama still has no legal sports betting, yet prediction markets like Kalshi operate in the state under federal commodities regulation, and an Alabama resident filed a class action in January 2026 alleging Kalshi has been operating illegally under the state’s gambling laws. To be precise, because precision protects us: the Racing Commission oversees the racetrack license, not Kalshi or Polymarket or PrizePicks. My point on stream was that the technology is moving faster than our policing and our policies, and eventually somebody at the county level is going to have to account for the betting that happens inside the county on apps nobody locally licenses. Me, Deontay, and a few other Black folks with platforms are very conscious, no pun intended, of how the gambling industry preys on Black people. Connect the dots is all I want to do. Connect the dots. X. Cast Down Your Bucket, Just Not on Your Neighbor’s Land Now let me hand y’all something to build with, because I did not come to Tuskegee to tell students they’re doomed. Apply Imani Perry. In South to America, Perry argues that the South is not America’s embarrassing exception but its key, the place where you can read the whole country most clearly, and also a place of extraordinary Black beauty, ingenuity, and home. She writes the South as somewhere you can choose, not just escape. That’s the mayor’s thesis, and I want to give him his flowers for it. People think he wants to be governor and then go to president, and he told the room he doesn’t, that Tuskegee is the biggest platform where he can lead Black America, the same way Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee Airmen, and Lionel Richie and the Commodores did from the same ground. He told students they can work remotely from Tuskegee, get a few acres instead of a little bitty one bedroom, start a business inside the student economy, come back for more than homecoming, and tune into council meetings. He quoted Washington’s “cast down your bucket where you are” to the young man from rural Louisiana deciding whether to register in Alabama, and he was honest that it’s election by election, which is why he told the story of switching his own registration to Virginia as a Hampton student in 2008 and feeling like his class helped carry the state for Obama. Two things can be true. Perry’s South also remembers that “cast down your bucket” was the Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895, and Du Bois spent the next decade arguing that Washington’s bucket came with a promise not to ask for the vote. The students who cast down their buckets in Tuskegee in 2025 did it at the ballot box, which is the part of the bucket Washington’s critics said he left in the well. There’s one more two things can be true I owe this room. The mayor told students about buying property at county tax sales, the lists of properties with unpaid taxes the revenue office publishes every spring, and he was clear that most of the time the owners come back and redeem. That’s real wealth advice and it’s also a door that has swung the other way in the Black Belt for a century, because tax sales are one of the ways Black families lost land, especially heirs property passed down without a clear title. So yes, buy the lot. Also check whose grandmama it belonged to, and if you can help a family keep it instead, that’s an investment too. Ownership that comes from your neighbor’s eviction is just Auburn with a Tuskegee address. Power in Closing See, Guinier reminds us that voting rights come in generations, first the right to cast the ballot, then the right to have it count inside a fair line, then the right to have it govern, and that a city redrawn into 28 sides in 1957 and a district redrawn from 48 percent to 40 percent in 2026 are the same second generation attack wearing a different suit. Williamson Lott teaches us that the state has always tried to manage Black campuses through the purse and the board seat, and that the students who refused to be managed, from Sammy Younge Jr. to the 73 votes in that room, are the reason the campus means anything at all. So define the phenomenon. The phenomenon is a map drawn on the assumption that you will not show up. Make it act in a desired manner. The forms are in the back. Use your dorm and your room number. Write legibly. Vote November 3. Then get on the helmet of everybody you voted for, including the folks you love. I put blood, sweat, and tears into creating this platform and then making sure that communities like Tuskegee, Alabama is accounted for. You feel me? Make sure that it got depth, breadth, perspective, visibility over there. Education Is Elevation, but power. How do you define power? 5 Key Takeaways * Tuskegee was born from a vote. Lewis Adams traded Macon County’s Black vote for a state funded school in 1880, and the school opened July 4, 1881. The vote has always been a contract, not a vibe. * Districting is the oldest weapon in the Tuskegee story. Act 140 turned the city into a 28 sided figure in 1957, Gomillion v. Lightfoot struck it down in 1960, and the 2026 redraw cut AL 02’s Black voting age population from 48 to 40 percent after Callais. * The raw count beats the percentage. Figures will win Tuskegee either way. Whether Tuskegee delivers 3,000 votes or 10,000 is what moves the districtwide number, and the map was drawn assuming students won’t show up. * The funding gap is a budget decision. Auburn’s system gets $436.3 million from the Education Trust Fund for FY 2026 to Tuskegee’s $15.8 million, and a $475 million land grant match repayment bill has sat in committee since March 2024. * Voting is the entry point, not the finish line. Keep the receipts, keep the dates, and stay on the helmet of every official you elected, including the ones who feel like family. Paid Subscriber Ask This piece exists because somebody has to fill the critical void left by the retreat of public education media, and I’m doing it from the ground, from Tuskegee’s campus to your phone, with no corporate backing and no institutional cover. Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession, I am that 2%, and every pack like this one takes hours of archive work, case law, budget documents, and fact checking so you can walk into any room with receipts. If this helped you understand why 73 votes matter, why a 28 sided city matters, and why a $475 million debt sitting in committee matters, become a paid subscriber today. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue. 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/RELATED READINGS * Cole, Eddie R. The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. Princeton University Press, 2020. * Forman, James. Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement. Grove Press, 1968. * Guinier, Lani. The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. Free Press, 1994. * Lasswell, Harold D. Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. 1936. * McGuire, Danielle L. At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance. Knopf, 2010.1819 News, “Tuskegee incumbent Haygood defeated by Lee in mayoral runoff.” https://1819news.com/news/item/tuskegee-incumbent-haygood-defeated-by-lee-in-mayoral-runoff (https://1819news.com/news/item/tuskegee-incumbent-haygood-defeated-by-lee-in-mayoral-runoff) * Alabama Political Reporter, “Can Shomari Figures win reelection after redistricting?” July 15, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/07/15/can-shomari-figures-win-reelection-after-redistricting/ (https://www.alreporter.com/2026/07/15/can-shomari-figures-win-reelection-after-redistricting/) * Alabama Political Reporter, “Race rater narrows GOP edge in Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District,” Sept 11, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/09/11/race-rater-narrows-gop-edge-in-alabamas-2nd-congressional-district/ (https://www.alreporter.com/2026/09/11/race-rater-narrows-gop-edge-in-alabamas-2nd-congressional-district/) * Alabama Political Reporter, “DraftKings, FanDuel backed PAC scores big wins in Alabama primaries,” May 26, 2026. https://www.alreporter.com/2026/05/26/draftkings-fanduel-backed-pac-scores-big-wins-in-alabama-primaries/ (https://www.alreporter.com/2026/05/26/draftkings-fanduel-backed-pac-scores-big-wins-in-alabama-primaries/) * Perry, Imani. South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation. Ecco, 2022. * Washington, Harriet A. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Doubleday, 2006. * Williamson Lott, Joy Ann. Jim Crow Campus: Higher Education and the Struggle for a New Southern Social Order. Teachers College Press, 2018. * Further reading: Blain, Keisha N. Until I Am Free (2021); Gray, Fred D. Bus Ride to Justice (1995); Jeffries, Hasan Kwame. Bloody Lowndes (2009). 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)

3. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Amy Cooper Called 911 and Got Served. Sonya Massey Called 911 and Got Shot.

   A little old white lady clutched her purse when a Black man stepped onto the elevator, and in that one second she did more sociology than most PhD programs do in a whole decade, because she wrote his entire life off his skin, wrote the beginning, wrote the ending, and convicted him before the doors even closed, and she ain’t never even met him. Today we ain’t talking about her purse. Today we talking about who taught her how to read. You ever been found guilty of a crime that ain’t even happened yet? Convicted by a side eye, sentenced by the clutching of a purse, no trial, no jury, no evidence but your own skin. My grandpa always said your skin is your sin, and if you Black in America you ain’t got to imagine that, that’s just a regular old Tuesday. White supremacy don’t always show up in a hood holding a torch, sometimes it shows up in a cardigan on the elevator holding the purse a little tighter, sometimes it shows up jogging past you and crossing the street, same system, different uniform. Yancy did not invent this feeling, Black folks been living it since the auction block, but he named it with precision. In his 2008 essay “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism,” and later in Black Bodies, White Gazes, Yancy walks us into the elevator and describes the click of the car door locks, the clutched purse, the woman who suddenly needs to stare at the floor numbers, and he argues that none of that is a private feeling, it is a learned way of seeing that whiteness rehearses so often it starts to feel like instinct. Peep the third edition of that book, released in July 2025, because it adds a whole new chapter on George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Sonya Massey, and Kayla Moore, which tells you the elevator keeps getting new passengers. Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Power Is Who Holds the Pen Huey P. Newton told us that power is the ability to define the phenomenon and make it act in a desired manner, so sit with that for a minute, because power ain’t just about who got the guns and the money, power is also about who gets to define, who gets to identify, and who gets to say what a thing is before the thing ever gets to be itself. Today’s phenomenon is what Yancy calls the elevator effect and what I call getting your whole biography written by a stranger who don’t know you from a can of paint in under a few seconds. It’s the moment a Black body enters a space and the space decides who you are before you do, the purse clutches, the door locks click, the security guard starts his little stroll behind you in the store, nobody said a word, yet a whole conversation just happened and you wasn’t allowed to talk in it. The Ignorance Ain’t an Accident, It’s an Achievement The system behind the purse is whiteness operating as a whole knowledge system, and the key term comes from philosopher Charles Mills: the epistemology of ignorance. Epistemology is the study of knowing, which to me is just a fancy word for how do you know what you know. If you believe Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, that’s an epistemological understanding of the world, and if you believe girls wear pink and boys wear blue, that’s one too. Academia likes to throw a bunch of syllables at you to confuse you, but don’t worry, Education Is Elevation and I got you. Mills argued in The Racial Contract (1997) that the contract requires white folks to sign on to an inverted epistemology, a structured agreement to misread the world and then call the misreading neutral, objective, common sense. Peep that. The ignorance ain’t an accident, it’s an achievement, it gets taught, funded, rehearsed, and graded, and it’s built into the intelligent design of how America perceives Black bodies. Yancy shows us what that misknowing does to being. He describes the Black body under the white gaze through what I’m calling the ontology of surfaces, meaning whiteness looks at Black skin and believes the surface is the depth, that everything worth knowing about you is pinned onto your epidermis. Sartre said existence precedes essence, you live first and become who you are after, and Yancy says whiteness flips that script for Black folks, so essence precedes existence and the verdict arrives before the person does. Fanon felt the same thing on a train in 1952 when a child pointed and said “Look, a Negro!” and he watched himself get turned into an object in real time. The not knowing already did its homework, already prescribed a reality for you that was never meant for you, it was built to cover up for what they refuse to know. Same Gaze, Different Sentences Now here’s what that means for your neighbors, because you gotta make sure your neighbor is good, and this gaze don’t read every Black body the same way. It reads Black men as threat, which is why the purse clutch. It reads Black women through what Dr. Moya Bailey named misogynoir, which is why Serena Williams told reporters at Wimbledon in 2018 that she had been drug tested more than any other top American player, male or female, five out of competition tests in the first half of that year alone, and why Black women’s pain gets dismissed in delivery rooms. It reads Black children as grown, what I call the adultification of our Black children, which is why the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality found in 2017 that adults see Black girls as less innocent and more adult than white girls starting at age five. Five, y’all, five. Phillip Goff and his colleagues found the same thing for Black boys starting around age ten, with police overestimating their age by about four and a half years. Tamir Rice got twelve years on this earth and about two seconds of assessment. The gaze reads Black disabled and neurodivergent folks as noncompliant, which is why Elijah McClain is not with us today. Same gaze, different sentences. That’s why I always say we need a multiplicity of Blackness, because white supremacy has different ways of texturizing Blackness, different ways of positioning Black folks and magnetizing violence onto us, and down South we bury Black trans women at rates that should make the whole country ashamed, because their Blackness and their transness and their womanness collide in front of the same gaze. We see this in the law too. You won’t find the word slavery in the original Constitution, yet we know what the three fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause was doing, and you won’t find the word Black in it either, yet we know who it wasn’t written for. That’s whiteness at power, mapped onto legislation, mapped onto bodies, and mapped onto the phone in a white woman’s hand. Receipt Number One: She Knew What Product She Was Ordering May 25, 2020, the Ramble in Central Park. Christian Cooper, a Black birdwatcher and Audubon board member, asks Amy Cooper, no relation, to leash her dog in an area where leashes are required. She tells him she is going to call the cops and tell them there’s an African American man threatening her life, and then she does exactly that, and on the recording her voice climbs into panic as if somebody had laid a hand on her, and nobody did. Now watch what she did, because this part is important and Yancy illustrates it perfectly. She announced his race first. She knew exactly what product she was ordering when she dialed 911, and she understood that the state would deliver it. Christian Cooper put it best when he told NPR she was threatening to bring the machine down on his head. Crazy how that same day, about a thousand miles west in Minneapolis, that same machine put a knee on George Floyd’s neck for over nine minutes. Same day. Same machine. Different zip code. Here’s the receipt on the receipt. Amy Cooper was charged with a misdemeanor for filing a false report, completed five therapy sessions in a restorative program, and the Manhattan DA dismissed the charge and sealed the file in February 2021. Five sessions. Meanwhile states and cities had to write whole new laws, New Jersey, California, San Francisco’s CAREN Act, just to say out loud that weaponizing 911 against Black folks is a harm, which tells you the law never saw it as one on its own. Receipt Number Two: Sonya Massey Dialed the Same Number Two things can be true. 911 is a weapon in a white woman’s hand, and 911 is a death sentence in a Black woman’s hand. July 6, 2024, Springfield, Illinois. Sonya Massey, a 36 year old Black mother, calls 911 because she thinks there’s a prowler outside her house. Two Sangamon County deputies arrive. Inside her kitchen, she moves a pot of hot water off the stove, and Deputy Sean Grayson shoots her in the face. In October 2025 a jury convicted him of second degree murder, and on January 29, 2026, a judge sentenced him to 20 years. At sentencing, her mother Donna Massey told the court that she is now afraid to call the police herself. Sit with the mirror image. Amy Cooper called the police and the state showed up to serve her. Sonya Massey called the police and the state showed up and read her as the threat in her own kitchen. Same number. Same dispatcher. The only variable was whose body was holding the phone. That’s not safety, that’s a racial sorting machine wearing a badge. The Definition Ain’t Mine Now let’s name the system. White supremacy runs on its favorite fuel, antiblackness. When I say white supremacy, I mean a synergistic system of privileges, presumptions, institutions, and enforcement that positions whiteness as the norm, the neutral, and the supreme, and that benefits white people individually and institutionally whether they asked for it or not. That’s damn near Yancy, so take it up with the academics, not me. That’s bigger than Amy Cooper and bigger than a purse on the elevator. Who has the power? White people, individually and institutionally, wealthy and poor. Yancy is careful here, y’all. Even poor white folks catching hell from capitalism every day of their lives still walk through stores without being followed, and still get read as individuals instead of specimens. Peggy McIntosh called this an invisible knapsack of unearned assets back in 1988, and Yancy sharpens it: whiteness is an inheritance, you ain’t got to sign for it, it came in the mail anyway. Yancy also invokes Herrenvolk democracy, a term the sociologist Pierre van den Berghe coined in 1967 for a system that is a democracy for the ruling racial group and a domination for everybody else, reminding us that America was never a democracy with racism sprinkled on top, racism was the recipe. The Body and the Flesh So who pays the cost? Black bodies, paid in flesh. Apply Spillers right here. Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), distinguishes the body, which the law sees and protects, from the flesh, the zero degree of social conceptualization, where personhood gets stripped and a human being becomes raw material for other people’s meanings. Whiteness issues white folks bodies and assigns Black folks flesh. That’s why the cost ain’t just hurt feelings on an elevator. The cost is material. The cost is a jail cell. The cost is a knee on your neck for over nine minutes while bystanders beg. The cost is being denied a position or a resource because of a microaggression in an office that nobody wrote down. The trick is that a manufactured hierarchy presents itself as nature, as just the way things are, and then Mills closes the loop: under the epistemology of ignorance, the not knowing is load bearing, the system produces white folks who genuinely cannot see it, and then it points at their sincerity as proof that nothing is there. Essence Preceded Existence in Money, Mississippi Willful ignorance gets the benefit of the doubt in this country, unless you a Black child. Emmett Till was 14 years old, a baby from Chicago, when Carolyn Bryant accused him of advances in her husband’s store in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955. In 2008 she told historian Timothy Tyson that part of her story was not true, and when his book The Blood of Emmett Till made that public in 2017, the country had to sit with the fact that a white woman’s testimony had been enough to end a child’s life. Peep the mechanics. His accusers never had to prove he was a threat. His skin testified against him. An all white jury took about an hour to acquit, and one juror said they’d have been faster if they hadn’t stopped for a soda. Essence preceded existence. Four months later, protected by double jeopardy, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam confessed to the murder in Look magazine and got paid for the story. The confession was the content, the content was the commodity, and Emmett’s family had to live with that for the rest of their lives. That ain’t ancient history either. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a law on July 23, 2026, making July 25, Emmett’s birthday, Emmett Till Day across the state, and he signed it at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the same church where Mamie Till Mobley opened that casket so the world could see. Mamie understood the gaze better than anybody, so she turned it around and made the country look at what it did. The Spectator Is a Member Now go to Yancy’s hardest bar, the one that won me a lot of college debate rounds. As a former college policy debater, if your school got a football team, I probably made a living intellectually whooping its debate team with this exact impact, so if you’re asking why whiteness matters and how it touches anything in real life, here it go. Yancy argues that the white spectator who watches and refuses to protest becomes part of the violence itself, indistinguishable in effect from the one who tied the noose. Thousands of white folks attended lynchings like county fairs, with photographs, postcards, and souvenirs. Historian Amy Louise Wood shows in Lynching and Spectacle that the crowd was not a side effect of the lynching, the crowd was the point, because watching together is how a white community taught itself that it was white, that it was innocent, and that it was in charge. The camera didn’t record the ritual, the camera was part of the ritual. We know that being a spectator is what a lot of judges call my homeboys and family members when they catch a case: an accessory. If you were in proximity to the crime and you didn’t stop it, the state says you guilty too. The monstrosity of white supremacy says that if you ain’t the one who tied the noose, you can take pictures, sell the postcard, and monetize the violence without being accountable for it, and that ain’t equal protection under the law. Self consciously signing the contract is not a requirement for membership. Let that hang. Let that marinate in your spirit. You ain’t got to light the fire. Standing there warming your hands is enough. Superpowers on Demand A grown, armed, trained officer, Darren Wilson, described 18 year old Michael Brown to a grand jury in 2014 by saying he felt like a five year old holding onto Hulk Hogan, and that Brown looked like a demon. Under oath. Accepted as reasonable. That’s the monstrosity of the Black body, and that is exactly what the subconscious is whispering when somebody clutches a purse on the elevator: the Black body doing its oldest job, transforming an unarmed teenager into a supernatural threat so that killing him reads as self defense. Crazy how the Black body only gets superpowers at the exact moment somebody needs to exterminate it. Doing Philosophy in a Chokehold Twenty three years old. Massage therapist. Anemic, so he wore a ski mask to stay warm walking home with an iced tea in August 2019 in Aurora, Colorado. Somebody called 911 and said he looked sketchy. Elijah McClain told the officers he was an introvert and asked them to respect the boundaries he was speaking. Listen to that sentence. That man was doing philosophy in a chokehold, asserting his autonomy, his depth, and his personhood in real time, and they couldn’t hear him, they refused to hear him, because whiteness had already decided that the surface was the whole story. The ontology of surfaces don’t take testimony from the deep. Now look at the ledger. Officer Randy Roedema got 14 months in jail. Paramedic Peter Cichuniec was sentenced to five years, and in September 2024 a judge converted that to probation and he walked out. The people of Aurora paid the McClain family a $15 million settlement in 2021. So the gaze made the mistake, the badge carried it out, and the taxpayers covered the tab. That ain’t accountability, that’s a subscription. Her Caution Is His Costing Somebody gon’ say: “She was just being cautious, she’s a white woman alone.” Two things can be true, so let’s talk about crime statistics. If she was clutching that purse based on data, she would clutch it hardest around the people statistically most likely to hurt her, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that from 2012 to 2015, 57 percent of violent victimizations of white people were committed by white offenders, and most violence against women comes from people they know. Statistically, the threat is her cousin, her daddy, or her brother, not Christian Cooper. The fear ain’t data driven, it’s curriculum driven. Whiteness taught her that fear, drilled it, rehearsed it, and then handed her a phone that turns the rehearsal into an armed response. Her caution is his costing. That’s not safety, that’s a subsidy, and it’s paid for by Black bodies that are always already scripted as criminal. Prejudice Is a Feeling, Racism Has a Government For those of you about to type “not all white people” in the comments, “I never owned slaves, I never called the cops on anybody,” Yancy already answered you with a lynching photograph: the spectator who watches and says nothing speaks through his silence. Some of y’all gon’ say, “Conscious Lee, Black people profile too, everybody’s a little prejudiced.” For y’all I say this: prejudice is a feeling, racism is a feeling with the government behind it. When Amy Cooper performed fear, an armed state apparatus stood ready to make her fiction real, and when a Black person side eyes somebody, ain’t no institution mobilizing behind that. Yancy is precise here: the white imaginary without infrastructure would just be empty ideas. It’s the courts, the police, the banks, and the schools that turn imagination into incarceration. Symmetrical feelings, asymmetrical firepower. Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying every individual white person is a villain. I’m making an analysis about patterns and trends. If you was raised around ostriches and told me birds can’t fly, I’d say that’s a cool personal experience, but it does not negate the data. Birds, in fact, do fly. The Hall Monitor Learned to Read in Kindergarten The elevator has a classroom version, and it opens at five years old. Jamilia Blake, a Texas A&M professor in College Station, right down the road from where I grew up in Bryan, coauthored that 2017 Georgetown study showing adults see Black girls as needing less nurturing, less protection, and less comfort than white girls the same age. The same report noted Black girls were under 16 percent of girls in school but 28 percent of girls referred to law enforcement and 37 percent of girls arrested at school. That’s the purse clutch with a hall pass. Apply Annamma here. Subini Ancy Annamma’s The Pedagogy of Pathologization follows disabled girls of color through schools and into juvenile lockups and shows how the school reads their bodies as problems before it reads their needs, so a girl who is anxious gets read as defiant, a girl who is processing gets read as noncompliant, and a girl who needs support gets a referral. That’s Yancy’s ontology of surfaces wearing a lanyard. It’s the same read that killed Elijah McClain on a sidewalk, introvert read as resistant, a boundary read as a threat, only in school it starts with a write up instead of a chokehold. So teachers, notice who in the group is shouldering all the labor and who is getting a grade for other people’s work, notice whose quiet you call focused and whose quiet you call attitude, notice which kid you send to the office for the same thing you let the other kid slide on. The gaze ain’t just a cop thing. It’s a lesson plan. The Delivery Room Has an Elevator Too When I said Black women’s pain gets dismissed in delivery rooms, I meant it as a receipt, not a metaphor. The CDC reported that in 2023 Black women died of maternal causes at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births compared to 14.5 for white women, a gap of almost three and a half times, and that gap widened even as white maternal deaths fell. Apply Dána Ain Davis here. In Reproductive Injustice (2019), Davis names obstetric racism: the way medical staff read Black women’s bodies through the same surface logic, as stronger, as exaggerating, as less in need of care, so the gaze literally decides who gets believed about her own pain. A 2016 study in PNAS found that about half of the white medical students and residents surveyed held at least one false belief about biological differences between Black and white people, like Black skin being thicker, and those who held those beliefs rated Black patients’ pain lower. That’s the elevator effect with a stethoscope. Come back to Serena, because it’s the same woman twice. The most tested player on tour in 2018 had, months earlier, nearly died after giving birth to her daughter when she told staff she was having a pulmonary embolism and had to push to be taken seriously. Surveilled when her body was winning, doubted when her body was dying. That’s misogynoir as a schedule. Then look again at Sonya Massey, a Black woman in a mental health struggle in her own kitchen, read as a threat by a man she called for help. The gaze don’t just see race. It sees race, gender, disability, and class at once, and it gives each combination its own sentence, which is why Spillers’ flesh is never abstract for Black women, it’s an intake form. They Be All Up in the Kool Aid and Don’t Know the Flavor Secondly, I’m not saying Black folks are just passive victims of the gaze with no interior of our own. Yancy himself honors the counter semiotic systems Black folks built, the churches, the music, the language, the freedom dreams, whole worlds of meaning constructed behind the veil where the gaze can’t even see. Elizabeth Alexander called this the Black interior, the inner life, the imagination, the private language that exists beyond what white folks think they’re looking at. It’s the reason we say they be all up in the Kool Aid and don’t know the flavor. The gaze is powerful, but it don’t know everything, it has never been total, and it has never been universal no matter how hard they try to hoodwink and bamboozle us into believing that the way they see the world is the way the world is. That’s why Du Bois gave us double consciousness in 1903: he understood the criminality the white gaze puts on our bodies, but he also knew how we see ourselves still matters. The Paperwork of Refusal So what’s the alternative? For white folks watching, Yancy’s word is that whiteness is an inheritance you do not have to accept, so start the paperwork of refusal. That means marking the unmarked. Notice when you are not followed in a store. Notice when your fear spikes in a hallway, and ask who taught you that. Notice who in the meeting gets listened to and who gets talked over, and interrupt it in real time, out loud, in the room where it happens, not in the group chat afterwards and not when you feel a little remorse and want a pat on the back. Spectator silence is membership. Cancel that membership. Your discomfort at being named white for the first time is a fraction of a fraction of what it costs to be named Black every day since 1619. For my folks, keep building the counter semiotics. Keep looking back at the white gaze. The gaze wants us flat, a surface of hieroglyphics somebody else gets to read, so every time we insist on our depth, our contradictions, and our joy, and refuse to perform for nobody, our rage don’t need an apology, our study and our organizing is ontological work, proof that essence does not precede existence, that we exist first, loudly, and define ourselves after on our own terms. If Huey said power is the ability to define the phenomenon, then liberation is snatching the pen back and writing our own stories. For all of us, individual awareness without institutional change is a spa day. The purse clutch is downstream of the redline, the sentencing disparity, and the school funding formula. So think differently and act differently: support policy that defunds the infrastructure of the white imaginary, organize where you are, and put your minutes and your money where your mouth is. The little old lady clutched her purse because the system taught her to read wrong. The best job for all of us is to teach the world to read again. See, Yancy reminds us that whiteness wrote a script and called it nature, and Mills teaches us that the racial contract required white folks to agree not to know what they wrote. Five Takeaways * The elevator effect is a reading, not a reflex. Yancy shows the purse clutch is learned perception that whiteness rehearses until it feels like instinct, and Mills shows the misreading is maintained on purpose. * 911 sorts bodies. Amy Cooper (May 25, 2020) called and the state came to serve her; Sonya Massey (July 6, 2024) called and the state shot her. Grayson got 20 years on January 29, 2026, and her mother now fears calling police. * The gaze hands out different sentences. Black men read as threat, Black girls read as grown from age five (Georgetown, 2017), neurodivergent folks read as noncompliant (Elijah McClain), Black mothers read as exaggerating (50.3 vs 14.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 in 2023). * The spectator is a member. From lynching postcards to the Look magazine confession, watching and profiting without protest is participation, not neutrality. * Awareness without infrastructure change is a spa day. Prejudice is a feeling; racism is a feeling backed by courts, police, banks, and schools, so the work is defunding that infrastructure and building Black interiors the gaze cannot read. EXPLICIT ASK TO BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER Black male educators are less than 2% of this profession—I am that 2%, and I am fighting alone against the systematic erasure of our histories, our legal protections, and our cultural truth. I’m independent with no corporate sponsor, and no safety net; this work lives or dies on the support of this community. If everyone of you reading this converted to a paid subscriber today, we would stop surviving and start building—a permanent, independent archive of Black expertise with the depth of PBS and the fire of our ancestors. So here is the ask: become a paid subscriber. Fund the fortress or watch the erasure continue; the choice is yours. 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/RELATED READINGS * Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior: Essays. Graywolf, 2004. * Annamma, Subini Ancy. The Pedagogy of Pathologization: Dis/abled Girls of Color in the School Prison Nexus. Routledge, 2018. * Davis, Dána Ain. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth. NYU Press, 2019. * Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. * Epstein, Rebecca, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González. Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood. Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, 2017. summary (https://youthtoday.org/2017/06/girlhood-interrupted-the-erasure-of-black-girls-childhood/) * Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. * Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2014. * Hoffman, Kelly M., et al. “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment.” PNAS, 2016. * Lindsey, Treva B. America, Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice. UC Press, 2022. * McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” 1988/1989. * Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell, 1997. * Newton, Huey P. To Die for the People. 1972. * Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, 1987. * Tyson, Timothy B. The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon & Schuster, 2017. * van den Berghe, Pierre. Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective. 1967. * Wood, Amy Louise. Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890 to 1940. UNC Press, 2009. * Yancy, George. “Elevators, Social Spaces and Racism: A Philosophical Analysis.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 34, no. 8 (2008). record (https://omeka.cloud.unimelb.edu.au/mapping-social-theory-and-sociology/items/show/533) * Yancy, George. Black Bodies, White Gazes, 3rd ed. Rowman & Littlefield/Bloomsbury, 2025. listing (https://www.jpc.de/jpcng/books/detail/-/art/george-d-yancy-black-bodies-white-gazes/hnum/12271198) * Yancy, George. Look, a White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness. Temple, 2012. Reporting and data * Amy Cooper charge dismissed (https://www.wgbh.org/news/national/2021-02-16/amy-cooper-white-woman-who-called-police-on-black-bird-watcher-has-charge-dismissed) (NPR/WGBH, Feb. 16, 2021); Christian Cooper interview (https://www.npr.org/transcripts/862230724) (NPR, 2020) * Sean Grayson sentenced to 20 years (https://www.click2houston.com/news/national/2026/01/29/a-former-illinois-deputy-is-sentenced-to-20-years-in-prison-for-killing-sonya-massey/) (AP, Jan. 29, 2026); Donna Massey statement (https://wmexboston.com/?p=169786) (ABC Audio, Jan. 29, 2026) * Cichuniec sentence converted to probation (https://keyt.com/?p=1140402) (CNN, Sept. 13, 2024); Roedema sentenced (https://ktvz.com/news/national-world/cnn-national/2024/01/05/former-colorado-officer-faces-sentencing-today-in-death-of-elijah-mcclain/) (CNN, Jan. 5, 2024) * Tyson on Carolyn Bryant Donham (https://newschannel9.com/news/nation-world/key-till-witness-gave-false-testimony-historian-says-01-28-2017) (AP, Jan. 28, 2017) * Illinois Emmett Till Day (https://www.nbcpalmsprings.com/2026/07/23/illinois-designates-july-25-as-emmett-till-day-to-honor-civil-rights-legacy) (July 23, 2026) * Serena Williams USADA testing (https://www.boston.com/sports/tennis/2018/07/01/serena-williams-drug-test-wimbledon/) (AP, July 1, 2018) * BJS, Race and Hispanic Origin of Victims and Offenders, 2012 to 15 (https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/AbstractDB/AbstractDBDetails.aspx?id=272916) * CDC 2023 maternal mortality (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/racial-gap-widens-in-maternal-mortality-around-time-of-childbirth) (AP/PBS, Feb. 2025) * New Jersey race based 911 law (https://unheardvoicesmag.com/2020/09/02/race-based-911-calls-can-now-put-you-in-prison-in-new-jersey); San Francisco CAREN Act (https://www.complex.com/life/a/alexwgalbraith/san-francisco-caren-act-racist-911-calls); California AB 1775 (https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/calif-legislators-to-consider-making-it-a-hate-crime-to-make-racially-motivated-911-calls/) This is a public episode. 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