Six years ago, almost to the date, a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds while he called for his mother. Today, an Instagram account called GeorgeDroidAI has more than 80,000 followers and depicts him as a cyborg powered by what the account calls a “fentanyl reactor.” Instagram has done nothing about it.

Americans have been making money off Black death for as long as there has been an American market. Lynching postcards, which historian Amy Louise Wood has documented extensively, were sold openly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mailed between family members, displayed in shop windows. The corpse was the product. The terror was the appeal.

GeorgeDroidAI is doing the same work with new tools. The account takes a man who was murdered on camera, strips him of the dignity of being a victim, reassembles him as a science fiction joke, and sells the engagement back to advertisers through Instagram's monetization systems. Eighty thousand followers is not a niche audience. It is a small city of people being trained, daily, to see Floyd as something other than a human being who died.

Here’s how we can end this ..

That's why I'm partnering with Change.org to demand Instagram moderate this content. The precedent is already there. CurbstompMFG, an account named after an act of neo-Nazi violence, was removed after sustained reporting from the ADL and the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Last year I documented racist AI videos pulling tens of millions of views on the platform, posts that looked nearly identical to what GeorgeDroidAI is producing now. Meta knows how to act when it decides the reputational math has shifted. The petition is one way to shift it.

The petition is one way to move the cost calculation. Reporting the account is another. Refusing to treat this as a fringe curiosity, when it is in fact the latest expression of one of the oldest industries in American life, is the most important. The technology is new. The business model is not.

George Floyd was a real person. He had a mother he called for. He had a daughter who said her daddy changed the world. Six years later, an algorithm is changing him back into a punchline, and the company hosting it is counting the clicks.

Sign the Petition NOW

Buy Dr. Kendi's Book NOW

The book traces the resurgence of the Great Replacement Theory over the last two decades. You have almost certainly heard this theory even if you have never heard its name. Every time someone says immigrants are “invading,” that Muslims are an “internal enemy,” or that diversity programs are “discriminatory,” they are repeating a version of it. Dr. Kendi explains how this single idea travels across the world, mutating to fit each country it lands in.

In our conversation we dig into where the theory came from, the surprising Frenchman who named it, and how it now shows up in France, Hungary, Russia, El Salvador, the United States, and beyond. We talk about how dictators use it to win elections and dismantle democracy, why the theory falls apart under any factual scrutiny, and how it spreads through movies, novels, and even NBA debates. We close on a personal favorite topic of mine: how the charge of “presentism” gets used to shield historical figures from honest moral judgment.

If you want to understand the ideas driving today’s politics, this one is worth your time. Read on.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Meeting Dr. Kendi and the Idea Behind the Book (00:00:00 – 00:03:40)

• I welcome the audience and introduce my guest, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, a historian whose work I have followed for years.

• Dr. Kendi orients us from his home office in D.C., where he is splitting time between book promotion and building Howard University’s Institute for Advanced Study.

• We turn to his new book Chain of Ideas, which chronicles the resurgence of the Great Replacement Theory.

• You will learn that this theory claims “globalist elites” are helping minority groups displace a privileged majority, and that authoritarians use this fear to position themselves as protectors.

• This section sets up the core question of the episode: how does one idea cause so much political damage across so many places?

2. One Theory, Many Countries: How Great Replacement Travels the World (00:03:40 – 00:07:18)

• We explore what makes Chain of Ideas unusual: rather than telling only the American story, the book is comparative, with ten sections each set in a different country, from France and Hungary to Chile, Russia, and El Salvador.

• Dr. Kendi explains how he expanded the definition of the theory after realizing it had mutated, so it no longer targets only race.

• The theory can cast any minority group as the “replacer,” whether the dividing line is religion, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality.

• You will learn how the same theory takes different shapes in different places: queer people in Putin’s Russia, Muslims in Hungary.

• The takeaway is that the demographics change from country to country, but the underlying propaganda formula stays the same.

3. The Frenchman Who Named It: Renaud Camus and the Origins of the Theory (00:07:18 – 00:13:15)

• We trace the theory back to its source: Renaud Camus, a pioneering gay novelist and poet in 1970s and 80s France.

• By the 1990s, Camus became convinced that Muslim immigrants were “taking over” a town in southern France, and he named the idea “The Great Replacement” in a 2011 book.

• You will learn that he did not invent the theory so much as give a memorable name to a much older set of ideas.

• We discuss why 2011 was a turning point: it was the year Marine Le Pen took over France’s National Front and the year Donald Trump pushed the false claim that President Obama was not born in the United States.

• The lesson is that similar political conditions, not a single shared book, allowed the theory to surface in multiple countries at once.

4. The Electoral Dictator: How Leaders Weaponize Fear to Gain Power (00:13:15 – 00:19:00)

• Dr. Kendi introduces a key concept from the book, the “electoral dictator,” a leader who keeps holding elections but rigs the conditions so the opposition cannot realistically win.

• We discuss how these leaders need to convince a critical mass of people, often around thirty percent, to consent to their own domination.

• You will learn that the Great Replacement Theory is the central tool in this propaganda toolbox, because it gets ordinary people to ask an authoritarian to “protect” them from an invented threat.

• This section covers how global events like the Great Recession and the pandemic were exploited by politicians to make people believe immigrants or minorities were stealing their livelihoods.

5. El Salvador: The Most Sophisticated Version of the Theory (00:19:00 – 00:26:00)

• Drawing on my own visit to El Salvador earlier this year, I ask Dr. Kendi to break down why he calls it “the future” of Great Replacement Theory.

• You will learn that President Bukele made the “replacer” not an ethnic group but the gangs, then expanded the label to include anyone who opposes him, which justified mass arrests of journalists, lawyers, and political opponents.

• We discuss troubling reports that his administration may itself be working with gangs.

• You will learn how official homicide statistics can be made to look good by simply not counting people who are “disappeared.”

• This section shows how a dictator can use selective data to manufacture a feeling of safety while eliminating accountability.

6. A Global Network: How Authoritarians Learn From Each Other (00:26:00 – 00:29:00)

• This section answers a question from the chat: are these leaders acting alone, or coordinating?

• Dr. Kendi documents the transnational gatherings, like CPAC events worldwide, NatCon, and the Madrid Forum, where these politicians and theorists meet, share videos, and trade tactics.

• You will learn how slogans migrate from country to country, such as “stop the boats” moving from Australia to the UK.

• I share my own experience witnessing a “Unite the UK” rally in London where demonstrators carried American Trump flags and Christian nationalist symbols.

• The takeaway is that this is not a series of isolated movements but a connected network borrowing language and strategy across borders.

7. A Lie That Spreads Through Culture: Movies, Novels, and Pop Culture (00:29:00 – 00:44:00)

• We move from politics to entertainment, where Dr. Kendi argues it is no accident that the theory was named by a novelist.

• He points to the French bestselling novel Submission as an example of fiction spreading the fear.

• I add examples from American pop culture, including backlash to diverse casting in films like Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey, the white nationalist obsession with the “fall of Rome,” and how alien invasion stories can echo and prime audiences for invasion rhetoric.

• You will learn how the theory shows up in subtle places like NBA debates about foreign-born players.

• This section shows that propaganda does not only live in speeches; it lives in stories.

8. The Empirical Lie: Why the Theory Falls Apart Under Scrutiny (00:44:00 – 00:46:00)

• Dr. Kendi lays out the factual case against the theory.

• You will learn the numbers that contradict the panic: roughly ninety-one percent of people living in Europe were born there, and around eighty-six percent of people in the United States were born in the country.

• We discuss how the theory is “ahistorical”: using blood-and-soil logic, most white Americans descend from people who arrived in the 19th and 20th centuries, while up to seventy-five percent of Black Americans trace their lineage to the founding era.

• We unpack the contradiction the theory uses to escape this, the claim that white people are somehow “indigenous” to any nation they live in, from the U.S. to South Africa to Australia.

9. Presentism and the Crisis of the Intellectuals: Judging the Past Honestly (00:46:00 – 00:54:00)

• We discuss Dr. Kendi’s 2023 Atlantic essay “The Crisis of the Intellectuals” and the accusation of “presentism,” the idea that we cannot judge historical figures by today’s morals.

• Dr. Kendi argues this is a sophisticated form of apology for figures like Jefferson and Washington.

• You will learn his key point: in nearly every case where we criticize a historical figure today, someone in their own time was making the very same criticism.

• We discuss how Benjamin Banneker directly challenged Jefferson’s racist ideas.

• The lesson is that abolitionist voices and the victims themselves always existed, so claims of “they didn’t know better” do not hold up.

10. Closing Thoughts: Ambition, Jealousy, and Why This Book Matters Now (00:54:00 – 01:03:00)

• We discuss why even some progressives and liberals get pulled toward these ideas.

• Dr. Kendi describes how professional jealousy and ambition can lead people to believe a talented colleague’s success must be “preferential treatment” rather than merit, a small-scale version of the theory’s logic.

• I thank him for his work and make a final pitch for Chain of Ideas, noting it connects to surprising history, including a link between the Salem Witch Trials and the origins of racist ideas.

• You will leave this section understanding why the book matters in a moment when bite-sized propaganda spreads faster than careful thinking.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Resources Mentioned

• Chain of Ideas by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi (the book discussed throughout this LIVE)

• Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi (also available as a graphic novel adaptation)

• How to Be an Antiracist by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi

• “The Crisis of the Intellectuals” by Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, published in The Atlantic, 2023

• Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

• The Great Replacement (2011 book) by Renaud Camus

• Submission, a novel referenced as French bestselling fiction tied to the theory

• The White Pedestal by Curtis Dozier, on white nationalist use of ancient Greece and Rome

Our conversation uses three primary source photographs and one filmed account as anchors. We examine the 4th United States Colored Infantry of the Civil War, the Choctaw code talkers of World War I, and the story of Roger Harris, a Black Marine who returned from Vietnam in full uniform and could not get a cab home to Roxbury. Together, these stories trace a single uncomfortable pattern: people fighting for a country that did not treat them as full citizens.

You will learn why the popular soundbite that “Lincoln freed the slaves” misses the truth, how enslaved and free Black men fought for their own liberation, and why Native Americans suffered some of the highest per capita casualty rates in Vietnam. Burns also explains how to read a photograph as a historical document, why public broadcasting matters, and how honest storytelling can change minds where arguments fail. This is history that asks you to sit with complexity. Stay and read the whole thing.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Two Storytellers, One Mission

I open by introducing myself, Khalil Greene, the Gen Z Historian, and my guest, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. We lay out the goal of this Memorial Day feature: to examine the disparate treatment of soldiers of color across American wars. We also discuss the political moment we are recording in, where some states want to teach figures like Rosa Parks while removing any mention of race. Burns explains why he has spent his career placing his films on PBS rather than streaming services or premium cable.

Main ideas:

• This feature centers on soldiers of color and what their stories reveal about America.

• We are working at a time when honest history is being actively contested in schools.

• Burns chose public broadcasting because it gives him creative freedom and reaches classrooms nationwide.

2. Why Public Broadcasting Still Matters

Burns explains the meaning behind the “S” in PBS. It stands for Service, not System. He argues that public broadcasting offers something commercial media cannot: a space free of misinformation, sensationalism, and the pressure to chase advertising dollars. We compare this to outlets like Fox News and CNN, where capturing attention often outranks public service. Burns uses the fable of the tortoise and the hare to describe how audiences eventually return to substance over spectacle.

Main ideas:

• PBS reaches millions and remains a major presence in American classrooms.

• Commercial media is built around attention and revenue, not public service.

• Audiences often re-engage with deeper content as they mature.

3. Reading History Honestly: Facts, Whitewashing, and “It’s Complicated”

We dig into what it means to tell history honestly. Burns insists that some facts are simply objective, like the dates of the Battle of Gettysburg, and cannot be argued away. He warns about the appropriation of historical figures, pointing to how people who oppose everything Frederick Douglass stood for still claim him as a hero. I share my own viral work on the whitewashing of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy. Burns describes the neon sign in his editing room that reads “It’s complicated,” a reminder that contradictory evidence must always be included.

Main ideas:

• Some historical facts are objective and not open to spin.

• Powerful figures like Douglass and King are often misused to support agendas they opposed.

• Good history includes contradictory evidence rather than smoothing it over.

4. The First Photograph: The 4th U.S. Colored Infantry

We turn to our first primary source, a photograph of the 4th United States Colored Infantry. Burns explains that this image, which he used in The Civil War, is filled with pride and possibility. He corrects the familiar soundbite that “Lincoln freed the slaves,” explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation freed no one in territory the Union controlled and was largely a political document. Between 180,000 and 200,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union. Burns stresses that Black people were active agents in their own liberation, not passive recipients of freedom.

Main ideas:

• Roughly 180,000 to 200,000 Black soldiers fought for the Union, often in segregated regiments.

• The Emancipation Proclamation was a political document that freed no one under Union control.

• Black Americans were active agents in winning their own freedom.

5. The Second Photograph: The Choctaw Code Talkers and the American Contradiction

Our second photograph brings us to World War I and the Choctaw code talkers. Burns describes what he calls the “undertow” of American history: Native Americans served a country that was simultaneously confining their people to reservations and criminalizing their culture. The Choctaw code talkers, who preceded the more famous Navajo code talkers of World War II, became vital to battlefield communications. Burns reflects on the irony and loyalty involved, noting that the U.S. Army remained segregated through both World Wars.

Main ideas:

• Choctaw soldiers served while their own people faced reservation policy and cultural suppression.

• The Choctaw code talkers came before the better-known Navajo code talkers of World War II.

• The U.S. Army stayed segregated through both World Wars, with separate barracks and even blood supplies.

6. The Third Story: Roger Harris and the Black Vietnam Veteran

We move to our most modern source, the filmed account of Roger Harris, a Black Marine who served in Vietnam. Burns, who became close friends with Harris, describes Harris serving in I Corps near the demilitarized zone, the most dangerous sector. The story that anchors this section is Harris returning home to Boston in full dress uniform and being unable to get a cab from Logan Airport to Roxbury. Burns connects this to Native American casualty rates in Vietnam, which were higher per capita than any other group, and to Black soldiers in World War II who escorted German prisoners into restaurants they themselves were barred from entering.

Main ideas:

• Roger Harris served in I Corps, the most dangerous Marine sector in Vietnam.

• He returned home in uniform and still faced racism trying to get a cab home.

• Native Americans suffered the highest per capita casualty rate of any group in Vietnam.

7. Telling Other People’s Stories: Whitewashing, Perspective, and the Other Side

This section addresses two harder questions. First, I ask Burns, who is white, how he approaches stories of marginalized communities. He frames it less as sensitivity and more as good detective work: telling all the stories, including all perspectives, and working with scholars and colleagues who carry those experiences. Second, I raise the growing argument that wars like Vietnam should not be celebrated even when soldiers of color served in them. Burns describes how The Vietnam War triangulated perspectives, interviewing North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians, Viet Cong guerrillas, and Americans ranging from medal winners to deserters.

Main ideas:

• Burns approaches marginalized histories by including every perspective and the right scholars.

• The Vietnam War deliberately triangulated voices from every side of the conflict.

• Burns argues there is only one race, the human race, and rejects rigid hierarchies and binaries.

8. The Craft: Photographs, the Ken Burns Effect, and Storytelling That Changes Minds

We close with the craft of historical storytelling. Burns explains that the still photograph is the “basic DNA” of his work, and that a filmmaker should treat an old photo like a film director treats a master shot, imagining the world moving before and after. He shares the origin of the Ken Burns Effect, which came from his friendship with Steve Jobs. He also argues, quoting novelist Richard Powers, that arguments rarely change minds but a good story can. We end discussing my own process of tying history lessons to current events, and a hope that we might collaborate in the future.

Main ideas:

• A photograph should be read as a living document, not a flat image.

• The Ken Burns Effect came out of Burns’s friendship with Steve Jobs.

• A good story can change minds in ways that direct argument cannot.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can’t Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Resources

• The Civil War (1990), documentary series by Ken Burns, PBS

• Baseball (1994), documentary series by Ken Burns, PBS

• Jazz (2001), documentary series by Ken Burns, PBS

• The National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009), documentary series by Ken Burns, PBS

• The Central Park Five (2012), documentary by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon

• The Vietnam War (2017), documentary series by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, PBS

• Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography

• UNUM, Ken Burns’s digital project curating documentary content into thematic collections, named for the U.S. motto E Pluribus Unum

• Roger Harris, Black Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, featured in The Vietnam War

• Daniel Inouye, Japanese American World War II veteran and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient

• Brooklyn Bridge (1981), Ken Burns’s first film, nominated for an Academy Award

Keywords

Ken Burns, Kahlil Greene, Gen Z Historian, Memorial Day, soldiers of color, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, United States Colored Troops, Civil War, Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln, Black Union soldiers, Choctaw code talkers, World War I, Navajo code talkers, Native American soldiers, Vietnam War, Roger Harris, Black Vietnam veterans, military segregation, American history, primary sources, historical photographs, PBS, public broadcasting, whitewashing history, Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr, documentary filmmaking, Ken Burns Effect, race in America, American history education

The Guardian reports that when the two met at an event in 2010, Cameron handed Kilcher a framed drawing of Neytiri he had signed himself, with a message: her beauty had been his early inspiration, and too bad she had been busy filming, maybe next time. Avatar, by then, was already the highest-grossing film ever made.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

The face is the asset

A lawsuit is a claim, not a verdict, and this one will be argued for years. Cameron has not responded publicly, and as the BBC notes, the finished Neytiri is widely credited to facial scans of Zoe Saldaña, who plays the character on screen. Kilcher’s team frames the issue differently. As reported by the BBC, her lead counsel called Cameron’s process “not inspiration” but “extraction,” describing the use of a teenager’s “biometric facial features” run through “an industrial production process” that generated billions of dollars. The complaint also claims that Kilcher’s agent had tried to get her an audition, and that no one from the production ever called. So much for “next time.”

What makes the suit land, whatever a court eventually decides, is that the underlying logic is old. Hollywood has always known the Native face was worth more than the Native person.

Consider what Kilcher was photographed doing when Cameron saw her. She was playing Pocahontas, the single most sanitized Indigenous story the United States tells itself, a narrative in which colonization resolves into romance. American film has spent a century in this mode. Native characters were routinely played by white actors in brown makeup, a practice the industry treated as ordinary craft. Native stories were filmed as stories of white discovery, white guilt, and white redemption, with Indigenous people cast as scenery. The image traveled freely. The actual people were rarely hired and almost never paid. When Native activists organized against Avatar, they gave this practice an exact name. According to the Los Angeles Times, the boycott campaign called it “blueface,” placing it in a lineage with redface, blackface, and yellowface: a creator borrowing a nonwhite culture, then casting white actors to perform it.

A dead-end society

Cameron has been unusually candid about all of this. The Los Angeles Times reported his 2010 explanation that Avatar was a retelling of colonization in the Americas, that “Europe equals Earth” and “the Native Americans are the Na’vi,” and that the parallel was “not meant to be subtle.” In the same period he described the Lakota as a people whose descendants were trapped in what he called a “dead-end society,” and suggested that if they had glimpsed that future, “they would have fought a lot harder.”

When those comments resurfaced in 2022, the response from Native writers was immediate. The Los Angeles Times quoted the attorney Brett Chapman calling the films a “whitewashing of history to let everybody feel good about themselves,” and the writer Kelly Lynne D’Angelo, who told Cameron: “You took our land, then our children, then our skin.”

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Glynn, Paul. “Actress Sues Avatar Director for ‘Theft’ of Facial Features for Character.” BBC News, May 7, 2026.

2. Myers, Owen. “Indigenous Actor Sues James Cameron for ‘Stealing’ Her Facial Features for Avatar Character.” The Guardian, May 6, 2026.

3. Valdez, Jonah. “James Cameron’s Old Comments Prompt Native American Boycott of New ‘Avatar’ Sequel.” Los Angeles Times, December 19, 2022.

The footage is funny at first. A confident young man squints at a stranger, declares him “gay as shit,” and offers as evidence a smirk, a stance, a pair of boots, a tote bag, the way someone is licking his lips. Then the camera flips. The same guy, asked about his own orientation, insists he is straight, and “for sure” people can tell just by looking. Watch ten of these in a row and the comedy curdles into something else. As one commenter put it, “Fascinating that it was the ‘stance’ that they all focused on.”

I’m fighting to document cultural patterns like this viral series before they get flattened into “just a funny TikTok” and stripped of their deeper meaning, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate stories at this intersection of culture, gender, and history full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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Subscribe now

The Social Experiment Hiding Inside the Joke

What @allstaranttt has stumbled into, or more likely engineered with precision, is a real-time documentation of how straight men police each other’s masculinity through accusation. Almost none of the men in these clips read as outright homophobic. This is 2026. They are not slurring anyone. They are not threatening anyone. They are just very, very confident that the guy across the street is gay because of his posture.

The correct answer to “is this stranger gay or straight” is, of course, “I don’t know.” It is the only honest answer available. But honesty is not what this game rewards. The game rewards a verdict, and the verdict, almost without exception, is gay. The men in these videos are not identifying queerness. They are conducting a witch hunt where the only available accusation is the one they themselves are most afraid of being charged with.

What the Sociologists Already Knew

In 2007, sociologist C.J. Pascoe spent eighteen months embedded in a working-class high school in north central California, watching how teenage boys talked to each other. The book she produced, “Dude, You’re a Fag,” remains one of the sharpest accounts of how American masculinity actually functions on the ground. Pascoe found, as reviewer Christine Shearer summarized, that male students “consistently assert their masculinity by attacking those seen as embodying its lack.” The accusation of being a “fag” was, in the words of one of her interview subjects, “the lowest thing you can call someone.”

The key insight of Pascoe’s research, and the one that makes the @allstaranttt videos so legible, is that the accusation almost never has anything to do with whether anyone is actually gay. It is a discourse, a verbal currency the boys traffic in to establish their own standing. You call another guy a fag to confirm you are not one. The label is hot, and you are trying to pass it along before it lands on you. Pascoe documented this as a near-constant feature of high school life, an atmosphere her research showed the institution itself helped foster rather than discourage.

The men in the viral series are not in high school anymore. They are grown. But the discourse they were trained in at fourteen is the one they are still speaking at twenty-four. The bag is gay. The stance is gay. The smirk is gay. The tongue is gay. Every gesture is a piece of evidence in a trial that never ends, and the only way to stay out of the defendant’s chair is to keep pointing at someone else.

The Witch Trial Logic

There is a reason “witch hunt” is the right metaphor. The actual Salem trials of 1692 worked the same way. Accusation was self-protection. To name a witch was to demonstrate that you were not one. The Lavender Scare of the 1950s, when the State Department fired thousands of suspected gay employees, ran on the same engine. So did the McCarthy hearings. Suspicion is communicable, and the cure is transferring it to someone else before it sticks to you.

What Jameela Jamil articulated recently is the underlying mechanism. “Boys aren’t raised to be men,” she said. “Boys are raised just not to be girls.” There is no positive content to American masculinity, only a list of disqualifications. You are a man because you are not feminine, not soft, not gay. The category is defined entirely by its exclusions, which means it requires constant maintenance. Every guy walking down the street is a potential threat to your standing, and every guy walking down the street is also a useful prop for reaffirming it.

This is why the men in the videos cannot bring themselves to say “I don’t know.” Saying “I don’t know” would mean opting out of the trial, and opting out of the trial is itself suspicious. The only safe move is to render a verdict, fast and loud, on someone else.

What the Camera Caught

The viral series is funny because the men are oblivious. They do not realize they are being studied. They think they are the ones doing the studying. And in a way, that obliviousness is the most honest thing in the footage, because it shows that the witch hunt is not a conscious choice. It is the water these men have been swimming in since middle school. The accusation comes out before the thought does.

The comments under @allstaranttt’s videos are full of women saying, in various registers of exasperation, that they want the men to free themselves. The strange thing is that the men in the videos would probably agree, if asked, that they are free. They would say no one is making them do this. And they would be right, in the narrowest possible sense. No one is making them. They are just doing it, over and over, on camera, to strangers, for a stranger holding a phone. The stake is always waiting, and someone has to be tied to it.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Pascoe, C. J. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

2. Shearer, Christine. Review of Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School, by C. J. Pascoe. Spaces for Difference: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2007.

3. @allstaranttt. “Gay or Straight? Can You Tell Based on Looks?” Instagram video series, 2026.

4. Jamil, Jameela. Interview clip on masculinity and patriarchy, 2026.

The moment was actually emblematic of current discourse. Feitosa’s ideological neighbors, the Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owenses and Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the new right, have spent the last two years discovering the word “genocide” and using it as a charge against Israel. Just never about us.

I’m fighting to document how American conservatives apply the word “genocide” selectively, naming it abroad while shielding it at home, before that double standard gets dismissed as “liberal hysteria” or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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The MAGA Vocabulary Has a New Word, and a Geographic Limit

This is, in fairness, a real shift. Tucker Carlson now gets labeled “Antisemite of the Year” by pro-Israel groups precisely because he describes “Israel’s genocide in Gaza” on his show. Megyn Kelly hosts guests who use the same framing and question blank-check U.S. support for the war. Candace Owens tweeted that no government has the right to commit a genocide, ever, and was promptly excommunicated from a chunk of her own movement for it. For a generation of populist conservatives raised to treat Israel as untouchable, this is a meaningful break.

The catch, of course, is that the legal definition of genocide is portable. Once you accept that bombing, starving, and displacing a population qualify, you have accepted a tool that does not stop working when you use it on your own country.

What the Word Actually Means

The UN Convention defines genocide as the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, through killing, serious harm, or the deliberate infliction of life-destroying conditions. It is, notably, a definition about structure and intent, not weapons systems. Starving a population qualifies. Forcing them on death marches qualifies. Systematically erasing their ability to live on ancestral land qualifies.

Which brings us to Andrew Jackson. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 cleared the Southeast for white settlers and enslavers by forcing Cherokee, Muscogee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminole nations west of the Mississippi at gunpoint. The Trail of Tears killed thousands through exposure, starvation, and disease. Jackson’s allies framed Native nations as obstructive, dangerous, and incompatible with “civilization,” language that cast them as a permanent threat to be removed. The federal government continued the removals, knowing the human cost, because the human cost was the policy.

If Gaza is a genocide because of mass death, deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure, and forced displacement under the banner of fighting terror, then Jackson’s removal regime is a genocide for the same reasons. The only thing standing between conservatives and that conclusion is the patriotic conviction that America cannot, by definition, be the thing they now condemn elsewhere.

America’s First Way of War

The historian John Grenier, in his book “The First Way of War,” argues that early American military culture was built on something European theorists called petite guerre, raids on villages, destruction of crops, and the deliberate terrorizing of civilian populations. As Grenier documents, this was not a fringe practice or an embarrassed compromise. It was, in his words, America’s “first way of war,” temporally and by preference.

The Sullivan Expedition of 1779, ordered by George Washington, set out to destroy Haudenosaunee towns and crops with the explicit goal of making the land uninhabitable. Captain John Lovewell’s Rangers earned bounties of 100 pounds per scalp at a time when the average wage was sixpence a day. Andrew Jackson’s troops, by the end of the Creek War in 1814, had what Grenier calls bled the Indian peoples of the Old Southwest “literally and figuratively.” This was the blueprint for what we now dress up as counterinsurgency, treating the civilian environment itself as the enemy.

From Native “Terrorists” to My Lai to Gaza

The pattern recurs because the logic recurs. Landon Jones, writing for TIME on what he calls America’s first war on terror, points to William Clark’s 1814 expedition up the Mississippi, where Clark designated Native nations as “terrorist” targets, a word, Jones notes, already in use then. The Missouri Gazette demanded that the frontier be “JACKSONIZED.” In Vietnam, U.S. troops at My Lai killed hundreds of unarmed villagers under the same logic of collapsing civilians into enemy targets. In 1980s Guatemala, a U.S.-backed army carried out scorched-earth campaigns against Mayan communities that a UN truth commission later concluded were genocide.

Now Gaza. Hospitals, schools, apartments, and food systems get reclassified as terrorist infrastructure. Tens of thousands killed. Mass starvation. Forced displacement. The American right finally sees the pattern. They just cannot see that they were raised in the country that exported it.

The Real Mask

Return to Feitosa’s pivot. He represents a wider audience that can finally say “genocide” when Israel or the United Nations is in the frame, but instinctively shields Andrew Jackson and the American founding from the same charge.

Admitting genocide in Gaza does not threaten their Americanness. It can even reinforce it, by reframing the issue as a fight against globalists and foreign lobbies they already distrust. Admitting genocide against Native peoples would force them to recognize that the United States itself runs on the same operating system they now condemn in Gaza. The question was never whether they could recognize genocidal patterns. Gaza proves they can. The question is whether they will ever let that clarity turn inward.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Grenier, John. The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

2. Grenier, John. “The First Way of War.” Lecture, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA.

3. Jones, Landon. “The Story Behind America’s First War on ‘Terror.’” TIME, July 12, 2016.

4. Jubilee. “Are Conservatives Turning on Trump? | Roundtable.” YouTube video.

Have you heard about the genocide in Sudan?

If the answer is no, or barely, you are not alone. Today’s piece comes from my friend Marwa Eltahir, a Sudanese American writer and cultural producer born in Omdurman, Sudan. I met Marwa through an organization called RIVET, which supports young changemakers through grants and developmental support. She is the founder of Our Political Home, a portal that incubates and amplifies Black art created by, with, and for trans and queer practitioners across the African diasporas. She is one of the most thoughtful writers I know, and what follows is her reflection on what the war in her home country has taken and what the Sudanese diaspora is building in its wake.

Before you read it, some context.

Since April 2023, a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces has killed an estimated 150,000 people and displaced more than 12 million. It is the largest displacement crisis in the world. Famine has been declared in multiple regions. The RSF, the paramilitary group at the center of the violence, traces its lineage directly to the Janjaweed, the militia responsible for the Darfur genocide that began in 2003. Two decades later, the international community is once again watching, or more accurately, looking away.

As Marwa points out in her piece, Sudan has been in crisis for the last three years, but really for much longer. Modern Sudanese history has been shaped by interruption. British colonial rule drew arbitrary borders that fused regions with little in common and exploited the divisions for control. After independence in 1956, the country lurched through coups, civil wars, and military regimes, including the thirty-year dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir, who took power in 1989 and was eventually indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Darfur. In 2019, a youth-led revolution forced him out. Sudanese women, students, and labor organizers filled the streets demanding civilian rule, invoking what Marwa describes as the legacy of the Kandakas, the revolutionary matriarchs of Nubian history. For a moment, it looked like the country might finally turn a corner. Then in 2021, the generals staged another coup. Two years after that, those same generals turned their weapons on each other, and the country has been at war ever since.

What gets lost in the headlines, when there are headlines, is everything else: the music, the poetry, the food. There’s the fact that Sudan is home to more pyramids than Egypt. And the fact that Khartoum and Omdurman were, until recently, vibrant cities where Marwa’s family gathered each summer.

Read her piece slowly, and uncover what has been hidden in Sudan with a member of her diaspora.

A Chance Encounter in Brooklyn

It’s one of those rare, balmy mid-April afternoons in Brooklyn—the kind that feels like a collective exhale. Sidewalks swell with people who have waited all winter for this exact softness in the air: dog walkers lingering longer than usual, couples leaning into each other on park benches, friends rediscovering the simple pleasure of being outside.

I duck into my favorite neighborhood spot for a quick bite and order the hamachi crudo. The restaurant hums with that low, steady rhythm of early evening—glasses clinking, quiet laughter, a playlist just loud enough to blur the edges of conversation. I’ve barely taken a few bites when someone taps me on the shoulder. When I turn, to my surprise, it’s one of my closest Sudani friends, Hind.

A screech escapes me before I can catch it. “My babe!” I shout, pulling her into a tight hug. It’s the kind of run-in that makes New York feel like a small town masquerading as a big city, where the right person always seems to appear at the right time. We squeeze into a booth in the back, giggling over small cups of sake. Two more friends join. A quick bite stretches into dinner, then into a nightcap, and before we know it, it’s that glowing hour when the restaurant begins to empty and no one is in a hurry to leave. We talk in loops, catching each other up on the small and large shifts of our lives.

Eventually, the conversation turns—as it often does—to Sudan. Someone asks how our families are doing, now scattered across Egypt, Qatar, and beyond.

A familiar feeling rises in me, layered and contradictory. Gratitude, because someone is asking, because someone cares. And grief, because to answer honestly is to reopen a wound that never quite closes. Sudan has been in crisis for the last three years, but really, for the last thirty years.

This time, I decide not to dwell on the obvious—the famine, the staggering loss of life, the forced displacement of millions. Instead, Hind and I find ourselves reflecting on something else: the unexpected expansion of the Sudanese diaspora in this moment of upheaval.

In April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, seized large parts of northern Sudan, including the capital, Khartoum, and my hometown of Omdurman. As a child, I spent every summer there in my grandmother’s home—running through the courtyard with my cousins, eating mangoes in the heat, playing cards long after the sun had gone down.

When the war began, families fled overnight. Those who could afford to leave scattered across neighboring countries like Egypt, Kenya, and Uganda, or farther to diasporic hubs in Qatar and the UAE. Others had no choice but to stay. The ability to escape became its own kind of privilege, shaped by access to visas, money, and networks.

Three years later, that forced exodus has reshaped the reach and influence of the Sudanese diaspora.

Carrying Home Abroad

To grow up in the diaspora is to live in an in-between space. My parents immigrated to the United States in 1995, when I was just six months old. My childhood was structured by an effort to preserve what distance threatens to erode—Arabic classes, Quran lessons, the steady insistence of tradition. But as I grew older, the tension between my life as a Black American girl and my identity as a Muslim Sudanese daughter became more pronounced.

As a teenager, I used to dread our yearly trips back to Sudan. I wanted novelty, not repetition. I wanted to travel elsewhere, somewhere novel. Now, hindsight repaints those memories with an ache I can’t ignore. What I wouldn’t give for one more summer, one more week, one more ordinary day in my grandmother’s home.

The last time I was in Sudan was New Year’s Eve, 2019. It was just after the uprising that led to the overthrow of Omar Al-Bashir’s three-decade totalitarian regime—a moment powered by student organizers, by المدنيّة (madaniya) protests, by women invoking the legacy of the Kandakas, the revolutionary matriarchs of Nubian history. For a brief moment, the air felt electric with possibility, a rare respite from a bloody history of civil war.

I flew back that year to celebrate with my family, to witness what felt like a monumental shift in power.

Though the momentum of that revolution was later crushed by brute military force, something else endured. In the years since, and especially since the outbreak of war in 2023, the Sudanese diaspora has not only expanded—it has become more visible, more connected, and more creatively alive.

The Diaspora’s New Shape

Across cities in Europe, the United States, the Middle East, and beyond, Sudanese artists, organizers, and cultural workers are building something that feels both urgent and enduring. Film screenings, exhibitions, mutual aid funds, dance parties, writing collectives—each one an assertion that Sudanese life cannot be reduced to senseless conflict and crude statistics.

I think of crowded rooms where Sudanese music fills the air, where Arabic and English weave together in conversation, where strangers become familiar through shared memory. I think of the quiet labor of archiving—of preserving stories, images, and histories that war attempts to erase. I think of the ways our culture continues to garner wide, diverse audiences that are invested in Sudanese storytellers and their narratives.

Inspired by this wave of cultural expansion, in 2022 I began building Our Political Home (OPH), an art incubator for trans & queer African storytellers. OPH asks: what does it mean to feel politically at home in a world that constantly displaces us? This question has guided my organizing practice and encouraged me to delve into stories that, especially on the African continent, have been erased, condemned, and even criminalized because of their assertion that queer, Black lives matter.

With the support of organizations such as RIVET, I am able to continue building the platform of OPH as a safe space that fills the gap in connecting trans & queer storytellers across the diaspora to explore how identity, migration, and memory shape the way we understand power, home, and politics.

On days when I am overwhelmed by the weight of loss in my ancestral home, I am comforted by the knowledge that being a part of the diaspora has bestowed me with freedoms that I would not have otherwise had access to. Who I am today — a queer organizer, a multi-disciplinary artist, a staunch feminist — is a product of two worlds colliding and creating something entirely different.

There is a particular kind of power in this diasporic generation—one that once felt like a contradiction. To belong to multiple worlds at once, to navigate the West and the East, to translate, reinterpret, and carry forward. What once felt like fragmentation now reveals itself as range.

At the same time, the losses are immeasurable. Homes abandoned in haste. Family heirlooms left behind. Museums looted. Archives buried under rubble. Musicians separated from their instruments. Entire histories interrupted.

And yet, despite all of this, something persists. Beckons to speak. A cultural force that is ancient, formidable, and irretractable. Illuminating the strange ways loss can also create new forms of intimacy.

Looking Forward

Back in the restaurant, our table has long been cleared. Chairs are stacked. The staff moves gently around us, signaling the end of the night. Still, we linger.

I return often to a question I don’t yet know how to answer: What future is the Sudanese diaspora imagining into being?

The Sudan we knew—shaped by decades of military rule, by systemic violence, by cycles of انقلاب (revolution) and المقاومة (resistance) —has been irrevocably altered. In its wake is both devastation and possibility. Something has ended. Something else is waiting to begin.

Perhaps the answer is not yet fully visible. Perhaps it is already here—in living rooms turned into gathering spaces, in art that travels across borders, in relationships that withstand time.

Outside, the Brooklyn air is still warm. The city hums on, full of small collisions and unexpected reunions. For a moment, it feels like everything is suspended between what was and what might be. And somewhere within that in-between, something beautiful is taking root.

Stories like Marwa’s and the work she is doing with OPH are not isolated — they are part of a broader movement of young people organizing in their communities, building solutions to challenges, developing technologies that expand equity and quality of life, and reimagining the future in real time.

At RIVET, we support changemakers like Marwa through early-stage funding and visibility, backing youth-led ideas rooted in lived experience — from storytelling platforms like Our Political Home to grassroots initiatives shaping culture, identity, and community.

The challenge is rarely a lack of impact. It’s a lack of visibility.

RIVETED is where we spotlight young leaders building what comes next. Subscribe to discover more stories that deserve to be told — and to be inspired by young people turning bold ideas into action.

Before I go further, a note about where I’m coming from. I’m Black, not Asian (though unlike the marketing of this event, I’d like to acknowledge that some people are both), and I’m writing this after carefully reading and weaving in the work of Asian and mixed Asian creators who have already been unpacking what this moment means. My interest is in what histories the Wasian discourse echoes, especially the older patterns where racial mixing got marketed as harmony while quietly protecting whiteness at the top. The point isn’t to render a verdict on anyone’s identity. It’s to ask whether some very familiar machinery is humming underneath a brand-new aesthetic.

I’m fighting to document how racial mixing narratives get sold as progress before they harden into the next colorist hierarchy, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these patterns full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that traces today’s “feel-good” cultural moments back to the histories they’re echoing, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

The comment sections under these videos are doing some of the most honest work in the entire discourse. Under one of the meetup breakdowns, a user posting as @jamesvssmith wrote simply, "I feel a certain way about this meet up being a Blasian man if I may," followed by a side-eye emoji. That sentence is the whole essay in eighteen words.

And then there is @fivecentpiece, who identifies as Wasian and is openly wrestling with what she sees: "As a 'Wasian' I've been worried about the inherent white supremacy of this 'moment.'… I hope all mixed Asians and mixed people and BIPOC can use this momentum to their advantage!" Read together, the comments do something the meetup itself did not. They sketch out a coalition that includes Blasians, Pacific Islanders, half African and half Black mixed kids, and Wasians who are nervous about what their own promotion does to others.

As Camargo writes on his Substack, you cannot be Wasian without the hard “W.” The label is built in proximity to whiteness, while older terms like Hapa, Asian American, and AAPI were built in opposition to it. Camargo, who grew up in Japan as half-Colombian, half-Korean and Japanese, points out that when he asked organizers what unified the Wasian community, one host told him, “We take pride in our beauty.” Pride in what beauty, exactly? Camargo is blunt about where that road ends: “if Wasian identity begins and ends with aesthetics, that’s eugenics.”

That charge sounds heavy until you remember that “we’re all mixed now” is one of the oldest scripts in the racial playbook.

In the early twentieth century, Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos popularized the idea of la raza cósmica, a future “fifth race” that would emerge from the blending of all peoples in the Americas. On paper, this was a universalist, anti-racist vision. In practice, as scholars of Latin American mestizaje have long documented, the cosmic race project traveled alongside blanqueamiento, or whitening, in which governments and elites encouraged populations to “improve the race” by marrying lighter and diluting Indigenous and African ancestry over generations. Afro-descended and Indigenous features were referred to in some national discourses as la mancha, the stain. Not all mixing was celebrated. Lightening was rewarded. Darkening was stigmatized. The harmony was selective, and it had a direction.

You can watch that selectiveness operate in real time in the biography of one of the meetup's patron saints. According to a 2019 Sports Illustrated interview republished after her Olympic win, Arthur Liu, the father of gold medalist Alysa Liu, explained that he intentionally chose Caucasian egg donors when arranging the surrogate births of his five children because he "felt his children would benefit from a diverse gene pool" and a multicultural upbringing. Arthur Liu is Chinese. His children were raised by him.

As one commenter posting as @flora.obj put it bluntly underneath one of the meetup videos, "Alyssa Liu's dad literally picked a white egg donor so that his children would be wasian... that's literally eugenics bc he raised those kids with an Asian woman so these wasian kids literally have 2 Asian parents." The decision to engineer whiteness into a child's genome in the name of a "diverse gene pool" is the cosmic race pitch translated into the language of fertility clinics. It is also, as @flora.obj names, the precise definition of the practice Camargo warned about when he said an identity rooted only in aesthetics begins to look like eugenics.

This is the history that makes @john__hedrick’s hopeful framing from his video about the NYC “wasian” meetup worth sitting with carefully. Hedrick described mixed-race people as “a physical amalgamation of protest” and argued that “the more confusing we make white supremacists, the fucking better off we’re gonna be.” There’s real warmth in that take, and I understand the appeal. But mestizaje is a century-long case study in what happens when “confusing the racists” becomes the whole strategy. White supremacy is remarkably good at absorbing confusion. It simply redraws the line a few shades lighter and keeps going.

The brown paper bag test is the United States’ homegrown version of that lesson. In some Black social clubs, fraternities, sororities, and churches across the twentieth century, a literal brown paper bag was sometimes held up against a person’s skin. Darker than the bag, and you could be excluded from the gathering, the dance, the network, the marriage prospect. The test formalized an already existing hierarchy in which lighter-skinned Black people, often with more European ancestry, were granted greater access to jobs, schools, and elite spaces. The Wasian picnic in Sheep’s Meadow is obviously not a brown paper bag test. The structural question it raises is similar. When the most visible, most marketable, most algorithmically rewarded image of “mixed” is overwhelmingly light-skinned and Euro-adjacent, who gets quietly filtered out of the frame?

Hollywood, naturally, has been running this experiment in public for years. The industry’s old habit of yellowface, of casting white women as Asian love interests so they could be paired with white leads, eventually gave way to a new habit, casting mixed Asian actors whose features read, as Camargo puts it, as “exotic but not too foreign.” Camargo names the kicker directly: by casting Wasian actors as lead Asian roles, Hollywood does not have to reckon with the broader mixed Asian diaspora, the darker-skinned, the non-East Asian, the non-white-adjacent, because it can point to a handful of palatable faces and call the job done. As he warned in his follow-up video, gatekeepers of culture think they are “giving themselves a free pass” by casting white-adjacent people, and the message that sends is, in his words, “a very dangerous warning sign.”

Katie Gee Salisbury, writing in her Substack Half-Caste Woman about Laufey’s “Madwoman” music video, captures the tension precisely. She felt genuine joy seeing seven mixed Asian celebrities, including Alysa Liu, Hudson Williams, Lola Tung, and Megan Skindiel, on screen together. She also notes that the video celebrates “a specific subset of mixed Asian people,” and asks how mixed Asians who are also Black, Latino, Native, or Middle Eastern are supposed to read their absence from this newly minted pantheon. Salisbury also draws the line that the linguistic frame draws for us. The terms Wasian and Blasian reinforce the same Black-white binary that has organized American racial hierarchy for centuries, splitting mixed people from each other along the country’s oldest fault line.

None of this means the joy in Sheep’s Meadow wasn’t real. The forty-year-old Wasian mother Camargo spoke to, who lit up describing what it meant to finally see so many people who looked like him, is not a punchline. He is the point of why representation matters at all. The harder question is whether the specific brand of representation winning this cultural moment, the Wasian aesthetic as marketed by Gold House, by Hollywood, by Instagram, by the algorithm, is doing the work it claims to do.

The branding sleight of hand goes deeper than the merch. As Madison, who posts as @madsteaparty, documented in his video breakdown of the meetup, the event was organized by a group called Half Asia Spring, which states on its Instagram that its mission is "to create half-Asian meetups around the United States." That sounds inclusive until you actually look at what they post.

Every single video on the account, he points out, only mentions Wasians. Every single flyer only mentions Wasians. The event was marketed exclusively as a Wasian gathering, with lookalike contests for Wasian celebrities and promotional materials featuring the Wasian cast of Laufey's "Madwoman" music video. Madison, who is Taiwanese and Cantonese Peruvian, asks the obvious question, why brand something as an inclusive mixed-Asian community gathering when in practice it is centered only on white mixed-Asian people. The answer the organization has not offered is the one its own marketing keeps providing. "Half-Asian" is the funding pitch. "Wasian" is the actual product.

Mestizaje promised harmony and delivered a lighter ruling class. The paper bag promised community and delivered a velvet rope. Hollywood’s love affair with ethnically ambiguous casting promised diversity and delivered a narrower beauty standard with a wider passport.

If mixed people really are, as Hedrick put it, a physical amalgamation of protest, then the question worth asking is who that protest is actually aimed at. Confusing white supremacists is a low bar. They have always been confused, and they have always recovered. The harder protest is the one aimed inward, at the colorist hierarchies and the proximity politics that decide which mixed faces get to represent the future. Until that work happens, the Republic of Wasia is less a new country than a very old one with a new flag.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

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• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Camargo, Aki Lee. “Start Wasian Hate? America’s latest obsession with Wasians is more dangerous than you think.” Aki Lee Camargo (Substack), May 11, 2026.

2. Camargo, Aki Lee (@arigatoaki). Instagram video follow-up to “Start Wasian Hate?” Substack post, May 2026.

3. Hedrick, John (@john__hedrick). Instagram video on the NYC Wasian meetup, May 2026.

4. Salisbury, Katie Gee. “The Hapa Girlies Are Having a Moment: Laufey, Alysa, Hudson, Lola & Megan + what their fame means for mixed race Asians.” Half-Caste Woman (Substack), May 11, 2026.

5. Young, Grant. "Alysa Liu's Father Arthur Once Revealed Reason Behind Egg Donor Decision." Sports Illustrated, February 21, 2026.

6. Madison (@madsteaparty). Instagram video on the Wasian meetup and Half Asia Spring, May 2026.

The trip detonated on its first full day. According to EL PAÍS, Ayuso appeared at an event grandly titled “Celebration for the Evangelization and Mestizaje of Mexico,” a tribute to Cortés and Queen Isabella I of Castile held at the Frontón México after religious authorities, sensing the storm coming, pulled the plug on an earlier plan to host it at Mexico City’s Metropolitan Cathedral. From the podium, Ayuso called mestizaje “a message of hope and joy” and warned against “hate speech that divides us.” Outside the cathedral, Indigenous groups gathered to read a statement accusing Cortés of “crimes against humanity.” Inside, the writer Juan Miguel Zunzunegui defended the conquest with the line, as EL PAÍS reported, “I love it when they say ‘genocide…’ so why did we build hospitals?”

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The European Right’s “Reconquista” Goes on Tour

Ayuso did not arrive in Mexico City by accident, and she did not freestyle the Cortés tribute. She represents a wing of Spanish politics that has spent the last decade rebuilding its identity around what it calls Hispanidad, the notion that Spain’s empire created a grand, unified civilization rather than centuries of racialized violence. Vox, the hard-right party currently squeezing the PP from the right, openly campaigns on “Reconquer Spain” rhetoric, casting migrants, feminists, and the left as new “invaders” of a supposedly pure Catholic nation. Ayuso is not Vox, at least technically, but she has been steadily borrowing its themes and exporting them.

The columnist Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán, writing in EL PAÍS, argued that Ayuso’s slogan, “Evangelization and Mestizaje,” functions less like a historical description and more like shouting “¡Viva España!” Martínez-Bascuñán invokes the late essayist Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio, who wrote that when mestizaje emerges inside a relationship of conquest, “the mixture does not express equality, only the social trace of domination.” Ayuso, naturally, was not interested in that conversation. She was selling a brand.

That brand has international distribution. As Martínez-Bascuñán notes, Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has already published her own ode to the “indissoluble bond” between Europe and the Americas as the “essence of the West,” and Donald Trump signed a proclamation last October celebrating Columbus for bringing “the principles of Western civilization” to the hemisphere. Ayuso’s Cortés tribute slotted neatly into that ecosystem.

Mexico Was Already Having This Argument Without Her

Here is what Ayuso seems to have missed: Mexico has been litigating the meaning of the conquest in public, loudly, for years. In 2019, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador sent letters to the Spanish crown and the Vatican demanding an apology for “the abuses committed during the conquest” ahead of the 500-year commemorations. Spain’s conservative establishment dismissed it as nonsense. Sheinbaum, AMLO’s successor, has continued the project with less letter-writing and more public confrontation.

So when Ayuso stood at the Frontón México praising mestizaje as joyful fusion, she was not introducing a daring new idea. She was walking into a country with state-level memory projects, ongoing Indigenous campaigns to rename streets and reinterpret monuments, and a sitting president who had already telegraphed exactly how she would respond. The next day, in a Cinco de Mayo speech in Puebla commemorating Mexican resistance to French invasion, Sheinbaum delivered the now-famous lines, as reported by EFE, that those reviving the conquest as “salvation” and those seeking to vindicate Cortés “are destined for defeat.” She did not need to say Ayuso’s name. Everyone heard it.

Who Drove Ayuso Out?

By Wednesday, Ayuso had quietly wiped her afternoon schedule. By Friday, she was announcing the cancellation of the rest of the tour through a furious press release, claiming Sheinbaum’s government had threatened to shut down the hotel hosting the Platino Awards. The Xcaret resort group, which runs the venue, denied any such threats, though as EL PAÍS reported, the company did acknowledge asking organizers to rescind Ayuso’s invitation after her “unfortunate declarations” to prevent the event from becoming a “political platform.” Even the PAN, Mexico’s conservative party and the PP’s natural ally, declined to officially receive her. The deputy Germán Martínez told EL PAÍS the visit had been “complex,” which is the kind of diplomatic phrasing that means the building is on fire.

The Era Is Over

For roughly five centuries, European powers could valorize conquistadors without much pushback from the people they conquered. The statues stayed up, the holidays stayed on the calendar, and the textbook chapters stayed sanitized. Ayuso flew into Mexico City expecting that arrangement to hold. It did not. Indigenous protesters showed up at the cathedral, the president used her largest platform of the year to publicly humiliate her, and the conservative opposition she had come to court refused to stand next to her in public.

History, for Gen Z and beyond, is not a museum label anyone is obligated to nod along to. It is a fight over who gets to speak, who gets named, and who, finally, gets told to go home.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

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That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

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The timing is, of course, not subtle. With the November congressional elections looming and Republican-led states already eyeing redistricting opportunities, President Trump publicly celebrated the decision. Harvard Law professor Nicholas Stephanopoulos told Reuters that Section 2’s results test is now “effectively dead.” Press Robinson, the Louisiana plaintiff who helped win the second Black-majority district before the Court took it away, said he feared elected Black officials would soon “disappear.”

This is what the third Reconstruction looks like.

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The first Reconstruction, after the Civil War, attempted something unprecedented in American history. The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments promised national citizenship, equal protection, and Black male suffrage, an experiment in multiracial democracy that lasted barely a decade before the Supreme Court began taking it apart.

In 1873, just five years after the 14th Amendment’s ratification, the Court issued its decision in the Slaughter-House Cases. According to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute, the Court read the Privileges or Immunities Clause so narrowly that it became, in the LII’s words, a “practical nullity,” protecting only a thin set of national rights like access to ports rather than the substantive civil rights the Amendment’s drafters had in mind. The majority dressed this gutting in the polite language of federalism, warning that a broader reading would “fetter and degrade the State governments.” Translation: states could keep doing what they had been doing, and the federal government would not interfere.

Twenty-three years later came Plessy v. Ferguson. As Britannica explains, the 1896 decision upheld Louisiana’s Separate Car Act and produced the “separate but equal” doctrine that licensed Jim Crow for the next six decades. Justice Henry Billings Brown wrote that segregation laws did not stamp Black Americans with inferiority unless they chose to read it that way, a line that has aged about as well as one might expect. Cornell’s LII notes that Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting alone, wrote that “Our Constitution is color-blind.”

That phrase, ironically, has become the favorite rhetorical instrument of the very Court now dismantling the laws designed to make color-blindness actually a reality.

The Second Demolition: Shelby County and the Slow Hollowing

The second Reconstruction broke the back of Jim Crow. Brown overturned Plessy in 1954. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 followed, with Section 5 preclearance forcing jurisdictions with histories of discrimination to get federal approval before changing voting rules, and Section 2 letting plaintiffs challenge maps and laws based on discriminatory results, not just provable racist intent.

Then came John Roberts. In 2013, as Reuters recounts, his majority opinion in Shelby County v. Holder struck down the coverage formula for Section 5, declaring the data “outdated” and asserting that the South had changed. Congress could, in theory, write a new formula. Congress, predictably, did not. Section 5 remained on the books in name only, much like the Privileges or Immunities Clause after Slaughter-House.

In 2021, the Court narrowed Section 2 in an Arizona case that, according to Kagan’s dissent referenced in the Reuters analysis, endorsed Republican-backed restrictions disproportionately burdening Black, Latino, and Native voters.

The Third Demolition

The 2026 Louisiana ruling completes the pattern. Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion, joined by Roberts and the four other conservatives, redirected Section 2 toward intentional racial discrimination under the 15th Amendment, a standard plaintiffs almost never meet because modern gerrymanders rarely come with confessional memos attached. Stephanopoulos told Reuters the results test now exists “in theory but now impossible to satisfy in fact.”

Supporters frame this as a triumph of the “color-blind Constitution,” to borrow the phrase John Yoo offered Reuters. The phrase echoes Harlan, weaponized against Harlan’s own purpose.

Three times in 150 years, this country has tried to build a multiracial democracy. Three times, the Supreme Court has walked into the unfinished house and quietly removed the load-bearing beams.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

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This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

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For days, social media treated the collapse as a punchline. People riffed on Spirit’s cramped seats, its endless fees, its reputation as the “ghetto airline,” the “flying Megabus” that “should’ve shut down years ago.” The mockery focused entirely on discomfort and chaos and the kinds of passengers who frequent the carrier, never on what its loss would actually cost them. The joke landed because the people who depended on Spirit were already coded as people whose mobility was negotiable.

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Choice Riders and Captive Riders

American transportation has always sorted passengers into two groups: people with options and people without. Transit researchers call them “choice riders” and “captive riders,” and the distinction tracks neatly onto race and income.

Houston is a useful case study. The city’s park-and-ride commuter buses, which serve a ridership that’s roughly 60% white, get plush seats, faster routes, and higher per-rider subsidies. The local bus network, with a ridership that’s roughly 60% Black, gets minimal frequency and chronic underfunding. Same agency, same city, two completely different services. The fancier one is described as “premium.” The slower one is described as what poor people get.

The pattern holds nationally. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the federal government has spent roughly four times as much on roadways as on public transit for decades. Between 1990 and 2020, urban interstate highways expanded by nearly 73%, while transit systems accumulated a maintenance backlog that researcher Basav Sen estimates at somewhere between $90 billion and $176 billion. The recent infrastructure bill allocated $39 billion in new transit funding, less than half of even the lower estimate.

The disparities show up in who actually has access to a car. Sen’s analysis of Census Bureau data found that barely two-thirds of Black households own vehicles, compared to 86% of white households. Among the poorest fifth of Americans, 39% own no vehicle at all. For the families who do own cars, the burden is staggering. The poorest 10% of U.S. households spend 22.6% of after-tax income on vehicle costs, a share 7.5 times higher than the wealthiest 10%.

This is the architecture Spirit operated inside. Legacy airlines sold comfort and status. A budget carrier built around bare-bones access for the working class got mocked as “ghetto” and allowed to fail.

The Federal Hand on the Scale

The mid-twentieth century made the choice-rider hierarchy concrete. Federal highway construction bulldozed Black neighborhoods, subsidized white suburban flight, and poured public money into car-dependent infrastructure designed around households that already had cars. Public transit, which Black, Latinx, and poor residents disproportionately relied on, got starved. Sen’s research notes that as much as 45% of Americans still live in places with no functional transit at all.

The logic is simple enough. The state invested heavily in mobility for car-owning suburbanites and treated the mobility of poor communities as optional. People could “make do.” A bus that comes every 45 minutes is presented as adequate, while a 12-lane highway is presented as essential.

Spirit’s shutdown extends that logic into the air. Legacy carriers received tens of billions in federal pandemic aid. Airports and the air traffic control system run on public money. When Spirit asked the Trump administration for $500 million in exchange for up to a 90% government stake, the request barely registered as a political question. Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary called the proposal “a really bad idea” on NewsNation, and that was roughly the depth of the national conversation.

The Local Bus in the Sky

Spirit was, functionally, a local bus in the sky. Not glamorous. Often uncomfortable. Sometimes chaotic. Vital for people whose only other option was not to go.

According to Business Insider’s Taylor Rains, who analyzed Cirium fare data across roughly 90 routes Spirit exited between 2024 and 2025, average airfares rose about $19, or 14%, after the carrier left. In cities where Spirit kept flying, fares rose only 6 to 7%, broadly in line with industry inflation. Some routes saw far steeper jumps. Oakland to Newark more than doubled, from $135 to $288. Fort Myers to San Juan rose nearly 140%, from $92 to $219.

CBS News, working with similar data, put the average fare jump at 23%, with passenger volume on those routes falling 20%. At the most exposed end, ultra-low-cost carrier exits have produced fare increases of more than 70% on specific routes, particularly out of Fort Lauderdale, where Spirit held nearly 29% of total airport capacity.

Spirit’s customer base skewed younger, price-first, and disproportionately non-white, with a heavy share of “visiting friends and relatives” trips along corridors connecting majority-Black and Latinx U.S. cities to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean and Central American destinations. As travel writer Eduardo Vega noted in TravelPirates’ coverage of the shutdown, the days of sub-$150 round trips to Punta Cana or San José look numbered.

The reverse Spirit effect doesn’t just touch Spirit’s old routes. Delta has openly called its basic economy fare the “Spirit match fare.” American Airlines designed its stripped-down product specifically to compete with ultra-low-cost carriers. With Spirit gone, that competitive pressure evaporates across the entire network. The home health aide visiting her mother in Santo Domingo, the immigrant flying home for a funeral, the family taking the only vacation they can afford, those are the people who will quietly stop flying.

Who Gets to Move

Calling Spirit “ghetto” did exactly the work it was meant to do. It marked the airline and its passengers as low-class, disposable, and undeserving of better treatment, while letting everyone else laugh off the question of who is allowed to move freely through the country and who is not.

Transportation is one of the clearest places where American racism and classism operate without ever using those words. The bus map does the work. The highway route does the work. The fare chart does the work. And now the question of which airlines survive does the work.

Spirit didn’t just fail as a business. It was allowed to fail as a utility for the poor because the country never respected the people who relied on it. The collapse of a “ghetto airline” should scare us more than it amuses us.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Kearney, Laila. “Americans on a Budget Mourn Loss of Low-Cost Spirit Airlines.” Reuters, May 2, 2026.

2. Rains, Taylor. “Airfare Data Shows How Ticket Prices May Jump if Spirit Collapses.” Business Insider, April 28, 2026.

3. Sen, Basav. “How the U.S. Transportation System Fuels Inequality.” Inequality.org, Institute for Policy Studies, January 27, 2022.

4. Vega, Eduardo. “Spirit Airlines Is Gone: What It Means for Flight Prices and Budget Travel.” TravelPirates, May 2, 2026.

The degree and the cast list are still being debated. Some social media commenters insist every guest in that room was a paid actor. Others limit the conspiracy to a handful of officials who supposedly knew the script in advance. Even the people who accept the basic factual account, that Cole Tomas Allen took a three-day Amtrak ride from Los Angeles to D.C., bought a shotgun in 2025 and a pistol in 2023, and rushed a magnetometer at the Washington Hilton, can still point to something performative. The Trump administration, which gutted the federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention earlier this year and previously spurred the J6 riots, suddenly discovered the horror of political violence the moment it landed in their ballroom?

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Even the Mainstream Joined In

What’s striking is how thoroughly the suspicion has crossed ideological lines. Right-wing conspiracy theorists who normally peddle false flag theories about Sandy Hook and Parkland found themselves, this time, in unusual agreement with left-wing activists asking why the same administration that posts memes celebrating airstrikes is now demanding civility. Even mainstream outlets raised eyebrows. NBC News itself ran a segment on the “unfounded conspiracies swirl[ing] online,” while quietly cataloging the very questions fueling them: How did Allen, armed with a shotgun, a .38-caliber pistol, and three knives, walk into a hotel hosting the President of the United States? Why was Vice President JD Vance evacuated noticeably faster than Trump? How did one guest become a viral meme by continuing to eat his salad as gunshots rang out? And why, as Senator Dick Durbin’s post-briefing comments hinted at, was the dinner not even designated a National Special Security Event despite the entire presidential line of succession being in the room?

This is the first time I have personally watched the political horseshoe close into a complete circle. MAGA influencers, Bernie supporters, and CNN panelists asking the same questions, in roughly the same tone.

A Brief History of American Lying

To understand how we got here, we have to be honest about something uncomfortable. Trump is not the first president to lie to us. He is not even close.

George W. Bush, as documented exhaustively by the Center for Public Integrity in their 2008 study tracking 935 false statements, told the country that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and operational ties to al-Qaeda. Both claims, as the Senate Intelligence Committee later confirmed, were untrue. Bill Clinton looked into a camera in 1998 and, as the Washington Post recounted in its archival coverage, declared that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Joe Biden, in November 2023, told a roundtable of Jewish leaders that he had personally seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” a claim the White House was forced to walk back within hours, according to reporting from Reuters, after no such images or confirmation existed.

These were not minor fibs. The Iraq lie killed hundreds of thousands of people. But notice the common thread. Each of these presidents lied because they wanted to be believed. They constructed elaborate, plausible-sounding narratives. They had press secretaries refine the talking points. They sent surrogates onto Sunday shows to defend the lies with grave seriousness.

We used to be a real America, with strong, committed liars who respected the craft enough to put effort into it.

The President Who Stopped Performing Credibility

Trump represents a different model entirely. He does not lie to convince. He lies to dominate, to entertain, to test what his audience will accept. The lie is the point, and the indifference to whether you believe it is also the point.

Consider the moment, captured aboard Air Force One in March 2026, when a Washington Post reporter asked Trump directly whether the United States had bombed a girls' elementary school in southern Iran on the first day of the war, killing 175 people. Trump, without missing a beat, said it was his "opinion, based on what I've seen, that was done by Iran." Pressed again, he insisted, "The only side that targets civilians is Iran," and added that Iran's munitions are "very inaccurate." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, standing nearby, offered no clarification. The president then pivoted to grievances about October 7th, "47 years" of Iranian behavior, and the line that did much of the work: no previous president, he said, "had the guts to do it." A bombed school full of dead children, blamed on the country whose school it was.

Worst yet is the ongoing fiasco of the Epstein files, where Trump's denials have unraveled in slow motion across the press. As CNN's Aaron Blake cataloged in a July 2025 analysis, Trump claimed Attorney General Pam Bondi never told him his name appeared in the files, only for sources to confirm to CNN that she had told him exactly that back in May. He insisted he never drew pictures, a denial that collapsed under the weight of auctioned Trump doodles and a charity director who confirmed he had mailed her two signed drawings in 2004. He said he "wasn't a fan" of Epstein, despite calling him a "terrific guy" in 2002 and signing a book to him in 1997 with the inscription, "To Jeff, You are the greatest!" He claimed he never flew on Epstein's plane, contradicted by flight logs, already public for years, showing seven trips. The pattern is almost insulting in its laziness. Each lie is disprovable within an afternoon of basic reporting, and the president keeps making them anyway, because the goal was never to be believed. The goal was to see whether the denial alone would be enough to move on.

This is the model. The president lies, contradicts his own people, and treats every fact as negotiable. Press secretaries shrug. Cabinet officials nod along. The White House itself, in this week’s briefings about the WHCD shooting, blamed “systemic demonization” of Trump for the violence while simultaneously calling on Disney to fire Jimmy Kimmel for a joke about Melania’s age. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stood at a podium and told reporters they were “just as guilty” as anyone on social media for the shooting at their own dinner.

When the people in charge stop caring whether anything is true, the audience eventually stops caring either. We learned the lesson they taught us. Now an actual shooting happens, with actual bullets, an actual wounded officer, and an actual suspect facing federal assassination charges, and a stunning portion of the country looks at it and says, sure, whatever, probably staged.

That is not a failure of media literacy. That is a population that has correctly identified that the people running the country treat reality itself as content. At this point, many are simply returning the favor.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

That headline is the least of it.

Dandia is, almost certainly, the first Muslim to hold the position. He is also a former plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit that helped force the NYPD to dismantle its post-9/11 Muslim surveillance program. Lara-Nour Walton, writing in The Nation, recounts the moment in 2012 when Dandia, then 19, discovered that a friend who had crashed at his Brighton Beach home and eaten at his family’s table was a police informant. The man Brooklyn just put in charge of its archive is a man Brooklyn once treated as a national security threat. The borough is now asking him to decide which stories count.

I’m fighting to document stories like Dandia’s, where the targets of state surveillance become the keepers of public memory, before they get flattened into a feel-good diversity headline or buried entirely.

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these stories full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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A Muslim Landowner Before There Was a New York

Long before Brooklyn was Brooklyn, a man named Anthony Jansen Van Salee owned a sizable chunk of it. According to the Center for Brooklyn History’s finding aid on the 1643 deed in their collection, Van Salee was the first known person of Muslim origin in the Americas. His father was a Dutch privateer who, after being captured along the Barbary Coast, converted to Islam and became one of the famed Barbary pirates. Anthony arrived in New Netherland in 1630, married a German woman named Grietje Reyniers, and eventually became one of the largest landowners in what is now Brooklyn.

Naturally, the Dutch establishment hated him. The finding aid documents how a feud with Domine Bogardus of the Dutch Reformed Church spiraled into a coordinated campaign of slander against Anthony and his wife, with neighbors swearing petitions against the couple until Director-General Kieft gave them six months to leave New Amsterdam. They crossed the river to Coney Island, where Van Salee got his land grant on August 3, 1639, and built a fortune. Several prominent New York families, including the Vanderbilts, trace their lineage back to him.

The first Muslim in colonial New York was wealthy enough to matter, foreign enough to expel, and useful enough to absorb into the bloodline of the city’s elite. The pattern was set early.

Malcolm, Mosques, and the Files They Kept

Three centuries later, the federal government decided Muslim New Yorkers were a problem worth a microfilm reel. According to the archival record for FBI file RG539, the Bureau’s surveillance dossier on Malcolm X stretches from 1953 to 1971, beginning the year he left prison and adopted the name.

The file follows him as he traveled the country preaching for the Nation of Islam, broke with Elijah Muhammad, founded the Muslim Mosque, Inc. in March 1964, made his pilgrimage to Mecca, and built the Organization of Afro-American Unity around what the archival summary describes as “the need for human brotherhood and international cooperation.” It continues past his assassination in New York on February 21, 1965, and runs another six years after he was already dead.

The Bureau was not waiting for evidence of a crime. Malcolm’s Islam was the file. Black Muslim organizing in Harlem, in mosques, in print, was treated by the federal government as something requiring documentation, infiltration, and pursuit, regardless of whether anyone had broken any law. Decades before the Demographics Unit existed, the template was already operational.

The Demographics Unit and the Plaintiff’s Notebook

After September 11, 2001, the NYPD’s Intelligence Division built what Ali Winston, writing for WIRED, describes as a department that “took on the operational posture and methodology of a national security directorate.” Undercover officers and informants infiltrated mosques, cafés, soccer leagues, and student associations across the city and surrounding states. The Demographics Unit mapped Muslim and Middle Eastern enclaves block by block. WIRED notes that, by the department’s own admission, the program failed to generate a single terrorism lead.

Dandia was one of the people they watched. He joined the ACLU suit, won, and started giving walking tours of the city that had spied on him. Walton describes him beginning each tour by enumerating the ways New York’s establishment had failed him before pivoting to the Islamic Cultural Center in East Harlem, the Muslim Boricuas of Alianza Islámica, the Syrian tenement dwellers of old Washington Street.

The fight is not over. WIRED reports that in December 2025, Samir Hashmi, another former target of the NYPD’s spying, filed a fresh open-records lawsuit demanding the department produce its weekly intelligence summaries and reports on specific mosques from 2006 to 2008. Hashmi told Winston that Mayor-elect Mamdani’s decision to retain Jessica Tisch, a former Intelligence Division official, as police commissioner was what pushed him to file. The surveillance state has not been audited. It has been inherited.

Locally Celebrated, Nationally Cursed

Mamdani took office on January 1 as the first Muslim mayor of New York City. Within weeks, a talk radio host called him a “radical Islam cockroach.” U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville shared a post invoking 9/11 alongside Mamdani’s photo with the caption “the enemy is inside the gates.” Alleged ISIS sympathizers attempted to bomb his residence. ABC7’s N.J. Burkett asked him directly whether this was what Islamophobia looks like. “It is, it is,” Mamdani replied, adding that what concerns him most is not what is said about him but what is said “about a million or so Muslims who call this city their home.”

WIRED documents Queens councilwoman Vickie Paladino calling for “the expulsion of Muslims from western nations” and, in an op-ed for the Queens Jewish Link, “massive sweeps of Muslim neighborhoods.” When pressed, Paladino told reporters, “They can call me Islamophobic if they want, the word has no meaning whatsoever.”

This is the country Brooklyn’s new historian inherited. A borough willing to hand him the archive, a nation still calling for sweeps of his neighborhood.

Holding the Pen

The Brooklyn historian post is unpaid and unglamorous. Schweiger held it for 24 years and most New Yorkers could not have named him. What changes with Dandia is who decides which Brooklyn counts as Brooklyn’s. The Van Salee deed, the Malcolm X file, the Demographics Unit map, the Mamdani inauguration: these are not separate stories. They are one continuous record of Muslim presence in this city and the apparatus that has tried, repeatedly, to surveil it, expel it, or write it out.

Dandia is now holding the pen. The country he is writing in still wants the eraser back.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Barron, James. “A New Historian for the Borough of Brooklyn.” “The New York Times,” April 17, 2026.

2. Burkett, N.J. “Mayor Zohran Mamdani Reacts to Attacks, Social Media Posts Sparking Islamophobia: ‘It Takes a Toll.’” “WABC-TV Eyewitness News,” March 13, 2026.

3. Center for Brooklyn History. “Guide to the Anthony Jansen (Janszoon) Van Salee Deed, 2019.013.” Brooklyn Public Library, revised 2024.

4. United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Malcolm X Surveillance File, 1953–1971.” Archives Record RG539.

5. Walton, Lara-Nour. “The Man Behind the Radical Walking Tours of New York City.” “The Nation,” October 15, 2025.

6. Winston, Ali. “NYPD Sued Over Possible Records Collected Through Muslim Spying Program.” “WIRED,” December 23, 2025.

Three memorial committee members have stepped down. Ten researchers were dismissed. One Howard University doctoral student, Christopher Newman, was walked out of a Harvard building by campus police and banned from retrieving his belongings, after, by his own account, asking too many questions about Antigua.

Harvard wanted a reckoning on its own terms. It got historians who took the assignment seriously.

I'm fighting to document institutional retreats like Harvard's before they get laundered into press releases about "community engagement" or erased from the historical record entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

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The Antiguan Sugar Empire Harvard Doesn’t Want to Inherit

To understand why Harvard is firing its own researchers, you have to understand what those researchers kept finding.

According to the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery report, John Winthrop, Massachusetts Bay’s first governor and a Harvard founder, pivoted the colony toward the Caribbean sugar trade in the 1640s. Boston ships left for the West Indies with grain and cattle and returned with sugar, tobacco, and the first enslaved African people sold in New England. Winthrop, who personally oversaw the massacre of at least 700 Indigenous people during the Pequot War and distributed enslaved survivors to fellow Harvard benefactors, called it the work of the Lord.

Winthrop’s youngest son Samuel sailed for Antigua in 1649. The Guardian reports that his plantation, grimly named Groton Hall, produced tens of thousands of pounds of sugar annually. By his death, Samuel enslaved 64 people, owned a thousand acres, held one-quarter of Barbuda, and served as lieutenant governor. Before leaving Boston, he and three classmates made the first property donation in Harvard’s history, the land that now houses Widener Library. Another Antiguan planter, Thomas Oliver, became a Harvard overseer and built a Cambridge mansion from Caribbean wealth. It is now Elmwood, the residence of Harvard’s presidents. Every Harvard president since has lived in a house built on Antiguan sugar.

When the Research Became Inconvenient

Harvard’s 2022 report counted 41 enslavers and roughly 70 enslaved people. By January 2025, independent researcher Richard Cellini and his team had identified more than 900 enslaved people and nearly 500 living descendants. Then Harvard fired them. Cellini told The Guardian he believes the firing came because his team had found “too many slaves.” Harvard’s spokesperson denies any directive limiting descendant identification.

The pattern preceded Cellini. Caitlin DeAngelis, who researched Harvard’s slavery ties starting in 2017, told The Guardian she identified more than 200 people enslaved on Thomas Oliver’s Antiguan plantation, including a 15-year-old boy named Richard Oliver. None appeared in Harvard’s final 2022 report, which claimed the number was unknown. DeAngelis realized her job “was to hold down a desk that allowed Harvard to mislead the press about how serious they were about making reparations.”

Newman’s firing followed the same logic. He had met members of the Lloyd family, descendants of people trafficked from Antigua to Cambridge by a Harvard benefactor, and started asking about the connection in staff meetings. He was met, as he told The Guardian, with “radio silence.” Then came the police escort. Harvard’s explanation is that the Legacy of Slavery Initiative is “the only group at the University authorized to engage in descendant research.” The firing, in other words, was a jurisdictional matter. Naturally.

Harvard history professor Vincent Brown resigned from the initiative last winter after a research team was fired upon returning from Antigua. In his resignation letter, Brown posed the question Harvard cannot answer: “Is it true that the university does not really want to know the whole truth about its history of slave ownership in the Caribbean?” Brown is leaving for Yale.

Free Renty and the Reparations-Lite Response

The Antigua fight runs alongside the case of Renty Taylor. In 1850, according to Reuters, Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz commissioned daguerreotypes of Renty and his daughter Delia on a South Carolina plantation, forced to disrobe, to “prove” the inferiority of Black people. Harvard kept the images at the Peabody Museum for nearly 170 years, at one point using Renty’s image on a book cover. Renty’s descendant Tamara Lanier sued in 2019. Massachusetts’ highest court revived her case in 2022, with Justice Scott Kafker writing that Harvard had “cavalierly” dismissed her claims and held “responsibilities to the descendants.” Harvard settled in May 2025. The pattern is consistent. Harvard lets go only when holding on becomes more expensive than releasing.

Antigua has been asking for the better option for nearly a decade. Ambassador Ronald Sanders, Prime Minister Gaston Browne, and UWI officials have requested scholarships, archival funding, genealogical support, and non-communicable disease research funding. The Guardian reports that what Harvard produced instead was a 2021 Harvard Business School partnership offering UWI students a 10 to 20 percent discount on online courses. The word “reparations” was explicitly avoided. Carla Martin, a Harvard lecturer who has tried to engage with the initiative, called it “window dressing, more performative than substantive.” She added: “It remains very opaque to us, what is possible.”

The Truth Has an Invoice

Harvard now has more documentation of its slave ties than any other elite university in America. Ignorance is no longer the obstacle. Real follow-through would look like descendant-governed scholarship funds drawn from endowed accounts traceable to slave wealth, shared governance over archives like the Renty daguerreotypes, and direct investment in Antiguan institutions rather than discounted Harvard Business School logins. Instead, Harvard fired its historians.

The late Antiguan poet Mary Geo Quinn, who grew up on the ruins of Samuel Winthrop’s Groton Hall, wrote: “Lest we forget, tell us again and again about our forefathers strong, who toiled for their captors in sun and in rain.” Forgetting is a choice institutions make. So is remembering. So is firing the people who remember too loudly.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me onVenmo (TheGenZHistorian) orCashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Moscufo, Michela. “Why Are Harvard’s Slavery Researchers Quitting or Being Fired?” The Guardian, April 18, 2026.

2. Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery. “Report of the Presidential Committee on Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery.” Harvard University, April 2022.

3. Raymond, Nate. “Harvard to Relinquish Photos of Enslaved People to Resolve Descendant’s Lawsuit.” Reuters, May 28, 2025.

4. Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative. “Timeline: Establishing the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative.” Harvard University, accessed 2026

It’s actually K-A-H-L-I-L.

To explain why, I went to Washington, D.C. to visit the memorial of the original K-A-H-L-I-L: the poet and artist Kahlil Gibran.

A Name Crossing an Ocean

Gibran was born in Bsharri, Lebanon in 1883. His full name was Gibran Khalil Gibran, and he carried his father’s name, Khalil, in the middle. In Arabic, it means “friend.”

Originally, it was written خليل, beginning with the Arabic letter خ, which makes a soft “kh” sound from the back of the throat. English has no letter for that sound, so today we approximate it by pairing “k” and “h.” That convention is how we get most of the Khalils walking around now.

But in the early 1900s, that rule wasn’t standardized yet. So when Gibran’s family immigrated to Boston, his teachers anglicized his name on the spot, shifting the spelling and pronunciation from Kh to Kah.

On the surface, this is a small story of ignorance and, frankly, disrespect from a classroom of adults who couldn’t be bothered to learn a child’s name correctly. A familiar immigrant experience, somehow evaded in most places but still the default in American schools well into the twentieth century.

What He Did With It

Here’s where it gets interesting.

Gibran kept the anglicized spelling. Not out of resignation, but as a kind of quiet reclamation. He decided the name could hold both worlds at once, the Arabic one he was born into and the English one he was building a life in.

For the rest of his career, he signed his English works Kahlil Gibran and his Arabic works Gibran Khalil Gibran. Two spellings, one person, no apology for either.

He went on to publish The Prophet in 1923, a book of poetry that has never been out of print, has been translated into more than 100 languages, and is one of the best-selling works of poetry in history. In the Arab world he is remembered as a literary titan who helped modernize Arabic prose. In the English-speaking world, he is quoted at weddings, funerals, and graduations by people who have no idea he was Lebanese.

And that idiosyncratic spelling, the one his Boston teachers scribbled down without asking, became its own tradition. It’s why my parents spelled my name the way they did.

Why This Matters Right Now

I tell this story because names are small and enormous at the same time.

When a teacher anglicizes a child’s name, they’re not just making a spelling error. They’re telling that child which parts of themselves are acceptable in the room. Gibran happened to be brilliant and stubborn enough to reshape the erasure into something generative. Most kids don’t get that option. They just quietly start going by Mike.

We’re living through another wave of pressure to flatten American identity into one approved version of itself. Curricula are being rewritten. Arab American stories, Black American stories, Indigenous stories are being pulled from federal sites and museum exhibits at a pace I genuinely can’t keep up with.

A name is one of the first things you’re given and one of the first things this country tries to take.

The Ask

It’s Arab American Heritage Month, and I want to go deeper this year. Into Gibran’s politics, into the long history of Arab immigration to America, into why so many Black Americans carry Arabic names, a thread I’ve barely begun to pull.

But I can only do that work because of readers like you.

Less than 5% of my subscribers are paid supporters.

Here’s what your support unlocks:

• 📖 At 5% paid subscribers, I can bring on Arab American historians and Black Muslim scholars to co-write pieces that go deeper than any single creator can on their own.

• 🧠 At 10% paid subscribers, I can go full-time on this newsletter and publish multiple pieces a week connecting current events to the histories they’re trying to bury.

• 🌎 At 20% paid subscribers, this becomes a platform, not just a newsletter. A home for young writers and historians from marginalized communities who get locked out of traditional media.

All for the price of a coffee once a month.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Names carry history. So do the people who keep telling it.

We can’t let them erase our stories. Not now. Not ever.

On April 6, 2026, a voice came through the feed from 215,049 miles away. Calm. Precise. Professional.

“Good morning, Houston, from inside Integrity.”

That voice belonged to Victor Glover: U.S. Navy captain, veteran test pilot, NASA astronaut, and the pilot of Artemis II, the first crewed mission to orbit the moon in over fifty years. A few hours later, his spacecraft swung behind the far side of the moon, cutting off all communication with Earth for about forty minutes. Four human beings were farther from home than any people in recorded history, with a Black man at the controls.

According to NASA mission updates, the Orion spacecraft reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, surpassing the record set by Apollo 13 in 1970. Victor Glover, born in Pomona, California, raised on his grandfather’s stories about being barred from flying in the Air Force because he was Black, is now the first Black astronaut to travel into deep space. He is the pilot.

That detail matters more than it might seem. Because the agency that handed him those controls spent decades making sure no one who looked like him ever got close to them.

I’m fighting to document history-making moments like Victor Glover’s flight before they’re flattened into feel-good headlines or stripped of their full context, and I need your help.

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these stories full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tells the whole truth about who gets to be “the future” and who gets left behind, please consider a paid subscription today!

The Pattern Starts Before NASA Existed

Before we get to mission patches and press conferences, we need to go back to 1804.

York was an enslaved Black man owned by William Clark. When Meriwether Lewis invited Clark to co-lead the Corps of Discovery, Clark ordered York to come along. York didn’t have a choice. He crossed the same rivers, climbed the same mountains, nearly drowned in the same rapids, and traveled more than 4,000 miles through terrain no American expedition had ever mapped.

According to historian Craig Fehrman, who spent five years researching newly uncovered documents about the expedition, York was one of only two men chosen to operate the corps’ single whipsaw when they built their winter quarters. Clark later praised York’s ability to manage the boats in an unpublished letter Fehrman uncovered. York was among a small group trusted to navigate the most treacherous river rapids on the entire journey. During councils with Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa leaders, the corps’ journals record that the Native nations called York “the most marvelous” thing about the expedition.

When the captains asked every member of the corps to vote on where to build their final winter quarters, they asked York too. His vote is recorded in Clark’s elk-skin journal.

When the expedition returned home, the federal government paid $274.57 for York’s labor during the journey, a sum similar to what enlisted privates received. That money went to William Clark. York went back to bondage.

The U.S. has always loved Black courage when it serves national glory. It has been considerably less enthusiastic about Black citizenship, Black wages, or Black credit.

That pattern held for the next two centuries.

NASA’s Whites-Only Era

When NASA launched in 1958, the agency quickly became the crown jewel of American Cold War mythology. The space race was framed as a contest between freedom and tyranny, democracy and oppression. The astronauts were clean-cut, crew-cut, and almost uniformly white. The face of American “freedom” in space looked nothing like the Black Americans who were, at that exact moment, being fire-hosed in Birmingham and beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Beginning in World War II, Black women with college degrees were recruited to work as “human computers” at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, performing complex mathematical calculations by hand in a segregated unit called the West Area Computers. According to Scientific American, Katherine Johnson’s trajectory math was so trusted that John Glenn reportedly refused to fly his 1962 orbital mission until she personally verified the numbers the electronic computers had produced. Dorothy Vaughan became the first Black supervisor at NACA in 1949. Mary Jackson became an engineer. All three did the math that sent white men into history.

They could not eat in the same cafeteria as the engineers whose careers their calculations were holding up. It took a 2016 film for most Americans to learn their names — more than fifty years after the fact. NASA did not simply forget them. It just never made room for them in the story it was telling about itself.

Gil Scott-Heron noticed. In 1970, as NASA celebrated the Apollo program’s triumphs, Scott-Heron released “Whitey on the Moon,” a spoken-word poem addressing the gap between the space program’s billion-dollar ambitions and the poverty grinding down Black communities at home. As reported in Space.com’s coverage of Glover’s mission, Glover himself has said he listens to that track every Monday, a deliberate reminder of the world he carries with him into space.

Scott-Heron was not wrong. The same year Apollo 13 set the distance record that Artemis II just broke, NASA’s astronaut corps was entirely white. The agency had not hired a single Black astronaut.

That changed, slowly and partially, in 1978. According to reporting from BlackAmericaWeb.com, Guion Bluford, Frederick Gregory, and Ronald McNair joined NASA’s astronaut ranks that year. Bluford became the first African American in space in 1983, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. But the door that opened in 1978 did so late, and even then, it did not stay fully open.

In 2018, NASA abruptly pulled Dr. Jeanette Epps from a long-duration ISS mission without explanation. As reported by BlackAmericaWeb.com, Epps had been on track to become the first African American astronaut on an extended ISS expedition. Her brother publicly called the decision a product of racism and misogyny inside the agency. NASA offered no clarifying statement beyond calling it a personnel matter. Epps, a former CIA intelligence officer with a doctorate in aerospace engineering, was replaced by her backup and moved to a desk in Houston.

NASA, to put it plainly, has a history.

The First Black Astronaut on a Long-Duration Mission

Victor Glover already broke one barrier before Artemis II. According to POCIT’s coverage of the mission, Glover became the first Black person to serve on an International Space Station expedition in 2020, spending six months on the ISS as part of Crew Dragon’s first operational mission.

He was born in 1976 and inspired, at least in part, by a grandfather who was told he could not fly because of his race. He earned his wings anyway, logged over 3,500 flight hours across more than 40 aircraft during his military career, and joined NASA’s astronaut class in 2013.

Now, in 2026, he is piloting the spacecraft that carried humans farther from Earth than they have ever been. According to CBS News’ live coverage of the mission, Glover said a quick prayer when the crew went behind the moon and lost contact with Earth, then got back to work. When his wife Dionna was confirmed to be watching from Houston’s mission control gallery, he said simply: “Hey, babe. I love you. From the moon.”

What This Moment Means — And Doesn’t

There are people in Washington right now working to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government. The argument, in its most charitable form, goes something like this: race-conscious policies are unnecessary because excellence is colorblind.

The history of York, of Julius Montgomery (the first Black technical professional at Cape Canaveral, who faced a colleague line that refused to shake his hand), of Guion Bluford, of Jeanette Epps, of Victor Glover’s own grandfather being told he couldn’t fly — that history is the answer to that argument. Excellence was never the barrier. Race was.

Glover is not a symbol deployed to prove a point. He is a Navy captain who earned his seat. But the fact that his seat was denied to generations of Black pilots and engineers before him is not incidental to his story. It is the story.

In 1970, Gil Scott-Heron was asking who the space program was actually for. In 2026, a Black man is the pilot. That is real, hard-won, undeniable progress. It does not mean the work is finished. The people Scott-Heron was speaking for—still navigating medical debt, housing insecurity, underfunded schools, and a justice system that too often treats Black lives as expendable—they are still waiting on a different kind of mission.

But Victor Glover looked out the window of Integrity and watched an eclipse that, in his words, “humans probably have not evolved to see.” He saw the Earth as a bright sphere hanging in darkness. He said, “Trust me, you are special in all of this emptiness.”

We changed who pilots the spacecraft. Now let’s change what people come home to.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me onVenmo (TheGenZHistorian) orCashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources:

1. Brown, Stacy M. “Victor Glover, Artemis II Crew Break Distance Record as Orion Sweeps Around Moon.” Washington Informer, April 7, 2026.

2. Czachor, Emily Mae, Jordan Freiman, Sarah Lynch Baldwin, and William Harwood. “Artemis II Crew Completes Record-Breaking Trip Around the Moon.” CBS News, April 7, 2026.

3. Fehrman, Craig. “Astronaut Victor Glover Is the Latest in a Long Line of Black American Explorers — Including York, the Enslaved Man Who Played a Key Role in the Lewis and Clark Expedition.” Space.com, April 2026.

4. Katsha, Habiba. “Victor Glover Is Set to Make History as the First Black Person to Reach the Moon.” POCIT, April 2, 2026.

5. Cottman, Michael H. “Was Racism the Reason a Black Astronaut Was Grounded?” BlackAmericaWeb.com, January 22, 2018.

6. Bock, Michael, and Thalia K. Patrinos. “Julius Montgomery: First African American Technical Professional at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.” NASA, June 15, 2021.

Most of my peers in their mid-twenties don’t think much about this moment. If you landed a salaried job after graduation, HR handled it. Someone emailed you a PDF, you clicked a few boxes during open enrollment, and a card showed up in the mail. I chose a different path: self-employed, unapologetically political, building an independent media company and newsroom from scratch. There is no HR department here. No automatic card. I’m completely alone with a marketplace full of premiums I’m actively trying to decode.

I’m fortunate enough to see a potential way through this. My education, income, and ability to navigate bureaucracy give me options most people in this limbo don’t have. But the gap itself, the hours spent comparing deductibles and network maps instead of writing, resting, or reporting, is real. And the fear sitting underneath it is realer still.

Which raises the question: why does a country this wealthy design a system where access to a doctor depends on whether your job is “respectable” enough for benefits, whether your body is productive enough to deserve coverage, and whether you can decode a maze of fine print on a deadline?

The answer, as usual, is hiding in history.

I’m fighting to document the racist and ableist architecture of American healthcare before it gets buried under talking points, and I need your help.

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

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The System Didn’t Fail. It Was Built This Way.

After the Civil War, formerly enslaved people faced a health crisis so severe that smallpox moved through their camps while surrounding white communities remained comparatively untouched. As historian Jim Downs documents in “Sick From Freedom,” Congress established the medical division of the Freedmen’s Bureau to respond, deploying roughly 120 doctors across the war-torn South, then ignored those doctors’ requests for personnel and equipment.

They built more than 40 hospitals, then prematurely shuttered most of them. White legislators argued, according to Jeneen Interlandi’s reporting in the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, that free assistance would breed dependence and that hard labor was a better remedy than medicine. The infrastructure for universal care was right there. They chose to dismantle it.

That pattern held for the next century. As Columbia historian Ira Katznelson has documented, Southern Democrats ensured that farm and domestic workers, more than half of the Black workforce at the time, were excluded from the Social Security Act of 1935, the Wagner Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. When Harry Truman proposed expanding the nation’s hospital system as part of a broader health plan, the American Medical Association spent millions branding it “socialized medicine” and “un-American.”

The Hill-Burton Act that followed poured federal dollars into hospital construction while explicitly allowing states to maintain segregated facilities. Hospitals took federal money and confined Black patients to inferior wards or shut them out entirely. The AMA simultaneously barred Black doctors from membership and medical schools excluded Black students. This was coordinated. For powerful white legislators and medical leaders, universal care was threatening because it would have meant Black, poor, and working-class people using the same hospitals, the same doctors, and living just as long.

The logic extended to disabled people too. As researchers Rotoli, Backster, and colleagues document in a 2022 review in Cureus, people with disabilities were historically institutionalized under the guise of care, warehoused in facilities that functioned as segregation and control. Eugenic sterilization laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell in 1927, treated disabled lives as costs to be minimized. Today, disabled and chronically ill people still risk losing Medicaid benefits if they earn or save too much, a policy design that communicates clearly: only productive bodies deserve stable care.

America didn’t forget to build universal healthcare. Powerful institutions made a series of deliberate choices to build a system tied to employment, wealth, and productivity, and they knew exactly who would fall through the gaps.

I am Not an Exception

Think about the undocumented worker who can’t access the marketplace at all, no matter how many hours they log, no matter how long they’ve paid into a system that won’t cover them. Think about the disabled person who has to stay poor on paper just to keep their Medicaid, because the moment they earn or save too much, the coverage disappears. Think about the gig worker, the domestic worker, the farmworker whose labor built this country and whose job category was deliberately excluded from the protections that gave other workers benefits in the first place. Think about the uninsured Black mother navigating a maternal health system that already sees her pain as less urgent, her life as less worth saving.

I’m spending hours I don’t have decoding network maps and premium tiers. They’re spending those same hours in emergency rooms, skipping prescriptions, and praying nothing goes seriously wrong. The gap between my situation and theirs is a matter of circumstance and privilege, not design. The design affects all of us.

The best birthday gift you could give me isn’t a card. It’s making this work sustainable.

⏰If just 5% of my followers became paid subscribers, I could dedicate more hours each week to reporting and less to chasing freelance gigs. More time researching means more deeply sourced, more thorough pieces, the kind that take weeks to build right.

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🎥If we get to 20%, I can invest in video, audio, and longer-form content that takes these histories off the page and into new formats and new audiences. The stories I cover deserve more than one medium.

This newsletter exists because I believe history told honestly changes how people move through the world. But honest history takes time, and time takes resources. If this piece meant something to you, the most direct thing you can do is become a paid subscriber today and share it with someone who needs to read it.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me onVenmo (TheGenZHistorian) orCashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources:

1. Downs, Jim. Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction. Oxford University Press, 2012.

2. Interlandi, Jeneen. “Why Doesn’t the United States Have Universal Health Care? The Answer Has Everything to Do with Race.” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019.

3. Kaiser Family Foundation. “How History Has Shaped Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities: A Timeline of Policies and Events.” KFF, 2023.

4. Rotoli, Jason M., Anika Backster, Cori Poffenberger, and Wendy C. Coates. “Promoting Access and Equity: A Historical Perspective of Healthcare Access for People With Disabilities.” Cureus 14, no. 11 (November 2022): e31594

@druskiHow Conservative Women in America act 🇺🇸😂😂😂😭😭 #druski #conservative #politicstiktok #politicalcomedy #funny

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In it, Druski appears in heavy white prosthetics, a blonde wig, and a white suit, playing a character widely understood to be modeled on Kirk herself, ordering elaborate coffee drinks, praying theatrically for the cameras, and embodying a particular strain of entitled, performance-ready conservative femininity. The free speech president, apparently, has limits.

The backlash to Druski’s skit came fast. Conservative commentators called it racism. Some dragged out the word “whiteface” and placed it next to “blackface” as if the two were mirror images, as if centuries of history could be flattened into a both-sides talking point. If Druski can do this, the argument goes, then blackface must have been fine all along.

Convenient logic, if you can pull it off. The problem is that it only works if you’ve never seriously asked what blackface was actually built to do.

I'm documenting stories like Ellen Craft's and the long history of Black survival strategies before they get dismissed as radical talking points or buried entirely.

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this newsletter runs entirely on reader support. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these hidden histories full-time.

Right now, less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that finds the roots of today's debates in yesterday's erasures, please consider a paid subscription today.

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Blackface minstrelsy emerged in 1830s New York, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. White performers darkened their faces with burnt cork, painted on exaggerated features, and built elaborate caricatures of enslaved Africans as lazy, hypersexual, ignorant, and buffoonish.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice developed the first nationally recognized blackface character, “Jim Crow,” in 1830. By 1845, the minstrel industry had generated an entire economy: sheet music, costumes, makeup, and a ready-made library of stereotypes. Historian Dale Cockrell has noted that poor and working-class whites who felt squeezed economically and politically used minstrelsy to define whiteness against a manufactured Black “other,” giving them something to share with wealthy whites across class lines.

The stereotypes minstrelsy produced made it easier to justify slavery, easier to defend segregation, easier to look away from lynching. This was propaganda wearing a costume, and it worked on a national scale.

Druski’s whiteface operates from entirely different terrain.

The history of whiteface in Black hands has never been about degradation. It has been, at its most serious, a survival strategy. In December 1848, an enslaved woman named Ellen Craft wrapped bandages around her face, put her arm in a sling, pulled on green spectacles, and walked into a Georgia train station as a white man. She and her husband William traveled over a thousand miles through first-class cabins, steamship dining rooms, and a Baltimore customs checkpoint that nearly ended everything.

According to the National Park Service, Ellen carried her arm in a sling to avoid signing her name, feigned deafness to avoid conversation, and limped with a cane to sell the disguise. Whiteness, in that moment, was a passport. Discovery meant re-enslavement, sale, or death. The disguise held, and on Christmas morning 1848, they arrived in Philadelphia.

Ellen Craft borrowed whiteness because the system had made it the only currency that moved freely. That is the throughline.

As scholar Clare Corbould argued in The Conversation, the joke in whiteface comedy is never “this person is white.” It is “this person is protected, entitled, and used to being in control.” Richard Pryor did it with his voice in the 1970s, parodying the speech patterns and body language of white police officers, bosses, and other authority figures who could harass, fire, or arrest Black people with impunity. The Wayans brothers did it on screen in White Chicks, mocking the wealthy white socialites whose privilege and connections shield them from consequences. Scholar R.N. Bradley, writing in PopMatters, argued that whiteface by Black artists consistently asks the same question: “What does white sound like?” It makes whiteness visible, strange, and constructed.

When Trump tells Erika Kirk to sue a comedian for mocking her, he is insisting that power deserves protection from the gaze of the racially subjugated. Blackface performers got rich. Their stereotypes were backed by theaters, studios, and the legal architecture of a white supremacist state. Druski’s bit generated a presidential intervention and calls to respect white feelings. Those two outcomes are not interchangeable.

Ellen Craft removed her disguise in a Philadelphia boarding house on Christmas Day and wept. She had worn whiteness to survive it. Druski put it on to expose it. Neither one threatened white people’s access to safety, employment, or their lives. Only its opposite ever did.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. Bradley, R. N. “Dy(e)ing to Be White: Whiteface Performance in Postracial America.” PopMatters, May 10, 2011.

2. Corbould, Clare. “Druski’s Viral Whiteface Skit Isn’t Racism. It’s Satire That Punches Up at Power.” The Conversation, March 30, 2026.

3. Craft, William. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. London: William Tweedie, 1860.

4. Holmes, Marian Smith. “The Great Escape from Slavery of Ellen and William Craft.” Smithsonian Magazine, June 16, 2010.

5. National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Blackface: The Birth of an American Stereotype.” Smithsonian Institution. Accessed 2026.

6. National Park Service. “’A Desperate Leap for Liberty’: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft.” Boston African American National Historic Site. Last updated January 7, 2023.

The executive order is sweeping. A federal reparations fund of $14 trillion, distributed through a newly created Office of Reparatory Justice. The Department of Education announced a mandatory curriculum overhaul, prioritizing Black History in states across the country, especially ones that legalized slavery at the time of the Civil War.

Okay, by now it should unfortunately be obvious that this is an April Fool’s joke. But stay with me, because there is a real lesson here. And it begins with the fact that just this past week, America did the complete opposite.

Last Wednesday, the United Nations General Assembly passed a landmark resolution, led by Ghana and a coalition of African and Caribbean nations, officially declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans “the gravest crime against humanity.” The resolution called for formal apologies, reparations, the return of looted cultural artifacts, and broader reparatory justice to address ongoing anti-Black inequality.

123 countries voted yes.

3 voted no.

The United States. Israel. Argentina.

52 others, including the United Kingdom and every single European Union member state, abstained. They couldn’t bring themselves to vote yes, but they at least had the diplomatic self-awareness to not stand next to the U.S. on that side of history.

The U.S. explanation, delivered with a “straight face”, was that it "does not acknowledge a legal entitlement to reparations for historical injustices that were not deemed illegal under international law at the time they occurred."

That's not a new argument. It's the same one used in 1865 when freedpeople demanded forty acres and a mule and were told yes, and then no. The same logic that returned land to Confederate slaveholders while leaving formerly enslaved people with nothing. The same thinking embedded in every redlining map, every exclusion from the GI Bill, every decade that H.R. 40, a bill just to study reparations, has sat in Congress since 1989 without passing.

Why Israel and Argentina Stood With Them

Israel voted no on the resolution, arguing it couldn't endorse language that ranks atrocities, that singling out the slave trade as the gravest crime might diminish others. Of note, two years ago, Benjamin Netanyahu had called the Holocaust "the worst crime in history."

Argentina, under Javier Milei’s far-right government, has been systematically dismantling memory politics and human rights institutions at home. Like the U.S., it also profited from the slave trade and mass eugenics policies that saw African genes as inferior. Its vote wasn’t a surprise.

Three countries, each with its own unreconciled histories of racial violence, stood against the world to protect the same thing: the wealth and power built on that violence.

The Real April Fools Joke

The United States has spent decades performing remorse for slavery at commemorations, in speeches, and in school curricula that call it shameful and tragic. At the United Nations, in a vote the world could watch, it dropped the performance and showed its hand.

Evanston, Illinois, built a reparations program. The California Reparations Task Force produced detailed proposals. Ghana led a coalition of 123 nations to the floor of the General Assembly. The infrastructure for reckoning exists. The political will, at the national level, keeps finding procedural reasons not to use it.

The U.S. didn’t just profit from slavery. Slavery was, in a meaningful sense, the engine of American economic development. Historians have documented how enslaved labor produced the cotton and commodities that fueled both Southern plantations and Northern banks, textile mills, and insurance companies. According to scholars of the period, the aggregate value of enslaved people as property was, before the Civil War, one of the largest asset classes in the entire American economy, exceeding the value of railroads and factories combined.

That capital didn’t evaporate. Families kept wealth. Institutions kept wealth. And within a century, a country built substantially on racial slavery emerged as the dominant global superpower, wielding extraordinary influence over the same international bodies now demanding a reckoning.

This Is Why the Work Matters

The UN resolution is non-binding. It won’t cut a check. But language shapes law, and law shapes resources. When the most powerful country on earth uses its UN vote to argue that slavery’s victims have no legal claim, that’s strategy.

This is exactly the kind of history that doesn’t make the evening news. The kind that gets called “divisive” when someone tries to teach it. The kind I built this newsletter to tell.

I’ve grown an audience of nearly 60,000 readers. But less than 5% of you here are paid supporters.

That’s what makes this work fragile. Not trolls. Not shadowbans. The simple math of whether I can keep doing this full-time.

📖 At 5% paid subscribers: I bring in more professors and historians to go even deeper on stories like this.

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I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)

Sources

1. UN News. “UN Resolution Urges Reparations for Slavery’s ‘Historical Wrongs.’” 2026.

2. NBC News. “U.S. is One of Three Countries to Vote Against U.N. Resolution Calling Slavery Humanity’s Gravest Crime.” 2026.

3. Capital B News. “U.S. Votes No on UN Measure Calling Slavery ‘Gravest Crime.’” 2026.

4. PBS NewsHour. “UN Calls for Reparations to Remedy the Historical Wrongs of Trafficking Enslaved Africans.” 2026.

5. Middle East Eye. “US and Israel Vote Against UN Resolution Recognising Slavery as Crime Against Humanity.” 2026.

6. Buenos Aires Times. “Argentina Votes Against UN Resolution on Transatlantic Slave Trade.” 2026.

7. Al Jazeera. “UN Passes Resolution Naming Slave Trade ‘Gravest Crime Against Humanity.’” 2026.

8. Congressional Research Service / EveryCRSReport. “An Overview of H.R. 40 — the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.” 2026.

9. ABC News. “How the 1st US City to Fund Reparations for Black Residents is Making Progress.” 2026.

On HBO Max’s The Pitt, ICE agents in tactical gear storm a Pittsburgh emergency room, dragging out a woman injured during a workplace raid and ultimately zip-tying a nurse who tried to protect her. On ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Miranda Bailey watches a young cancer patient named Katie deteriorate after her experimental clinical trial gets defunded, delivering a raw monologue about “bureaucratic stupidity” gutting the research that was keeping Katie alive.

Within hours of both episodes airing, conservative media declared war. MAGA pundits called The Pitt “woke fan fiction,” demanded HBO boycotts, and accused Grey’s of “weaponizing sick people against Trump.” What they couldn’t do was point to anything that was factually wrong.

I'm tracking stories like these, where government policy becomes a matter of life and death before our eyes, and I need your help doing it.

History Can't Hide has no corporate backing, no wealthy sponsors, and fewer than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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What The Pitt and Grey’s Anatomy Got Right

As the Los Angeles Times reported, medical providers across Southern California have documented increasing missed appointments from immigrant patients too afraid to come in, and there have been documented cases of ICE agents detaining people near hospitals and clinics. The show’s own executive producer, John Wells, told journalist Matt Belloni that ICE operating inside emergency rooms is “a real issue,” and the episode was even watered down at the network’s request to feel “balanced.” A watered-down version still sent MAGA into a meltdown, which tells you everything about how bad the unfiltered reality must actually look.

Grey’s Anatomy‘s storyline tracks just as closely with documented reality. According to Mother Jones and NBC News reporting, the Trump administration’s NIH slashed hundreds of grants across cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and heart disease research in 2025 alone, with new chronic disease funding dropping 16 percent overall. A federal judge had to intervene to restore over 2,000 grants.

Clinical trials involving more than 74,000 participants were disrupted. Congress ultimately pushed back on the most extreme proposed cuts, but as one NIH employee told Mother Jones, the damage was already done: researchers fled, labs shuttered, and doctoral pipelines narrowed. Bailey’s monologue about a child dying because a trial lost its funding is a dramatization, but it is not an exaggeration.

Decades of TV Protecting Power

The outrage makes more sense when you understand what conservative audiences have come to expect from medical and law enforcement dramas: cover.

For decades, cop shows like Dragnet were literally produced in partnership with police departments. As scholars Jessica Hatrick and Olivia González document, Dragnet creator Jack Webb agreed to let the LAPD’s Public Information Division approve every script in exchange for access, funding, and locations. The result was a template: police as noble, necessary, and perpetually besieged by bad apples rather than bad systems. That framework spread through nearly every law-and-order drama that followed. Medical dramas ran the same play. Budget crises were treated as weather: things that happened from time-to-time with no one to actually blame. Presidents were ambient, not antagonists.

The Pitt and Grey’s have broken that arrangement. The agents are on screen, faces covered, hurting people. The politicians are offscreen but named. For viewers who grew up on television that treated state power as a neutral backdrop, seeing it reframed as an active source of harm feels like an assault. It’s because the storytelling is finally honest.

The Culture War Over Who Gets to Tell the Truth

What’s happening now is not new. Governments have always worked to shape which stories reach audiences. During the Cold War, Hollywood cooperated with federal agencies to ensure entertainment reinforced American ideological priorities. During the War on Drugs, networks partnered with campaigns like D.A.R.E., turning individual choices into the villain and making structural policy invisible. The pattern is consistent: when state power is the problem, entertainment is expected to look somewhere else.

The new twist is that a few mainstream shows are refusing to redirect the camera. And the people who spent decades enjoying television that treated cops as heroes and presidents as well-meaning are now discovering that TV has always been political because, for the first time, it's not their politics.

But The Pitt and Grey’s Anatomy are political in the way that a doctor treating a gunshot wound is political, the way that a clinical trial being canceled is political, the way that a waiting room emptying because people are terrified of being detained is political. All of it is happening. The shows just decided to show it.

The fact that MAGA is furious is proof that accurate depictions of their policies are, on their own, damning enough.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

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Sources

1. Kaul, Priyadarshini. “Grey’s Anatomy Calls Out Government Cuts to Cancer Research in Latest Episode.” Primetimer, March 13, 2026.

2. Garcia, Maira. “’The Pitt’ Shows ICE in an Emergency Room. Here’s How It’s Played Out in Real Life.” Los Angeles Times, March 20, 2026.

3. Langmann, Brady. “The Pitt Called Out ICE. But They Were Too Kind.” Esquire, March 19, 2026.

4. O’Dell, Liam. “MAGA Supporters Fume at The Pitt for ‘Demonizing ICE Agents.’” Indy100, March 22, 2026.

5. Rogers, Anna. “Trump’s NIH Slashed Research on Chronic Diseases in 2025. Will It Happen Again?” Mother Jones, February 9, 2026.

6. Bush, Evan. “Trump Tried to Gut Science Research Funding. Courts and Congress Have Rebuffed Him.” NBC News, February 4, 2026.

7. Hatrick, Jessica and Olivia González. “Watchmen, Copaganda, and Abolition Futurities in US Television.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 11, no. 2 (Fall 2022).