Thread by @BreakingBrown

I’ve advocated leveraging the #ADOS vote, not suppressing it, but @rolandsmartin’s recent video berating Black voters 4 expressing apathy in politics is a lesson Boomers and Boomer hooked #ADOS need to unlearn. (Thread)

1.) While watching @rolandsmartin ridicule Black folk 4 being too stupid 2 understand the importance of voting, it occurred to me that that’s his base: Black respectability viewers who get off on talking down to & believing they r better than the rest of us #ADOS 🇺🇸

2.) We all watch as @rolandsmartin livecasts his good life: Eating too much gumbo in a big house, watching the game, jigging at the Essence festival, soft showing for Hillary Clinton. I watch & understand that Roland’s stability is tied to his political outlook #ADOS 🇺🇸

3) While I don’t encourage it, I also understand the apathy. I understand that the apathy is based on outcomes, not stupidity. It’s not that #ADOS folk don’t understand the importance of judges; it’s that, whether driving Uber or living in the projects, they know it isn’t enough

4.) The #ADOS community, as an Exploitation Group, is entering a starvation phase: no inheritance, with income inequality at its height, mass incarceration, affirmative gutted, etc. This calls for a new kind of Black leader and a new kind of politics.

5) The job of Black leaders now is not to berate our own #ADOS community for threatening to withhold their vote, but to press politicians to give them something to vote *FOR*. That’s our job; to amplify the plight of #ADOS, not shout them down & demand that they fall in line.

6) Punching down, as Roland often does, is easy. Getting politicians to understand the predicament of the #ADOS community, then signing onto policy solutions that alleviate those problems? That’s hard. We’d all be better served with more people doing that work, and less shaming.