Most of the Black Stacks series reaches back into history. The $2 bill, titled Discontinued, does something different. It reads the present. Where the other notes document slavery, lynching, and disenfranchisement, this one records the rollback happening right now, the moment the country began quietly closing the ledger on repair.
It is built on the two-dollar bill for a reason: America's least circulated, most forgotten note, the deliberate vessel for a debt the country would rather not remember. Here is what it encodes.
The face at the center
At the center, where Jefferson sits on the real two-dollar bill, is George Floyd, rendered in gold and marked with red scrawl, the face of the movement, tagged to Minneapolis, Minnesota. His presence turns the note from a historical artifact into a contemporary one. The banner beneath reads Discontinued, and that single word is the bill's thesis: all the progress that has been deliberately halted.
The policy rollback, encoded
This bill catalogs a specific era of reversal, each reference a real action:
Order 14173, the 2025 order ending federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the dismantling of reparative policy at the federal level.
CRT, struck through, marks the academic framework targeted and banned across states during this period.
DEI, also struck through, rings the circle as shorthand for the programs withdrawn.
A raised fist inside a circle, with a red cross over it, marks the wave of state anti-protest laws enacted between 2020 and 2022, the right to protest itself being curtailed.
The legal architecture
The bill names the court decisions that narrowed the path:
Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court decision ending race-conscious college admissions, signed on the note as "Future Ancestors of the Diaspora."
Brnovich v. DNC, the ruling that weakened Voting Rights Act protections, the ballot box quietly narrowing again.
HR 1280, 117th Congress, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which passed the House and stalled in the Senate. Reform deferred.
The engraved coin reading TWO stands in for the 1964 anti-discrimination protections, the legal bedrock now under pressure. The Series of 2025 dates the note to the moment of rollback, the year the reparative ledger was closed.
The throughline and the resistance
Two details tie this bill to the rest of the series and to the longer history. John Conyers appears again as Secretary of the Treasury, author of H.R. 40, the bill to study reparations, installed on the note he never got to issue. And tucked into the design is a code from the Underground Railroad quilts, signaling those traveling to gather their tools and prepare for the journey to freedom, a quiet instruction that the work continues.
The renamed nation, The United Slaves of America, carries across the whole Black Stacks series, the thread connecting this present-day note to the founding documents of bondage.
Why it works
Discontinued is the bill that refuses to let "progress" be the end of the story. By rendering this exact moment, the executive orders, the court rulings, the stalled legislation, in the visual language of currency, it insists that rollback is not neutral. It has a price, and someone is paying it. The two-dollar denomination, the one nobody spends, becomes the perfect place to record a debt the country keeps trying to forget.
And because every Black Stacks sale funds direct payments to community members, the piece does the opposite of what it depicts. Where the policy withdraws repair, the purchase enacts it.
Own the piece
The Discontinued $2 bill is available in the shop, alongside the full Black Stacks series, each one a decoded document with its own buried history.
[See the Dicontinued bill in the shop]
Decoded is the journal of Andre Woolery's studio, where the hidden histories inside the work get read out loud.
