The Diaspora learned about the Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in Ituri Province because Geneva said so — three weeks after the index case fell ill, seventeen days after the first healthcare workers died, and seventy-two hours after 80 people were already suspected dead. This is not a failure of awareness. It is a structural choice: the African American institutional ecosystem has outsourced its threat recognition to an organization with a documented history of delaying emergency declarations for political and economic reasons, while building no independent health forecasting capability of its own. The institution that would anchor Diaspora health sovereignty — purpose-built, independently capitalized, with field presence in Africa Core and the legal standing to act without waiting for Geneva — does not exist. No one is designing it. The conversation that would produce the design is not happening. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: May 2026
The Governance Problem at Huston-Tillotson: Cecilia Abbott and the Architecture of Texas HBCU Subordination
Cecilia Abbott sits on the board of trustees of Huston-Tillotson University, a historically Black institution in Austin, Texas. She is the wife of Governor Greg Abbott — a UT Austin alumnus whose institution spent sixty years absorbing Black East Austin through eminent domain, whose administration has made the rollback of Black institutional support its signature domestic achievement, whose state has never permitted its only Black institution of the first class to govern itself on equal terms with its white peers, and who declined to act when his own appointees at Texas Southern University drove that institution toward governance collapse. There is a common assumption that private HBCUs occupy safer ground than their public counterparts — that self-governance insulates them from the gubernatorial power that has always threatened public Black institutions. The Huston-Tillotson situation exposes that assumption as dangerously incomplete: the governor’s influence does not require statutory authority when it can walk through the front door of a private institution’s boardroom. Continue reading
HBCU Politics 