Tony McDade, a Black trans man, was killed by police in Tallahassee earlier this week. This story is unfolding and details are still coming out. #TonyMcDade hashtag will have updated information.
My opinion: I think the decline in the humanities due to the exact opposite of “lack of exposure.” Students are actually saturated with the humanities. High school requirements are typically 4 years of English, several history courses, and years of foreign language. 1/N
Humanities courses are typically the most likely to be transferred in with AP and with dual enrollment (taking college courses in high school). For better or worse, we have designed secondary education in a way that selects the humanities first due to the existing exposure. 2/N
Where do we see humanities enrollment growth? In creative writing. In technical writing. In military history. In media and film. In gender and sexuality. All of these are largely unique to college-offered humanities courses. There isn’t a high school/AP substitute here. 3/N
Recall “the habitual be” and how Black people are mocked for a sophisticated linguistic structure that includes a conjugation of the verb “to be” that goes beyond the limits of English and has tangible, identifiable meaning. They use it instead to humiliate our children. 1/N
Evidence is clear that Black children understand the conjunction of “to be” at a point in time versus “to be” as a normal state. For someone to say “Trevon be on they necks” does not mean I’m doing so right now, but is something I do habitually. It’s sophisticated and nuanced 2/N
This is not grammatical standard English, but is part of the grammatical structure of AAVE. English doesn’t have a habitual conjunction of “to be,” but some other languages do. It’s not made up, strange, lazy, nor invalid. It’s language and is easily discerned by its users. 3/N
The bottom line: Elite private universities do NOT have a land grant mission. They were not created to be engines of social mobility, provide opportunity to disadvantaged students, or serve the broader public. They are exclusive finishing schools.
Stop asking dogs to fly. 1/N
Elite schools educate a very, very small number of college students, but have an outsized impact on perceptions of higher education. Most higher education in America is open admissions (or nearly so) and the best of these DO serve as economic mobility engines. 2/N
If we invested more strategically in universities that are serving a broader public, providing world class education, producing cutting edge research, and changing lives we’d all be better for it. I’d settle for better community college funding. 3/N
Watching Black conservatives confront the naked racism of their fellow travelers is fascinating. Murray is upset at teenagers because they’ve defied his belief that Black people are incapable of high cognition. Yet Black conservatives must give him the benefit of the doubt.
The level of naïveté required to believe that Murray is anything other than a racist who is so angered by any evidence of Black achievement that he argues it must be (1) not true and (2) a product of media manipulation is mind boggling. But here we are.
Murray now wants to attack the entire “Hidden Figures” movie as a false narrative that White NASA scientists could not correct because of wokeness. This ignores the source material from Margot Lee Shetterly’s book because facts do not matter here. Where is his evidence?
Recently, I've been working on gender and American enslavement. Inspired by @sejr_historian's brilliant work, I want to quantify the propensity of White women to be active as economic agents in the market for enslaved people. Preliminary results are in! Buckle up!! A 🧵 1/N
We know that enslavement was an area where White women overcame coverture. For example, Mississippi was the first state to allow married women property rights in their own name in 1839. Four of the 5 sections of the Act specifically referred to rights to own slaves. 2/N
Key curiosity: Mississippi partly passes the Act because of Fisher v. Allen, in which a Mississippi woman of bi-racial Chickasaw heritage claimed property rights as Chickasaw practices for property ownership were matrilineal. Mississippi needed to extend this to White women 3/N
Another short thread on letters: A tenure/promotion letter need not be long to be effective. Rather than summarizing every paper, tell us who this candidate is as a researcher-- what is their substantive/methodological contribution? What have you learned from them? 1/N
Do you teach their papers in your courses? If so, why? The department/university knows all about the papers and the results in each one, what we do not know is how this fits a scholarly profile. Is this work at the cutting edge (journal placement does NOT tell us that)? 2/N
What was the state of the field before this scholar entered, and how have they helped to change it? Can you see their influence in the work that others are doing? Have they inspired additional work, changed perspectives/methods? 3/N