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Clint Smith
@ClintSmithIII
, 3 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
I just want to take a moment & say that it's remarkable how quickly our national discourse on the issue of reparations has evolved. Years ago it was a fringe issue & now presidential candidates are being asked about their stance on it. I think that itself is pretty extraordinary.
People of good faith can have different ideas about what the best policy prescription is, but we're in a moment where *the speaker of the house* has endorsed a commission to explore reparations for the decedents of enslaved ppl. Few would have anticipated that just a few yrs ago.
Shout out to the black lives matter activists who made racial justice central to our politics, shout out to the scholars who've been studying reparations for yrs, shout out to Ta-Nehisi for giving this so much attention, & shout out to the journalists who keep asking the question
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Clint Smith
@ClintSmithIII
Some low-income students clean the bathrooms of their more affluent peers, have no food to eat during spring break, and enter through a separate door at school events. I wrote about how elite colleges are systemically failing their disadvantaged students. theatlantic.com/education/arch…
At some of the top universities in the country, there are policies in place that reify & amplify the class differences between their students. As a result, low-income students are constantly sent messages, both systemic & interpersonal, that they don’t belong at these schools.
Many elite schools have historically been built with the specific intention of serving the wealthy, as a result they often overlook, or simply ignore, the needs of students coming from intergenerational poverty.
Read 4 tweets
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Clint Smith
@ClintSmithIII
I know there can be the temptation from some to want these parents to go to prison for a long time to pay for what they did, but I would really push folks to interrogate where that desire is coming from. As was relevant with the Manafort case, punishment shouldn't be zero sum.
It can be true that these parents did a terrible thing and that they need to make amends *and* that sending them to prison for a long time won't make anything better. We shouldn't want wealthy people going to prison for longer, we should want poor people getting more mercy.
Prisons are terrible terrible terrible places that we should be constantly working to make less relevant in our society.
Read 3 tweets
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Clint Smith
@ClintSmithIII
Thinking about all the black, brown, & low-income students who arrive at college & who are made to feel as if they don't deserve to be there, while so many wealthy students have their parents essentially buy their way into these schools & rarely experience the same skepticism.
Some ppl don't fully appreciate the psychological toll it takes on a student to navigate a school environment that both implicitly & explicitly tells you that you only got in because of an undeserving hand-out, meanwhile somebody's parents donate a building & no one bats an eye.
The very idea of our society, higher-ed or otherwise, being a "meritocracy" is something that was made up to justify & reify existing social hierarchies. It's not real. What's real is how wealth & race combine to give ppl things that they tell themselves they inherently deserve.
Read 3 tweets

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Keiko
@keikoinboston
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Seth Cotlar
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Inspired by the great @JaneMayerNYer piece I went looking for a thread I'd done on Hannity and noticed something weird. Back in July I'd noted how Hannity started tweeting about "fake news" right when the Russia stuff was about to break. Those tweets are now gone.
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FightinCowboy
@Fightincowboy
So lately there's been a lot of fuss over gaming "forcing diversity" and people getting upset that a character is gay, trans, etc. and I want to take a moment and try to explain this to folks that are having trouble understanding the issue, as a straight white dude myself.
As a straight white dude my whole life has been filled with cool white dudes in gaming and comics. Iron Man, He-Man, Spiderman, Cloud, you get the idea. There's literally a million different choices you could pick from and think "oh I want to be like them, I can relate to them".
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Jonathan Martin
@jmartNYT
NEW: The choas enveloping Virginia deepened early this morning when @LGJustinFairfax issued a statement at 2:55AM denying claims of sexual assault from 2004 - and threatened to sue those who spread the claims.

First take from a shell-shocked Richmond >

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Updated lede-all w @alanblinder: Northam under siege, meeting w cabinet, while Fairfax vehemently denies charges of sexual assault and Speaker Kirk Cox says he’s not sure there are grounds to impeach the gov

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nytimes.com/2019/02/04/us/…
....and the Post publishes the woman’s account, says they could not corroborate last year. BUT the paper denies Fairfax statement that they held off bc of “red flags”

washingtonpost.com/local/va-lt-go…
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Brandi Buchman
@BBuchman_CNS
Feinstein also said today she wants to take a moment to speak about women; notes Sens. Ernst and Blackburn as new members of the Sen. Judiciary committee.
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Peter Maass
@maassp
1) I'm not sure how to make people remember or care that 15 years ago the United States invaded Iraq, setting off a war that continues to this day, with several hundred thousand Iraqis dead, millions turned into refugees. I covered the invasion for the New York Times Magazine.
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3) The photographer I worked with, Laurent vander Stockt, drove his own SUV. After several failed attempts to get into Iraq, one time turned back at gunpoint by U.S. soldiers, we finally got through, via what we guessed was a minefield (I followed Lauren tracks). Here's Laurent.
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