A few weeks ago, twenty Black conservatives surrounded one Black woman with a master’s degree. They weren’t debating policy or economics. The argument? Whether racism still exists. In 2025. On camera. For entertainment.
The Jubilee episode “1 Black Radical vs 20 Black Conservatives” should have been satire. Instead, it became a masterclass in what happens when willful ignorance metastasizes into self-hatred. Watch Amanda Seales, armed with facts, statistics, and lived experience, try to explain systemic oppression to people who have decided that denying it makes them special. Watch them dismiss data as “victim mentality.” Watch them confuse contrarianism with critical thinking.
One participant declared, with conviction, that Black people’s problems are “cultural, not systemic.” The last time this argument gained mainstream traction about Black Americans, those making it owned them.
This represents something beyond simple ignorance. This is intellectual surrender packaged as enlightenment. Anti-intellectualism with a podcast. The nightmares of ancestors streaming in 4K.
In 1833, teaching a Black person to read in Alabama was punishable by fines and imprisonment. In 1865, formerly enslaved people built schools before they built homes. In 1960, Ruby Bridges needed armed guards to attend elementary school. In 2025, Black people on social media boast about how they “don’t read all that” as if illiteracy were a personality trait.
The journey from illegal literacy to voluntary intellectual abandonment should have taken centuries. Some have completed it in two generations.
From Freedom Schools to TikTok
After emancipation, Black literacy rates rose from under 10 percent in 1865 to over 50 percent by 1900. That transformation was not assimilation. It was resistance.
Between 1865 and 1900, formerly enslaved people and their children built over 90 institutions of higher learning. According to recent educational data, HBCUs produce 40 percent of all Black engineers, 50 percent of all Black teachers, 70 percent of Black doctors and dentists, and 80 percent of Black judges, despite comprising only 3 percent of the nation’s colleges.
George Washington Carver, born enslaved, became one of the most prominent scientists of the early 20th century, developing more than 300 products from peanuts. Katherine Johnson’s calculations as a NASA mathematician were critical to America’s space program. When John Glenn was about to become the first American to orbit Earth, he specifically requested that Johnson verify the computer’s calculations. “If she says they’re good,” Glenn said, “then I’m ready to go.”
The Harlem Renaissance was not merely poetry and jazz; it was a declaration that intellect and creativity were Black birthrights.
This is the legacy. How did the culture shift from W.E.B. Du Bois debating the Talented Tenth to online debates about whether the moon landing was staged?
The Anatomy of Anti-Intellectualism
1. The Proximity to Whiteness Paradox
Intellectualism became coded as “white” in America, and too many have accepted this false premise. Speaking with standard grammar becomes “talking white.” Reading books becomes “acting like them.” Possessing a vocabulary beyond colloquialisms means someone has “forgotten where they came from.”
The tragic irony should be obvious. The same white supremacists who once criminalized Black literacy now watch as some Black Americans voluntarily reject education. Literacy laws are no longer necessary when some enforce intellectual boycotts independently.
Sociologist John McWhorter identified this as one of three “defeatist thought patterns” that have become foundational to certain aspects of Black identity: victimization, separatism, and anti-intellectualism. Once understandable as survival tactics, these patterns now, he argues, make their adherents appear “paranoid, parochial, and dumb.”
Consider the reversal: the master’s tools have been repackaged as liberation theology. Intellectual curiosity gets labeled “white supremacy” while actual white supremacists celebrate every dropout, every disengaged student, every brilliant mind that dims itself to fit in.
2. The Legitimate Mistrust Problem
Historical grievances run deep, and justifiably so. The Tuskegee experiments turned Black
men into unwitting test subjects. Henrietta Lacks’s cells were taken without consent. J. Marion Sims perfected surgical procedures by experimenting on enslaved women without anesthesia. Add chronically underfunded schools, redlined neighborhoods, and medical apartheid.
Economic data compounds the problem. Black college graduates carry an average of $25,000 more in debt than their white peers. Four years after graduation, nearly half owe more than they initially borrowed.
The fatal error lies in the response: instead of becoming more informed for self-protection, too many reject information entirely. Instead of learning to analyze medical studies to identify exploitation, they reject medicine wholesale. Instead of mastering legal frameworks to fight injustice, they declare education itself the enemy.
This is equivalent to discovering contaminated water and choosing to die of thirst. Yes, institutions have failed Black communities. But rejecting knowledge doesn’t punish institutions; it punishes those who need that knowledge most.
3. The Crisis of Black Male Educational Attainment
According to HBCU enrollment data, Black men now comprise only 26 percent of students at historically Black colleges and universities, down from 38 percent in 1976. At institutions built specifically for Black excellence, young Black women outnumber men by nearly three to one.
This educational gender gap intersects dangerously with digital indoctrination. College enrollment among young Black men declines while subscriptions to what is known as the “manosphere” — that loose network of podcasts, YouTube channels, and forums promoting male grievance narratives — surge. These young men haven’t abandoned education; they’ve simply chosen problematic educators.
The recruitment formula follows a predictable pattern: Target young men already feeling academically inadequate, economically insecure, and socially rejected. Feed them a worldview that locates their problems not in systemic racism but in feminism. Not in capitalism but in women’s standards. Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer who famously called reading books “for broke people,” becomes a prophet. Joe Rogan becomes a professor. The Fresh & Fit podcast, known for its misogynistic content, including calling educated women “damaged goods,” becomes curriculum.
Why read bell hooks when a podcaster will explain women in ten minutes? Why study systemic oppression when Kevin Samuels, the late YouTuber who built a following critiquing Black women’s marriageability, declares you are simply not “high value”?
Educational research confirms that teachers often fail to recognize Black boys’ academic potential even when they excel, leaving them vulnerable to these digital father figures who offer validation without effort. These influencers train their followers in selective skepticism: Question vaccines, not billionaires. Doubt professors, not podcasters. Distrust Black women with advanced degrees, not the system that marginalizes you.
The result is a cohort of young Black men who can quote Jordan Peterson but not James Baldwin, who understand “sexual marketplace value” better than systemic racism, who have traded solidarity with Black women for alignment with their own oppression.
4. When Algorithms Become Overseers
If the manosphere provides the curriculum, social media supplies the campus, with algorithms serving as admissions officers.
According to Pew Research Center data, 43 percent of adults under 30 now receive their news from TikTok, a dramatic increase from just 9 percent in 2020. For Black teenagers, 79 percent of whom actively use the platform, TikTok can deliver an entire worldview through dopamine-triggering video clips.
These algorithms are not optimized for truth; they are optimized for engagement. They serve a steady diet of rage bait, conspiracy theories, and content that normalizes intellectual apathy as entertainment.
The radicalization pipeline operates with ruthless efficiency: It begins with seemingly benign “self-improvement” content, slides into misogynistic talking points, and can culminate in users parroting white supremacist rhetoric, often delivered in Black voices. A young man searching for explanations for his struggles doesn’t encounter Cornel West or Ta-Nehisi Coates in his feed. The algorithm instead serves him courses on “escaping the matrix” for $50.
The podcast influencers didn’t create anti-intellectualism in Black communities. They weaponized existing vulnerabilities. They found young men already primed to distrust formal education and offered them an alternative gospel: Why read books when Rogan hosts “conversations”? Why study history when Tate shares “experience”? Why listen to Black women with doctorates when Black men with microphones “keep it real”?
When Ignorance Becomes Policy
Anti-intellectualism has evolved from a cultural phenomenon to a political strategy. Mock the experts. Ban the books. Dismantle diversity programs. Render the word “woke” meaningless through overuse. Schools face funding cuts for teaching what legislators deem “discriminatory equity ideology,” while HBCUs watch federal grants freeze despite operating on already constrained budgets.
The cruel irony: Some Black Americans actively support these measures. They celebrate the removal of their own history from curricula. They co-sign the destruction of programs their grandparents died to create.
The message has been successfully sold: Learning history constitutes indoctrination, while forgetting it represents freedom. And some have bought this narrative wholesale.
The Counter-Movement
Despite this troubling trend, a quiet intellectual renaissance is building momentum among those who refuse to surrender.
Howard University recently became the first HBCU to achieve Research One (R1) Carnegie Classification in 2025. While some debate whether racism exists, Howard conducts cutting-edge research that will shape the future. Spelman College and Morehouse College report application surges. Young Black Americans who recognize what is at stake are doubling down on excellence.
The fact that Amanda Seales’s confrontation with twenty conservatives went viral reveals something important: Not everyone accepts this new anti-intellectual orthodoxy. Comment sections have become battlegrounds where young Black people deploy citations, fact-check claims, and refuse to let willful ignorance go unchallenged.
The same platforms used to spread anti-intellectualism also host its antidote. Black academics on TikTok smuggle knowledge past algorithms, making James Baldwin trend between dance videos. Dr. Karen Hunter’s free YouTube courses offer more intellectual substance than many paid “masterclasses.” Even on the depleted platform formerly known as Twitter, Black users fact-check more rigorously than many newsrooms.
What anti-intellectualism’s proponents failed to anticipate: Black excellence proves addictive. Once experienced, voluntary ignorance becomes unpalatable. Some young men who fell into manosphere ideology are emerging, armed with bell hooks and therapy. Students who once believed reading was “acting white” are discovering Octavia Butler and recognizing imagination as a superpower.
Every significant Black cultural movement has emerged from periods of darkness. The Harlem Renaissance followed the Red Summer of 1919. The Black Arts Movement followed political assassinations. Hip-hop emerged from urban decay. What follows this era of intellectual retreat? Call it Neo-intellectualism. Call it Renaissance 2.0. But this time, participants are keeping receipts, screenshot evidence, and making “I don’t read” as socially unacceptable as it should always have been.
This new generation of Black intellectuals writes its own theories, builds its own frameworks, remixes the canon on its own terms. The audience has shifted. Performance for white validation has ended. This generation builds an intellectual community for itself, by itself.
The Stakes
Our descendants didn’t brag about not reading. They built schools before homes because they knew: without knowledge, freedom is just a rumor.
Black Americans descend from people who built pyramids, created mathematical systems, developed complex languages, and, when enslaved, preserved and transmitted knowledge despite unimaginable oppression. They built Tuskegee, Hampton, and Howard. Their calculations sent rockets to space. Their innovations fed nations.
The current wave of anti-intellectualism betrays everyone who bled for the right to learn. Boasting about ignorance doesn’t resist the system — it surrenders to it.
The ancestors understood literacy as liberation. They recognized education as a revolution’s tool, not assimilation’s trap. They knew that oppression cannot be dismantled by those unable to articulate, document, and strategize against it.
The plantation had overseers. The algorithm has influencers. Same function, different century.
The homework isn’t just to “read more.” We’re already scrolling endlessly. The task is to read better. To seek out the work that sharpens us instead of numbs us. Read Baldwin, Morrison, hooks, and Butler. Read the scholars, the journalists, the thinkers who treat our intellect as an inheritance, not an accident. Then do more than post a quote, build with it. Debate it. Teach it to your children. Use it to strengthen the muscles that ignorance keeps trying to atrophy.
Because “staying woke” means nothing if all you’re doing is sleepwalking through conspiracy videos.
Our ancestors didn’t risk lashes and death for literacy so their desc
So here’s the real assignment: curate your mind like you curate your feed. Guard your intellect the way you guard your money. Make critical thinking the standard, not the exception.
Your ancestors are watching. What will you show them that you repeated memes, or that you carried their brilliance forward?
Class dismissed. Not to the algorithm. To the library, the book club, the classroom, the kitchen table debate.
Because ignorance was never the revolution.
It was never the flex.
Knowledge, sharpened and shared, always was.
Written by : Nyarde
