This is wild. A data scientist, after tweeting about my husband @owasow’s work, was accused of anti-blackness and fired from his job. Not for nothing, but Omar majored in Race & Ethnic Relations, co-founded BlackPlanet, got a Ph.D in African-American studies, and is black.
I can also affirm that rigorous scholarship and lively debate about the tactics and goals of the freedom struggle are, in fact, very black. @owasow’s work is deeply informed by his reading of Martin Luther King, Jr., Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, Malcolm X. cambridge.org/core/services/… 
@owasow The black community—like any community—has always had radicals and conservatives, nationalists and integrationists, a wide spectrum of experiences, thoughts, and interests. To collapse the black community into a single idea is a common problem on both the left and the right.
For what it’s worth, my husband came to this project not from any ideology but as a social scientist informed by a deep sense of history. Persecution under Jim Crow drove his mother’s family from Texas to Seattle. The Holocaust drove his father’s family from Germany to New York.
.@owasow’s paper is clear that a range of tactics, both nonviolent and violent, may be moral, just, and legitimate if you are trying to win your freedom from a brutal and oppressive state.
What he wanted to know was how stigmatized minorities, such as African-Americans, people with HIV, or disabled people, can get what they want when confronted by a hostile majority. He wanted to know, “What works?,” and was committed to sharing the answer, whatever it might be.
His research offers no prescription for the present. He would be the first to say that 2020 is not 1968. My great hope, though, is that 2020 might be 1964. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/0…
WOW. I don’t know why, “Can protests influence public opinion?” was ever a debate in social science, but it was. My deep respect for all the organizers and protesters, whose commitment to nonviolence—even in the face of brutal police repression—is changing the world, yet again.
If you‘re new to the debate around nonviolent v. violent protests for civil rights and their impact on politics in the 1960s, here is a great, accessible thread @owasow wrote about this work:
