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It’s Wednesday morning and I got three headlines open on the same screen.
Texas is putting a whole industry on a Schedule I list next to heroin on July 31. Tuskegee University is banning bonnets, durags, and bedroom shoes out the classroom and the cafeteria. Two congressmen from Indiana wrote a letter demanding a university fire a Black woman for putting a cake outside a dead senator’s office.
Three stories. Every algorithm in America will serve them to you as three separate arguments so you can go pick a side on each one and feel like you did something.
They ain’t three stories. They one story wearing three outfits.
Every single one of them runs on the same move. Somebody with power announces a standard. The standard gets described as neutral, natural, obvious, just how things are, just how the world works. Free market. Professionalism. Civility. And then, every single time, when you follow the money back to who wrote the standard and who gets paid when it is enforced, you find the same thing.
Professionalism is not a thermometer. Professionalism is a preference with a payroll behind it.
So is the free market. So is civility. And I’m finna show you the receipts on all three before I’m done.
Let me get the definition in first, because I don’t want to just throw words around. Maybe we got some students watching. We ain’t going with the AI definition. We going with Merriam Webster.
A free market is an economic system in which prices are based on competition among private businesses and are not controlled or regulated by the government.
Hold that. Now here go the receipts.
In 2019, Texas passed House Bill 1325 legalizing hemp with no more than 0.3 percent delta 9 THC by dry weight, tracking the 2018 federal Farm Bill. Businesses did exactly what the law told them they could do. Farmers planted. People signed leases. People bought inventory. People hired. The industry says it grew to roughly 4.3 billion dollars in annual sales and about 53,000 jobs in Texas, and I want to flag that those are the industry’s own numbers from the Texas Hemp Business Council, not an independent audit, so hold them accordingly.
Then in 2025 the Legislature passed Senate Bill 3, a near total ban. It cleared the House 87 to 54 and the Senate 25 to 6, mostly party line, in a chamber the Republicans control. Greg Abbott vetoed it just before midnight on June 22, 2025, and his stated reason was not that the ban was wrong. His stated reason was that it was, in his words, almost certainly unconstitutional, and that a law that gets immediately enjoined serves no one. He called a special session for July 21 to build a regulatory framework instead. The framework never got built. In September 2025 he issued an executive order restricting sales to adults 21 and over and pushed the rest to the agencies.
Now watch what happened next, because this is the part that matters.
The Legislature never passed the ban. The Legislature never passed a framework either. So the fight moved out of the room where you get to vote for somebody, and into the room where you don’t. The Department of State Health Services had quietly expanded its controlled substance definitions back in October 2021 to sweep in delta 8, delta 10, THCP, and other intoxicating THC variants. A Travis County court blocked it. That injunction held for nearly five years while the case moved. On May 1, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court sided with the agency in the Sky Marketing litigation and upheld its authority. The mandate issued June 5. DSHS published notice in the July 10 Texas Register. Effective July 31, 2026, more than trace amounts of any THC other than delta 9 is a Schedule I controlled substance in the state of Texas, sitting on the same list as heroin, LSD, and psilocybin.
Somebody explain to me which part of that is the free market.
The elected body could not pass it. So an unelected agency defined it into existence and a court blessed the definition. Small businesses across this state spent their hard earned money on inventory that a state agency made contraband by publishing a notice in a register. That is not competition among private businesses with prices unregulated by government. That is the opposite of the thing they say they love. That is the government picking who eats.
And here is the part I need y’all to sit in. When Abbott vetoed SB 3, the model he publicly recommended was to regulate THC the way Texas regulates alcohol.
The alcohol way. From the state that has been watching alcohol consumption hit record lows.
The hemp industry has been saying out loud for two years that lobbyists tied to Big Alcohol and to the licensed marijuana operators were pushing the ban. I am going to be honest with y’all about the evidentiary status of that: that is an industry claim made by an industry with a direct financial stake, and I have not seen a lobbying disclosure audit that nails it down, so I am putting it on the table as a claim and not as a proven fact. But you do not need the smoking gun to see the shape of the thing. The prison industrial complex loses volume when cannabis gets easier. The alcohol industry loses shelf space when cannabis gets easier. Both of them are old, both of them are organized, both of them have Austin on retainer, and both of them just watched their competition get delisted by definition rather than by vote.
That’s the call coming from inside the house. The same folks that spent my whole childhood telling me socialism is when a small group of unaccountable planners decide what gets made and what gets banned just described their own July.
And do not let nobody act like this is a fresh fight either.
Anytime the pathology around cannabis gets warmed up, it has to borrow from the old archaic file. Criminalize Black people. Make you scared of the dark brown cartels south of the border. Add a little anti work moralism on top, it’ll make you lazy, it’ll make you unable to think.
The word itself was the first move. Cannabis had been in the American pharmacopeia for decades under the name cannabis. When the Federal Bureau of Narcotics went to work under Harry Anslinger in the 1930s, the word that got pushed into the newspapers and into the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act was marihuana. Not a scientific term. A Spanish language term, selected because it sounded foreign and it sounded brown and it made a plant that had been sitting in tincture bottles at the drugstore feel like an invasion. The 1970 Controlled Substances Act put cannabis in Schedule I. The Shafer Commission that Nixon himself appointed came back in 1972 recommending decriminalization and Nixon threw it in the trash.
Then the outcomes. The ACLU’s 2020 analysis found Black people were 3.64 times more likely than white people to be arrested for marijuana possession nationally, in a country where usage rates between the two groups are roughly equal. Same plant. Same behavior. Almost four times the handcuffs.
So when Texas tells me on July 31 that this is about intoxicating variants and public safety, I want to know why the word intoxicating is doing all that work and the word alcohol is not in the sentence. Drunk driving is one of the leading causes of preventable death in this country. Alcohol is a leading preventable cause of death, period. We got commercials for it during the game. We got it at graduations. We got it at the funeral after. If the concern was intoxication, the ban would have started somewhere else and everybody knows it.
Most of y’all know it and won’t say it.
And poetically, this is happening in the same state, in the same election year, where the whole pitch to working people is that immigrants are taking your jobs. You cannot blame an immigrant for the smoke shop closing. You cannot blame an immigrant for the grower shutting down. You cannot blame an immigrant for the shelf getting cleared by a register notice. Those jobs are getting taken by policy, in public, by people whose names are on a ballot in November, while they point at somebody who doesn’t have a vote.
Gina Hinojosa is running against Greg Abbott. James Talarico is running against Ken Paxton. There is a whole ballot underneath that. I am not telling you who to vote for. I am telling you to know who did what.
Now let me bring in the framework, because I don’t want this to just be me pointing.
Lewis Gordon wrote a book in 1995 called Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. Gordon takes bad faith out of the French existentialist seminar and puts it where it belongs, which is on the ground in an antiblack world. Bad faith, for Gordon, is not lying to somebody else. It is choosing to believe something you have the evidence to disbelieve, because believing it lets you keep your role, your comfort, and your innocence at the same time.
The key thing in Gordon is that bad faith is not an accident. It is not ignorance. It is a labor. You have to work to keep it going. You have to manage the evidence. You have to keep the file closed.
Apply Gordon here.
A Texas legislator who votes to schedule a legal product out of existence and then goes home and gives a speech about the free market is not confused about economics. He knows. A university president who has the retention data in his own institutional research office and announces a bonnet ban as the intervention is not unaware of the data. He has it. A congressman who spent a decade calling the left the cancel culture party and then writes a letter demanding a university fire a woman for a cake does not lack a mirror.
They are doing the work of not knowing. Gordon calls that work by its name.
And Gordon adds the part that gets left out. Bad faith is contagious, and its favorite recruit is the person who has already been harmed by it, because for that person the lie comes with a promise attached: comply and you’ll be exempt. That is the bridge from the statehouse to the schoolhouse, and it is where the second story starts.
We going to end this part with etymology, because y’all keep throwing the word professionalism around like it’s a thermometer.
Professionalism traces back to the Latin profiteri, to declare publicly, to make a vow. It moves through Middle English as the solemn vows a person took when entering a religious order. It secularizes into job based callings. It takes its modern form in the middle of the nineteenth century, right alongside the rise of the modern professions as organized bodies that controlled who got a license and who did not.
Read that again. The earliest English noun profession referred to the vows you took joining a religious order. A specific religion. A specific continent. A specific set of people with the power to say who had taken the vow and who was still out in the cold.
So when somebody tells me professionalism is neutral, that it is just standards, that it has nothing to do with culture, I know exactly what I am dealing with. Even at the root of the word, professionalism is a declaration of membership in somebody’s particular order. It never stopped being that. The vow just got a dress code and a hiring manager.
Karen Fields and Barbara Fields have a word for what happens next. Racecraft. Their argument is that racism, the practice, produces race, the appearance, and then hides its own tracks by pointing at the thing it just made. The ritual manufactures the evidence and then cites the evidence as the reason for the ritual. Professionalism runs the identical loop. A dominant group’s grooming habits get called the standard. Everybody else gets measured against it. The gap that measurement produces gets called a difference in professionalism. And then the gap is used to justify the standard that produced it.
That is not a thermometer. A thermometer reads a temperature that exists whether or not you show up with the thermometer. This thing manufactures the temperature and then charges you for the reading.
Now let’s get the receipts straight before the argument, because I do not do vibes.
Ahead of the 2026 to 2027 academic year, Tuskegee University President Dr. Mark A. Brown emailed parents of incoming students announcing a set of changes he framed as the first step in a period of transformation and renewal, with the university expecting its largest new student enrollment in 32 years. The policy prohibits bonnets, durags, bedroom shoes, and revealing clothing in classrooms, dining facilities, and official university events including Convocation. Students attending business meetings and professional events are expected to wear business suits and appropriate shoes. The package also tightens attendance requirements, limits cellphone use in lectures, and pushes internships and résumés.
Brown’s rationale, in his own words: the goal is not meant to restrict students from enjoying the Tuskegee Experience, but to prepare them with a solid foundation for the workforce they will enter once they leave Tuskegee.
Hold on to that sentence. The whole argument falls apart right there, and I am going to show you exactly where.
But first, the history, because Tuskegee is not a random campus and this is not a random policy.
Booker T. Washington preached the gospel of the toothbrush at Tuskegee. Literally. Personal grooming and hygiene as the road to acceptance. Industrial training as the price of admission. And in the 1895 Atlanta Compromise the deal got stated in public: cast down your bucket where you are, accept social separation, earn respectability through labor and presentation, and the rest will come.
That is the root of every dress for success argument in your comment section right now, whether the person making it knows it or not.
W.E.B. Du Bois answered him eight years later, in 1903, in chapter three of The Souls of Black Folk, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” Du Bois’ answer was that a program of submission and industrial training, purchased at the price of political rights and higher learning, would never deliver what it promised, because the terms were being set by people who had no intention of honoring them.
Du Bois was right, and the receipts came in fast. Jim Crow hardened. The vote receded. The lynching curve went the wrong way. And the toothbrush did not save a single person.
So when Tuskegee in 2026 announces that Black students must present a certain way in order to be received by the workforce, that is not innovation. That is a reissue of the Atlanta Compromise in new fabric. Same institution. Same theory of change. Same century old bet that if we manage the surface, the structure will relent.
The structure has never relented. Not once. Not one time in a hundred and thirty one years.
The education section.
Kevin Gaines wrote Uplifting the Race in 1996 and it is the book that should be on every group chat right now. Gaines traces racial uplift ideology from the 1890s forward and shows the split inside it. Uplift started as a collective liberation claim, the whole race rising together. Then a Black elite took hold of it and quietly converted it into a class project. Uplift stopped meaning we rise together and started meaning we are the respectable ones, the evidence of the race’s capacity, and the problem is those other Negroes down there who have not learned yet.
Gaines’ point is the sharp one. That conversion did not just fail to protect Black people. It handed white supremacy a vocabulary. Once the Black elite agreed that the race’s condition was a matter of morals, manners, and hygiene, every structural argument got harder to make, because the terms of debate had been surrendered by the people with the credentials.
Apply Gaines here and you can stop calling people bougie and start naming a documented intellectual history with a class position attached. When a comment section fills up with lazy, ghetto, carry yourself better, pull your pants up, that is not an original thought and it is not a Black thought. That is uplift ideology in its degraded phase, and it has a bibliography.
Now the data, because Gaines gives us the why and the numbers give us the what.
Tuskegee’s own reported figures put first year retention around 81 percent and the four year graduation rate roughly in the 29 to 31 percent range, with six year completion somewhere around 57 percent depending on the cohort and the source. Verify the exact vintage before you quote it, and I will flag that again at the end.
Sit with the shape of it. Students show up. Students stay through year one at a high rate. And something between year one and year four is eating them alive.
Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres gave us the frame for reading a number like that in The Miner’s Canary. The canary in the mine does not die because the canary is weak. The canary dies because the air is bad, and the canary’s body is the instrument that tells you so. Read the graduation gap as a canary and it is a diagnostic of an environment. Read it as a defect and you end up regulating the bird.
The bonnet ban regulates the bird.
Here is what the research actually says, and I already said on the stream that no matter how much you disagree with how I am saying it, you cannot negate the data.
Brunsma and Rockquemore, 1998, in the Journal of Educational Research, took the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 and pulled tenth grade data across public, private, and Catholic sectors to test the exact claims uniform advocates were making. No direct effect on attendance. No direct effect on behavior problems. No direct effect on substance use. The one association they found for academic achievement ran negative. That is 1998. Twenty eight years ago. And I want to be fair, there is a real methodological back and forth in that literature, Bodine published a critique in 2003, and I keep that caveat in the room because I am not doing what they do.
The GAO’s dress code report found that stricter and more restrictive dress code policies clustered in schools serving higher shares of Black students, and that enforcement fell hardest on Black girls, including through removal from class. Hold that one, because removal from class is the whole ballgame.
Now let me get specific, because as a debater I know specificity is the difference between an argument and a feeling. Everything I just cited is K through 12. So let me move it up to the level we are actually arguing about.
Terrell Strayhorn established sense of belonging as a basic human need in the college context and a direct predictor of persistence, and established that it operates most powerfully precisely for students who perceive themselves as marginal in an institution’s dominant culture. Which is to say, the students most sensitive to belonging cues are exactly the students this policy is aimed at.
Walton and Cohen, 2011, in Science, ran a brief social belonging intervention with college students. Not a dress code. A short exercise reframing social adversity as normal and temporary rather than as evidence that you do not belong here. African American students’ grade point averages rose across the following three years, the racial achievement gap in that sample was cut substantially, and there were measurable improvements in self reported health and wellbeing.
Read that against the policy. A message about belonging moves the number. A message about your bonnet is also a message about belonging. It is just pointed the other way.
Hurtado and Carter demonstrated that campus racial climate shapes sense of belonging, and that hostile climate perceptions in the first years predict weaker belonging later. Museus’ Culturally Engaging Campus Environments model operationalized the same insight into measurable institutional indicators, and two of the nine are cultural familiarity and culturally relevant knowledge. Meaning: the degree to which students encounter their own culture reflected back at them by the institution predicts belonging, and belonging predicts persistence.
Two of the nine indicators. And the policy runs directly against both of them.
Then there is the part about the market this is all supposedly preparing students for. Koval and Rosette, 2021, four studies out of Duke’s Fuqua School and Michigan State. Participants were placed in the role of recruiters screening applicant profiles. Black women with natural hairstyles, afros, braids, twists, were rated less professional, rated less competent, and recommended for interviews less often than Black women with straightened hair and than white women with either curly or straight hair. The penalty intensified in industries with strong dress norms.
Read Rosette’s own account of the mechanism. In a Western society where whites have historically been the dominant social group, the standard for professional appearance is the physical appearance of white people.
So you cannot train a student out of the trait being penalized, because the trait being penalized is her.
Which brings me to the thing nobody in this debate has put on the table, and it is the one that should end it.
Tuskegee sits in the Eleventh Circuit.
In 2010, Chastity Jones, a Black woman in Mobile, Alabama, was offered a job at Catastrophe Management Solutions. The offer was pulled when she would not cut her locs. A human resources manager told her they tend to get messy. The EEOC sued on her behalf under Title VII. In EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 852 F.3d 1018, the Eleventh Circuit held for the employer. The reasoning: Title VII protects immutable characteristics, and while Black hair texture is immutable, a Black hairstyle is a mutable choice. The court leaned on Rogers v. American Airlines, 527 F. Supp. 229 from 1981, which held that a grooming policy banning an all braided hairstyle was not racial discrimination because braids are the product of artifice. The Supreme Court declined to take it up.
The Eleventh Circuit covers Alabama, Florida, and Georgia. Tuskegee, Alabama is in Macon County, Alabama. The CROWN Act has been enacted in 27 states and the District of Columbia. Alabama is not one of them, and the federal CROWN Act passed the House in 2022 and has never become law.
Now put the whole thing together.
The president of a university located inside the Eleventh Circuit is telling students that a dress code will prepare them for the workforce they will enter. The controlling law of that circuit already told a Black woman from that same state, in that same decade, that her hair is a choice and therefore she has no remedy when an employer refuses to hire her over it. The state has no CROWN Act to fill the gap.
So the policy cannot possibly do what it claims. It cannot deliver protection because the protection does not exist in that jurisdiction. What it can do, and what it does do, is teach a student that the employer who penalizes her is applying a formality rather than an animus.
That is the injury. You are not building her armor. You are building her a translation dictionary in which the word that means antiblackness has been redefined to mean professionalism, and you are handing it to her before the interview so she blames herself in the parking lot afterward.
I care more about what I am putting in a student’s head than what she is wearing on her head, and this policy puts something in her head.
And a class analysis has to run through here too, because we are talking about an institution where families are scraping to make tuition. The GAO documented that dress code enforcement pulls students out of the room. If we can acknowledge our students is having a hard time getting the money together to be in the building at all, what does it look like to add a business suit to the list? Who does that cost? It does not cost the legacy kid. It costs the first generation kid whose whole financial aid picture is held together with tape. Every dollar in that policy is a regressive tax collected from the students the retention number is already failing.
The intersectional section.
Everybody in the comments is throwing around respectability politics, and about half of them are using it wrong, so let me do this properly.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham coined the politics of respectability in Righteous Discontent in 1993, studying Black Baptist women’s convention work from 1880 to 1920. And here is what gets flattened. Higginbotham did not describe it as simple self hatred. She described a both and. Those women used respectability as a genuine weapon against a white supremacist order that had declared Black women unrapeable, unchaste, and unfit, and they wielded it in a period of open racial terror where the stakes were survival. It was a strategy with teeth.
And Higginbotham documented the other half in the same book. That same strategy licensed the policing of poor and working class Black people by a Black middle class that had made itself the arbiter of the group’s public image. Two things can be true. Both of them are in the archive.
So when I critique this, I am not saying those women were stupid. I am saying the strategy had a documented cost, we have had a hundred and thirty years of data on whether the trade paid off, and the payment never arrived. Du Bois said the terms were being set by people with no intention of honoring them. The Eleventh Circuit proved him right in 2016.
Now the part about the bonnet itself, and the argument I keep seeing that a durag is not Black culture. If the durag was created specifically to protect our hairstyles, how is it not? If Blackness is not a monolith, how you gonna tell me what is not Black culture, especially when it is worn by that many Black folks?
But I want to go past culture, because framing it as culture lets people call it preference. It is not preference. It is labor.
Adia Harvey Wingfield’s research on Black professionals in majority white workplaces gives us the term racial tasks. Wingfield’s finding is that Black workers routinely perform an additional category of work that is nowhere in the job description and nowhere on the pay stub: managing white colleagues’ comfort, regulating their own affect, and absorbing the cost of being read wrong. Unpaid, unlisted, and mandatory.
Apply Wingfield to a bonnet and the whole conversation changes.
That bonnet is protecting a hairstyle that cost money and cost hours. Silk presses, braids, locs, twists, a set of braids that took six hours in somebody’s kitchen and has to hold for six weeks. The bonnet is the maintenance protocol for an asset. The Dove CROWN research found Black women are roughly one and a half times more likely to be sent home from work because of their hair, and roughly 80 percent more likely to change their hair from its natural state to fit in at the office. That is the market this student is being prepared for. The bonnet is what makes the compliance survivable and affordable.
So the ban does not remove an indulgence. The ban confiscates the tool and keeps the requirement. It is a timesheet nobody is paying, and now the equipment is contraband too.
One of my viewers wrote in during the stream: signed, a Black woman working from home today in her bonnet and slippers. And that is not a joke, that is a labor market fact. The rules being defended here were written for a workplace that in large part no longer exists in the form it is being described in. Meanwhile the person enforcing them is quoting 1895.
Now let me take this to the other end of the news cycle, because it is the same demand.
Elizabeth Booker Houston is a lawyer, a comedian, and an adjunct professor teaching food and drug law at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis. She is also my homegirl, and I want to be transparent about that, because I saw this headline scroll past my feed several times without realizing the IU professor in it was somebody I know.
Senator Lindsey Graham died on July 11, 2026 at 71. On July 14 she posted an Instagram video of herself and another creator setting a cake among the floral tributes outside his former Senate office. The cake had his photo, a cross of blue frosted roses, and the word congratudolences, a mash of congratulations and condolences. She posted commentary about his political record along with it.
For that, U.S. Representatives Marlin Stutzman and Mark Messmer of Indiana wrote a formal letter to IU President Pamela Whitten and the dean of the McKinney law school demanding she be fired for comments they described as vile and cruel and in violation of the university’s handbook. Their line: celebrating the death of anyone, regardless of political affiliation or ideology, is abhorrent and counter to the values of civility, respect, and basic human decency that Hoosiers hold dear. Senator Jim Banks, Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, and Representative Erin Houchin joined the pile.
She did not break a law. She bought a cake and put it on public property outside an office. Steve Sanders, a constitutional law professor at IU who publicly said he found her conduct distasteful and would not want to associate with someone who behaved that way, also said plainly that this is protected speech and that a university retaliating against her for it would run straight into the First Amendment. He is right. Her cake has nothing to do with her competence to teach food and drug law.
And on July 28, at the National Cathedral, at the funeral itself, in front of the man’s family, the President of the United States stood up and said that virtually everyone, Republican or Democrat, liked Lindsey, and then said, well, not everybody, but it sounds good. Not everybody. And went on. And nobody wrote a letter.
She sent a cake to an office. He said it to the family in the sanctuary.
Now watch the two roles here. What they say is that this is about decency for the dead. What the position structurally does is establish that a Black woman’s continued employment is contingent on a hostile audience’s emotional comfort. That is Wingfield’s racial task escalated into a firing condition. And when a member of Congress attaches federal appropriations pressure to a university’s personnel decision, decency is not what is operating. That is leverage.
And the last piece is the one that stays with me.
She told me she had been booked to speak at an event for a left leaning caucus, progressives, democratic socialists, establishment Democrats, the whole conglomeration, and after this hit, she got pulled from the event. That is her account and mine, and I am flagging it as such. But I have been making this argument for two years now and it does not get less true. The same officials who reach out to content creators to go to bat for them, who want us in the comment sections defending them when the harassment comes, went quiet when it was her turn.
If proximity to a Black woman brings criticism, they open the distance. If proximity to a Black woman insulates them from criticism, they close the distance. Both parties can disagree on almost everything and still agree on that.
The Republicans want her fired for the cake. The Democrats did not want to be in the room with her. Tuskegee wants the bonnet off her head. Every one of them is telling the same woman the same thing: your presentation is a condition of your access, and we will bill you for the maintenance and then confiscate the equipment.
I don’t want to end on the diagnosis, because the diagnosis is not the whole record.
Katie Geneva Cannon wrote Black Womanist Ethics in 1988, and her whole project was to say that the dominant ethical tradition in the West was built for people who had real options. It assumes you have freedom, that you have self reliance, that you can choose a good and pursue it. Cannon’s argument is that Black women, historically, were handed a situation where those preconditions did not exist, and rather than having no ethics, they built a different one. A moral wisdom made out of what was actually available. Cannon went to the Black women’s literary tradition, to Zora Neale Hurston, to find it, because it was never going to be in a seminary syllabus.
That is what I see in the bonnet. That is what I see in the durag. That is what I see in the cake.
None of it is asking a handbook for permission. The bonnet is a woman protecting six hours of her own labor with something she can afford. The durag is a technology invented by us, for our hair, by people nobody was giving a grant to. The cake is a Black woman refusing to perform a grief she does not feel for a man whose politics she watched hurt people, and doing it with a joke, which is the oldest tool in the box.
That is not the absence of ethics. That is an ethics with a different author.
Booker T. Washington bet that if we managed the surface, the structure would relent. He put a hundred and thirty one years on that bet and it has not paid once. Antiblackness is not a bug in the labor market that better grooming can rattle loose. Antiblackness is the load bearing wall. The market did not accidentally develop a preference against Black hair and Black skin. The market was built on the ability to read and rank Black bodies, going back to the Negro Act of 1740 and forward through the Tignon Laws of 1786, which made Black women in Louisiana cover their hair by law because the hair itself was a problem for the social order.
They passed a law about our hair in 1786. In 2016 a federal appeals court said our hair is a choice. In 2026 a Black university put it in the student handbook.
You cannot dress your way out of an engine.
Whether I speak perfect diction English or I speak with Ebonics, I understand it is a Black skin that is going to make me deal with certain things. Whether my pants below my ass or they held up with a Gucci belt, I understand there is a certain level of antiblackness I am still going to have to deal with. And you smoking dope and dog food if you believe I am going to walk in with a 4.0 and a master’s and a record of never once wearing a durag in the cafeteria and come out more qualified than my white counterpart. The audit study literature is clear on it. Identical credentials, identical experience, and the white applicant still gets the call. There is something pervasive about the permanence of racism. That is Derrick Bell. That is the critical race theory right there.
So see, Gordon reminds us that bad faith is a labor somebody has to keep performing, which means every one of these standards is being actively maintained by people who have the evidence and choose the file. And Cannon teaches us that Black women have been building a moral life out of the materials actually available to them for four hundred years without ever getting a memo authorizing it, and they did not need the handbook then and they do not need it now.
Two things can be true. Tuskegee is an institution I would send my own children to before I sent them to a PWI. And this policy is a misdiagnosis dressed up as a plan. It is a picture of Malcolm behind me right now and it would be intellectually dishonest to say we cannot critique that man. Just like humans are fallible, institutions is too.
Who gets to dictate professional, and who gave them the jurisdiction.
Answer that one honestly and you’ll find the payroll every time.
As a former professor, I care more about what I was putting in my students’ heads than what they wore to class on their heads.
Amen. Amen.
I’m an acquired taste. Not for everybody. If you got an issue with anything I’m saying or doing, you got a few options. You can reject it. You can respect it or check it. You can block it or buck it. I’m still going to say what I want to say though.
I ain’t turning nothing down but my collar.
Education Is Elevation.
I’ll see y’all next Wednesday, 1030 Central AM. I even try to be on time. I try to be on time, man.
The free market claim collapsed in public and the vote never happened. Texas’ Legislature could not pass a hemp ban. It passed SB 3, the governor vetoed it as almost certainly unconstitutional, the promised regulatory framework never got built, and the prohibition arrived anyway on July 31, 2026 through an agency definition upheld by a court. Products that were legal under a law the same Legislature passed in 2019 became Schedule I by register notice.
Professionalism has an etymology and it is not neutral. The word traces to profiteri, the vows taken entering a religious order, and takes its modern form alongside the professions organizing themselves as licensing bodies. A standard that begins as a membership vow does not become objective because it got a hiring manager.
Tuskegee sits in the Eleventh Circuit, and the Eleventh Circuit already ruled. EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions held that a Black woman in Alabama has no Title VII remedy when an employer pulls a job offer over her locs, because a hairstyle is a mutable choice. Alabama has no CROWN Act. A dress code cannot deliver a protection that does not legally exist in its own jurisdiction.
The bonnet is maintenance labor, not preference. Dove’s CROWN research found Black women are about 1.5 times more likely to be sent home from work over their hair and about 80 percent more likely to alter it to fit the office. The bonnet protects an expensive, hours long investment made to survive that market. Banning it confiscates the tool while keeping the requirement.
The same demand shows up at both ends of the week. Tuskegee tells a Black woman her presentation is a condition of her education. Two congressmen tell a Black woman her employment is a condition of a hostile audience’s comfort. A left leaning caucus quietly removes her from a program. Different politics, identical instruction.
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House Bill 1325, 86th Texas Legislature (2019), establishing the state hemp program at 0.3 percent delta 9 THC by dry weight
Senate Bill 3, 89th Texas Legislature (2025), House vote 87 to 54, Senate vote 25 to 6
Governor Greg Abbott, veto proclamation on Senate Bill 3, June 22, 2025
Governor Greg Abbott, executive order on hemp derived THC products, September 10, 2025
Texas Department of State Health Services, Schedule of Controlled Substances definitions of tetrahydrocannabinols and marihuana extract, adopted October 2021
Texas Department of State Health Services v. Sky Marketing Corp. d/b/a Hometown Hero, Supreme Court of Texas, decided May 1, 2026, mandate issued June 5, 2026
Texas Register, notice of reinstated controlled substance definitions, July 10, 2026, effective July 31, 2026
Marihuana Tax Act of 1937; Controlled Substances Act of 1970; National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse (Shafer Commission) report, 1972
EEOC v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, 852 F.3d 1018 (11th Cir. 2016)
Rogers v. American Airlines, Inc., 527 F. Supp. 229 (S.D.N.Y. 1981)
CROWN Act state enactments (27 states and the District of Columbia as of 2026); Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, passed U.S. House 2022, not enacted
Negro Act of 1740 (South Carolina); Tignon Laws of 1786 (Spanish Louisiana)
Booker T. Washington, Atlanta Exposition Address, September 1895
Letter from U.S. Reps. Marlin Stutzman and Mark Messmer to Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and the dean of the Robert H. McKinney School of Law, July 2026
Dr. Mark A. Brown, message to parents of incoming Tuskegee University students, July 2026
Tuskegee University published retention and graduation figures
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