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Education is Elevation

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Education is Elevation. Stats. Facts. History. <a href="https://theconsciouslee.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast">theconsciouslee.substack.com</a>

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July 3, 2026

George Washington Bought Human Teeth. Obama Calls Him Great. I Got Questions.

Y’all know I watch these interviews so you don’t have to. On June 28, 2026, Barack Obama sat down with Michele Norris on MS NOW for a special tied to the grand opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, ten days after the ribbon got cut in John Lewis Plaza, six days before this country throws itself a 250th birthday party. Timing matters, kinfolks. The semiquincentennial machine is running at full steam, the National Mall got a state fair on it, the flags are pressed, and into that moment the first Black president of the United States decided to hand the founding fathers a permission slip.Here is what he said, word for word, so nobody can say I’m putting words in the man’s mouth:It is possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder. And that does not negate his greatness. It simply acknowledges that there is a profound, deep flaw in these founding fathers, who were also geniuses and gave us these tools... which is true of all of us, right? It’s true of every president. We’re this mixed bag. We’ve got contradictions and embody the country’s contradictions.Now on the surface that sounds like the reasonable grown up in the room talking. It sounds like nuance. It sounds like the thing they teach you to say at a dinner party in Hyde Park. Peep the two roles frame I been teaching y’all from my debate days though: there is what a statement SAYS, and there is what a statement STRUCTURALLY DOES. What it says is, history is complicated. What it does is launder human trafficking into a personality flaw, the same way you’d say your uncle is a great man who just talks too loud at the cookout. That laundering is not neutral. Claimed neutrality IS a position, the view from nowhere, and the view from nowhere always ends up being the view from Mount Vernon’s front porch.Research over MeSearch, so let’s run the receipts.Receipts from Mount Vernon: What Kind of Great Are We Talking About?George Washington was not a man with a flaw. George Washington was a human trafficker with a farm. When he died in 1799, there were 317 enslaved human beings held at Mount Vernon, and across his lifetime the man bought, sold, rented, raffled, and mortgaged Black people like they was equipment, because under the law of Virginia, that is exactly what we were. Historian Henry Wiencek documented this in An Imperfect God, and the Mount Vernon estate’s own records confirm it. This ain’t hidden history. This is ledger history, written in the man’s own hand.Speaking of ledgers. In May of 1784, Washington’s account books record a payment of 6 pounds and 2 shillings for nine teeth pulled from the mouths of enslaved people, teeth that scholars believe went into the dentures of the so called father of the nation. Sit with that. The smile on the dollar bill in your pocket may have been built out of Black people’s teeth. When I said on camera that this man had other people’s teeth in his mouth, that was not a punchline, that was a citation.It gets more premeditated. While Washington was serving as president in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania had a Gradual Abolition Act on the books saying any enslaved person who resided in the state for six continuous months became legally free. So what did the great man do? He set a rotation. Every time an enslaved person got close to six months, Washington cycled them back to Virginia and brought them back on a fresh clock, deliberately, repeatedly, in writing, specifically so the law could not free them. Then in 1793 he signed the Fugitive Slave Act, putting the full weight of the federal government behind hunting human beings who freed themselves. That is not a contradiction inside a genius. That is a man committing calculated evil with a calendar reminder.Then there is Ona Judge. In May of 1796, a young enslaved Black woman held by the Washingtons walked out of the president’s house in Philadelphia and freed herself, slipping onto a ship to New Hampshire. Erica Armstrong Dunbar tells the whole story in Never Caught. Washington did not shrug and say we’re all a mixed bag. Washington used federal officers, customs officials, and family agents to hunt this woman for years, trying to trick her onto ships, pressuring her even after she married and had children, and under the law he signed, she died in 1848 still legally a fugitive. The greatest man in America spent the last years of his life trying to drag one Black woman back into bondage. Tell me again about greatness.Nobody Ever Calls the Mustache Man a Great OratorHere is the test I gave y’all in the video, and I need you to feel how it lands in your body. Nobody, in the entire history of polite society, has ever stood in front of a camera and said the mustache man was a great leader who galvanized his people and pulled Germany out of turmoil after the first world war, and sure, he put some folks in ovens, but that does not negate his greatness, he was a great orator. That sentence does not exist. The second you even try to build it, your stomach turns, your hands get clammy, every alarm in your moral hardware goes off. That reflex is the point.Now notice when the reflex goes missing. It goes missing, every single time, when the atrocity is antiblack. Wilderson calls this gratuitous violence: violence against Black people that does not require a transgression, a reason, or a cost benefit analysis, violence that is constitutive of the world rather than an exception to it. Hartman showed us in Scenes of Subjection how the terror of slavery got absorbed into the everyday, into the mundane, into the paperwork, until it stopped registering as terror at all. That is exactly what is happening when a slaveholder’s crimes get filed under flaws. The rationalization is so smooth, so automatic, so bipartisan, that it proves the diagnosis. Antiblack violence is the one atrocity this country has trained itself to metabolize without gagging. That is the reason the status quo look the way it look.Contradiction Is a Luxury ItemLet me bring this down from the marble columns to the block, because this is where it stopped being abstract for me. My daddy is a great daddy and a great man. The system does not see him as a great man. The system sees him as a man who once sold drugs, full stop, end of file. His greatness is not allowed to sit beside his record. There is no interviewer on a soundstage saying his conviction does not negate his greatness. Every guilty person sitting in a cell right now could tell you about the great things they’ve done, the kids they raised, the mamas they took care of, the crews they fed, and every one of them is still gonna be defined by the conviction. The Sentencing Project counts about 4 million Americans stripped of the vote behind felony convictions, disproportionately Black, in a country where a man who trafficked over three hundred human beings gets a monument, a state, a university, a bridge, and the number one spot on the dollar.Derrick Bell told us in Faces at the Bottom of the Well that racism is not a glitch America is working out, it is a permanent load bearing feature, and that Black people’s suffering gets acknowledged only when acknowledging it serves somebody else’s interest. Watch how that plays here. Washington’s slaveholding gets acknowledged, sure, but only in the exact form that protects him: as a flaw, a footnote, a shadow that makes the portrait more interesting. The acknowledgment is doing protection work. Meanwhile the same public that extends infinite moral credit to a dead slaveholder extends none to a living Black man with a record. Contradiction is a luxury item in this country, and everyday Black folks cannot afford it.The View from Hawaii Ain’t the View from the PlantationNow let me say the uncomfortable part with precision, because I said it on camera and I’ma stand on it in print. Barack Obama is the child of a white American mother and a Kenyan father. That is not a diss, that is a data point. His family line does not run through the auction block, through partus sequitur ventrem, through the hush harbors and the whipping post and the Great Migration. What he knows of the plantation, he learned the same place most Americans learned it, in school, filtered through the same curriculum that taught all of us that Washington could not tell a lie. Lineage is not a purity test, feel me, plenty of children of immigrants ride harder for descendants of the enslaved than some cousins I know. Socialization matters though. When the flagship Black American political figure carries no inherited memory of American slavery, and then publicly extends grace to the man who hunted Ona Judge, we are watching the difference between representation and rootedness play out on national television.This is where the intersectional lens is not optional. Crenshaw taught us to ask who sits at the intersection and gets hit from every direction, and the Combahee River Collective told us that if Black women were free, everybody would have to be free, because Black women’s freedom requires tearing down every system of oppression at once. So run the Obama quote through Ona Judge. Run it through the enslaved women at Mount Vernon whose children were born into bondage because Virginia wrote in 1662 that the child follows the condition of the mother, turning Black wombs into factories of property. Spillers named that ungendering of Black flesh in Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. Washington’s greatness was materially built on Black women’s bodies, their labor, their reproduction, their teeth. A framework of greatness that requires footnoting Black women is not a framework, it is a crime scene with good lighting.Exceptionalism Is a Hell of a DrugZoom out to the empire level, because Obama’s statement is not just about the past, it is a user’s manual for American exceptionalism in the present. This country will tell you it must invade, sanction, or bomb another nation because that nation engages in human trafficking, because those people over there are barbaric, uncivilized, in need of democracy and stability. Charles Mills called this the epistemology of ignorance in The Racial Contract: a structured, cultivated way of not knowing, where white supremacist states produce moral maps on which their own atrocities literally cannot appear. Every barbaric, inhumane, unethical thing that happens outside the West becomes proof those people need saving. When the identical thing happens here, it becomes a contradiction inside a great man. Same act. Different ontology. That is the racial contract doing its paperwork.The man delivering this lesson has his own ledger, which is exactly why the framing serves him. Over 540 drone strikes across his two terms, with his own administration admitting between 64 and 116 civilian deaths outside declared war zones and independent monitors counting far more. Over three million deportations, enough that Janet Murguía of La Raza named him the deporter in chief back in 2014. A 2011 intervention in Libya that collapsed the state and, by 2017, CNN cameras were filming open air slave markets in the wreckage. Every president makes bags off the machine and embodies the country’s contradictions, he said it himself. Peep the move though: they get to be heroes for their contradictions, and the rest of us get locked up for ours. Every accusation is a confession, and mixed bag is just what empire calls a body count it intends to keep.Material Impacts: This Ain’t Just DiscourseSomebody in the back is saying this is just words, just vibes, just an old man being diplomatic before a holiday. Nope. Frameworks fund things. Frameworks write curriculum. Frameworks decide what your babies are allowed to learn. Texas already passed its 1836 Project in 2021 to promote patriotic education, and dozens of states have passed laws restricting how teachers can discuss race, slavery, and structural racism, laws that get enforced through book pulls, teacher firings, and district lawsuits. The 250th anniversary is a federal content machine right now, pumping out a version of the founding scrubbed for family viewing. When the first Black president cosigns the flawed genius framework on national television days before July 4, he is not making an observation, he is handing every school board, every textbook publisher, and every state legislature a bipartisan permission structure: see, even Obama says the slaveholding does not negate the greatness.Trouillot broke down in Silencing the Past how power operates at every stage of historymaking: what gets recorded, what gets archived, what gets narrated, what gets commemorated. Greatness is not discovered, kinfolks, greatness is manufactured, and the factory has a silence at every station. The material outcome lands on real people: the descendant community of Mount Vernon fighting for their ancestors to be named, the Black studies programs getting defunded while founder worship gets a federal budget line, the teachers in former slave states choosing between honest history and their mortgage, the millions of disenfranchised who learned that redemption arcs are whites only. That is the impact calculus, straight out the debate round: the link is the framework, the internal link is the curriculum and the law, and the impact is a generation raised inside a lie with a gift shop.What This Means for the ClassroomFor my fellow educators, here is the andragogy of it all. Knowles taught us that adult learners bring their lived experience into the room and learn best when new knowledge connects to that experience, and Freire taught us that education is never neutral, it either functions as an instrument of conformity or an instrument of liberation. The flawed genius framework is conformity pedagogy: it hands students a settled verdict and asks them to admire it. Liberation pedagogy hands students the primary sources, the 1784 ledger, the Pennsylvania rotation letters, the Fugitive Slave Act, the runaway advertisement for Ona Judge, and asks them to render the verdict themselves. In practice that means teaching students to separate what a claim says from what it structurally does, to ask who is allowed contradictions and who gets defined by convictions, to read commemoration itself as a primary source, and to notice whose grandmother’s testimony counts as history and whose counts as bias. A classroom that can run that analysis on George Washington can run it on any power structure it meets for the rest of its life. That is the whole point of education, and that is exactly why they keep passing laws against it.Five Key Takeaways for the Folks in the Back1. The flawed genius framework is a laundering device. Calling slaveholding a flaw converts a crime against humanity into a character quirk, and that conversion is the political work the statement performs, regardless of intent.2. The rationalization test never fails. No other atrocity in modern memory gets the his crimes do not negate his greatness treatment. The grace flows only when the victims are Black, which is Wilderson’s gratuitous violence thesis playing out on a press junket.3. Contradiction is distributed by race and class. Presidents get to be mixed bags. My daddy gets to be a record. About 4 million disenfranchised Americans get to be their convictions forever. Who is allowed complexity is itself a power map.4. Center the women or you are lying. Mount Vernon’s greatness was built on Black women’s labor, wombs, and literal teeth. Ona Judge’s hunted freedom is a truer founding document than anything signed in Philadelphia.5. Frameworks become curriculum, and curriculum becomes law. The 250th, the 1836 Project, and the classroom censorship wave all run on the same permission structure Obama just cosigned. This is material, not rhetorical.Become a Paid Subscriber: Keep the Receipts ComingIf this breakdown gave you the primary sources, the frameworks, and the language that the flawed genius curriculum was built to keep from you, then you already understand exactly what is at stake when honest history depends on one independent Black educator instead of a funded institution. Becoming a paid subscriber today is how this work survives the same machinery that manufactured Washington’s greatness in the first place.I’m fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. Right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe</a>

July 2, 2026

White or Black, Pick One: The Court Cases That Built the Latino Whiteness Pipeline

Thank you <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/2073006-reda-rountree-sheher">Reda Rountree (she/her)</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/205390666-richard-hogan-md-phd2-dba">Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/96662126-jeanne-elbe">Jeanne Elbe</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/143367321-judy">Judy</a>, <a target="_blank" href="https://substack.com/profile/5668343-dmg">Dmg</a>, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.This week I sat down with somebody I spent years trying to beat: Brian Ontiveros-Kersch, UNT to my OU, fifteen-something rounds against each other, from random little prelims all the way to the elims of the National Debate Tournament. We came together to talk about borders not borders the way cable news talks about borders, where the whole conversation starts and stops at “did you cross legally,” but borders the way Gloria Anzaldúa taught us to see them: a wound that never healed, a line that keeps moving, a weapon that gets pointed at some bodies and holstered for others.Brian said something early that framed the whole conversation. Talking about his mama’s people, the Ontiveros side, who been in New Mexico since before it was either “New” or “Mexico,” he put it plain: “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”Sit with that for a second, for the folks in the back. Every argument about “illegals” rests on the assumption that the border is fixed, natural, and legitimate, that the line was always there and the only question is which side of it you standing on. The history says otherwise. The history says the line been redrawn, re-enforced, and re-weaponized every single generation, and the only consistent thing about it is who it gets used against.Borderlands Ain’t Just a Place, It’s a ConditionAnzaldúa grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, right on that line, and in Borderlands/La Frontera she describes the border as an open wound, a place where two worlds grind against each other and bleed, a strip of land that belongs to both countries and neither one at the same time. Anzaldúa wasn’t just talking geography. She was talking identity. The borderlands is also the mestiza consciousness, the person who carries Indigenous and European blood in the same body, who is somehow both and neither, who gets sorted differently depending on who’s doing the looking.Brian lives that. His mama’s family is Mexica, in that land before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo dragged the United States over top of them in 1848. His daddy’s side goes back to the Mayflower. He presents white, went to a white high school, and still got called an anchor baby because, as he put it, passing is a privilege that gets revoked. He can be white, he can be Indigenous, he rarely ever gets to be both, and which one he gets to be changes on the circumstance. That’s the borderland. That’s the liminal spot the national dialogue got no room for, because America wants this OR that, never this AND that.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Texas Was Annexed for Slavery, PeriodY’all know I’m born and raised in Texas, so let me give you the receipts they left out of your 7th grade Texas History class, the class that somehow taught “Remember the Alamo” without teaching Juneteenth.Mexico abolished slavery in 1829 under Vicente Guerrero a president of African descent, feel me, a Black man signing abolition into law decades before the United States could stomach the thought. Anglo settlers brought enslaved people into Mexican Texas anyway. When Santa Anna’s army came, the fight at the Alamo was, at bottom, slaveholders fighting to keep human property inside a country that had outlawed owning humans. Folks did walk out of the Alamo alive women, children, and enslaved people the slavers brought with them. The annexation of Texas happened because white settlers wanted slavery. That is the impetus. That is why Texas is part of the U.S. and not part of Mexico.Then there’s that “Come and Take It” flag your gun-rights uncle loves. That cannon was given to the settlers at Gonzales by Mexican authorities in the first place given to them to help fight off Native people, to keep the so-called savages at bay. Settler solidarity held as long as the deal was clearing Native land together. The moment Mexico’s abolition threatened the slave economy, the settlers turned the same cannon around on the government that armed them. What broke the solidarity wasn’t principle. Slavery broke it.Crazy how the same border got flipped the other direction too. A lot of my ancestors’ folk, enslaved Africans in Texas, ran SOUTH instead of north, because Mexico’s shifting border was a freedom line. There was a whole southern road to freedom into Mexico. The border been a freedom line and a slave-catching line at the same damn time, depending on who drew it and when. Nobody’s illegal on stolen land and the land’s been stolen more than once.The Courtroom Been a Whiteness MachineNow watch how the law manufactured all of this. In 1897, in San Antonio, a case called In re Rodriguez asked whether a Mexican man could naturalize as a U.S. citizen. Naturalization law at the time only had two doors: you could be white, or you could be of African descent. The court dodged the question of whether Rodriguez was white they leaned on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo instead, but the frame was set. Two doors. Pick one.Then in the 1930s comes Timoteo Andrade, a Mexican national up in Buffalo, New York, applying for citizenship after decades in this country. The government’s position leaned on him being Indigenous, and natives couldn’t naturalize — remember, Native Americans didn’t even get U.S. citizenship until 1924, damn near 60 years after Black folks. So what did Andrade argue in open court? That he’d been exaggerating his indigeneity. That his nose wasn’t flat like the Olmec or the Mexica. That his skin was light. That he was, in fact, white. He won. He argued himself white in a court of law, and the court agreed, and the door opened.Fast-forward to 2010, when the census told Latinos that ethnicity is not race and made folks pick a race on top of “Hispanic.” Our old debate colleague Nate Cohn yeah, that Nate Cohn, he became a stats journalist wrote it up in the New York Times: over a million people who checked “some other race” in 2000 checked “white” in 2010. Latinos became white overnight, on paper, by the stroke of a pencil. Latino is an ethnicity, kinfolks, not a race there are Black Latinos, white Latinos, Indigenous Latinos, Asian Latinos and when the machine forces the underlying racial question, where do folks run? Toward whiteness. Not because they’re uniquely evil. They run toward whiteness because whiteness is a protective class in this country, because the law been teaching that exact lesson since 1897, because the white-over-Black binary logic of America says it is best to be white, and if you cannot be white, whatever you do, don’t be Black.We talk about epigenetics when it comes to Black folks and the trauma of slavery. I’d argue there’s a social epigenetics operating in the Latino community too. Generations of symbols, patterns, norms, and court cases teaching that it is safer and more beneficial to be seen with the Europeans than to be seen with us. Black folks peep that. Consciously and subconsciously, Black folks peep that, and that inherited lesson is exactly what keeps getting in the way of solidarity.“Peons”: The Hundred-Year-Old ScriptThe rhetorician Lisa Flores went back and studied how America talked about Mexican labor in the early twentieth century, and what she found should sound familiar as hell. After World War I took a generation of white and Black American men to Europe, Mexican workers filled the labor gap, and the country welcomed them — as “peons.” Docile. Menial. Cheap. The papers praised them for one thing in particular: they send their money back to Mexico, so they don’t disrupt our economy. Flores found that sentence in the 1920s. I heard that same sentence at somebody’s cookout THIS YEAR. The script is a hundred years old and ain’t missed a beat.Peon rhetoric is slave-adjacent rhetoric that’s the point. Paid under the table, paid below minimum wage, paid slave wages, welcomed exactly as long as the labor is needed. Then the Depression hit, the labor wasn’t needed, and the same people became “job stealers” overnight. What followed was the deportation drives of 1929 to 1936, what historians call the Mexican Repatriation: as many as a million people removed, and scholars estimate somewhere around six in ten of them was U.S. citizens. Flores tells the story of a nineteen-year-old boy, born and raised in this country, birthright citizen, working the fields, who got swept up and shipped to Mexico, a country he wasn’t born in, speaking a language he didn’t speak.Now tell me what that sounds like. Tell me that don’t sound like citizens and legal residents getting swept up in raids right now, like people getting rendered to a mega-prison in El Salvador with no process. History don’t repeat itself so much as it be reciting itself, word for word, off a script white supremacy wrote a century ago.“Do It the Right Way” Is a Moving TargetHere’s where the good-immigrant/bad-immigrant paradigm collapses, just like we knew it would. Haitians in this country had Temporary Protected Status, which means by definition they did it “the right way.” Then the administration changed, the they’re-eating-the-dogs rhetoric did its work, and TPS got stripped. Thousands of people who did it the right way became “undocumented” overnight, not because they moved, but because the line moved. Meanwhile I need you to hold both of these at once white South Africans got offered a refugee welcome mat by the same administration.Every accusation is a confession. They accuse migrants of disrespecting legality; the receipts confess it was never about legality, because when legality inconveniences whiteness, legality gets rewritten. Notice too whose status got revoked first: Black people. The first folks made illegal by a stroke of the pen under this administration wasn’t Latinos, it was Haitians, Black people. As Brian put it: they’re coming for everyone. You aren’t safe.Let me be clear on Haiti while I’m here, because I don’t engage in anti-Black pathology about that country: the instability in Haiti is not some natural Haitian condition. The instability in Haiti is the compounding bill that France and the United States been making Haitians pay ever since Haitians had the audacity to free themselves — the ransom debt, the occupations, the coups, the coercion. When people flee Haiti, they are fleeing the consequences of Western imperialism, trying to follow the stolen resources back to where they got taken.Three Pillars, One ArchitectSo why do Black, Brown, and Indigenous folks keep ending up at each other’s necks? Andrea Smith’s three pillars of white supremacy the framework behind my favorite debate I ever had against Brian explains the mechanism. White supremacy don’t run on one logic; it runs on anti-Blackness anchoring slavery and capitalism, on genocide anchoring settler colonialism, on orientalism anchoring permanent war. The evil genius of the design is that a group crushed by one pillar can still collect benefits from another one, and white supremacy pays out them benefits like a crooked casino, just enough to keep everybody betting against each other.Black folks didn’t run settler colonialism stolen bodies, not stolen land yet we still live on and benefit from land taken from Indigenous people. Indigenous people in the continental U.S. largely wasn’t enslaved, yet they still benefited from the material wealth that stolen Black labor built. Then it gets uglier. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes got offered “civilization” by the United States on explicit terms: adopt settler agriculture, which meant plantation slavery, which meant practicing anti-Blackness as the price of ascending toward whiteness. Several of those nations signed treaties with the Confederacy, and the descendants of their Freedmen are still fighting for citizenship and dignity inside those nations today. Flip it around: Buffalo Soldiers, Black men fresh off the plantation, took army pensions to fight Native people across the Southwest after Guadalupe Hidalgo. If Group A harms Group B in service of white supremacy, Group A gets privileges. That’s the machine. That’s always been the machine.This is where I bring in Wilderson, because y’all know I hold Afropessimism and coalition politics in the same hand. Wilderson’s triad puts the white settler as the Human, the “savage” as the half-human, and the slave as the non-human… the fungible flesh against which the Human defines itself. Wilderson says slavery is ontological for Black people, not an event but a structure, and “savage negrophobia” names how even the Native position gets recruited into anti-Blackness. Two things can be true: those positions was coerced through settler colonialism, AND anti-Blackness is anti-Blackness. If you’re doing impact calculus, gratuitous anti-Black violence is still the backdrop everything else plays out against. I appreciate the competing interpretations inside the academy more now than I did when I was younger everybody don’t agree with Wilderson, still, the descriptive power of that critique shows up every time solidarity gets tested.Which brings me to the present. When mass deportation kicked off, a lot of Black folks said “I’m sitting this one out,” and I understood the hurt underneath it you feel like a community chose whiteness over you every time it counted, so now it’s “f**k the community.” That’s not paranoia, that’s pattern recognition, that’s the non-theoretical, lived version of the junior-partner critique. Here’s the nuance I argued then and I’ll argue now: I’m not advocating for no Black person to sacrifice themselves in the street for a cause that never had them in mind. What I’m saying is you don’t have to celebrate mass deportation to stay in the house and sit this one out. There is no version of a white supremacist agenda that helps your Black ass. Remember what the Supreme Court blessed with them Kavanaugh stops. ICE stopping people based on how you look, what language you speak, and what job you work. White people know Black Latinos exist. Blackness gets profiled first and asked about ethnicity never.The SAVE Act Math Don’t MathSame trap, different door: “non-citizens are polluting the vote, so we need strict ID and citizenship verification.” Brian broke the math down like the debater he is. If democracy is a process of maximizing the participation of the demos the actual people — then any policy that blocks one ineligible voter while also blocking ten eligible ones leaves you net down nine true votes. That’s not protecting democracy, that’s subtracting from it. Look at Texas: demand a Real ID, then close the DPS offices in your city, so now it’s a four-hour round trip you can’t take off work for, no bus route, no car and Houston-born, definitely-citizen Black folks can’t vote. All to make sure one Latino couldn’t. If fifty eligible voters get blocked to stop one ineligible one, the dilution runs fifty times the other direction. Every argument for these laws ends up anti-democratic on its own terms. Black folks cheering voter ID because it targets “non-citizens” — that’s the same knife, kinfolks, just rotated. Don’t support that.Conservative Contradictions: Borders Matter Till They Don’tLastly, watch the double-speak, because this the part that’s always stuck with me since I first read Anzaldúa. The same people who say the border is sacred will conveniently forget every border on the map when it’s time to go grab Maduro over gas prices, or invade Iraq, or roll into whoever’s country talking about we got to save THEIR citizens from being mistreated while our government mistreating ours. So we see it in every instance: whatever white people create, they get to pick and choose when it matters and when it don’t matter. When they say borders matter, goddammit, borders matter. When borders inconvenience empire, borders evaporate.Same energy with race trading and class trading. Poor whites keep trading in their class interests for their racial similarities — that’s how you get people with no boots cheering for the man taking their laces. That’s also the exact history that makes so many Black folks view so many non-Black folks with skepticism, because they be like: history tells me you gonna sell me out when there be a chance.Where Do We Go From HereCoalition don’t come from pretending none of this happened. Coalition comes from the tough conversations about anti-Blackness in the Latino community, about xenophobia in ours, about the settler colonialism sitting over all of it had honestly, without the academic language if we don’t need it. It’s the Fred Hamptons of the world we’re missing. It’s the Rainbow Coalition we need to get back to: solidarity built on naming exactly how white supremacy pays each of us to police the other, then refusing the payment.See, Anzaldúa reminds us the border is a wound that keeps moving, that the borderlands live in territory and in flesh at the same time — and Flores teaches us the words always come first and the buses come after, that “peon” and “illegal” are rhetorical constructions doing a century of dirty work. The border crossed them. The ships crossed us. The land was crossed out from under the first peoples. None of us drew the line, and every one of us been cut by it.I’m worried moving forward. I’m an optimistic worried, though, because more people are having these conversations than ever. Let’s keep having them.Key Takeaways* Borders are constructed and constantly moving. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) dragged the U.S. border across whole communities — folks like Brian’s family didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. Anzaldúa’s borderlands names both the physical strip and the identity condition of being both-and-neither.* Texas exists because of slavery. Mexico, under Afro-Mexican president Vicente Guerrero, abolished slavery in 1829; Anglo settlers fought the Texas Revolution largely to keep enslaving people, and the “Come and Take It” cannon was originally a Mexican gift to settlers for fighting Native people. Meanwhile, enslaved Black Texans ran SOUTH across that border to freedom.* The courts built a whiteness pipeline. In re Rodriguez (1897) and the Timoteo Andrade case (1930s) show naturalization law offering two doors — white or Black — and the material incentive to argue yourself white. The 2010 census shift (documented by Nate Cohn) shows over a million Latinos choosing “white” when forced to pick a race.* The deportation script is 100 years old. Lisa Flores’ work on “peon” rhetoric shows the same cycle — welcomed as cheap labor who “send money home,” then demonized as job-stealers and mass-deported. The 1929–36 Repatriation removed up to a million people, an estimated ~60% of them U.S. citizens. Citizens getting swept up today is a rerun, not an anomaly.* “Do it the right way” is a moving target. Haitians with TPS did it the legal way and were made undocumented overnight by a policy stroke, while white South Africans got refugee status. Legality bends to whiteness; every accusation is a confession.* The three pillars pit us against each other by design (Andrea Smith): anti-Blackness/slavery, genocide/settler colonialism, orientalism/war. Groups harmed by one pillar still collect benefits from another — Five Civilized Tribes’ coerced slaveholding, Buffalo Soldiers’ pensions — which is exactly how solidarity gets bought off. Wilderson’s triad (Human/Savage/Slave) keeps anti-Blackness named as the backdrop.* You don’t have to celebrate mass deportation to sit one out. Black skepticism toward coalition is pattern recognition, not pathology — still, a white supremacist agenda helps no Black person, and the Kavanaugh-blessed ICE stops (race, language, job) guarantee Black folks, starting with Black Latinos and Haitians, are already in the crosshairs.* Voter ID math is anti-democratic on its own terms: blocking one ineligible voter at the cost of ten (or fifty) eligible ones is a net subtraction from democracy — and the subtraction lands on Black and poor voters first.BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBERI'm fighting to fill a critical void left by the retreat of public education media. I document and teach the histories, legal frameworks, and cultural knowledge that are being systematically erased or distorted. With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. As a Black educator and researcher my work depends entirely on a community of readers, not corporate sponsors. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, we could build a full-time digital sanctuary: a new, independent source of PBS-depth reporting and curriculum, centered on Black expertise. But right now, less than 1% of my followers are paid subscribers.Education Is Elevation is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Related Reading & Cited SourcesCore theoretical frameworks* Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).* Lisa A. Flores, “Constructing Rhetorical Borders: Peons, Illegal Aliens, and Competing Narratives of Immigration,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 4 (2003).* Lisa A. Flores, Deportable and Disposable: Public Rhetoric and the Making of the “Illegal” Immigrant (Penn State University Press, 2020).* Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010) — the Settler/“Savage”/Slave triad and savage negrophobia.* Frank B. Wilderson III, Afropessimism (Liveright, 2020).* Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy,” in Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology (South End Press, 2006).* Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012).* Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993).* Juan F. Perea, “The Black/White Binary Paradigm of Race,” California Law Review 85 (1997).* George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness (Temple University Press, 1998; rev. 2018).Cases, laws, and policy referenced* Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) — U.S. annexation of roughly half of Mexico’s territory.* Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) — origin point of the modern “right way” legality discourse.* In re Rodriguez, 81 F. 337 (W.D. Tex. 1897) — Mexican eligibility for naturalization in San Antonio.* The Timoteo Andrade naturalization case (Buffalo, NY, 1930s) — see Patrick D. Lukens, A Quiet Victory for Latino Rights: FDR and the Controversy Over “Whiteness” (University of Arizona Press, 2012).* Indian Citizenship Act (1924) — Native Americans granted U.S. citizenship.* Mexican Repatriation, 1929–1936 — see Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s (University of New Mexico Press, rev. ed. 2006).* Noem v. Perdomo (U.S. Supreme Court, 2025) — emergency-docket order lifting limits on ICE stops; Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence on apparent ethnicity, language, and occupation as factors.* Trump v. Barbara (U.S. Supreme Court, June 30, 2026) — the 6–3 birthright citizenship ruling; see the prior Education Is Elevation essay on the settler/immigrant/arrivant framework.* Termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians (2025) and the refugee program for white South Africans (2025) — DHS/State Department actions.* The SAVE Act — proposed federal proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement.Deeper history — related reading* Alice L. Baumgartner, South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War (Basic Books, 2020).* Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton University Press, 2004).* Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).* Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (University of California Press, 2005).* Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (UNC Press, 2013).* Gerald Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins: The U.S., the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (Monthly Review Press, 2015).* Jakobi Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago (UNC Press, 2013) — Fred Hampton’s original Rainbow Coalition.* Nate Cohn, “More Hispanics Declaring Themselves White,” The New York Times, May 21, 2014. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe</a>

June 30, 2026

The 14th Amendment Was Built for the Freed Slaves, Not Ellis Island

The clip went something like this: every American who is a natural-born U.S. citizen is only a couple generations removed from somebody who wasn’t, go back far enough and every single American is the child of a migrant, this is literally the United States of America, so trying to end birthright citizenship is the most un-American thing you could push for. And on the surface that sound like solidarity. On the surface that sound like a man with a big heart standing up for immigrants against a cruel policy. Ahh, but words have meaning.My grandfather used to tell me the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and what that means in this context is I’m not about to sit here and accuse this man of evil, I’m not about to pretend Hasan woke up trying to harm nobody, because I don’t believe that he did. I believe his heart was in the right place. I also believe his analysis was empirically false. Both of those things can be true at the same time. Lefty to lefty, that’s the whole conversation.Because here go the problem. There is a difference between an immigrant and a settler, and calling the descendants of settlers “immigrants” ain’t a cute simplification — it’s a misnomer, and a dangerous one, and the danger is exactly what it erases.Words Have Meaning — Immigrant, Settler, ArrivantLet me put the definitions on the table, because this whole disagreement live and die on the definitions.A migrant — say it with me — a migrant moves into a political order that already exists. The migrant recognizes a sovereignty that is already sitting there, submits to a state that is already built, knocks on a door that is already hung. That is Lorenzo Veracini’s whole point in Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview: not all migrants are settlers. The migrant enters somebody else’s house. The migrant don’t own the deed.A settler is a different animal. The settler don’t come to join the order — the settler come to found one. Veracini says settlers “come to stay,” and they carry a sovereign capacity with them, they bring the state in their pocket, they plant a flag and call the planting “discovery.” Patrick Wolfe gave us the line everybody quotes: settler colonialism is a structure, not an event, and that structure runs on a logic of elimination — the native is in the way, so the native has got to be made to vanish, made into a ghost, made into the past tense.And then there is the third category, the one Hasan’s “we’re all immigrants” math leaves no room for. Jodi Byrd, in The Transit of Empire, borrows a word from the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, arrivant for the people forced into the Americas through the violence of European and Anglo-American colonialism. Not settlers, because they founded nothing and owned nothing, not even themselves. Not migrants, because didn’t nobody migrate in the belly of a slave ship. Arrivants. Forced arrivals.Tuck and Yang built the whole frame in Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor: settler colonialism stands on a triad settler, native, slave. Three positions, three different relationships to the land, three completely different stories about how a body ended up standing on this soil. And when you take that triad and you blend it all into one smoothie called “we’re all the children of immigrants,” you ain’t being inclusive. You collapsing three histories into one. And the one you keep is the settler’s.So when I say what I said “African Americans, we ain’t settle here, we ain’t migrate either, we was forced here,” I’m not being poetic. I’m being precise.The Math Don’t Math — Ellis Island Showed Up LateMost of the people who repeat the “we’re all immigrants” line are picturing Ellis Island. The huddled masses, the manifests, the new name the clerk gave grandpa. Beautiful image. Wrong amendment. Let me walk the timeline, because the dates do the arguing for me.1790. The very first Naturalization Act says the path from immigrant to citizen is open to “free white persons.” Free. White. Persons. That is the law. For most of this country’s history, the immigrant-to-citizen pipeline that the clip is romanticizing was, by statute, a whites-only pipeline.1857. Dred Scott. The Supreme Court looks a Black man in the face and rules that Black people, free or enslaved, are not citizens and cannot ever be that we hold no rights the white man is bound to respect.1868. The 14th Amendment. Born out of the Civil War, written in the blood of four years of war, ratified specifically to take Dred Scott and tear it up: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” That is the root of birthright citizenship in this country. Not Ellis Island. My ancestors. The freed people. Birthright citizenship was built to account for the descendants of forced labor, to finally make citizens of the people this country had spent two and a half centuries treating as property.1884. Elk v. Wilkins. The same court rules that Native Americans the actual indigenous people, the people who were here before “here” had a name are not made citizens by the 14th Amendment.1892. Ellis Island finally opens its doors. Twenty-four years after the 14th Amendment had already settled birthright. The immigration mythology the clip is leaning on shows up almost a quarter-century after the clause it thinks it explains.1898. Wong Kim Ark. Now the court extends birthright to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants a real and important expansion, but notice the order of operations. The freed slaves first. The immigrant’s child after, standing on a foundation the freed people had already laid.1924. The Indian Citizenship Act. The first peoples of this land had to wait until nineteen twenty-four to be granted citizenship by an act of Congress — granted, like a favor, like a permission slip — while the descendants of European settlers had been citizens by default the whole time.Read that timeline back. The settler’s grandchild was a citizen automatically. The freed slave needed a constitutional amendment. The native had to wait on Congress until 1924. So when somebody tells me every single American is a generation or two removed from being an immigrant, what they are telling me whether they mean it or not is that Native Americans and Black Americans don’t count as Americans, because our citizenship did not come from Ellis Island. It came from a war, an amendment, and a sixty-year wait.Whose Womb, Whose NationAnd here is where I have to do the both/and work, because this fight has never been only about race it has been litigated, every single time, on and through the bodies of women of color. Intersection ain’t a decoration on this argument. It’s the engine.Go back to 1662, Virginia, the doctrine the lawyers called partus sequitur ventrem — “that which is born follows the womb.” English common law said a child’s status followed the father. The colony flipped it: a child’s status would follow the mother. And that one flip turned every enslaved Black woman’s womb into a factory for the institution her children born into bondage automatically, hereditary slavery reproduced through her body, by law. Hortense Spillers taught us to read that ungendering, that reduction of the mother to flesh and the flesh to capital. Dorothy Roberts taught us this country has always claimed the right to police who Black women are allowed to bring into the world.Now hold that against 1868. The 14th Amendment takes partus sequitur ventrem and turns it inside out. Under slavery, the womb made you a slave; under the Citizenship Clause, birth on this soil makes you a citizen. The same site, the birth, the body, the mother went from the mechanism of bondage to the doorway of belonging. That is not a small thing. That is the whole revolution of Reconstruction compressed into one clause.So watch what happened the same week the Supreme Court upheld birthright in 2026. Within hours, the Justice Department announced it would prioritize prosecuting “birth tourism.” Birth tourism. The phrase itself points the finger straight back at the racialized woman’s womb, the Chinese mother, the Nigerian mother, the woman who had the nerve to give birth on the wrong soil. From 1662 to 2026 the through-line never breaks: in America, the question of who gets to belong has always been answered at the site of a woman of color’s body. Crazy how that part stays the same.The Melting Pot Makes Whiteness DisappearLet me name the mechanism, because the mechanism is the whole point. When you say “we’re all the descendants of immigrants,” it feel generous. It feel like everybody invited to the cookout. But watch who that sentence actually disappears.It disappears the native, who was already here and didn’t immigrate to nowhere. It disappears the arrivant, who was dragged here in chains and didn’t choose nothing. And it takes the one figure who actually did come from somewhere else to take this land the settler and it rebrands him as just another immigrant, just another striver, just another huddled mass.That is the trick. Tuck and Yang call it a “settler move to innocence” — a story you tell so the settling stops feeling like settling. And the slickest part, the part you almost can’t see, is that the melting-pot story makes the white settler the invisible default, the normal one, the natural American against whom everybody else has to be measured. Veracini said it plain: the settler positions himself as both superior and normal, while the native and the slave are the ones who have to keep explaining themselves.So when you flatten all of us into “immigrants,” you do not make everybody equal. You make whiteness the water nobody can see they swimming in. By doing the inclusion, you do the erasure. By trying to put everybody on the same boat, you let the people who built the boat out of stolen wood and stolen labor pretend they bought a ticket like everybody else.Same Framework, Different ContinentNow let me talk to Hasan directly, lefty to lefty, because this is where the disappointment comes from and the disappointment comes from respect.When it comes to Palestine, the man is sharp. He’ll walk you through settler colonialism with the precision of somebody who actually read the literature — the dispossession, the logic of replacement, the difference between a person fleeing into a land and a project built on taking it. He acknowledges indigeneity over there without blinking.Ahh, but bring that same framework home and something seizes up. The man who can see the settler clearly in one hemisphere suddenly can’t acknowledge that Native Americans exist as indigenous people here, can’t see that the descendants of colonists are not the descendants of immigrants, can’t apply the analysis to the soil he is standing on. And I don’t think that’s malice. I think that’s a blind spot — the specific blind spot a lot of the broader Left carries the second Black and native specificity is the thing on the table. A bunch of us been feeling it: brilliant on so many issues, breadth and depth for days, and then a flatness, a quickness, an intellectual laziness that only seems to show up when the subject is us.That matters because of the platform. Millions of mostly white folks love following this man, and they learn from him, and when he says “we’re all immigrants” with that much conviction and that much reach, he ain’t just making a point, he’s teaching. He’s miseducating an audience that trusts him, even if he’s doing it passionately, even if he’s doing it by accident. I speak passionately too. I make sentences out of words too. I get it. Which is exactly why I’d rather call him in than call him out. Lefty to lefty: let’s talk, let’s fix the blind spot, because right now it’s doing both of us a disservice.And Then the Court Said It TooHere’s the part that would be funny if it wasn’t so on time. The same day I’m making this argument, June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court hands down Trump v. Barbara and upholds birthright citizenship six to three, striking down the executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office. And read how Chief Justice Roberts grounds it: in the Reconstruction Congress, in the abolitionists, in the men who wrote the 14th Amendment and defined citizenship broadly on purpose, because they were trying to secure freedom for people coming up out of slavery.Even the government’s own lawyer, arguing to gut the thing, conceded the root. The Solicitor General stood up and said the Citizenship Clause was meant to give citizenship to those newly freed from slavery and their descendants that was his argument, the argument for the restriction. Both sides in front of the highest court in the land agreed on the origin: the freed slaves, not Ellis Island. The exact distinction I’m drawing isn’t fringe. It’s the holding.And lest anybody think this is settled and soft: within hours of the ruling, the Justice Department sent every U.S. attorney a letter telling them to go prosecute “birth tourism,” and the President got on his platform telling Congress to end birthright by statute. So no, this is not a history lecture. This is a live wire. Which is exactly why getting the words right matters right now, today, not as an academic flex but as a matter of who this country is going to admit it owes.So let me bring it back to where the clip pointed and then refused to look. Birthright citizenship in this country has got nothing to do with Ellis Island and everything to do with settlers trying to account for the free labor of my ancestors… people who did not come here voluntarily, who were not migrating toward a dream, who were forced, forced laborers, and whose forced presence is the actual root of the 14th Amendment. Wolfe gives us the structure. Veracini gives us the difference between the one who founds the order and the one who enters it. Byrd gives us the word for the ones who were dragged into it. Tuck and Yang give us the triad so we never flatten the three into one. And the freed people themselves, through a war and an amendment, gave us the very birthright the whole country is now fighting over.We ain’t settle here. We ain’t migrate either. We was forced here. Hold the distinction, because the distinction is the history, and the history is the receipt.Lefty to lefty, Hasan — let’s talk.Five Key Takeaways* Immigrant, settler, and arrivant are three different categories with three different relationships to the land and the law — a migrant enters an order that already exists, a settler founds one and comes to stay, and an arrivant is forced in. Collapsing all three into “immigrant” is the original error.* Birthright citizenship is older than Ellis Island. The 14th Amendment (1868) predates the opening of Ellis Island (1892) by twenty-four years, and it was written to overturn Dred Scott and make citizens of the freed people — not to romanticize immigration.* The immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, a whites-only pathway. The 1790 Naturalization Act limited naturalization to “free white persons.” Black citizenship came through the 14th Amendment (1868); Native citizenship had to be granted by the Indian Citizenship Act (1924). Different routes, both forced or delayed.* Who counts as American has always been decided at the site of the racialized woman’s womb — from partus sequitur ventrem (1662), which made the enslaved mother’s womb reproduce slavery, to the 14th Amendment that inverted it, to the “birth tourism” panic the DOJ revived in 2026.* “We’re all immigrants” is a settler move to innocence: it erases the native and the arrivant and makes the white settler the invisible, natural default American. Even Trump v. Barbara (June 30, 2026) grounds birthright in the freed slaves — the distinction isn’t fringe, it’s the holding.Annotated BibliographyVeracini, Lorenzo. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 (2nd ed., 2024).The load-bearing distinction for the whole piece: “not all migrants are settlers.” Settlers “come to stay” and carry a sovereign capacity, founding political orders by disavowing Indigenous sovereignty; migrants enter an order already constituted and submit to a sovereignty they did not make.Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409.Source of “settler colonialism is a structure, not an event” and the “logic of elimination.” Establishes that settlement is ongoing, not a finished historical moment, and that the native is targeted for disappearance so the settler can become the natural inhabitant.Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. University of Minnesota Press, 2011.Introduces the arrivant a term Byrd borrows from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite for peoples forced into the Americas through colonial violence. This is the precise category for enslaved Africans and their descendants: neither settler nor native, but forced arrival.Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.Frames settler colonialism as an “entangled triad” of settler–native–slave and names the “settler moves to innocence” the evasions (like “we’re all immigrants”) that reconcile settler guilt without returning land or reckoning with the triad.Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81.The theory of “flesh” and the ungendering of the enslaved — essential for reading how the maternal body was reduced to capital, which is the foundation the womb argument in this piece stands on.Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Pantheon, 1997.Documents the long American project of policing Black women’s reproduction. Grounds the claim that citizenship and belonging in the U.S. have always been adjudicated through control of racialized women’s childbearing.Wilderson, Frank B., III. Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.Theorizes the tripled antagonism of settler, native (“Savage”), and slave as structurally distinct positions reinforcing why the three cannot be collapsed into a single “immigrant” narrative without erasing two of them.Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857).The decision the 14th Amendment was written to overturn: held that Black people, free or enslaved, were not and could not be citizens. The before-picture for birthright citizenship.Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).Held that the 14th Amendment did not confer citizenship on Native Americans the legal basis for why indigenous citizenship had to wait for separate statutory action in 1924.United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898).Extended birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants. Important, but chronologically and logically downstream of the 14th Amendment’s original purpose for the freed people.Indian Citizenship Act (Snyder Act), 43 Stat. 253 (1924).Granted U.S. citizenship to Native Americans by act of Congress — nineteen years into the twentieth century, and decades after settler descendants held citizenship by default.Naturalization Act of 1790, 1 Stat. 103.Limited naturalization to “free white persons,” establishing that the immigrant-to-citizen pathway was, by statute, racially restricted for most of U.S. history.Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (U.S. June 30, 2026).The 6–3 decision upholding birthright citizenship and striking Executive Order 14160. Chief Justice Roberts grounds the holding in the Reconstruction framers and abolitionists; even the Solicitor General conceded the Citizenship Clause’s origin in the newly freed and their descendants. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <a href="https://theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2">theconsciouslee.substack.com/subscribe</a>

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