Guy Emerson Mount Profile picture
Sep 8, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Would you believe me if I told you it was even worse?
Enslavers DID know that they were dealing with fully complicated human beings but decided to regard enslaved peoples as chattel anyway in hopes of destroying that very humanity (while reifying their own).
#AuburnWorldHistory
For proof of this, think about Mary Prince's diary and how often, how arbitrarily, and how much "pleasure" her enslavers took in beating her. They didn't need to treat their cows that way because there was no human spirit to control, condition, and manipulate. @bethany_hadley1
In many ways, the racist notion of enslaved peoples as non-human is an attempt to justify the naked violence that is required to hold human beings in a condition of slavery. #AuburnWorldHistory @bethany_hadley1
It is a way for enslavers to settle the cognitive dissonance of imagining themselves as both good people and slaveholders. #AuburnWorldHistory @bethany_hadley1

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More from @GuyEmersonMount

Aug 13, 2021
"What if we saw in this data the increasing numbers of racially blended families and mixed-race children – and understood them as signs of a more racially diverse, economically just and culturally rich future? "

This is called mixed race utopianism. It's wack. A quick thread.
Since at least the 16th century settler colonial societies in the Americas imagined the mixed race character of the colonies as some kind of futuristic utopian ideal where the bodies of mixed people would somehow magically lead to a more just world (w/o any affirmative politics).
Mixed race people have continuously been used as America's symbolic embodiment of hope and change---being forced into the role of political props to deny the existence of racism (despite being so brutally subjected to it). The empires of violence that made mixed people get erased
Read 8 tweets
Sep 28, 2020
Can we please stop individualizing and moralizing this.

The 'patriotic' state SYSTEMATICALLY subsidizes the 'owners' of stolen land and labor through a variety of police actions and tax incentives.

Receipts below on how to make tons of money in real estate while paying no taxes
The IRS has "How to tips" to show accountants and wealthy owners how to avoid taxes. It starts with depreciation. Owners of rental property can offset profits by deducting 3.6% of its purchase price per year for 27.5 years even if the value is going up. irs.gov/publications/p…
This means you can buy a rental property for 1,000,000 dollars, it can go up in value by, say, $50,000 but in that tax year it will look like you lost $36,363 (3.6%). Add in deductions for interest payments insurance, maintenance, etc. and you'll usually pay no taxes on rents.
Read 14 tweets
Sep 21, 2020
"Against State Capture" by @AustinMcCoy3 in @TowardFreedom is THE read of the day. So much insight from one of the most caring scholar activists I know. Avoiding elite capture of this uprising is SO important right now (even as it's already happening). towardfreedom.org/story/against-…
"Confrontations with police and attacks on property operate symbiotically with various strategies and tactics that activists and organizations have devised to evade state and electoral capture."---@AustinMcCoy3 on a diversity of tactics.
The notion of “non-reformist reforms” is likewise something that we cannot ever lose sight of. Any demand must ask itself how it is going to deepen and extend this crisis. The risk of falling into well-laid neoliberal traps right now is serious.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 4, 2020
Excellent, balanced review by @JRWinters77 in @BlkPerspectives

I'd only add that, in my reading, critics of #Afropessimism who see it as "a death knell for...the kind of hope and energy needed to confront current problems" don't really understand Afropessimism

It's VERY utopian
It's certainly pessimistic as it relates to OTHER utopian visions (Pan-Africanism, Marxism, feminism, etc.) but only then as it relates to the question of Black ontologies and the capacity to address antiblackness. Destroying capitalism/sexism is part of destroying the world.
In this way I always contend that a better name for those who get hung up on the pessimism part is Afrorealism or Afroskepticism.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 2, 2020
Black grad students @UChicago are joining the #MoreThanDiversity strike by withholding their labor from diversity committees and refusing to help recruit Black students to campus until the university meets their demands for #abolition and #reparations. docs.google.com/document/d/1DO…
The original faculty letter (also calling for abolition and various forms of reparations on and off-campus) can be found here docs.google.com/document/d/1ks…

They also are calling for a full outside boycott of all UChicago sponsored events (seminars, workshops, conferences, etc.).
Additional, specific, reparative demands that are now part of the student letter include increased funding and scholarships for Black grad students, a "formal grievance and reconciliation process" for acts of racism, and grad student participation in university governance.
Read 4 tweets
Aug 5, 2020
Harold Franklin, who integrated #Auburn University in 1964 (and was wrongfully denied his M.A. for half a century by my predecessors at @Auburn_History) has finally received his diploma. He is 87 years old.

Congratulations Dr. Franklin!

wvtm13.com/article/auburn…
While this small act of reparative justice can never undo the wrongs that Dr. Franklin experienced at Auburn or in America writ large it will hopefully contribute to new way of being in the world for members of the #Auburn community. When we do wrong we must try to make it right.
As I often say here, when you are talking about slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing acts of racism, many things can be partially reparative but nothing can ever be fully reparative. All acts of repair (even big material ones) are mere symbolic gestures towards an incalculable loss.
Read 6 tweets

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