Mehrsa Baradaran Profile picture
Aug 16, 2019 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
This is such a petty and ugly sentiment. Whenever I talk about my book (about the black/white wealth gap), it's shocked me that the most vociferous outrage I get is from other people of color (I get gross/racist emails from white men too, but that's more troll-y so diff category)
People think that if you are pointing out the unique injustice of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc, then you are somehow diminishing what happened to other groups. And they get really mad.
At my last talk, an Indian man yelled at me and stormed out b/c he thought I didn't understand how colonization hurt India. Are you kidding? I slept in the basement for most of my childhood thanks to Saddam's chemical weapons purchased from US. Then we escaped. I GET colonization
The migrant crisis keeps me up at night as does the perpetual war machines, etc. BUT, the original sin of the US was SLAVERY and the anti-BLACKNESS it was based on. Every other racism was filtered through that--arguably, worldwide. The Nazis learned from Jim Crow
In other words, there is a black/white binary in America. That's how everything else is filtered. That is not to say that there aren't groups within each race that are more or less discriminated than than those from another race. It is to say that anti-blackness is the lens.
All the races can argue against each other about who got it worse or we can have solidarity and fight against the systems of colonization and racial hierarchy that manifest in multiple ways with multiple victim groups
Fighting racism is not zero-sum. It is my belief that reparations to African Americans must come first because that process will help heal the original sin from which all other racisms come.
I also think that former and present empires need to deal with their subjects worldwide and that might mean reparations for India too. A great argument here:
Solidarity means fighting for other people's claims for justice. Not resenting attention paid to them. Don't punch down and across. Punch up. Why fight against the Black community when you can go after corporations and govts that are still causing these harms?
(big caveat: I think the Native American genocide at the hands of the colonizers does not fit into this metric because it preceded the nation and was ongoing. To me, that fits into the atrocities of empire and also must be reckoned with).

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More from @MehrsaBaradaran

Mar 15, 2023
Q's and takes on the SVB coverage thus far:

1. If I were pointing my blame finger, I'd be on Peter Thiel who seems not to understand how banks work. Yes, mistakes were made by bank management but a run is a killer (see George Bailey).
If a company does bad things, it's fine to sell your shares. But if a bank does bad things and you tell people to go get their deposits, that is just dumb and bad.
2. Lots of coverage blaming the Fed and other regulators, which fine. But SVB is a state-chartered bank so CA is their primary regulator and that's important given the history of regulators there. You can go look it up.
Read 8 tweets
Jul 27, 2022
A thing that makes me angry is that:

W.E.B. Dubois is probably the best if not one of the best American intellectual of all the centuries during which he lived, which is 2 whole ones.

He was apparently so dangerous that the FBI took away his passport when he was OLD!
And forbid him going to international conferences in his 90s. He should have been given all sorts of metals by the Presidents and an op-ed page or a whole department to run, but he was harrassed by the FBI and died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington...
He wrote everything and was everywhere and shockingly, he was not treated all that well. He was indicted by a McCarthyist court, but the case was dismissed when the judge was told that his character witness would be Dubois' good friend, Albert Einstein.
Read 5 tweets
May 18, 2022
Quick thread about Elon's latest tweet and the thing Amber Heard just said:
The judiciary has just begun unraveling this here democracy and there's no real check on their power. As to Elon musk....
If the SEC is deemed unconstitutional, so is the EPA, FTC, CDC, FDA, all of the New Deal order.

I can't believe Johnny Depp....
Read 5 tweets
Dec 31, 2019
So I'm helping a kid I know with some college applications and I have some thoughts. My friend has a GPA of over 4.0 and a star in track and cross-country. She grew up Black in a white rural town in CA--oh and she's homeless. She's living with a friend's family.
So I convince her to apply to some top colleges and offer to help her jump thru all the dumb financial and non-financial hoops. It occurs to me, after 10 or so applications in, that if you wanted to design a system to keep out poor kids, this one is probably your best bet
We've already paid over $1000 (even with fee waivers). I have no idea how she was ever going to pay that money or who in her life was going to help her with the 100s of essays we've written!
Read 8 tweets
Jul 31, 2019
Here is my bitcoin/crypt thread:
An analogy first: I know a bunch of ppl (mostly youngish tech ppl) who think that the best solution to climate change is.....Mars!
Like actually colonizing and living on a planet that has yet to sustain like any human (or other recognizable) life. Like build spaceships and build communities and transport people and eat there and did I mention breathe too?
Read 13 tweets

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