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Thicky Watters. Profile picture
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14 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
been thinking a lot about that Jack and Jill conversation on CH the other day

one thing that struck me was how odd it was to hear folks be so uncritical of an elite org/institution they belong to

the critiques of J&J were "PR problems," "misunderstandings," etc
i said this in one of the replies, but there's nothing about belonging to an institution that precludes being able to critique it

the people in the room seemed to fundamentally not understand what the critiques of the org were
"what's wrong with being elite?"

"we're not elitist. we're invite-only."

"why don't you start your own thing?"

this is y'all Talented Tenth?
previously:

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More from @GeeDee215

Thicky Watters. Profile picture
15 Dec
We had a conversation on the podcast about the racialization of dog breeds, where we talked to @BronwenDickey, the author of Pitbull: The Battle Over an American Icon.
In the 1930s, Pitbulls — which, as Bronwen pointed out to me over and over, don’t constitute a dog breed but a shape — used to be seen as the trusty sidekick of the proletariat, the Honda Civic of canines. (Think of “the Little Rascals” dog.)
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That began changing in the postwar years and the rise of the suburbs. A pedigreed dog became a status symbol for the burgeoning white middle class. And pitbulls got left behind in the cities.
Read 16 tweets
Thicky Watters. Profile picture
14 Dec
The Gallery. 10th and Market.
I worked at the Chick-Fil-A there.

I have *stories.*

Also, that probably planted the earliest seeds of my class consciousness. Working fast food is like observing capitalism in miniature.
One time i was working the weekend of The Greek Picnic, jfc

There were six lines, 20 deep all day, from open til close

People in line pausing to get orders from their friends who were holding down tables for them
Read 5 tweets
Thicky Watters. Profile picture
14 Dec
since i'm going on a lot about Black people and class, i've been thinking a lot about "Coming To America" thru the lens of @DrMChatelain's book "Franchise," which at this point i will reference for no reason
Doc writes that in the late 1960s/early 1970s, McDonald's corporate, previously focused on suburban expansion, realized how much money it could make putting franchises in Black, inner-city neighborhoods. (read: because of food deserts and the like).
A lot of those first/early Black McDonald's owners became millionaires.

(and millionaires who thought of their wealth as part of the ascendant Black capitalism wave of the post-civil rights era)
Read 18 tweets
Thicky Watters. Profile picture
22 Nov
This is it.

At least one of the officers on the scene at the time of Breonna Taylor’s killing was wearing a body camera in Louisville.

The NYPD had a decades-old chokehold ban in place at the time of Eric Garner’s asphyxiation at the hands of the NYPD.

Etc.
More diverse cops? At the peak of NYPD’s stop-and-frisk (2011), cops made *684,000* stops.

abt NINETY PERCENT of those were of Black + Latino citizens; there were more stops of Black teenage boys in NYC than there *were* Black teenage boys in NYC.

The NYPD? Mostly nonwhite.
2011 stats here:

theguardian.com/world/2012/feb…
Read 14 tweets
Thicky Watters. Profile picture
16 Nov
“Reform” convos so often go like this:

“Someone did X thing and it worked!”

Then they stop asking questions bc the “reforms,” at least superficially, achieved some measurable “good”thing. Maybe test scores went up or police complaints went down. But the devil is in the details.
In the case of Camden, NJ...police complaints have plummeted bc Black neighborhoods are subjected to more electronic surveillance — which is what i meant by reforms just pushing for the same policing imperatives but differently formalized.
People want the problem to go away, so we often don’t think harder or deeply about the premises of the “reforms” or the tradeoffs.
Read 10 tweets
Thicky Watters. Profile picture
7 Nov
CNN's pundits – not Dana Basch and Abby Phillip but that unholy quartet of Van Jones and Rick Santorum and Axelrod and whassaname — are already doing that "It will be good if GA's two Senate seats go to the GOP bc then Biden will have to govern from the sensible middle" thing.
the "sensible middle' is one of the most inane, nonsensical constructions in mainstream US political discourse.

besides the fact that it presumes that Biden is going to govern from the left — tuh — it also assumes that the two parties are symmetrical ideological opposites.
Now Kasich is doing it: "Now is the time for Democrats to listen to the other side...we need to listen to what those Republicans want."
Read 5 tweets

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