June 2026
The Fields Confessed: Forced Labor, Racial Geography, and the Unfinished Business of Abolition at Angola
A federal court found Angola's Farm Line unconstitutional and walked away. Pattern Hunters examines the land Louisiana named after the homeland of the people it stole, the breaking that was always the point, and the fight being waged from Elysian Fields.
When the Blueprint Is the Crime: Racial Terror, Parental Accountability, and the Architecture of Hate in Zachary, Louisiana
Louisiana named a neighborhood Plantation Way, built it on Confederate land, and watched a 13-year-old allegedly cross the street in a Klan robe to terrorize a Black elder who dedicated her life to children. The blueprint was never the child's. Pattern Hunters examines the architecture of inherited hate — and the statutory gaps Louisiana refuses to close.
The 6-0 map nobody passed tells you everything about the 5-1 map they did
They claim they did not look at race. But the reason Republicans killed the 6-0 map was calculated fear of Black voters. What reads as principled dissent from Clay Higgins is textbook moral disengagement — and the math makes the racial targeting impossible to deny.
May 2026
Louisiana again sows seeds to propagate Jim Crow through the South
When Governor Landry says Louisiana must be "unshackled" from race-based redistricting, the record disagrees. Louisiana is the shackle's blacksmith — from Plessy to Callais, the state keeps forging new instruments of disenfranchisement and calling them something else.
Kiffin's vision of diversity relies on the colorblind dollar
What Kiffin sold those parents was access — specifically, access to the American dollar. And the American dollar, unlike American law, is colorblind. Money does not care what color you are. It cares whether you produce. That is the contract, and it is not new.
Black Louisiana still fights for the right to be in the room
In Louisiana, a map has never been just a map. After Callais, four versions of the state's congressional districts sit before the committee — and Black Louisianans are again being asked to defend their right to be drawn into the room.
The boy in the video, the boy in the mugshot: Louisiana met Markel Lee twice
The boy in the prevention video and the girl in the food court are not two separate stories. They are the same budget line read from two ends.
For Black Louisiana, justice is not colorblind — just blind, period
Boston colonists called taxation without representation political bondage. Two and a half centuries later, the Supreme Court has told Black Louisiana that the principle which built this republic does not fully extend to us.
April 2026
Mall of Louisiana shooting response reveals Baton Rouge disparities
A tale of two Baton Rouges. One where shoppers are shielded and reassured. Another where residents are policed but not protected. The urgency of the response is real — the problem is that it is not evenly distributed.
Eight children, two mothers and Shreveport's unanswered 'why?'
Eight children killed in Cedar Grove. Two mothers wounded. The question that lingers — Why? — is not asking what we do not know. It is asking us to name what we already do.
90% of Louisiana foster youth face re-victimization. One senator believes the state could do better by abolishing DCFS altogether.
Louisiana's child welfare system was built to protect children. For Black girls, it has become another door into the pipeline.
Louisiana keeps running the same play. People in prison take the loss.
Two years after Louisiana overhauled its parole system, the cost of running the same broken play is being paid by the people inside — and the families they left behind.
A Livingston fire chief allegedly used the N-word — with no consequences so far
A leaked recording. An emergency meeting. And what "no consequences so far" tells us about who Louisiana institutions are still built to protect.
Louisiana is building cages while our kids keep being killed
Eighty-two million more for prisons. A budget that funds cages while refusing to fund the community infrastructure that actually keeps children alive.
Who guards the children? Louisiana's crisis of abusive teachers is a policy choice
When the one who is supposed to report the abuse is the abuser. A pattern, a policy contradiction, and a reckoning that Louisiana districts have refused to face.
March 2026
East Baton Rouge: The parish that fiscal secession built
How the deliberate architecture of fiscal secession carved East Baton Rouge into separate and unequal worlds — and what it costs the children left behind.
The classroom as first courtroom: Jada's story
Black girls often take the first steps toward the delinquency pipeline in the schoolroom, where teachers too often misread curiosity as sassiness — or as Louisiana law describes it, "willful disobedience."
When Louisiana writes off its children
A reckoning with what it means when the systems designed to protect children become the systems that disappear them.
Law and order on life support: Elayn Hunt in the age of Louisiana's tough-on-crime laws
The story a whistleblower needed told — and what it reveals about the gap between Louisiana's tough-on-crime rhetoric and the reality inside its walls.
The girlhood to prison pipeline: how Louisiana policy fails Black girls
Louisiana is building a door for women leaving prison. But for girls leaving childhood detention, there is no threshold, much less a door.
How East Baton Rouge's due process collapse left a 94-year-old woman unprotected
A case study in what happens when the machinery of due process breaks down — and who gets left behind when it does.
Gov. Landry's DEI wrecking ball misses the mark on 'fairness'
Dismantling equity infrastructure in the name of fairness is not fairness. It is a rebranding of the same old exclusion.
Louisiana's law contradicts communal dignity of the Ten Commandments
When the state posts the Ten Commandments in classrooms while writing laws that contradict their communal ethic, something has gone deeply wrong.
February 2026
HBCUs do more than offer Black youths a pathway to opportunity and success
Reframing the conversation: when we fund Black institutions, we do not just educate — we intervene in the very systems that criminalize Black life.
HBCUs do more than offer Black youths a pathway — my criminology research suggests another benefit
The peer-reviewed public scholarship behind the argument: HBCUs function as crime prevention infrastructure, and the data makes the case that policy has long refused to see.