Thread by @DonnerKay

1. Vital: This isn’t “but racism is everywhere” excuse-making. Point is to focus on what’s in your front yard everywhere, not scapegoat other places so you’re, well, superior. First: Learn your own history like we do ours here. Don’t be in denial because you were miseducated, too

https://twitter.com/ashtonpittman/status/1330319219339177984

2. Pilgrimages to Mississippi to understand our race fascism/history are great, and I meet/tour these folks continually. But when I ask them about history-digging for white supremacy and violence back home, I’m often met w blank looks. But we weren’t Mississippi, the logic goes.

3. No, their states weren’t the worst. We were. Mississippi was the heart of US slavery wealth and then resistance to ending it and the right to give Black people full human status. But all along way, that was reinforced from outside state, and racism was bad *everywhere* in U.S.

4. So many of you don’t know about systemic race massacres *outside* the South too that wiped out Black communities, killed so many and destroyed economies with generations of effects. Start with Red Summer 1919, but don’t stop there. Dig into newspapers.com locally.

5. Who knows that viciously racist Citizens Council started in Mississippi and that taught that Black people were inferior had chapters in San Francisco etc and broadcast from DC, helped create Reagan revolution, fought for racist housing laws in west? lsupress.org/books/detail/r…

6. I assume all smug New Yorkers have studied and pilgrimaged to Seneca Village, Weeksville, the old site of Ebbets Field (and studied why Dodgers left and the white flight that broke NYC), and the slavery burial ground downtown, and know what happened to Ota Benga, to name a few

7. I don’t say this to be smug back. I’m a student, and it’s more of a challenge. I’ve made these discoveries and so many more around U.S. precisely because I want to know the real, full history of my state and of my nation, so I can try to help repair the results. We all need to

*should say racism “is” bad everywhere in U.S., not just “was”

Speaking of these NYC historic spots and others, I often put them on the list for non-New York friends/family to visit when they ask me what to do in NYC, just as I recommend civil-rights sites in Mississippi to visitors and residents.

8. Also a caution: Mississippi is infected with “Krazy Klucker in Korner” syndrome (my phrase) of blaming racist history on “them rednecks” or such to evade systemic responsibility. Don’t allow this in your state either: Your “alt-right” movements grew out of systemic racism.

9. Many neo-fascists today went to private white schools across US or desegregated ones hearing parents talk about not sending kids to certain schools because “they” are too violent, etc. “Their” culture is a problem. A racist system radicalized them.
nyupress.org/9781479803682/…